2026.txt

This note is titled 2026.txt, but I have been meaning to put these thoughts down since I was 15, which was almost 5 years ago. We are witnessing a widespread collective cognitive decline, and I believe this would be one of the very few artifacts on the internet untainted by AI -- this is an attempt to snapshot the current state of reality through the flavor of my own unique consciousness. I often write down my stream of thoughts; there are no climaxes and conclusions, and there is no narrator or a main character. Just time+thoughts coexisting.

I have had various special interests in my life, and one of the longest-standing ones is the meta-analysis of human behavior (especially as a grand collective). I have encountered hundreds of people in my life, some absurdly intelligent, some questionably dumb. And one of the most recurring traits I have noticed is the abrasive tendency to avoid anything "meta." "It is not that deep" is the most infuriating combination of words that has ever been spoken to me, and now when I reflect, it does make sense. The average Joe or Jane is capable of deep thoughts, but most people are somehow conditioned over the years to avoid them. Why? It's mentally taxing and has no immediate payoff, even at a life-horizon scale. Devoting time to the abstract, mysterious, and seemingly obvious things does not make sense from a natural point of view. All of these come with a certain level of anxiety because all of it is uncertain. Unpredictability breeds anxiety. Anxiety is not a natural state of any biological being. We would rather prefer to take refuge in this mundane world of ours, despite living in a world full of spectacle and drama. The true significance of human life, or the lack there of, is not really a concern. The average person, like you & me, would easily lead to the concretization of terror management theory. Ditching our biological safeguard won't make sense when we can distract ourselves with work, religion, sex, drugs, etc.

But has reality diverged? Ever since we ("humans") developed language, the perception of reality has synced higher with our consciousness. This is the input phase. Information, as we know it, would not arrive to you in the same form as it happened. There are master observers; they interpret reality, and what we know about the world is essentially a fragment of their consciousness copied into yours. That's nearly everything -- except the things you truly observe. We are not questioning an individual's way of perceiving reality or whether something truly is what it is. Instead, I wish to focus on the mechanical propagation of it. In a way, we all are part of a collective hive of intelligence. We are mmap()-ed into each other's interpretations. Interpretations depend upon the language you think in. When I do not have a word for a feeling or a pattern, I can not make sense of it in my brain. It feels like an untouchable slimy colored blob, which I can't quite see through. It's a paradox. Language does not dictate reality, but it does dictate which parts of reality become available to consciousness. So if you think about it, what if a master observer (spawned randomly) missed out on something due to the weakness of their language set? As they become the new propagators of information, the receiving nodes ("us," "humans") never get to know what something truly was. In cognitive literature, it resonates with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. You cannot optimize for something that you cannot distinguish. Last year, nearly around this time (autumn of 2025), I wanted to express a certain variant of nostalgia, which was triggered after I studied about liminal spaces. English does not have a word for it. Neither did Bengali. When I wanted to explain liminal spaces to somebody who had never heard of them before, I could not make them understand what they truly mean. That's what I wanted to explain. This is one such instance. Billions of humans, over thousands of years, had trillions and trillions of such interactions, which means our collected consciousness is fundamentally unaware of everything around us. One human suddenly cannot come into existence and solve everything. One might argue that I am pointing towards linguistic elitism, which I thought at first too. But then I realized that it is all about granularity of concepts. An infant can feel before it learns to speak, right? Then perhaps we do not need words to feel something, but maybe how we reflect does. We cannot think recursively without a syntax that allows for embedded clauses; similarly, formal logic without "ifs" and "therefores" is impossible. I am hinting towards the Chomsky hierarchy now, but I think it is not the right place for that. In simple words: certain cultures intuitively understood nothingness, but only a few of them unlocked a new area of reasoning when the concept/word for "zero" came into existence. We just need these to improve our ability to manipulate our understanding in a structured way. Language shapes the boundaries of what can be explicitly reasoned, nested, and compared around. I can express "the nostalgia for a time you never lived" in English, but mono no aware gives me better portability and the ability to manipulate something in my cognitive space. My instrument is incomplete, as are yours. There are things that we can't operate on yet or ever. I do not know WE do not know. The loss (over time) is done and will be done; let us accept this.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. [Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio]

The emphasis here should be on "dreamt of," as Hamlet is pointing out how little even the most educated people can explain.

I was supposed to write down the mechanics of human thought propagation; let me get back there. I started reading Encyclopedia Britannica in 5th grade; I read 2 volumes of it (retention % of the exact facts is not our concern), and the most striking realization was that everything can be modeled as a system. Indus civilization, WWII, the Black Plague, the emergence of the motor vehicle -- everything. All of it points back to how we handle scarcity and coordination; information and the control loops of which; and the most important: power asymmetry in the system. The postmodern world, as we live it, is no different. But does something feel off? The system is pretty much the same for the last 20-30 years; trends come and go but are constrained by the aforementioned axes all the time. But DOES something feel off? Like a collective shift in our consciousness? Maybe a state of a subconscious sensory perception that something is going to happen, just like animals and birds?

This is a theory ("conspiracy"?) I have been developing post-2022. Something accelerated. The pandemic was a catalyst. Billions of people were affected at the same period of time. Almost everyone had a stable view of the world around us, and suddenly things flipped. The realization, the glimpse of how the world can be a different place than what it looks like every day or at least the stories that we tell to ourselves, the dreams that have been injected into our minds, that don't have roots in us, but rather we do it anyway for survival. They are all…bleak. Nothing matters as much anymore as it did before. Everything has a certain sense of dullness to it. Be it festivals, the start of a new school year, birthdays, etc. We realized that we could live without a lot of things we found traditionally "important" in society. Is this a mass psychological response to a collective trauma? Government bodies showing that they do not care about the people as much as they say? That the events and necessities in your life are as bleak as a sheet of glass? Or is it because we saw humans dying like insects, the same ones who dreamt of travelling the world 7 months back or were about to graduate as an engineer in 2 years -- but never did? Or was it the forced addition and dependence on technology, which opened up a new way for us to interact with reality as our primary means?

Billions of people simultaneously realized the fragility of institutions (schools, government) and the arbitrariness of traditional life milestones (career goals). This forced reliance on tech as our primary lens for reality, paired with witnessing life rendered cheap and fragile, resulted in a widespread psychological numbness -- a collective shift where traditional sources of meaning lost their resonance completely. For a farmer in the Middle East, the halt of global supply chains affected him and continues to do so. For a middle schooler in India, she watched her physical transition into adolescence dissolve into a parasocial dependence on technology. The family man in the US discovered that his corporate labor, the core of his socially prescribed identity, can be paused, outsourced, or erased.

All these people, despite operating within very different socio-economic control loops, all got to look behind the curtain of the fragile mechanism. They -- we -- collectively realized that our inherited life trajectories are not laws of physics but highly contingent, arbitrary agreements. When those agreements failed globally, the resulting cognitive dissonance has hardened/is hardening into a universal numbness. We are now billions of disjointed nodes, now aware of the simulation's fragility, yet we continue to operate within it. Purely out of biological momentum.

Every year since 2023, I watch 4 episodes of Black Mirror -- Bandersnatch and Smithereens make total sense now, right?

Let me summarize whatever I had spilled over in the last 1600+ words. In short, reality exists, but our access to it is throttled by the bandwidth of our language. So we build fragile systems to manage our terror of the unknown, but when a global catalyst shatters those systems, the illusion dies. As we lack the language to construct a new reality, we default to running the old code without believing in it. What happens when we do something without believing in it? Dissatisfaction.

As of 2026, we have the highest amount of alive people in history, at once, on Earth (~ISS is an anomaly). 7% of all of the human population is alive right now; that means we have the highest raw collective consciousness operating ever. How cool is that? And still, we are stressed out.

People still survive and fall in love; they still study for exams, go to work, get married, cook food, remember the lost family members, and plan trips six months into the future. The machinery STILL continues. But underneath it, what exactly are we building towards? For most of modern history, even miserable people were offered some forward narrative. Inside that sequence, there used to be an implicit promise that life would eventually begin to make sense. That promise feels weaker now. Something is attacking the assumption that effort accumulates into permanence. You can spend ten years becoming exceptionally good at something and still wonder whether the economic value of that ability will survive another five. The future no longer appears stable enough to justify long-term attachment to any identity.

And humans need attachment -- people, places, rituals, and imagined futures. With so much metaphysical weight put on us (referring to young adults now), how will the future stand? Blame AI, blame the declining job market, and come up with theories that the pandemic was a long shot project by the people on Epstein's files and the naked exposure of corporate greed. Be concerned about the rise of a thoughtless generation that has lost the sense of reality, the leakage of control loops over everything, and what not. Maybe we won't face a dystopia in a non-binary way, but instead the total descent into societal madness gradually over time. Humanity has never uniformly done what's right, and I challenge you to offer a time where they did. The parallel worlds of our constructed reality and the one that it truly is have collided. Fallout is happening.

Maybe what looks like a crisis of motivation is partly a crisis of believable futures.

Together, we have all lost the plot.

I spent 4 hours typing this and spent the whole night going through my journal, trying to organize scattered notes and thoughts. As someone who nearly thought that his days were limited in 2021, everything now feels "extra," and stacking myself with more self-imposed work seems to be the only coping mechanism that there is. For someone, it might be completely different. This existential anxiety is like a half-eaten piece of rotting meat stuck in the food pipe, which has fused with the system through biological mutation, and hence, in order to puke it out, you need to tear apart the system itself. Hopium is running out, we need something different.