My grandmother was born at around the peak of the British Empire, and in her funeral there was a story of her childhood in a military base in the British Raj.

The pound was the world reserve currency, India was the jewel in the largest empire the world has ever seen and upon which the sun would never set, and Westminster ruled directly and indirectly over more than a third of the world GDP — roughly equivalent to $30 trillion/year against the world of 2018.

When my brother was a child, that same great empire had been so reduced that it found itself forced to make a series of humiliating fishing rights concessions to Iceland, total population ~350,000.

The world can become unrecognisable in even just a few years; that just gets more likely when you assume nothing can ever change.