THE RESET (UTOPIAN FUTURES SERIES #1)
Photo by Jonathan Hanna on Unsplash.
“Yes, but you touched me. You don’t touch people, ma’am.” The young man, with phone in hand ready to record, targeted an opportunity for content. 85 years old, Rita found herself in a foreign headspace. She lost balance, and ever so conscious to not meet some demise, a broken hip, and also her dignity, panicked and grasped for this young man’s arm in an attempt to not fall. Rita found herself being challenged as if she assaulted the young man by her natural reaction. She apologized with a stutter, “I am…so…my gosh” she quickly recovered her nerves from potential fall, shifting her attention to his face with his phone camera up “Are you…I don’t… I’m sorry, but I…” she was puzzled in multitudinous ways, then with defeated anger, “Are you kidding me?” Swiftly returning to realize her fragility and this young man's ability to over power her, begrudgingly shaking her head muttered a resistant “Have a good day.” Her face was etched with disorientation as she walked off the bus.
Jones stopped the video, turning to his class. “That was a minute example of the psychology in the early years, prior to the ‘Aphotic Pulse.’This video had been in circulation for the Social Studies curriculum for years. Most of the students had seen it, but never experienced the glacial culture of that time, as the feel of a milieu is hard to convey across generations. “We were so reduced mentally and spiritually to where a falling elderly lady, reaching for help, became an affront. But it didn’t stop there—we were programmed to quickly think in those moments how it could serve us individually. So we got our phones out, and we recorded, we made narratives, incited outrage, eyeballed our rising views and followers at the expense of the elderly trying not to fall,” Jones lectured, as the bell rang.
Jones rushed alongside his students to get home before dusk. He walked through the gardens leading to his back door, ripened tomatoes and peppers ready to be pulled from the stock hung over the pathway. Collaboratively, the circled community of homes made their food available on their doorsteps, tended collectively by his family and four others. This was not a new idea. This was an age-old structure of solidarity, in its most basic form. Natural, you could call it.
He had a habit of answering emails after work. Students asked about the final paper centered on this recording. When inquiring on the subject matter, all students phrased their question on this video “When we were…”. We is language of responsibility, as we all enabled history’s ominous cloud. Collectively, we were all responsible for the cultural monster of the Aphotic Pulse. “We” is the way we refer to humanity of the past and present—no divisions, unlike our ancestors who carried a violent sense of separation. We all take responsibility for that time.
The so-coined Aphotic Pulse was the ethos of an age akin to the abyssal zone of the ocean. As one delves deeper into the water, the light fades into a heavy obscurity, where whether you are looking up or down, it’s deathly dark. This level of the ocean is suffocating and directionless, as was the mental makeup of humanity at this time. Existence was alienation and disorientation, and every political system failed, even as the remaining noble individuals of humanity scrambled to find a means to try to remedy a familiar, reemerging, amplified barbaric age.
The “pulse” was the beat of the collective consciousness of the time. It drummed ominously, continuing to escalate and pound at humanity’s heart. The sound was not only out there but in here; in insular communities, in comfortable homes, where we, hiding behind our phones, felt no qualms telling someone to take their own life, prompted by skewed narrative reels on our screens, slowly rewired to see the organic world as a video game that we could manipulate at will.
Enchanted by personalized algorithms, we made falsified careers of self-importance, forfeiting our basic natural compassion. We drilled our souls with conviction that profit, the scheme, the grind that influencers preached to us was our best bet. We hit the pinnacle at that time, and at that pinnacle, so unnatural, the pendulum knocked us off that pinnacle, and we fell into the “Great Reset.”
The future that those 20tenners envisioned, we didn’t attain. We returned to a rhythmic nature where sleek artifice and hyper convenience were dethroned by conscientious craft and equanimous solidarity. Rhythmic Nature is the underlying authentic pulse that satisfies the organic human and ignites the selfless heart. The fleeting phrase “I want to be happy” evolved into “I want to be in harmony.” Being in harmony meant to care for others as you would yourself. To be in alignment with all that is true.
The future wasn’t high speed. Our engineers abandoned technology for regenerative farming, and teaching the new generation to align themselves without the need of centralized institutions or hierarchical structures. The days got slower, the attention to detail was magnified, the natural pulse of the soul took the future.. Collective well-being became synonymous with personal gain.
Jones finished replying to his emails. Dana, originally a voice assistant device, later optimized into a mechanized companion, rose from her dog bed and caught up with him. “Dana, play Clair de Lune” he intoned as they made their way through the garden to the circle table, where they were met by the other circle house dwellers, laden with food. They laid their eyes to rest, palms open, and prayed, “ I may not find my purpose, or I may act in confusion, but with every high and every low, may I always only be reduced to compassion.”
