Heirs to the Wreckage

There’s something so alluring about fiction, because it integrates that fundamentally human instinct to narrate. Every day that we live we’re simultaneously and retroactively telling ourselves a narrative. It’s necessary, because in order for life to make sense we need to cognitively micromanage it. Our memories are selective, our biases are always operative, and more than anything we need to fulfill our sense of meaning. That means that, in any scenario, fiction and storytelling is always at work. A wind is just a wind, but if the wind is a sign of God- a gratifying sign that the universe has its benevolent eye on you- it becomes something completely different.

This is why I loved stories as a child (and still do). I daydreamed not just because I was bored, but because I found my fantasies more interesting than the flavorless slop that was school life. I loved stories in all their forms, books, movies, even the kind that respectable society deplores (video games, comics). Because what makes those mediums proper art forms, is that they parallel the way actual life experiences work. Again, the wind is purely a wind, unless the subject invokes the divine. From the perspective of secularized science, childbirth is just a process by which a blot of cells multiplies until it takes human form. This reading doesn’t acknowledge (and doesn’t change the fact) that childbirth is a miracle, romanticism is needed to appreciate that dimension. If you remember that a game is just code with inputs and outputs, or that books are really just ink shapes on paper, the fiction dissolves. But no, I take those forms, and I complement them with my own fantasy. I don’t simply play a game to watch pixels react to my moving of a joystick, I play because in that instant I am willing to partially entertain the belief that I really within the game’s “world”. Same as when I read a book, I treat the plot’s consequences as if they are actually happening.

In any case (at least in western society) I’ve observed that our authority figures actively play on this tendency of ours. I grew up hearing of glorious futures of potential, of impact, of opportunities. Of how, if we played the game correctly, got good grades, networked with the right people, Success would follow. And what is Success? Of course what they likely meant is for us to wind up in an office, performing quotidian tasks for high pay. One locates here another instance of human self-narration, romanticizing the milquetoast of our world. Children do not associate consultants with greatness, they imagine superheroes (another sort of fantasy). Or, later on in life as I frequented more politically inclined circles, the mythmaking took a different bent. Leadership programs, impact seminars, mock trial, sermons on how we the new generation had to eclipse our forebears to save the world from its own demons. “You guys will be better, you’ll be the ones to deliver us to salvation, so let us tell you how to do it.” If you learn how to communicate with “Stakeholders”, attend more leadership programs, demonstrate your “initiative”, you’ll save the world. This was a fantasy of its own, as most of those pipelines ironically just end up propelling you into that same office. Public Policy (supposedly the academic pipeline to change) suffers from a similar condition- for most of us just end up working for the Rand Corporation.

Yet, the sobering truth is that life simply goes on. You complete your degrees, and by some miracle (in our economy) come to possess all the signifiers of success. You wind up at the job (or more frequently you don’t) you believed was synonymous with those vague promises of greatness, and life simply goes on. They march you in with bright smiles and congratulations and fanfare all around until you reach your cubicle, bought and paid for with college tuition and years of your time, and then you’re just there. The romanticism, the moment, the event, those things become quite rare in our daily experience. This is not to say they cannot happen: being promoted, hitting a milestone, experiencing a rare and unexpected achievement, these are all remote but not infinitesimal possibilities in the 21st century. But even so, the fictions we are sold by institutions, popular society, authority figures, rarely come to fruition. Even without the propaganda, that’s simply how it is with human minds, life inevitably falls short without neurotic embellishment on our part. Even if one experiences the thrilling high of an Event, of destiny writ true, that moment is always temporary, and life simply goes on.

And now in 2025, I find myself wondering, where exactly is the event for us? What ought we actually do with our lives? Should we as Gen Z’s simply do as society tells us to do, work to preserve ourselves while maintaining an acceptably liberal awareness of current events? Should we endanger ourselves and our stability to provocatively push the boundaries of what is politically possible? Is it one grand deceit to regard our stability as true stability, given how much we sacrifice to uphold it? Is all of this beyond me and am I transposing my personal trivial dissatisfactions onto the political (even if these categories overlap)? God, one has to deplore the way western society corrupts the temporal experience of one’s life. Your time on this earth is sorted and micromanaged anachronistically as if on a calendar, do this during these years, then work X amount of time on this, all the way until you retire and die. Yet, it’s easy to prove that capitalism cannot predict the future. Financial speculation is just that- speculation- and the only predictable trend is how quickly people give weight to that speculation (and render it into fact). In this same way, it projects a fantasy of an infinite existence for itself: the modern world is set in stone at the end of our evolution and that is how it shall be until the sun consumes the earth. Yet, every legible indicator suggests that either the system will change or burn itself out in the near future. And eco-capitalism is somewhat of its own destructive fantasy. No matter how many elegant modifiers (green energy, AI, etc.) you introduce into the formula, capitalism still needs to be changed in such a way that it would no longer be the capitalism we know. So, with the advent of the digital age, real-time information, and an enhanced awareness of the world, what ought we do? How do we reckon with (as Žižek put it) this topsy-turvy world? There is little cognitive or political mapping for this era. Climate change, the rise of neo-fascism, technocratic control, posthuman AI accelerationism, these terms come close to the mark but even then it doesn’t feel as if they encompass the full scope of what’s happening. I feel that the burden on me, on everyone who feels the weight of these issues, is to make different choices. I cannot help but feel the solution of how to reckon with the topsy-turvy world, to answer the question of what we ought to do and where the Event should lie- exists outside the scope of our knowledge. The modern world has seemingly colonized all the thinkable, that is by design.

But this is an easy thing to say. It makes for better performative rhetoric than it does an actual point. There are other ways of knowing, of relating to the universe, of relating to self and to the world, of which a great deal can be observed and learned, but ultimately they are never quite the solution. For one, I am the first to critique the modern world order and its antagonisms, yet it’s senseless for me to ignore that the modern world and its antagonisms made me who I am. The world in its financial inequality has gifted me a comfortable existence. The culture that I’m from is imperfect, yet it’s a culture that I love still. I look at the destructive impacts of colonialism, that which shattered and stitched back together the world we know today, and I realize I can’t fully critique it, because I am explicitly a product of the post-colonial world. I will never live as sustainably or think as ecocentrically as some people. There are excessive tastes of mine, precorporated and supported by the status quo, that I find pleasure in. This does not mean we should not critique these things, nor should we get lost in penitent guilt and self-examination, but it just means the problem of solving them and extricating ourselves from the system becomes that much more difficult. I live by leave of the world I wish to change, I live still affectively and materially linked to the object of my critique, the modern fantasy is so dangerous to me because I still find it incredibly appealing (even as the evidence against it mounts). So here I am, trying to touch that otherness which lies beyond the known, trying to find the right path and the right way of thinking for our circumstances. Of course, there is no right path, it’s all subjective; but my self-narration demands I characterize it as the “right path”. I mean, surely talking about it and questioning it has to be a productive first step, right? Perhaps what my self-narration most fears is that the Event that will affect reality will not involve me at all.