If you were to go back in time, even a little bit, everything would seem weird. That’s because we don’t notice when things change.
By definition, our current day-to-day life is labeled as normal. So we don’t really notice the ways that our life is different from how it used to be.
Case in point: If you were to go back to before March 2020, you would find a world in which pretty much all meetings were in person. To attend a meeting, you needed to show up with your physical body.
Now that we routinely meet over Zoom, we forget how much of a change this is from the very recent past. I now have colleagues around the world with whom I meet to collaborate all the time, and I don’t really think much about it.
Similar radical shifts in reality happened when SmartPhones came out, and before that when libraries started to be replaced, for many purposes, by Wikipedia. To me the most fascinating thing about all this is not the radical shifts themselves, but how quickly we collectively absorb them and then forget that they ever happened.