References

In recent years, people have had far more leisure time. This directly translates to far more literature consumed — although note that for our purposes, we interpret ‘literature’ broadly, as any widely-distributed reasonably non-ephemeral work, including television, radio, blogs (possibly eventually via Wayback), usw.

This has, of course, led directly to much of humanity sharing a common cultural background. Of course not everyone will read the same books, watch the same movies, listen to the same podcasts... but there is and will continue to be a great deal of overlap. Rarely will two native speakers of English be separated by so great a gap as exists between, say, the wizarding and Muggle worlds — to make a familiar reference. They all have a minimal shared culture on which to fall back, stories and analogies like the preceding, and that minimal culture grows daily.

Not entirely unrelatedly, it is often noted that everything that can be written about has. This is not quite true, but as the number of works of literature (by the above definition) increases, it is at least certain that everything day-to-day, all the combinations of common events and the feelings coincident with them, will have been written about, and written about famously.

Someday, these two phenomena will touch.

On that day, we will all be Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.