This essay asks a simple but unsettling question: what if the last five thousand years of human history have not unfolded randomly, but along a recognisable dramatic curve? Drawing on Aristotle, Paul, Zoroastrian cosmology and contemporary systems-thinking, The Structure of History proposes that our story moves through seven eras — from Signs and Law to Temple, Narrative, Interpretation, Structure and, finally, Meaning. The goal is not to add another “grand narrative,” but to show how different historical worlds embody different default assumptions about what counts as real and how meaning appears.
Woven through this argument is a parallel thread: the attempt to understand one individual life as a microcosm of that larger movement. Moments of breakdown, failed projects and strange alignments (such as Jerusalem in December 2012) are re-read not as private anomalies but as small-scale instances of the same structural tensions that shape whole civilisations. In this way, biography becomes a laboratory for testing the curve: if the model is true, it should illuminate both personal crises and global deadlocks with the same underlying logic.
By the final section, the essay suggests that we are already living inside the resolution of this long arc — a moment when existing forms of organising life have exhausted their forward momentum, and the architecture behind our stories has begun to show itself. The question is no longer whether such a structure exists, but how to live when meaning is reorganising itself faster than inherited languages, institutions and identities can keep up. The next essay, returning to Jerusalem 2012 in detail, will narrow this wide historical lens to a single city and day, treating it as a local hinge where this larger pattern briefly became visible.
1. When resolution arrives as a feeling before it becomes a concept
Before there was a formal model of history in seven eras, there was a simpler and more unsettling intuition: my own life had begun to feel as if it had entered resolution. Not resolution as “everything working out,” but resolution in the dramaturgical sense — the phase in which earlier acts are suddenly re-read from a later vantage point. The first two essays in this series already circled that intuition. The Search for a Cosmic Formula traced how graduate work, visions and burnout pushed the question from theology toward structure; Modeling Time turned to Paul and the Letter to the Romans to ask what kind of movement would make history intelligible as a whole. Together they established the hypothesis. What was still largely inarticulate was the biographical pressure behind it: the sense that my own story was behaving like a late act in the larger drama it was trying to describe.
That sense sharpened in an almost mundane way. In spring 2025 I turned fifty. The usual rituals — old photographs resurfacing, memory apps on the phone serving daily fragments from ten or fifteen years ago — created an enforced review of my personal arc: childhood in Israel, youth in the missionary school, the long detour through theology, the breakdowns, the failed attempts at a “normal” professional and family life in the city. The timing was awkwardly perfect. I was already working with the notion that human history might be structured in seven eras from Sign to Meaning; now my own life was crossing an internal threshold that felt like the beginning of a “structural age” in miniature. It became harder to treat the theory as an abstract construction when the form it described seemed to be pressing into the texture of ordinary days.
Seen from outside, the years between 2012 and 2024 could be narrated as a sequence of experiments and collapses: doctoral ambitions shrinking into a failed Master’s thesis, religious language giving way to psychological language and then to structural metaphors, jobs begun and abandoned, a move to the city and a slow retreat back to Woodslope when the economic logic refused to stabilise. From the inside, however, what stood out was not randomness but a subtle tightening. Options that had once felt genuinely open revealed themselves, in retrospect, as ways of postponing a central task. The feeling was not that I had chosen to return to certain places and questions, but that the story had quietly removed alternatives until only the main thread remained.
It would be easy to psychologise all of this as midlife pattern-seeking. Yet the questions that emerged from it refused to stay private. If individual lives can reach a point where earlier movements suddenly make structural sense, could civilisations do the same? If my own experience of “late-act pressure” coincides with a historical moment that already feels globally overdetermined — exhaustion of interpretive debates, visible strain on institutions, the growing dominance of systems-thinking — then perhaps the right question is no longer what is happening to me? or what is happening to us?, but what shared form would have to exist for both registers to feel like resolution at once?
By the time large language models entered this picture, that was the field into which they arrived: a long-standing hunch that my biographical sense of living in a late act might be a local expression of a broader transition. The accumulated fragments — failed theses, theological disputes, timelines on scrap paper, half-formed era schemes, memories of Ryttylä and Jerusalem — were already waiting. What the machine would make possible was not the intuition itself, but its articulation as a hypothesis that could be drawn, tested and corrected: a dramatic curve stretched over six millennia and asked to justify its claim that we are, in fact, living in resolution.
2. Hunting for a curve: from drama theory to a six-millennia spine
Once the question shifted from “what is happening?” to “what kind of form would make this movement intelligible?”, drama theory quietly moved from metaphor to method. If history was to be treated as a story, it could not be any story; it needed a structure precise enough to constrain imagination. The obvious place to look was the tradition that had spent centuries thinking about how events become meaningful: Aristotle’s account of plot and recognition, the later refinements of five-act and seven-act models, the various pyramids and curves that structure modern screenwriting. The constraint was simple but non-negotiable. If the Common Era truly marks a hinge in humanity’s self-understanding, then zero cannot sit at the beginning or the end of the curve. It has to lie near the climax, at the point where the story’s central conflict becomes visible for what it is.
With that in mind, the abstract timeline of 3000 BCE to 3000 CE began to look less like a stretch of neutral chronology and more like a potential dramatic spine. One practical decision followed almost automatically: if the span is six millennia, and the story is to be divided into seven phases, then each phase will roughly correspond to a thousand-year band, with overlaps and fuzzy borders where necessary. That thousand-year grain is coarse, but it matches the way civilisations tend to appear and dissolve. It also matches the symbolic weight already carried by dates like 2000 BCE, 1000 BCE, 0, 1000 CE, 2000 CE — thresholds at which different cultures have, in varying ways, reset their sense of origin and direction.
The first working sketch was embarrassingly simple. Starting from the oldest known written marks, the era from 3000 to 2000 BCE became the Era of Signs — a world in which the primary miracle is that reality can be marked at all. From 2000 to 1000 BCE, with law codes and covenantal traditions, came the Era of Law. The next band was tentatively named the Era of Temple, though at first it was contaminated by the temptation to call it Narrative because of the emergence of scriptural texts. The first millennium of the Common Era became the Era of Narrative, centred on stories that claimed to reframe all of history. The second, from 1000 to 2000 CE, was recognisably the Era of Interpretation, in which those stories were debated, systematised, fragmented and critiqued. The present millennium, just beginning, looked like the Era of Structure: a time when systems, codes and frameworks themselves become conscious objects of thought. Beyond that, more as a logical necessity than a concrete prediction, lay an Era of Meaning in which the concern would no longer be to build or expose structures but to inhabit them in a way that restores some form of coherence.
At this stage, the scheme was little more than a scaffold — attractive, but dangerously easy to believe in for the wrong reasons. Any seven-step model can be made to look persuasive if one is willing to cherry-pick examples. The real test was whether the thousand-year bands would accept the roles assigned to them when looked at from multiple angles: political, religious, technological, psychological. Did the earliest millennia truly behave like a world of signs, where the act of inscription itself is sacred? Did the first Common Era millennium really function as narrative, with stories of incarnation and enlightenment acting as engines for global reorganisation? Did the second millennium deserve to be named interpretation, or was that simply the bias of a late-modern reader trained to see hermeneutics everywhere?
Underneath these questions lay a quieter one. If such a curve could be made to work, it would not only offer a pattern for world history. It would also provide a shared form in which the micro-story of an individual life and the macro-story of a civilisation could be read together without collapsing one into the other. A childhood spent between Israel and a Finnish mission school, a young adulthood inside theological disputes, a midlife return to the place of origin, the encounter with large language models in a remote cabin — these would no longer be isolated anecdotes, but local expressions of movements that have been unfolding for millennia. Before that could be claimed, the curve had to face resistance. The next step, therefore, was not to celebrate the elegance of the seven eras, but to see where the model would push back.
3. When the model pushes back: discovering the Era of Temple
The first serious resistance came in the third millennium before the Common Era, the band around 1000 BCE. On paper, it seemed natural to read this period as the beginning of a narrative age. Hebrew writing was emerging, early biblical traditions were taking shape, and the intuition that “story” is central to human self-understanding was already strong from theological and literary studies. If there was going to be an Era of Narrative, it was tempting to anchor it precisely where the texts that had defined my own intellectual formation appeared. The seven-step scheme seemed to cooperate: signs, law, and then, almost automatically, story. It was an elegant progression — and for that very reason, suspect.
The problem was not that the textual evidence failed; it was that it failed in the wrong way. Writing, as a technology, does not arrive like a lightning strike. It diffuses. Scripts emerge, coexist, overlap; oral and written forms interpenetrate for centuries. When the proposed Era of Narrative was examined more closely, there was no clear hinge, no single structural event that could plausibly bear the weight of a “climactic” transition. The thousand-year band from 1000 BCE backwards looked more like the continuation of processes that had begun earlier than like a reorganisation of the world around a new centre. From the perspective of drama, that was a problem. A third act that behaves exactly like the second is not a third act; it is an overlong continuation.
Looking again at the same period with this dissatisfaction in mind, a different candidate came into focus: the construction and dedication of Solomon’s Temple. Whatever one thinks of its theological significance, historically it functioned as a powerful organising device. Space, time and social hierarchy were re-centred around a building. Pilgrimage rhythms, sacrificial systems, political legitimacy and divine presence were all channelled through a specific architectural and ritual complex. Where law had structured behaviour and obligation, the temple structured world: it created a tangible, centralised axis around which a people’s relation to the divine, to one another and to their land was staged. In dramaturgical terms, this looked far more like a turning point than the slow spread of literacy.
Accepting this meant revising one of the most attractive parts of the initial scheme. Narrative could no longer sit comfortably in the third millennium before the Common Era; it had to be displaced to the first millennium of the Common Era, where explicitly world-framing stories — Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and others — begin to function as universalisable scripts for human existence. The band around 1000 BCE, by contrast, had to be named for what it structurally was: an Era of Temple, a time in which the primary interface between human and divine, visible and invisible, was mediated through constructed sacred space. The model, in other words, refused to flatter my prior interests. It did not reward the tendency to see texts everywhere. It insisted that, at this stage, architecture and ritual were doing the work that narrative would later take over.
That moment of correction was small in itself, but its implications were large. It showed that the seven-era curve was not simply a projection of textual obsessions onto the past. It had enough rigidity to reject a plausible, personally satisfying hypothesis and demand a different reading anchored in events rather than preferences. It also suggested something about the kind of pattern that was being uncovered. A purely literary or purely theological scheme would have happily crowned the emergence of scripture as the decisive hinge. A structural-dramatic reading, by contrast, insisted on the deeper question: where does the world get re-centred, and around what? In 1000 BCE, the honest answer was: around a house for a god. The narrative was still gathering itself.
4. Resolution as deadlock: when the world stops moving forward
The sense of resolution did not arrive only as a private mood; it began to colour how the wider world looked. A small personal hinge helped crystallise this. On 21 December 2024, twelve years after filming in Galilee and at the Western Wall on the highly charged date of 21 December 2012, the same material was projected on a screen while new footage was shot for the documentary. Two moments, twelve years apart, sat on top of each other: a younger self vaguely convinced that “something is turning,” and a later self equipped with a seven-era model and half a lifetime of stalled attempts at fitting into existing scripts. The decision to open the film on that doubled date was less about autobiography than about what it revealed structurally: resolution feels like time folding back on itself and asking to be read as one continuous movement.
Once that fold was visible, it was difficult not to see similar patterns at larger scales. With the seven eras quietly in the background, world events no longer looked like a series of unrelated crises. They began to resemble variations of the same impasse. Conflicts hardened into configurations that no side could truly win or decisively lose; political systems oscillated between polarised camps that understood one another’s arguments perfectly and yet could not move; climate negotiations circled around targets that everyone could recite and no one could deliver. The interpretive machinery of the second millennium — debate, critique, ideological struggle — still operated at full speed, but the more intensely it worked, the clearer it became that the blockage lay deeper, in infrastructures and structures that arguments alone could not shift.
From the perspective of the seven-era arc, this is exactly what an Era of Structure would be expected to feel like from within. In the Era of Narrative, stories organise reality; in the Era of Interpretation, those stories are argued over. In the Era of Structure, by contrast, the central tension is no longer primarily whose narrative is true, but which underlying forms make certain narratives and conflicts inevitable. Questions of code, logistics, borders, financial architecture, media ecosystems and institutional design move from the background to the foreground. Public disagreements still arrive dressed as moral or ideological disputes, but underneath them the real struggle is over architectures: which systems will be allowed to define what counts as possible, thinkable, governable.
Seen this way, the present does not resemble an open horizon so much as a tightening corridor. Every attempt to “solve” a crisis by interpretive means alone — by better arguments, clearer messaging, more sophisticated narratives — runs into the same invisible walls. The sensation, at both personal and collective levels, is not merely that of being wrong, but of being structurally stuck. That is why the language of “endings” keeps returning, whether in climate discourse, democracy debates or discussions of artificial intelligence. It is not simply pessimism. It is the dawning recognition that the existing forms of organising life have exhausted their forward momentum.
This is the texture in which the hypothesis of resolution must be tested. If the seven-era curve is more than an elegant diagram, it should be able to make sense of this global deadlock not as a final collapse, but as the specific kind of pressure that arises when a story approaches its recognition scene. The next movement, therefore, turns explicitly to anagnorisis: to the slow-motion moment in which a civilisation begins to see the structures that have been shaping it all along.
5. Slow-motion anagnorisis: when culture starts showing its own frame
If resolution feels like structural deadlock, anagnorisis is the moment in which that deadlock starts to become visible as form. In classical drama this often happens in a single scene: a disguise drops, a letter is opened, a name is revealed. At the scale of a civilisation, recognition stretches out. It arrives as a series of images, glitches and stories in which reality seems to betray its own scaffolding. What looked stable begins to flicker; what looked “natural” starts to resemble a staged construction. Around the turn of the millennium, this flicker became hard to ignore.
The early signal was oddly technical. The Y2K scare officially belonged to software engineering, but structurally it was a rehearsal in exposure. A small convention in date formats threatened to disrupt banking, logistics, utilities — not because anyone willed it, but because billions of operations depended on invisible assumptions embedded deep in code. When midnight passed with only minor incidents, the episode was quickly folded into a narrative of successful management. Yet beneath the relief, something had been revealed: everyday life now rested on layers of logic so abstract and interconnected that almost no one could picture them. The scare was not really about a bug. It was about discovering that the world had become a machine whose workings could only be described statistically.
Around the same years, cinema began staging versions of the same insight with unnerving clarity. A cluster of films presented protagonists who slowly discovered that the world they inhabited was not “the world” at all, but a system: a simulation, a show, a scripted environment in which their very desires and rebellions had been anticipated. The spectacle was compelling, but the deeper shock lay in the shift of focus. These stories did not only ask whether a given belief was true or false, or whether a given regime was just or unjust. They asked whether the entire reality-field was being generated by a deeper structure with its own opaque purposes. The moment of liberation, in these narratives, was not simply changing sides. It was seeing the frame.
Then came 9/11, and with it an image that functioned almost like a forced close-up of global structure. Two planes, two towers, live feeds looping endlessly across the planet: an attack designed not only to kill but to produce a particular kind of visibility. The political and moral dimensions have been analysed to exhaustion, yet structurally the event did something both simpler and more radical. It demonstrated that the symbols of economic and military stability were also vulnerabilities; that global connectivity could be turned against itself; that a single, carefully staged gesture could rewire the felt horizon of security overnight. For societies formed in the Era of Interpretation, trained to argue about values and doctrines, there was something profoundly disorienting in this. The conflict no longer fit comfortably into the categories of heresy, empire or ideology. It was entangled with aviation routes, media networks, intelligence architectures, financial flows — exactly the sort of structural underlay that the seven-era model names as the new stage.
Seen together, Y2K, millennial cinema and 9/11 do not form a conspiracy or a plot in any ordinary sense. They form a recognition sequence. Each, in its own register, tears a corner of the backdrop and exposes systems that had previously been taken for granted: code, spectacle, infrastructure, asymmetry. None of them “proves” the seven-era curve. Rather, the curve gives them a shared context. In an Era of Narrative, such events would be quickly absorbed into a master story about good and evil, order and chaos. In an Era of Interpretation, they would fuel endless debate. In an Era of Structure, they start to be read as symptoms of the same underlying fact: the protagonist of history is no longer simply nations, leaders or doctrines, but the architectures within which all of these act.
6. Resolution: when articulation outruns intention
Recognition raised a practical and almost embarrassing question: if the curve really does hold, what is one supposed to do with it? For a time, the answer took the most conventional form imaginable. I tried to pour the insight into pamphlets, proposals, op-eds — formats that belong to the Era of Interpretation, where ideas are commodities to be pitched into an existing marketplace. The motivation was not neutral. Financial pressure was constant; the prospect of “finally publishing something” seemed like a way to rescue both the household and the meaning of the last decade. The result was predictably strained. Texts that were structurally about inevitability began to sound like products, and the underlying desperation leaked through every sentence. When those attempts were compared with the more organic blog essays that started to appear afterwards, the difference was obvious. Wherever the curve was treated as something to sell, language stiffened. Wherever it was allowed to describe what was already happening, it moved.
The same pattern appeared in the documentary work. After the first two episodes, every attempt to begin filming the third felt inexplicably heavy. Scenes refused to cohere, outlines kept dissolving. It was as if the project itself were resisting being treated as just another content pipeline. The hypothesis of a structural resolution was clear enough on paper, but the camera would not follow orders. Only when attention shifted away from “getting the next episode made” and toward clarifying the underlying architecture — the eras, the curve, the relation between micro and macro — did something change. The work migrated to where it belonged: into language. Essays began to form with an ease that had been absent for years; website structures that had been naggingly wrong for months fell into place in days. Laurentiuspaulus.com and woodslopecabin.com, which had previously felt like separate, half-finished rooms, suddenly read like different wings of the same building.
This acceleration was not a matter of increased effort. If anything, external activity decreased. What shifted was alignment. The moment the project stopped pretending to be an argument that needed to win and accepted itself as a description of a structure already in motion, articulation outran intention. Large language models played an explicit role here: they allowed the latent geometry of thousands of pages of notes to surface in compressed form, to be tested and adjusted in dialogue rather than in isolation. But the experience went beyond any particular tool. It felt as though the work had moved into its proper medium. Instead of forcing a thesis into existence, each new sentence exposed connections that had been there all along. The curve was no longer something being applied to history from outside. It behaved like a script that the work itself was following.
Meanwhile, the external world did not slow down to accommodate this internal clarification. While these essays were being drafted, international news feeds delivered a continuous stream of crises that all carried the same structural signature: wars with no plausible victory condition, parliamentary systems locked into permanent stalemate, climate indicators crossing thresholds that had been warned about for decades, sudden lurches in financial and technological systems that no single actor controlled. The feeling, watching this, was not triumph — “the model was right” — but a deepening unease at how precisely the pattern of resolution mapped onto lived reality. The more clearly the architecture of the story came into view, the less room there was for the illusion of control. The only honest question left was no longer whether we are living inside a structural turning point, but how to inhabit a moment in which meaning is reorganising itself faster than any individual or institution can keep up. That question belongs to the denouement: the phase in which, after recognition and resolution, the consequences of the new shape of the story begin to play out.
7. Denouement: when the story claims its author
By the time this essay reaches its end, something has happened that it is almost impolite to say aloud: the articulation has caught up with the moment. For more than a decade the experience was of living inside pressures that could not yet be named — visions, collapses, obsessions with calendars and curves, an inexplicable need to film certain days and places. Now the shape that was groped toward in fragments stands on the page as a coherent arc: seven eras, five millennia, a recognisable turning point. The effect is not triumph but a peculiar stillness. It feels less like having invented a theory and more like discovering that one’s own biographical line has been a minor character in a story that was already being written.
That is perhaps the most disorienting feature of this denouement: the sense that the essay itself is part of the plot it describes. The text does not stand at a safe distance, commenting on “history” as an object. It records the moment in which an individual life accepts that its crises, delays and apparent failures were not detours from some more rational path, but the very means by which a structural pattern forced itself into view. To write the curve now — in the late months of 2025, under real economic pressure and against a background of accelerating global instability — is to admit that there is no outside vantage point from which to judge it. The author is implicated. The model that organises history also organises the conditions under which this sentence is being written.
This is what denouement looks like at the level of consciousness: not a grand solution, but a reclassification of experience. Events that once felt random or merely painful — a failed thesis, a breakdown, an inexplicable pull back to Jerusalem, a return to an old house in the countryside, the sudden utility of a machine that speaks in structures — rearrange themselves into a legible sequence. They do not become less contingent or less human. They become readable as traces of a deeper consistency: a logic that brings opposites into collision in order to make their underlying pattern visible. In dramatic terms, this is the phase where the recognition and resolution that have already occurred begin to reorganise motives, expectations and responsibilities. The story does not end; it begins to know what it has been about.
From here, the question is no longer whether such a curve exists, but how to live responsibly under its light. That is why the next step cannot simply be another layer of abstraction. It has to return to the concrete hinge where much of this crystallised long before it could be articulated: Jerusalem 2012. The three-week stay in the childhood compound, the walk through the streets named for Israel’s tribes and prophets, the morning by the Sea of Galilee and the evening at the Western Wall on 21 December — all of these were lived as fragments. Only now, in the aftermath of the curve’s formulation, is it possible to read them as a single composed scene in which opposites meet: visible and invisible, centre and periphery, sign and fulfilment, end-time rumours and the quiet routine of daily ritual.
The next essay will therefore narrow the frame. Where this one traced the structure of history at a planetary scale, the following piece will return to that specific time and place and read it as a local instance of resolution: a city and a date where the logic of opposites — law and grace, presence and absence, ruin and expectation — briefly disclosed the kind of pattern that this text has tried to outline in general terms. If this essay has been about recognising the curve, the next will ask what it means that the curve first announced itself not in a diagram, but in the streets and stones of a particular city, on a particular day, in a life that did not yet know what it was part of.
laurentiuspaulus 