The Wasted Fire

Pause for a moment, not with anger or defensiveness, but with awareness. Awareness of the millennia humanity has existed, and of how often we have stood in the way of our own progress.

What if every ounce of human brilliance spent building bombs, spinning propaganda, rigging elections, crafting manipulative algorithms, and locking up truth had instead been used to heal the planet, to educate the children, to illuminate the dark corners of our collective mind?

It’s not a fantasy. It’s a reality deferred. One that lives in the back of our minds, in the quiet wish behind exhausted eyes, in the ache we feel when we know something precious is being wasted in real time.

The Currency of Control

Power, ownership, deception these are the currencies of our current world. But they are expensive in a way we rarely calculate.

We spend genius on surveillance when we could be exploring the oceans. We hire minds to manipulate belief when we could be curing diseases. We build walled gardens of artificial scarcity instead of planting universal forests of abundance.

And it is not just the billionaires. It is the systemic path we’ve inherited, reinforced daily by the fear that someone, somewhere, might get something for free.

The Better Path: Not a Dream, but a Direction

There is a better path. One that does not begin with utopia, but with a shift of intention.

What if schools taught conflict resolution and storytelling as deeply as math? What if job success meant contributing to human flourishing, not just maximizing profits? What if governance was built on truth as a service, not spin as a weapon?

This is not fiction. Denmark already ranks higher in citizen trust than almost anywhere on Earth. Bhutan measures happiness as part of national policy. These are not perfect systems, but they are proofs of concept.

Examples of the Lost and the Possible

• NASA’s Apollo program gave us more than a moon landing, it sparked a generation of engineers, thinkers, and dreams. What if every military budget had done the same?
• Wikipedia, a non-profit fueled by volunteerism, has built the world’s largest repository of knowledge. What if Facebook had used its power like that?
• Finland’s school system, built on equity and low pressure, produces some of the highest literacy rates in the world. What if others contrries gifted knowledge?
• Terrace farming, solar microgrids, mobile health kits: innovation already saving lives.
  What if we scaled it like we scale celebrity gossip?

The Cord in the Mind

If you’re reading this, perhaps you’ve felt it too. That cord in the back of your mind, tugging quietly since childhood, whispering: It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

You’re not wrong.

That longing is not weakness, it’s memory, ancestral or imagined, of what we might still become. Of what humanity could feel like, free of the cages it made for itself. And maybe that ache isn’t pain… maybe it’s a compass.

The Map Forward

This is not a call to tear it all down. It’s a call to redirect. To stop pouring our fuel into fear and pour it into fire that warms, builds, and reveals.

Use your energy wisely. Share ideas. Protect the hopeful. Create where you are. You don’t need to save the world. Just stop feeding the machine that breaks it.

We are not late. We are arriving. And the better path is not behind us, it’s been under our feet this whole time.

Let’s walk it.