This Is It — The Metacrisis — Our Once-in-a-Lifetime Event

We haven’t entered a new chapter — we’ve entered a whole new story. And this shift is rewriting what it means to be human.

In 2015, at Santa Maria del Fiore, Pope Francis named it: Si può dire che oggi non viviamo un’epoca di cambiamento quanto un cambiamento d’epoca. We are not so much living in an era of change as in a change of era.

A sacred civilizational threshold.

As John Fullerton emphasizes, the scale of this transformation rivals the shift from the medieval to the modern age — only this time, the future of life itself is what hangs in the balance.

There was a time — still fresh in memory — when the phrase “once-in-a-lifetime” meant something. It marked moments that punctuated history: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2008 financial crisis, a global pandemic. These were anomalies, rare forks in the road, the kind of shocks that sent generations into reflection.

But today, something has changed. “Once-in-a-lifetime” events have become the background music of our lives.

I remember reading one of Thomas Friedman’s most striking metaphors — the one about the stampede of black elephants — and feeling like it cracked open the worldview…