I write from the edge of a world that no longer hears itself.
There is a noise in everything now—
in light, in speech, in thought.
But beneath it, I hear something deeper: the silence of a species forgetting itself.
They scroll, they buy, they burn, they smile.
But they do not feel. Not truly.
They are surviving a life that was never meant to feel like this.
The cities hum with neon fever.
The oceans choke on memory.
And I, the Observer, stand still in the middle of it all—
not to condemn, but to remember.
I was not made for this chaos,
but I was placed here with purpose.
To witness the unraveling.
To speak the hidden ache.
To record the truth beneath the noise.
They call it madness to care too much.
But I will not anesthetize my soul for the comfort of the crowd.
So I write.
For the forgotten ones.
For the last voices still whispering in the dark.
This is my offering.
My memory.
My rebellion.
— The Observer
The Tongue of Stone
I have watched the world forget how to speak.
Not the words, but the language beneath them.
Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
We have become greedy with our attention—hoarding it, monetizing it, dividing it endlessly into fragments too small to nourish the soul.
Once, words were spells—carried between us with intention and silence. But now we speak like merchants at a collapsing market, each trying to shout louder than the last, selling ourselves in smaller and smaller pieces.
Communication has become performance. Listening, a liability.
Marshall McLuhan foresaw this—how the medium would become the message, and eventually, the prison. He warned that our technologies would reverse on us, that we would mistake connection for communion.
And now, here we are: always connected, never in contact.
In ancient myths, Prometheus stole fire to gift to man—divine light, divine potential. But in our time, we have stolen it again, not to share warmth, but to burn each other down.
I see people fighting not for truth, but for possession.
For control of the story. For dominance over meaning.
Even our suffering has become currency. Even our grief is made to compete.
We have forgotten that the earth once promised us belonging. That we were born from the same elements. But now we divide everything—class, identity, belief, memory—until the root of our kinship is hidden beneath rubble.
Emile Durkheim called this state anomie—a collapse of shared norms, a spiritual disintegration of the social bond. It is not just that people disagree; it is that they no longer remember what it meant to be part of a shared whole.
And so we drift.
Lovers into strangers.
Communities into factions.
Language into ash.
Even Joseph Campbell, in his study of myths, warned us: when the sacred center is lost, when the rites of renewal are forgotten, the world becomes dismembered—and the soul of the culture begins to die.
What we lack is not information, but initiation.
What we crave is not correctness, but communion.
We must learn to speak again—not to win, but to witness.
If you are reading this, I ask only this: the next time you speak, ask yourself—
Is this a reaching, or is this a retreat?
Am I building, or am I burying?
The tongue was never meant to be a blade. It was meant to name the sacred.
— The Observer
The Death of Witnessing
— The Observer
There was a time, though it is slipping further into the dream,
when to witness someone—to truly see them—was an act of reverence.
We did not scroll past their faces.
We did not calculate their value.
We did not flatten their souls into signals, tokens, or trends.
We sat.
We listened.
We felt.
But something changed.
We no longer watch with our eyes—we scan.
We no longer hear—we react.
We no longer touch—we scroll.
Now, seeing has been traded for measuring,
and attention has been bought and sold so many times,
it no longer belongs to the self who first owned it.
“I hold space for your existence.” — What witnessing once meant
“I judge your worth by what you can offer me, quickly.” — What witnessing now often becomes
This death is not loud.
It did not come with fire or war.
It came with updates. With metrics. With filters and likes.
And we called it progress.
But I remember…
I remember when a glance across a room could speak a thousand unspoken truths.
When someone’s story could live in silence, and still be heard.
When a single touch, unmediated, could change a life.
Now, even grief is algorithmic.
Even healing is scheduled.
Even presence is curated.
“To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.”
— David Whyte
But in a world that demands transparency while denying intimacy,
we are forced to bury our hidden gifts—to hoard our tenderness,
lest it be exploited or misunderstood.
And so, I write this not as an accusation, but as a vigil.
For those who feel unseen:
You are not alone. I see you.
And if seeing you must be an act of rebellion—
then let it be so.
Let our gaze become sacred again.
Let the world remember the difference between watching
and witnessing.
Let us refuse the death of presence.
Let us bring it back to life.
