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We,The People, are not happy
2 - We the poeple are not happy
AI is changing our life. We know that something even more powerful may follow. And yet, despite all this progress, something is missing. In the past 200 years we developed TV, plastic, cars, planes, vaccines, running water, electricity, freeways, telephones, computers. What more can we ask for? What can we complain about?
After AI something even more powerful will turn our life upside down again. We keep moving forward, faster and faster. We cannot stop and question where we are going. Our life is getting out of control. We have the feeling of being caught in an avalanche.
We have the feeling of being caught in an avalanche
and our life is getting out of control.
Over the last two centuries, people left farms, small towns, and villages, searching for a better life in cities. Today we have 32 cities around the world with more than 10 million people - from Jakarta (42 million) to London (10 million).
We did not get together to feel isolated.
In a village, people knew each other. Not just names, but stories. They knew who you were, where you came from, and what you cared about. There was a sense of belonging. Today, thousands can live in the same building and never exchange a word. We pass each other every day, and yet we remain strangers. Sometimes it feels like we are neatly arranged, like eggs in a basket. We may be close but without real contact and very lonely.
We did not get together to feel isolated.
Our lives are more comfortable than ever, but comfort is not enough. You can have everything you need and still feel empty. We are not made of flesh and bone alone. We also carry something invisible—call it a soul, a need for meaning, for love, for connection, for purpose.
Children used to play together in the meadows. They climbed trees, ran freely, laughed loudly, and didn’t need much to feel alive. They learned, without thinking about it, how to share space, how to argue, how to forgive, how to listen to the birds, how to belong. Today, many of them sit still for hours, isolated and staring at computer screens. Something has changed—not just in how they play, but in what it means to become a mature adult. The people that our society produces are different. It may be better. It may be worse. It may be both at the same time. The truth is, deep down, we don’t really know what we are doing and where human evolution is leading us.
This unease is not limited to one country, one generation, one religion, or one culture. It seems to belong to something deeper in the human story. A kind of spiritual homesickness. There is some emptiness that cannot be measured. A feeling that, despite all our progress, we may have drifted away from something essential. It is getting to a point where the society that we created in the last 200 years is not the society we want to live in.
The society we created is not the society we want to live in.
The real question is simple, and much more difficult at the same time. What kind of life do we want? Do we need more thinking? More love? More noise or more silence? The answer will not come from governments. It will come from a general consensus of the individuals.
What happens when we grow up?
Something important happens when the human child is 2 or 3 years old and starts saying “I”. He is now conscious of being a separate human being. He has an individual ego. He divides the world into two: What is inside his skin and what is outside. Before this separation, he was part of the world, and the world was in him. He is now going to spend the rest of his life trying to escape his isolation. His first love may give him the illusion that there is a way to escape his solitude. That can make the first broken heart even more painful. He is getting access to a higher level of good and bad.
The ‘Bad” can help understand the ‘Good’.
When you break a cookie into pieces you get the pieces and the link between them. Humans focus on the pieces because they have shape, color, and taste. They belong to the material world. This is well-known territory. We are not sure what to do with the links between the pieces. We discard them. This is what happens when the human species gets broken into little groups. Each group fights for what it perceives to be its own survival. We forget that we all belong to the same species. The “bad” appears when we focus on the parts and ignore the links between them. A country may start a war with another country. A religion may fight another religion. They have forgotten what unites them. That would require a higher level of consciousness.