We’ve never had more answers.
We can explain emotions with hormones.Predict behavior with algorithms.Simulate love. Automate care.There’s an app for sleep, a podcast for grief, a dashboard for purpose.
We’ve become brilliant at responding to discomfort.But somewhere along the way, we forgot how to question it.
The questions that once shaped civilizations—Who am I?What is worth suffering for?What does it mean to live well?—now feel like they belong to a different time. Or worse, to a different species.
Because comfort has taken over.Not just our homes or our chairs—but our entire idea of the good life.
Pain is now seen as failure.Sadness a malfunction.Stillness an error.
We mistake silence for absence.And any hesitation for a bug to be fixed.
We call this progress.But it might just be an escape.From depth. From contradiction. From ourselves.
Dostoevsky saw this long ago.He gave us the Underground Man—not to romanticize suffering, but to remind us that being human was never supposed to be clean, optimized, or easy.
This man doesn’t rebel for the sake of drama.He rebels because everything around him seems to demand a performance.A performance of happiness.Of moral clarity.Of being well-adjusted in a world that quietly empties the soul.
He prefers dissonance to delusion.Pain to pretense.Silence to small talk.
Because somewhere in the rush to feel better, we lost the ability to feel truthfully.
We cleaned up the outside.And in doing so, made the inside uninhabitable.
Now we’re left with a strange paradox—A world full of stimulation.And a growing hunger for something real.
Not another insight.Not another feature.Just the space to sit with the mess we tried so hard to edit out.