Do People Really Change? Time Travel, History, Human Nature

“100 years from this day, will the people still feel this way? Still say the things that they’re saying right now?” Every time I hear those lyrics by The Byrds, I find myself thinking about time travel. Not because I want to change history or win the lottery with tomorrow’s stock prices, but because I wonder if people have really changed at all.

To me, time travel has always been about something much simpler. I’d love to spend one ordinary day in another era. I’d wander the streets, listen to conversations, smell fresh bread coming from a bakery, and watch people going about lives they considered completely normal. History books tell us what happened. Time travel would let us understand what it actually felt like to be there.

Maybe that’s why the internet became so fascinated with the famous Charlie Chaplin footage from 1928. A woman walks past the camera holding something to her ear, and for years people insisted she was talking on a cellphone. Historians have offered far more believable explanations, but the theory never really disappeared. I don’t think people were searching for proof that time travel exists. I think they simply wanted to believe they were catching a tiny glimpse of another century.

That thought always brings me back to 1926.

When Rudolph Valentino died at just 31 years old, an estimated 100,000 grieving fans poured into the streets of New York. They weren’t mourning someone they actually knew. They were mourning someone they felt they knew. Long before Instagram, TikTok, podcasts, or YouTube, people had already blurred the line between a public image and a real person.

We like to think we’ve invented celebrity culture, but we really haven’t. We’ve simply changed the way it’s delivered. Movie screens became television screens. Television became phone screens. The faces changed, but the emotional connection didn’t.

The world around those fans looked completely different from ours. Laundry meant washboards. Homes were heated with coal. Iceboxes kept food cold, and a simple infection could become life-threatening. Yet despite living in a world that feels almost unimaginable today, they still fell in love with movie stars, worried about tomorrow, dreamed about the future, and tried to make sense of the world around them.

That’s the part that fascinates me most. Technology evolves at an incredible pace, but people don’t seem to change nearly as much. We still want to belong. We still look for love. We still admire heroes, chase success, worry about tomorrow, and search for meaning. Every generation believes it’s different, yet the more history I read, the more familiar everyone becomes.

If you dropped most of us into 1926, we’d probably struggle before lunchtime. We depend on electricity, the internet, and technology so completely that many of the skills we value today would disappear overnight. On the other hand, if someone from 1926 woke up tomorrow morning, they’d probably be overwhelmed by smartphones and artificial intelligence, but I wouldn’t bet against them. People who grew up in that era understood hard work, patience, and adapting because they didn’t have another choice.

One thing that amazes me is how much can change in only a hundred years. The leap from 1926 to 2026 is almost impossible to wrap your head around. We went from silent movies and radio to artificial intelligence and carrying more knowledge in our pockets than entire libraries once held. It’s exciting, a little unsettling, and it makes me wonder what someone living in 2126 will think when they look back at us.

They’ll probably laugh at the technology we thought was revolutionary and shake their heads at some of the things we took for granted. They’ll ask the same question I ask whenever I look back at another era: What on earth were they doing? The honest answer will probably be the same one that applies to every generation. We were simply doing the best we could with the knowledge, tools, and understanding we had at the time.

Maybe that’s what time travel really teaches us. It isn’t about changing the past or predicting the future. It’s about understanding people. The more I look back, the more I realize the biggest changes aren’t found in human nature. They’re found in the tools we build and the speed at which the world changes around us.

The Byrds wondered whether people would still feel the same way a hundred years later. Looking back across history, I’d say they already had their answer. We build better machines, invent remarkable technology, and keep finding new ways to connect. Underneath it all, we’re still chasing the same dreams, asking the same questions, and trying to make sense of the world around us. The scenery changes far more than the people do.

Tony M.

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