The future is not a machine waiting to consume us. It’s a mirror, showing us the depth of our dependence and the reach of our imagination. What we call progress is only as real as the awareness we bring to it.
Author: Trance
Artist. Writer. Truth seeker.
We’ve been told to “fake it until we make it,” as if pretending our way through life will somehow bring us truth. But pretending has a price — one paid in authenticity, integrity, and the quiet collapse of self.
Every so often, a truth we’ve lived by begins to fracture. What once felt steady and self-evident no longer holds. The mind resists, the heart hesitates, and we question how something once sacred could suddenly feel hollow. Yet this breaking is not collapse — it’s transformation. The moment a past truth gives way, we stand at the threshold of what’s next, if only we’re willing to look beyond the shards and keep walking.
What if free will is just an illusion, and the life we live is a game within a game? Across centuries, sacred texts and mystics promise enlightenment, yet the contradictions of existence remain. This essay confronts those tensions, questioning the narratives we inherit and what it truly means to be free.
We’re living through a quiet inversion — a moment when the map has overtaken the territory, and data has become the dominant expression of what we call real. The human story, long mediated through art, language, and memory, is now increasingly shaped by algorithms, proxies, and synthetic simulations of experience. What began as tools to extend our understanding have become the filters through which that understanding must now pass. And so we find ourselves adrift in a new kind of labyrinth — one built not of walls, but of reflections.