The Inner Monologue

I often wonder what really qualifies as a major historical event. Is it the kind of thing that alters the course of humankind, reshaping borders and belief systems, or is it something smaller—something that simply changes us?

We tend to reserve the word historical for the grand and catastrophic: wars, revolutions, pandemics, moon landings, collapses of empires. These are the milestones written in textbooks, recited in classrooms, stamped into commemorative coins. But most of the events that truly shape who we are never make it into those pages.

If something changes me, does that make it history—or just biography? When a generation grows up under constant surveillance, when a nation trades privacy for convenience, when an algorithm begins to finish our thoughts—those things don’t announce themselves as “historic.” They just quietly become normal.

Maybe that’s the real measure of a historical event: not the headlines, but the habits it leaves behind. The moment the extraordinary becomes ordinary, the moment “before” and “after” stop being distinguishable.

In that sense, the digital revolution was a historical event, not because of any one invention, but because it rewired how we think, love, argue, and remember. The pandemic was historical, not only because it killed millions, but because it revealed how interconnected and fragile we are. The rise of misinformation, the climate reckoning, the fading trust in institutions—all of these are less single events than long, slow earthquakes still rumbling beneath our feet.

And yet, for all the epic moments that changed humanity, it’s the personal ones that changed me that feel the most real. The first time I saw the towers fall. The first time I realized my data wasn’t mine. The first time I saw a world leader use power like a weapon instead of a duty. None of those events shifted the planet’s orbit, but they shifted mine.

So maybe “major” is relative. Maybe history isn’t a single grand narrative but billions of overlapping trajectories—each of us our own minor historian of the self. Maybe the true test of a historical event is this: if you can’t go back to who you were before it happened, then history has already claimed you.