The New Era: Between Progress and Self-Destruction

I often feel old-fashioned.

As if I cannot keep up with everything changing around me. Overnight something new appears, literally. While it is dark and quiet here, somewhere far away it is daytime, and the world is already transforming as we sleep.

Sometimes I wake with the uneasy feeling that I have fallen behind. Things I had never even heard of yesterday become today’s normal. What once needed an instruction manual now comes as an app with a button that says “try.”

Technology sharpens every day. Artificial intelligence learns, creates, writes, paints. In medicine we see breakthroughs that felt impossible when I was a child. Robots no longer work only in factories. They are in laboratories, in hospitals, even in people’s homes. And, almost without noticing, life has shifted online, lived more and more at a distance. Today we solve in hours what once took months or even years.

It is astonishing.

And at the same time, terrifying.

Because alongside this progress we still have wars. We still have a planet that is suffocating in pollution and being exploited without pause. We still have people dying of incurable diseases even as experiments try to build artificial life. And there is always a new virus in the background, keeping us tense with the fear of another pandemic.

We live between wonder and disaster.

Between progress and suffering.

Between the promise of a better world and the reality of a world that so often seems set on self-destruction.

When I was a child, change came slowly. Years passed, and you had time to adjust to whatever was new. A device could last a decade. A rule could last a lifetime. Today everything shifts at a dizzying pace. What feels revolutionary today is obsolete tomorrow. I ask myself: where does the human being remain in this endless race for faster and smarter?

Maybe I do not understand everything. But I still believe that if all these brilliant minds came together and designed a simple algorithm, one of the thousands already out there, aimed only at building a better life, we would find solutions. If we can route packages across a planet in a day, we can route medicine to every child who needs it. If we can predict storms from space, we can predict shortages and hunger and prevent them. If we can model galaxies, we can model fairness.

And yet, it does not happen. Why?

Maybe because somewhere, for someone, it is simply not convenient. Maybe because there is no real will to change. Maybe because it is easier to create fear, dependency, and consumption than it is to create a calmer, more balanced life for everyone. Fear sells. Noise distracts. Confusion keeps people busy. A quiet, healthy society is harder to monetize.

Meanwhile, the distance between us grows. We meet on screens. We work in tabs. We celebrate in chats. We argue in comments. We watch the world in real time and feel it less and less. The new era has trained us to watch, to analyze, to understand. But not necessarily to be present. Not to breathe slowly. Not to listen long enough to hear the truth in another person’s voice.

There is also something else the new era rarely admits: speed has a cost. Attention has a cost. When everything is urgent, nothing is meaningful. When everything is optimized, the imperfect human moments slip through the cracks. The coffee that cools while you answer one more message. The walk you cancel because there is always another update, another task, another alarm.

So I keep asking simple questions. If we can automate the complicated, why do we not automate compassion? If we can scale data, why can we not scale dignity? If we can design systems that learn, why can we not design systems that forgive? The answers are not technical. They are moral. They are political. They are human.

Perhaps the algorithm we need is not written in code but in choices. Fewer shortcuts. More responsibility. Less spectacle. More substance. Slower news. Deeper conversations. Fewer promises. Better outcomes.

It is sad to admit this, but honesty helps. The new era shows us that we can do everything faster, smarter, more digital. It has given us tools that would have looked like magic to our grandparents. But it still has not taught us how to live better. That part is on us. On the stories we tell. On the limits we set. On the care we offer. On the courage to choose quality over speed, meaning over noise, life over the illusion of control.

Maybe that is where the human being remains, after all. Not in the rush, but in the pause. Not in the update, but in the understanding. Not in the next big thing, but in the small decisions we repeat every day. If this is the new era, then let it be new because we finally choose to live it well.