It is 3:00 AM, and I am staring at the blue light of my phone, scrolling through an endless feed of things I cannot afford, advertised by people who look exhausted pretending they are happy. There is a specific kind of quiet that comes with the middle of the night, a heavy, hollow feeling that makes you realize just how strange it is to be alive right now.
It feels like we are all trapped in a giant machine that forgot its original purpose. Somewhere along the way, we stopped building a world for humans to live in and started building a world just to keep the numbers going up. Every corner of existence has been turned into something you have to pay for, or something you have to sell.
Remember when hobbies were just things we did because they brought us joy? Now, if you paint, you are supposed to open an online shop. If you take photos, you need an online following. If you have free time, you are told to monetize your passion. We have turned our resting hours into side hustles because the cost of just breathing seems to double every few years. It is exhausting to live in a world where your worth as a human being is entirely tied to how much profit you can generate for someone you will never meet.
Even the planet feels like it is crying out for a break. We watch the seasons blur together, the summers getting hotter and the storms getting weirder, and yet the factories keep churning out plastic trinkets destined for a landfill. We all know something is deeply wrong. We can feel it in the air. But the people at the top just keep squeezing every last drop of life out of the earth, assuring us that everything is fine as long as the quarterly earnings look good.
What breaks my heart the most is what this is doing to our relationships. We are lonelier than we have ever been, even though we are constantly connected. We spend our days working jobs that feel increasingly meaningless, staring at screens, only to go home and stare at smaller screens because we are too tired to do anything else. True community has been replaced by algorithms designed to keep us angry and divided, because angry people click more links and buy more things.
We are living in the future that science fiction warned us about, but it is not shiny or exciting. It is just incredibly beige and bureaucratic. It is the slow, quiet erosion of everything that makes life beautiful, all for the sake of an abstract concept called the market.
I do not know how we fix it. I do not think anyone really does. It just feels like we are all passengers on a train that is speeding toward a cliff, and the conductor is too busy counting the ticket sales to notice the tracks are ending. So we just sit here in the dark, scrolling, wishing for a world that cares a little less about margins and a little more about people.
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