The World of Three Zeros

The world had changed. Not in the way anyone had expected, not through war, famine, or some apocalyptic event, but through a quiet, yet all-encompassing transformation. It began with an inexplicable phenomenon—one that erased three fundamental aspects of human society. No one could recall precisely when it happened, only that one day, the world awoke, and everything was different.

Zero Poverty. Zero Crime. Zero Lies.

At first, it was a utopia. The disappearance of poverty meant that every individual had access to food, shelter, and clothing. No longer did families suffer from hunger, no longer did children grow up on the streets. Resources, once hoarded and fought over, seemed to distribute themselves perfectly. Every man, woman, and child had exactly what they needed.

Crime, too, had vanished. Prisons emptied overnight. Police forces were disbanded, and justice systems crumbled into irrelevance. No one stole, no one harmed, and no one deceived. People moved through their days in complete trust, safe in the knowledge that no ill intent lurked in the shadows.

And then, the third zero—the one that should have been the most liberating—was the most unsettling. No one could lie. Words emerged from people’s lips as pure, unfiltered truth. The moment someone attempted to tell a falsehood, their throat tightened, their voice seized, and the lie dissipated into nothingness. There was no deception, no exaggeration, no diplomacy. Honesty, in its rawest form, governed human interaction.

At first, celebrations erupted worldwide. This was the society philosophers had dreamed of for centuries. Economies flourished, politics became transparent, and relationships were built on nothing but truth. But the honeymoon period was brief. The cracks began to show.

Without poverty, ambition withered. The drive to create, innovate, and strive for more became meaningless. A writer with a novel in their heart, a painter yearning to capture beauty on canvas—what drove them forward when their survival was no longer at stake? Where was the hunger to succeed when failure had no consequence? The world dulled as people drifted into complacency, their passion buried beneath endless comfort.

Without crime, there was no consequence, no thrill, no rebellion. The stories of old—of heroes triumphing over villains, of justice prevailing—became obsolete. Entertainment industries crumbled, their narratives rendered meaningless. There were no villains left to fight, no conflicts to resolve. Humanity, it seemed, needed struggle to define itself, and without it, the world became unnervingly static.

And then, there was the truth. A truth that stripped relationships bare, that turned love into a fragile thing. Husbands told wives, without malice but with brutal honesty, that they no longer loved them. Friends revealed secret resentments, buried deep but never forgotten. Every whispered insult, every quiet doubt, every insecurity was laid bare, and society, once so cohesive, began to splinter.

Governments collapsed—not through rebellion, but through transparency. The leaders, incapable of withholding their true intentions, exposed their incompetence. Every carefully crafted political speech, every reassuring promise dissolved under the weight of absolute honesty. The illusion of leadership crumbled, and with it, the systems that held civilization together.

And so, a paradox emerged. A world that had eliminated its greatest evils found itself adrift, aimless and fractured. People, now without hunger, without danger, without lies, were lost. There was no motivation, no aspiration, no need for progress. The world had not found peace—it had found stagnation.

Some whispered in hushed voices that this was not a miracle, but a punishment. That humanity, in its arrogance, had been stripped of its struggle, left to exist in an endless, unchanging lull. Others, the dreamers, searched for a way forward, desperate to reclaim the fire that once drove mankind.

No one knew how it had begun, nor did they know if it could be undone. But as time stretched on, one truth remained undeniable.

The world of three zeros was not a paradise.

It was a prison.