Understanding the psychology of presentism can help you adapt through change.
Every generation believes it is living through the most dangerous, most consequential moment in history. Public policymakers call this presentism or presentism bias: our tendency to overestimate the singularity and existential weight of our own time.
Psychologists would focus more on availability heuristics and recency bias: information that is most easily recalled, and more recent events tend to seem most important.
It isn’t irrational. The Prussian and the Roman empires aren’t going to hurt you now. The eventual heat death of the universe isn’t worth losing sleep over. Threats that feel most relevant are the ones that could affect us directly. Nuclear brinkmanship in the 1960s, stagflation in the 1970s, and the 2008 financial crash were each experienced as uniquely defining. The greater the crisis, the more it commands our attention.
Human cognition evolved to prioritize the immediate and tangible over the distant and abstract. That vigilance helps us survive, but it also narrows perspective, making it harder to see continuity with the past or to prepare for the future.
Overlapping Transitions
History rarely moves in clean breaks. Even in times of upheaval, remnants of the old order persist.
Industrial and digital economies overlap. Secular and religious values compete. Generational attitudes toward work, family, and identity clash and cross-pollinate at the same time.
Psychologically, this coexistence can feel destabilizing. The neat categories people expect, like “old versus new” and “Boomers versus Zoomers,” don’t map cleanly onto reality. New technology is never just simply better; it has risks and consequences. People find themselves in the middle of contradictions: leaders who preach change but make the same mistakes, workplaces that find new ways to make the same mistakes, families that are divided by different views and struggle to relate.
This is where ambiguity tolerance plays an important role. It is trait that describes how comfortable people are with uncertainty, complexity, and mixed messages. For those with high ambiguity tolerance, the coexistence of old and new feels manageable or even energizing. They can sit comfortably with paradox and enjoy the complexity and unpredictability. But for those with low ambiguity tolerance, overlapping and uncertain transitions can feel threatening. The lack of clarity can produce anxiety, rigid thinking, or even backlash.
Living by Other People’s Rules
This tension is familiar across the lifespan. Entering the workforce, many young adults discover that workplaces are governed by norms and hierarchies shaped by older generations. The rules of belonging, from communication styles to work ethic to career expectations, often feel strange and inscrutable.
Over time, individuals may find their own cohort rising into positions of influence. But later in life, the cycle reverses. Older adults re-enter environments increasingly governed by younger norms, from digital platforms to cultural spaces, where they must once again adapt to rules that don’t feel like their own.
At both ends of the lifespan, individuals often have the least autonomy and the least power to impose the norms of their own age group. Adolescents adapt to adult rules. The elderly adjust to the changes brought in by younger generations. It’s a process of constant renegotiation and change. Whenever things seem to be settling in, life events and global changes can upend everything again.
The overall process of continuous change is nothing new in the context of history, but the challenges are totally new from an individual perspective.
Why the Present Feels So Heavy
What makes periods of transition so emotionally charged is that they always involve a struggle over power and legitimacy. Established ways of doing things must continually prove their relevance to be adopted by newcomers, while emerging groups test different ideas, pushing the boundaries of what should endure and what should be reformed.
Psychologists studying identity threat show that when long-held norms are challenged, groups often respond with defensiveness, nostalgia, or outright hostility. Those in power may exaggerate the risks of new approaches not only because they are unfamiliar but because they unsettle the group’s social position or role.
When the costs of maintaining old structures fall on some while the benefits accrue to others, resentment can slowly build up.
Workplaces as a crucible of change
Workplaces are a good example of this. Ideally, succession planning provides a bridge between generations: Experienced leaders pass down not just technical knowledge but also the tacit know-how, networks, and cultural memory that keep an organization functioning. Done well, it is gradual, deliberate, and reciprocal. The outgoing group retains dignity and respect by sharing what they have built, while the incoming group gains confidence by learning within a supportive structure. Both sides invest in a future where their contributions endure. Changes are navigated through interpersonal networks instead of crises and knee-jerk responses.
In reality, succession is often messy. Urgent demands of the present overwhelm long-term preparation. Transitions happen suddenly, with little time for mentoring, documentation, or shared reflection. New groups are left to reinvent processes from scratch; older groups feel discarded or unappreciated. Instead of continuity, organizations get torn apart. When resentment builds, people may be eager to discard inherited structures and processes wholesale, when they were not involved in sustaining and retaining the value of them.
This is one of the reasons times of transition can feel so difficult. Not only are rules and norms shifting, but the difficult work of handing them over is often avoided or resisted. The demands increase without sufficient resources (psychological, social, material) to support the process of change. Without deliberate, well-managed succession, the weight of the present demands feels more intense, as each new group scrambles to rebuild what might have been passed on more gracefully and with less resulting damage.
Resistance to change
Decline is inevitable. Change can bring renewal, but when people cling to power long after their ability to wield it effectively, they often accelerate their own downfall.
Bound by their own rules and hierarchies, leaders may resist change even as their capacity to shape those around them diminishes. Increasingly rigid or manipulative methods only hasten collapse. A long-standing leadership structure may still appear to wield power, but without moral authority or genuine respect, its rules become hollow and observed outwardly but ignored where and when it is not convenient.
The weight of now
Presentism and associated psychological biases mean we tend to see own era as uniquely consequential, more turbulent or unstable than anything that came before. In some sense, this is inevitable: the crises we face today are the ones we can most immediately feel.
Recognizing presentism doesn’t make current crises less real, but it offers perspective. We are not the first to feel this way, and we will not be the last.