Night
I woke in the middle of the night, not dreaming, not yet awake. The mind unguarded. Thoughts arriving without invitation.
What occurred to me was simple.
In the future, being rich will not mean having more things.
It will mean still being a self.
Poverty is usually described in material terms. Money, comfort, access. That language belongs to a receding world. The one forming now sorts people differently.
Those who still think.
This is not imposed. It emerges through repetition.
You can see it in language. Headlines no longer describe events. They place them. In German media the phrase appears again and again: Experten ordnen ein.
Not commentary. Placement.
Not what happened, but how it is to be held.
Experience arrives already folded.
You may look.
You may feel.
Conclusion is deferred.
Elsewhere the mechanism is obvious. People scroll. Exposure becomes thought. Repetition becomes emotion. Reward becomes belief. Not stupidity. Habituation.
Choice still appears to exist. You select. You react. You comment. Participation is simulated. But the corridor is narrow, and narrowing. The acceptable range contracts. Emotional responses converge.
Eventually this will not register as influence.
It will register as functioning.
The technical form is irrelevant. Device or substance, interface or ambient system, visible or invisible. The result is identical. Thinking outsourced. Judgment prefabricated. Emotion regulated.
Some will wake, work, consume, respond, sleep. No force. No violence. No sense of oppression. They will simply never encounter the internal silence from which an unscripted thought might arise.
That absence will be the new poverty.
Not hunger.
Not exposure.
Interior vacancy.
Alongside this, a smaller group will persist. Those who can afford disconnection. Who tolerate boredom. Who endure time without stimulation or confirmation. Nervous systems not permanently synchronized.
They will hesitate.
They will doubt.
They will not know what to think next.
That discomfort will signal wealth.
Because something is still happening inside.
A form of universal basic income is likely. Not promise, not emancipation. Stabilization. A floor.
Material conditions will flatten. Except for the materially extreme, lives will resemble one another. Housing. Access. Mobility. Technology. Status through possession will lose meaning.
Difference will not vanish. It will relocate.
The divide will run through cognition. Between autonomous minds and managed ones.
Some will remain internally unoccupied. Their attention will not be continuously leased.
Everyone else will move within a system that functions perfectly. Bodies acting. Signals exchanged. No requirement to be someone.
This will not arrive through coercion.
It will arrive through relief.
Uncertainty reduced. Responsibility softened. Reactions prepared in advance. To be spared interior labor will feel humane.
The future’s real wealth will not be financial.
It will be the capacity to think when nothing demands it.