The sky was a deep purple, with lashings of red, as emerged from the radio studio a week last Sunday morning. It was a lovely morning. 04:08. Four hours and eight minutes after I should have originally gone home. It’s unusual for me to catch an early sunrise, so I drank in the quiet of that fallow period between late night revellers and early risers. The sound of the birds had an unfamiliar crispness to it. The air felt clean, not yet filled with the fumes of the day. The morning was still a blank canvas, and although I was on my way to bed, it was full of possibilities for whoever came along next.

And yet… despite the luxuriousness of that morning… everything felt a little bit terrible.

My Times Radio show – usually 10pm-1am – had been stretched into the night to cover the breaking news of the US strikes on Iran. Donald Trump had ordered Iran’s nuclear sites to be stuck by some of the most destructive bombs available. The wait for Iran’s response had begun. One of the world’s many fizzing conflicts had bubbled to boiling point. Again.

It’s certainly easy to feel that with raging conflicts, authoritarian slides, and the re-emergence of once eradicated diseases, we are living in a bad period of history. Or, at least, that the once solid notion that there has never been a better time to be alive is being challenged. As the old Chinese curse goes: may you live in interesting times.

Fortunately, just a few hours earlier, I’d had the right conversation with the right person. We’d done an item on that very point: are these really terrible times? We’d spoken to the historian Gemma Hollman who, having studied the arc of history, would surely know the answer.

The first point she made was an obvious one… and one I’m clinging to. We have never been more connected. We have never had greater access to news and information. We have never been more exposed to the horrors, and highs, of the world. And although we live in a time of rapid change, one principle remains: bad news sells. We are not just able to follow every dramatic twist and turn of global events, we’re actively encouraged to. The platforms we use make it addictive. It gives us a rush of dopamine and adrenaline, and so we come back for more. Swipe. Refresh. Scroll. Conflict leads to clicks, and clicks are lucrative.

Truth is, some of this might be my fault. My job depends on people listening to my radio show. More people listen to my radio show when something dramatic happens. Over the last few weeks, we have followed live coverage of riots in LA and strikes in the Middle East. Our audience numbers have spiked. I think we have covered them in a way that is considered and nuanced and insightful – that’s what we do on Times Radio – rather than creating conflict for the sake of it, but the principle remains.

And I don’t always get that right. Earlier in the evening, we were discussing a story about health secretary Wes Streeting that made a few of the front pages. He had been critical of the idea of introducing assisted dying, a few days after MPs had voted in favour of it, including the Prime Minister, his boss. Conflict. Clicks. Cash. I spent some time trying to tease out the possibility that the rift between Wes Streeting and the Prime Minister was existential for their professional relationship. Maybe Wes Streeting would have to resign, I’d said to one guest. Probably not, they said.

I caught myself. Maybe it’s OK that Wes Streeting has a different opinion to the Prime Minister. Maybe that’s kind of… healthy… or at the very least not much of a big deal. Maybe this news story isn’t existential. Maybe everyone is going to be fine. Maybe it isn’t laced with high drama. Maybe I was trying to force conflict where, if it did exist, it was pretty benign.

In any case, minor disagreements between politicians are not the reason we’re feeling this odd sense of dread about our times. Rather, it’s the major rifts that are the problem. The ones that do, in fact, feel existential, and make us feel like these are terrible times. I wondered if there was an example of another particularly terrible time in history, ideally a worse time, that could give us some reassuring perspective? Gemma Hollman could help. In fact, she had exactly the story we needed.

The story of 536AD, to be precise.

“Travelling back almost 1,500 years, we find a recognisable world. Empires have risen and fallen, but there are still many great civilisations across the different continents. Populations are thriving, trade and industry flourishing, religions are established. But then an almost apocalyptic event happens that impacts people the world over. Somewhere, a huge volcanic eruption occurs. Scientists are still unsure exactly where, but it is somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere at a high latitude. No known written records survive recording this event, so few if any were aware of it. But they were about to feel its impact.

Ash, sulphur, and debris was launched high into the atmosphere, and winds spread the fallout far and wide. This was no small explosion; the dust spread for thousands of miles, gradually coating Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. Contemporary writers from a multitude of countries record the strange veil that fell over the sky, dimming everything in its path. This ash not only dimmed the light, but thus had a huge impact on the entire Earth’s ecosystem.”

What came next may not surprise you. Food chains broke down. People fought and pillaged. Empires collapsed. And just as things couldn’t get more fragile and febrile… a devastating plague struck, considered one of the worst pandemics in history.

“The impact of years of unusual weather, failing crops, plague, terror and unrest is easy to imagine. It took decades, if not a century for the continents to recover.”

So… I think we’re doing OK, on balance.

Although these clearly aren’t the worst times, I did wonder if there had been better times. Maybe the mid-90s, before 9/11, a period of relative peace and prosperity. Was that a golden era? Are we sliding back in the wrong direction? And what of the future… is a woman who knows and studies the horrors of the past, feeling hopeful about what’s to come?

You can get the answers to those questions by listening to my chat with historian Gemma Hollman below. And you can read her brilliant blog on the worst year in history by clicking here.

This isn’t a conversation designed to convince you this moment of history is fine, or even reassure you that the future will follow the upward trajectory of progress and prosperity, but it will put our times into context.

By the way – as we mark Times Radio’s fifth birthday this week, it’s worth me reminding you (and maybe myself) that that’s exactly what we’re about: the context, not just the conflict.