We often ask what life would look like if humanity awakened. The problem isn’t the question itself, but the assumption that we could recognize the answer from within our current condition. Whatever such a world might be, it would not resemble our fantasies, myths, or technologies. It would demand something far more unsettling: presence without projection.
Tag: modernity
Wanting is not neutral. In modern life, it has been shaped into a mechanism of deferral that keeps us reaching without ever arriving. Let’s examine how that mechanism operates — and how it can be dismantled.
Empires don’t usually collapse from external attack. They rot from within — through comfort, corruption, and the arrogance of believing they are immune to consequence.
Modern life does not fail loudly — it hums. It hums with stimulation, urgency, and ritualized compensation, masking misalignment just well enough to keep the machinery turning. Coffee, caffeine, and the countless “small” stimulants threaded through daily life are rarely questioned because they feel benign, even necessary. Yet beneath their ubiquity lies a subtler function: sustaining motion in systems that no longer nourish the human nervous system, spirit, or sense of meaning. What follows is not an indictment of coffee, but an examination of what it reveals.
Reverence can quietly become self-erasure. When admiration turns into kneeling, something essential is misplaced. This reflection questions our habit of sanctifying the past — and asks what it would mean to remember ourselves instead.