Why 2025 Might Be the Most Important Year of Our Lives

I watched Peter Leyden’s Freethink video yesterday and he nailed a feeling I couldn’t quite articulate.

We’re living through one of maybe four moments in American history where everything changes at once.

Here’s the pattern - every 80 years America hits a reset. The old systems stop working, everyone fights about it, then we build the new era.

1945 (World War II ends). 1865 (Civil War ends). 1787 (founding America during the Enlightenment).

Each reset gave us 25 years of explosive progress. Post-war boom brought interstate highways, the GI Bill, suburbs, 90% tax rates on the rich. Post-Civil War brought 175,000 miles of railroad and land-grant universities. The founding brought modern democracy and capitalism.

Leyden says we’re in the middle of three tipping points right now.

AI - ChatGPT in November 2022 was the starting gun. This is Bronze Age level change - a breakthrough that amplifies human mental capacity the way steam engines amplified physical capacity.

Clean energy - For the first time our primary energy source is a technology instead of a commodity. Solar costs drop 20% every time production doubles. We’re headed toward abundant clean energy.

Bioengineering - CRISPR lets us edit any genome, we can grow real meat from cells in a vat. Sequencing the human genome cost $3 billion in 2003 and took 15 years - now it costs $100 and takes hours.

These three reinforce each other. Cheap energy powers AI, AI accelerates bioengineering, bioengineering creates new materials for energy systems.

The uncomfortable part - massive political conflict comes first. We’re watching the old system come down (financial capitalism that worked for the top 10%, representative democracy that feels broken, nation-states trying to coordinate a global civilization).

The America First movement in the 1930s, the Civil War - these weren’t aberrations, they’re features of transition moments. People invested in old systems fight to preserve them.

What comes next according to Leyden: sustainable capitalism replacing financial capitalism, digital democracy replacing representative democracy, global governance replacing nation-states.

Sounds insane. Probably is insane. But so was everything from those previous 25-year innovation bursts.

The key insight - we’re not upgrading the software, we’re replacing the operating system. The sooner we understand that the better our chance of building what works.

I don’t know if Leyden is right, but the framework makes sense of the chaos. We’re not breaking down - we’re breaking through.