What historical moment?

I've been thinking lately about the ego required to opine on "this historical moment." Not just this one we're in, but I mean any commentator at any time having the small-mindedness to think he (usually a he) could find a general enough viewpoint that represents an entire zeitgeist. I feel as if I'm constantly battling my own myopia, struggling to shed my own subjective and biased entry into the world. I work at it, and yet I would never be shameless enough to claim any view I was able to reason myself to as some privileged uber-view representative of a whole mass of people. 

Yet I continue to read these types of commentaries because I keep giving them the benefit of the doubt, that perhaps someone cleverer than I has indeed been able to shed their own myths in favor of some grander narrative. But they never deliver. Inevitably these promises of wrapping up various threads of discourse and experiences yield nothing but, at best, skeletal narratives that are possibly representative at the cost of being so bare. Perhaps there are some universal truths about "our time"; but they are not very interesting in their necessary vacuousness. 

I don't mean to suggest that there are no universal human truths. For one, we all seek to avoid pain (probably, short of some biological abnormality). But that is a claim so general that it can't speak to a "historical moment." What I do mean is that it seems to me impossible (or possibly only impractical) to find actionable generalizations of the human condition for time scales of, say, a decade or two, for groups of people at the level, say, of a state or country. 

We need not despair, however. Instead of fretting over the meaning of the historical moment at the aggregate, why not interrogate the experience of the moment for the individual. Talk to your neighbor, ask him how he's experiencing this moment. Compare that to your own experience. Talk to more neighbors in expanding circles of proximity. Note the similarities, but be conservative in your extrapolation. Even within the same city, we're not having the same experience. Interrogate why that is. 

I'm afraid the rush to paint with too broad a brush is confusing us. Claim a universal narrative and you'll have to work hard to explain the divisions -- this is effort that can be more productively spent enumerating the divisions and interrogating whether they should exist at all.