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Essays About the Contemporary World: Top 5 Examples

We live in a very different world from the one our parents lived in; if you are writing essays about the contemporary world, you can start by reading essay examples.

The contemporary world refers to the circumstances and ideas of our current time. From costly conflicts to tremendous political developments to a global pandemic, it is safe to say that the 21st century has been quite chaotic. Recent events have put various issues including bodily autonomy, climate change, and territorial sovereignty, at the forefront of the global discussion.

A good understanding of the contemporary world helps us become more conscious, responsible citizens, no matter what country we are from. Therefore, many schools have included subjects such as “the contemporary world” or “contemporary issues” in their curricula. 

If you wish to write essays about the contemporary world, here are five essay examples to help you. 

You might also be interested in these essays about engineering and essays about cooperation .

1. Our Future Is Now by Francesca Minicozzi

2. what it may be like after the chaos by kassidy pratt, 3. does social media actually reflect reality by kalev leetaru.

• 4.  Importance of English by Terry Walton

5. The Meaning of Life in Modern Society (Author Unknown)

1. the effects of technology, 2. why you should keep up with current events, 3. college education: is it essential, 4. politics in the contemporary world, 5. modern contemporary issues.

Top 5 Examples of Essays About the Contemporary World

“Our globe is in dire need of help, and the coronavirus reminds the world of what it means to work together. This pandemic marks a turning point in global efforts to slow down climate change. The methods we enact towards not only stopping the spread of the virus, but slowing down climate change, will ultimately depict how humanity will arise once this pandemic is suppressed. The future of our home planet lies in how we treat it right now.”

Minicozzi discusses the differences in the U.K.’s and her native U.S.’s approaches to one of today’s greatest issues: climate change. The U.K. makes consistent efforts to reduce pollution, while the U.S., led by President Donald Trump, treats the issue with little to no regard. She laments her homeland’s inaction and concludes her essay with suggestions for Americans to help fight climate change in their way. 

“College began, in-person classes were allowed, but with half the students, all social distanced, wearing a mask at all times. Wearing a mask became natural, where leaving without one felt like I was leaving without my phone. It is our normal for now, and it has worked to slow the spread. With the vaccines beginning to roll out, we all hope that soon things will go back to the way

we remember them a year ago before the pandemic began.”

Pratt reflects on her school life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in this short essay. She recalls the early days of class suspension, the lockdowns, and the social distancing and mask guidelines. She understands why it has to be this way but remains hopeful that things will return as they once were. 

You might be interested in these essays about cheating .

“While a tweet by Bieber to his tens of millions of followers will no doubt be widely read, it is unlikely that his musings on the Syrian peace process will suddenly sway the warring factions and yield overnight peace. In fact, this is a common limitation of many social analyses: the lack of connection between social reality and physical reality. A person who is highly influential in the conversation on Twitter around a particular topic may or may not yield any influence in the real world on that topic.”

Leetaru criticizes the perception that social media gives users that what they see is an accurate representation of contemporary worldviews. However, this is not the case, as the content that social media shows you are based on your interactions with other content, and specific demographics dominate these platforms. As a result, people should be more aware that not everything they read on social media is accurate. 

4.   Importance of English by Terry Walton

“We can use English to develop ourselves culturally and materially so that we can compete with the best side in the world of mind and matter. We can say that English language is our window to the world. One of advantage is that it is the world most used business and political language. Those who are still unaware about the importance of English. They should start learning English as a time come when everything would be understood spoken and written in English.”

According to author Terry Walton, proficiency in the English language is vital in today’s world. He discusses its status as a lingua franca used by people worldwide. He also lists some of the ways English is used today, such as in business, science and technology, and education. 

“The socialites have ensured the meaning of life is to push their followers beyond their healthy lives by making them feel that they are only worthy of keeping tabs on the next big thing that they are engaging. These socialites have ensured that life has been reduced to the detrimental appraisal of egos. They have guaranteed that the experience of social media is the only life worth living in the modern society.”

This essay describes the idea in contemporary culture that prioritizes social media image over well-being. People have become so obsessed with monitoring likes and follow that their lives revolve around social media. We seldom genuinely know a person based on their online presence. The meaning of life is reduced to the idea of a “good” life rather than the true reality. 

Top Prompts On Essays About the Contemporary World

Technology is everywhere in our life –  in social media, internet services, and artificial intelligence. How do you think technology affects the world today, and how will it affect the future? If this topic seems too broad, you can focus on technology in one particular sector, such as education or medicine. Describe the common technologies used in everyday life, and discuss the benefits and disadvantages of relying on these technologies.

In your essay, you can write about the importance of being aware of whatever is happening in the contemporary world. Discuss lessons you can learn from current events and the advantages of being more conscious or knowledgeable in day-to-day life.

In the 21st century, we have heard many success stories of people who dropped out or did not attend college. In addition, more and more job opportunities no longer require a college degree. Decide whether or not a college education is still necessary in the contemporary world and discuss why. Also include context, such as reasons why people do not attend college.

Many countries have undergone drastic political changes, from coups d’état to wars to groundbreaking elections. In your essay, write about one important political event, global or in your home country, in the contemporary world. Provide context by giving the causes and effects of your chosen event. 

From vaccination to the racial justice movement to gun control. For your essay, you can pick a topic and explain your stance on it. Provide a defensible argument, and include ample evidence such as statistics, research, and news articles. 

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

I Thought We’d Learned Nothing From the Pandemic. I Wasn’t Seeing the Full Picture

M y first home had a back door that opened to a concrete patio with a giant crack down the middle. When my sister and I played, I made sure to stay on the same side of the divide as her, just in case. The 1988 film The Land Before Time was one of the first movies I ever saw, and the image of the earth splintering into pieces planted its roots in my brain. I believed that, even in my own backyard, I could easily become the tiny Triceratops separated from her family, on the other side of the chasm, as everything crumbled into chaos.

Some 30 years later, I marvel at the eerie, unexpected ways that cartoonish nightmare came to life – not just for me and my family, but for all of us. The landscape was already covered in fissures well before COVID-19 made its way across the planet, but the pandemic applied pressure, and the cracks broke wide open, separating us from each other physically and ideologically. Under the weight of the crisis, we scattered and landed on such different patches of earth we could barely see each other’s faces, even when we squinted. We disagreed viciously with each other, about how to respond, but also about what was true.

Recently, someone asked me if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, and my first thought was a flat no. Nothing. There was a time when I thought it would be the very thing to draw us together and catapult us – as a capital “S” Society – into a kinder future. It’s surreal to remember those early days when people rallied together, sewing masks for health care workers during critical shortages and gathering on balconies in cities from Dallas to New York City to clap and sing songs like “Yellow Submarine.” It felt like a giant lightning bolt shot across the sky, and for one breath, we all saw something that had been hidden in the dark – the inherent vulnerability in being human or maybe our inescapable connectedness .

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But it turns out, it was just a flash. The goodwill vanished as quickly as it appeared. A couple of years later, people feel lied to, abandoned, and all on their own. I’ve felt my own curiosity shrinking, my willingness to reach out waning , my ability to keep my hands open dwindling. I look out across the landscape and see selfishness and rage, burnt earth and so many dead bodies. Game over. We lost. And if we’ve already lost, why try?

Still, the question kept nagging me. I wondered, am I seeing the full picture? What happens when we focus not on the collective society but at one face, one story at a time? I’m not asking for a bow to minimize the suffering – a pretty flourish to put on top and make the whole thing “worth it.” Yuck. That’s not what we need. But I wondered about deep, quiet growth. The kind we feel in our bodies, relationships, homes, places of work, neighborhoods.

Like a walkie-talkie message sent to my allies on the ground, I posted a call on my Instagram. What do you see? What do you hear? What feels possible? Is there life out here? Sprouting up among the rubble? I heard human voices calling back – reports of life, personal and specific. I heard one story at a time – stories of grief and distrust, fury and disappointment. Also gratitude. Discovery. Determination.

Among the most prevalent were the stories of self-revelation. Almost as if machines were given the chance to live as humans, people described blossoming into fuller selves. They listened to their bodies’ cues, recognized their desires and comforts, tuned into their gut instincts, and honored the intuition they hadn’t realized belonged to them. Alex, a writer and fellow disabled parent, found the freedom to explore a fuller version of herself in the privacy the pandemic provided. “The way I dress, the way I love, and the way I carry myself have both shrunk and expanded,” she shared. “I don’t love myself very well with an audience.” Without the daily ritual of trying to pass as “normal” in public, Tamar, a queer mom in the Netherlands, realized she’s autistic. “I think the pandemic helped me to recognize the mask,” she wrote. “Not that unmasking is easy now. But at least I know it’s there.” In a time of widespread suffering that none of us could solve on our own, many tended to our internal wounds and misalignments, large and small, and found clarity.

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I wonder if this flourishing of self-awareness is at least partially responsible for the life alterations people pursued. The pandemic broke open our personal notions of work and pushed us to reevaluate things like time and money. Lucy, a disabled writer in the U.K., made the hard decision to leave her job as a journalist covering Westminster to write freelance about her beloved disability community. “This work feels important in a way nothing else has ever felt,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’d have realized this was what I should be doing without the pandemic.” And she wasn’t alone – many people changed jobs , moved, learned new skills and hobbies, became politically engaged.

Perhaps more than any other shifts, people described a significant reassessment of their relationships. They set boundaries, said no, had challenging conversations. They also reconnected, fell in love, and learned to trust. Jeanne, a quilter in Indiana, got to know relatives she wouldn’t have connected with if lockdowns hadn’t prompted weekly family Zooms. “We are all over the map as regards to our belief systems,” she emphasized, “but it is possible to love people you don’t see eye to eye with on every issue.” Anna, an anti-violence advocate in Maine, learned she could trust her new marriage: “Life was not a honeymoon. But we still chose to turn to each other with kindness and curiosity.” So many bonds forged and broken, strengthened and strained.

Instead of relying on default relationships or institutional structures, widespread recalibrations allowed for going off script and fortifying smaller communities. Mara from Idyllwild, Calif., described the tangible plan for care enacted in her town. “We started a mutual-aid group at the beginning of the pandemic,” she wrote, “and it grew so quickly before we knew it we were feeding 400 of the 4000 residents.” She didn’t pretend the conditions were ideal. In fact, she expressed immense frustration with our collective response to the pandemic. Even so, the local group rallied and continues to offer assistance to their community with help from donations and volunteers (many of whom were originally on the receiving end of support). “I’ve learned that people thrive when they feel their connection to others,” she wrote. Clare, a teacher from the U.K., voiced similar conviction as she described a giant scarf she’s woven out of ribbons, each representing a single person. The scarf is “a collection of stories, moments and wisdom we are sharing with each other,” she wrote. It now stretches well over 1,000 feet.

A few hours into reading the comments, I lay back on my bed, phone held against my chest. The room was quiet, but my internal world was lighting up with firefly flickers. What felt different? Surely part of it was receiving personal accounts of deep-rooted growth. And also, there was something to the mere act of asking and listening. Maybe it connected me to humans before battle cries. Maybe it was the chance to be in conversation with others who were also trying to understand – what is happening to us? Underneath it all, an undeniable thread remained; I saw people peering into the mess and narrating their findings onto the shared frequency. Every comment was like a flare into the sky. I’m here! And if the sky is full of flares, we aren’t alone.

I recognized my own pandemic discoveries – some minor, others massive. Like washing off thick eyeliner and mascara every night is more effort than it’s worth; I can transform the mundane into the magical with a bedsheet, a movie projector, and twinkle lights; my paralyzed body can mother an infant in ways I’d never seen modeled for me. I remembered disappointing, bewildering conversations within my own family of origin and our imperfect attempts to remain close while also seeing things so differently. I realized that every time I get the weekly invite to my virtual “Find the Mumsies” call, with a tiny group of moms living hundreds of miles apart, I’m being welcomed into a pocket of unexpected community. Even though we’ve never been in one room all together, I’ve felt an uncommon kind of solace in their now-familiar faces.

Hope is a slippery thing. I desperately want to hold onto it, but everywhere I look there are real, weighty reasons to despair. The pandemic marks a stretch on the timeline that tangles with a teetering democracy, a deteriorating planet , the loss of human rights that once felt unshakable . When the world is falling apart Land Before Time style, it can feel trite, sniffing out the beauty – useless, firing off flares to anyone looking for signs of life. But, while I’m under no delusions that if we just keep trudging forward we’ll find our own oasis of waterfalls and grassy meadows glistening in the sunshine beneath a heavenly chorus, I wonder if trivializing small acts of beauty, connection, and hope actually cuts us off from resources essential to our survival. The group of abandoned dinosaurs were keeping each other alive and making each other laugh well before they made it to their fantasy ending.

Read More: How Ice Cream Became My Own Personal Act of Resistance

After the monarch butterfly went on the endangered-species list, my friend and fellow writer Hannah Soyer sent me wildflower seeds to plant in my yard. A simple act of big hope – that I will actually plant them, that they will grow, that a monarch butterfly will receive nourishment from whatever blossoms are able to push their way through the dirt. There are so many ways that could fail. But maybe the outcome wasn’t exactly the point. Maybe hope is the dogged insistence – the stubborn defiance – to continue cultivating moments of beauty regardless. There is value in the planting apart from the harvest.

I can’t point out a single collective lesson from the pandemic. It’s hard to see any great “we.” Still, I see the faces in my moms’ group, making pancakes for their kids and popping on between strings of meetings while we try to figure out how to raise these small people in this chaotic world. I think of my friends on Instagram tending to the selves they discovered when no one was watching and the scarf of ribbons stretching the length of more than three football fields. I remember my family of three, holding hands on the way up the ramp to the library. These bits of growth and rings of support might not be loud or right on the surface, but that’s not the same thing as nothing. If we only cared about the bottom-line defeats or sweeping successes of the big picture, we’d never plant flowers at all.

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Globalization.

Globalization is a term used to describe the increasing connectedness and interdependence of world cultures and economies.

Anthropology, Sociology, Social Studies, Civics, Economics

Freight Trains

Freight trains waiting to be loaded with cargo to transport around the United Kingdom. This cargo comes from around the world and contains all kinds of goods and products.

Photograph by Bloomberg

Globalization is a term used to describe how trade and technology have made the world into a more connected and interdependent place. Globalization also captures in its scope the economic and social changes that have come about as a result. It may be pictured as the threads of an immense spider web formed over millennia, with the number and reach of these threads increasing over time. People, money, material goods, ideas, and even disease and devastation have traveled these silken strands, and have done so in greater numbers and with greater speed than ever in the present age. When did globalization begin? The Silk Road, an ancient network of trade routes across China, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean used between 50 B.C.E. and 250 C.E., is perhaps the most well-known early example of exchanging ideas, products, and customs. As with future globalizing booms, new technologies played a key role in the Silk Road trade. Advances in metallurgy led to the creation of coins; advances in transportation led to the building of roads connecting the major empires of the day; and increased agricultural production meant more food could be trafficked between locales. Along with Chinese silk, Roman glass, and Arabian spices, ideas such as Buddhist beliefs and the secrets of paper-making also spread via these tendrils of trade. Unquestionably, these types of exchanges were accelerated in the Age of Exploration, when European explorers seeking new sea routes to the spices and silks of Asia bumped into the Americas instead. Again, technology played an important role in the maritime trade routes that flourished between old and newly discovered continents. New ship designs and the creation of the magnetic compass were key to the explorers’ successes. Trade and idea exchange now extended to a previously unconnected part of the world, where ships carrying plants, animals, and Spanish silver between the Old World and the New also carried Christian missionaries. The web of globalization continued to spin out through the Age of Revolution, when ideas about liberty , equality , and fraternity spread like fire from America to France to Latin America and beyond. It rode the waves of industrialization , colonization , and war through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, powered by the invention of factories, railways, steamboats, cars, and planes. With the Information Age, globalization went into overdrive. Advances in computer and communications technology launched a new global era and redefined what it meant to be “connected.” Modern communications satellites meant the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo could be watched in the United States for the first time. The World Wide Web and the Internet allowed someone in Germany to read about a breaking news story in Bolivia in real time. Someone wishing to travel from Boston, Massachusetts, to London, England, could do so in hours rather than the week or more it would have taken a hundred years ago. This digital revolution massively impacted economies across the world as well: they became more information-based and more interdependent. In the modern era, economic success or failure at one focal point of the global web can be felt in every major world economy. The benefits and disadvantages of globalization are the subject of ongoing debate. The downside to globalization can be seen in the increased risk for the transmission of diseases like ebola or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), or in the kind of environmental harm that scientist Paul R. Furumo has studied in microcosm in palm oil plantations in the tropics. Globalization has of course led to great good, too. Richer nations now can—and do—come to the aid of poorer nations in crisis. Increasing diversity in many countries has meant more opportunity to learn about and celebrate other cultures. The sense that there is a global village, a worldwide “us,” has emerged.

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March 6, 2024

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Contemporary world.

• Teacher: Florida Quibuyen