Isn’t it wild how time goes by, both with and despite us? I mean, birth takes nearly a year, but death can happen in a matter of days or less. We all become pregnant with ideas and opinions from an early age, and yet we soon get sick on the virality of culture. It has become customary practice in today’s world to recycle and regurgitate just about everything. This is natural in the cycle of consumerism, but the speed at which we consume it all makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish what actually has substance from what merely passes by or through us. And all this information circulates at rates we can’t individually process, pinballing between our personal devices and the vast technological infrastructure – towers, data centers, satellites, and other systems spread across Earth and beyond – that increasingly surveils us and turns our attention into a source of profit.
This is the now, but it’s also the forever. For generations, we’ve looked for escape routes, shortcuts, schemes, and scams rather than honestly confronting the conditions of our time and figuring out how to live with them. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can find pleasure in the material and immaterial alike, recognize fulfillment when it arrives, and seek hope even in disheartening situations. We can decide what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we want out of this collective durational performance we’re stuck in, which often appears trivial at best.
Some times are better than others. Some lives are easier than others. But everything is relative; everything is a narrative. We don’t have to allow others to be the authors of our existence. Those in power may presume to determine the stories we inhabit, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept their versions of reality. For decades, those who shape our culture and wield some form of authority have been producing variations of the same duplicitous science-fiction dystopia, presenting each new technological innovation as progress while reproducing the same underlying assumptions about our future. There are many other possible futures, though – ones that both require and compel us to be both present and patient. A new world can begin whenever we decide we want it.
– Keith J. Varadi, 2026
