We live in ordinary times

"These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation -- now there's a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn. We have no change of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? …Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy -- probably a necessary lie -- that these are crucial times, and we are in them. …New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?"
--Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (1999)