The 1930s Called - They Want Their Anxiety Back

Every generation calls their era “unprecedented,” which is adorable. The 1930s already ran this simulation, just in black and white. We’re simply rebooting it with better visuals and worse restraint.

Back then the world was broke, bitter, and looking for someone to blame. Today we call it a cost-of-living crisis and quietly accept that global debt still sits above 235% of world GDP, according to the IMF. Inequality was the dry tinder then, and it’s tinder now; the World Inequality Database makes for grim reading if you fancy seeing how top incomes are soaring while everyone else flatlines. When your bills rise faster than your pay and the billionaire class launches another space holiday, resentment isn’t a mood, it’s policy fuel.

Governments in the 1930s printed money to survive. Ours do it because they’ve run out of imagination. Central banks, once cautious priests, have become magicians conjuring liquidity and calling it stability. Debt is no longer a warning; it’s a lifestyle. The IMF has already pointed out that debt is rising faster in 80% of the global economy. In other words, we’ve learned nothing except how to make the same mistakes with Wi-Fi.

Culturally, the rhyme is uncanny. Nationalism hasn’t died; it just got a social-media account. In the thirties, mobs filled squares. Now they fill comment sections. Back then, people marched under banners. Now they march under hashtags. False news spreads six times faster than truth, as shown in a landmark MIT study, and industrial-scale manipulation of social media is now routine, according to the Oxford Internet Institute. The thirties had demagogues on balconies; we’ve got them on podcasts.

Authoritarianism has rebranded itself as “efficiency.” The slogans are sleeker, the fonts cleaner, but the story’s the same: the world’s a mess, trust the loud guy with certainty in his eyes. Propaganda once needed a printing press; now it just needs a trending tab.

Geopolitically, the stage looks familiar too. The thirties ended with the League of Nations collapsing under its own impotence. The United Nations may be on the same trajectory. Global military spending hit $2.72 trillion in 2024, the highest ever recorded, according to SIPRI. Europe is quietly rearming, Asia less quietly. Russia’s replaying its empire mixtape, while the US and China glare at each other like two exhausted heavyweights waiting for the bell.

The main difference now is interdependence. Trade, supply chains, and energy are wound together so tightly that one blockage can freeze global arteries. When the Ever Given wedged itself in the Suez Canal, about $9 billion of goods per day were delayed. World trade now totals roughly $32 trillion, says the WTO, and it still behaves like a live wire: one shock, and everyone gets burned.

The nuclear deterrent is the only reason we haven’t had a proper sequel. Mutually assured destruction remains humanity’s least inspiring peace treaty. Yet the number of near-misses is longer than you’d like to imagine, as the Nuclear Threat Initiative keeps reminding us. The good news: no one sane wants a world war. The bad news: sanity isn’t always the controlling shareholder.

The new battleground is invisible. The next conflict won’t begin with tanks, it’ll start with data cables and power grids. Energy corridors and chip corridors are the modern trenches. Taiwan alone makes roughly 70% of the world’s semiconductors and around 90% of advanced chips, according to CSIS. A misstep in the Taiwan Strait wouldn’t be regional; it would be global within days. The IEA’s World Energy Outlook reads like a polite warning that our energy networks are just as brittle.

So are we staring down the barrel again? Maybe not the full trilogy. But history loves a remix. A regional flashpoint that hits the wrong artery, the South China Sea, Iran, Ukraine, the Red Sea, could trigger chain reactions faster than anyone can tweet “containment.” The thirties had trenches and telegrams; we’ve got sanctions and cyberattacks. It’s the same plot, just rendered in 4K with real-time updates.

The irony is that we’ve never had better tools to avoid disaster. We can predict market crashes, model climate risk, and track every ship on Earth in real time. Yet we’re still teaching AI to fight wars before we’ve figured out how to regulate it. Technology could save us, or kill us faster. The deciding factor, as ever, is who’s holding the steering wheel.

Avoiding the rerun isn’t complicated. It just isn’t glamorous. Boring diplomacy, buffer stocks, redundancy, restraint, all the words no one likes saying. The thirties burned because people believed they were too clever to make the same mistakes. The twenty-first century might burn because we think we’re too modern to do it at all.

The past isn’t repeating. It’s remixing. And the beat sounds painfully familiar.