Timing is Everything

There’s not a parent alive who doesn’t remember the day their child becomes a parent. I don’t mean the day you overhear your son or daughter lecturing their own child. I mean the day they start lecturing you about your behaviour.

I’ve had more than a few of those moments in the past year, usually over AI, and usually with my son, Jay. Our early‑morning coffee rituals are decades removed from those lazy summer days when I could cuddle my insufferably cute tow‑haired boy. I’m posting an old picture from one of those mornings alongside this piece, partly for nostalgia, partly to confound the algorithms that typically banish my blog posts to the digital wasteland.

Today I was recounting to him my latest breakthrough in how I’m using AI and more or less gushing about my new relationship with ChatGPT. Mr. Chat has now joined Mr. Perplexity in my morning editorial meetings as I work on my new book. 

“Mum. You spent years telling me phones and social media were rewiring our brains,” he said. “Now something much bigger comes along and suddenly you’re completely relaxed about it?”

Fair point. More than fair, really. I wasn’t exactly subtle during my anti‑social‑media years. Jay had to wait an awfully long time to have a phone. Back then, I worried constantly about what those technologies were doing to young people and their ability to be bored for five minutes without reaching for a screen. I saw phones and platforms as corrosive, and I said so, often and loudly.

Now, when a technology arrives that could potentially transform education, employment, politics, creativity, and perhaps society itself, I’m surprisingly calm. Why?

The answer, I suspect, has less to do with wisdom than with timing.

Recently I’ve been thinking about something I call “chronological privilege.” C.S. Lewis, a writer I greatly admired, used a slightly different phrase—“chronological snobbery”—to describe the assumption that whatever is newest must automatically be best. That’s not quite what I mean. I’m talking about the privilege of being born at a particular moment in history when more doors were opening than closing.

Like many people my age, I spent decades attributing my successes to hard work, good judgment, persistence, and the occasional flash of brilliance. Now I’m beginning to wonder how much of the credit belongs to timing.

I entered journalism when newspapers still hired reporters, foreign bureaus existed, and nobody had yet imagined that one day people would get their news from a dancing cat on TikTok. I wrote books about expatriate life just as international mobility was exploding, before Google could answer every question in thirty seconds, and conveniently, just as Amazon was invented. Later, Rodney and I became involved with Maple Bear precisely when demand for bilingual international education was taking off around the world. 

Good decisions mattered. Experience mattered. But so did arriving at the right place at the right historical moment. 

Which brings me back to AI.

My son and I are looking at exactly the same technology. The difference is where we happen to be standing when it arrives. I’m seventy‑three and my career is largely behind me. Jay and his friends are on the cusp of turning forty. They’re working in an economy transformed before they’ve even established themselves within it. They don’t know which jobs will change, which skills will matter, or which assumptions about careers will still hold true. From where they’re standing, AI doesn’t necessarily look like an exciting tool. It looks like uncertainty.

It’s very easy for someone my age  to be enthusiastic about disruption when most of my own life has already been built. Perhaps my calmness isn’t evidence that I see AI more clearly but just proof that I have less at stake. Perhaps that’s what chronological privilege really is: not just being born at the right moment in history, but eventually becoming old enough to recognize that you were.

I’m not criticizing my own generation, nor a younger one. I’m simply acknowledging that technologies arrive at different moments in our lives, and those moments shape how we see them. When social media arrived, I was the worried parent and my son was the adaptable teenager. Now AI has arrived, and we’ve traded places. There’s no right or wrong. We’re simply seeing the future from different points on the timeline.

After we hugged and returned to our cars, I found myself wondering whether one of the privileges of ageing is finally recognizing how much timing influences perspective. For years I’ve been asked for advice because of my experience. Occasionally, people have even treated me as something of an oracle. But perhaps one of the most important lessons age has taught me is humility.

The older I get, the more I wonder whether I spent decades surfing a historical tailwind while congratulating myself on my balance—or, to put it more bluntly, whether I mistook a historical tailwind for personal brilliance.

Because now, in the age of AI, I find myself asking a question I never considered when I was younger: how much of what I call wisdom was actually timing?