To be a human in 2024...

If you like your spoken poetry - written, you're gonna love this.

To be a human in 2024 is to live in a hyper-connected, hyper-contradictory, and hyper-confrontational world.

To be a buyer is to expect everything at your fingertips, conveniently and without delay.

To be a user is to seek social bonds through social media, blind to its social isolating irony.

To be a teenager is to live in a perpetual state of FOMO, pinned to your phone, comparing your life to that of other teenagers living tens of thousands of miles away.

To be an influencer is to parade a curated version of your life to millions of strangers for their validation.

To be a celebrity is to have more followers than Jesus, but no one to help feed your cat.

To be a viewer is to feel a closer connection to simulated characters in TV shows and social media, than real humans in real life.

To be a customer is to justify the excesses of capitalism with comfort.

To be online is to have a relentless firehose of dopamine firing at your brain 24/7.

To be a consumer is to have technology manipulate your humanity for profit, and be OK with it.

To be a programmer is to create technology that produces consequences even worse than the ones you intended to solve and keep doing it.

To exist is to relinquish your personal information and control to corporations.

To be a writer is to write prompts for robots to impress, instead of words for humans to inspire.

To be a scholar is to have the world's knowledge at your fingertips, and choose to live in a bubble.

To be a futurist is to have uncritical faith in technological progress, and to forget there's no brake to pull at the end of the road.

To be a historian is to look at the past with disdain, to criticize the present with an unironic sense of superiority, and to accept that the future is not in your own hands anymore.

To be a sociologist is to live both in awe and fear of humanity and not to know the difference.

To be a student is to have unprecedented opportunities for learning and growth.

To be educated is to be intelligent enough to know your actions are destroying your planet but be too naive to do anything about it.

To be a bystander is to leave human and environmental care to activists.

To be a politician is to think unity and cooperation lead to a lack of freedom.

To be a leader is to equate human value with money, celebrating those who choose financial success and power, over morals.

To be a researcher is to be at the forefront of scientific and medical breakthroughs.

To be a parent is to live in constant fear of things you cannot control.

To be an adult is to have the mildest inconvenience, of no real consequence, ruin your day.

To be sick is to no longer die.

To be a dreamer is to be socially marginalized for your creativity and empathy.

To be a poet is to forget how perfect and beautiful the world is.

To be a citizen is to know so much, yet do so little.

To be a Westerner is to be able to choose.

To be an advocate is to be able to spark a worldwide movement for change with a hashtag.

To be a person is to live in the most peaceful time ever known to humanity.

To be young is to experience the revival of empathy.

To be alive is to be so wounded that you do not dare remember it's not supposed to be this way.

To be a human in 2024 is to live in an Era marked by a paradox: our mastery over humanity, technology, and the environment, paired with an all-too-human fallibility.

To be a human in 2024 is to wield powers once deemed divine. With a mere flick or click of a button, we reshape realities, forge virtual worlds, and make decisions impacting millions.

To be a human in 2024 is to play God without the wisdom such omnipotence demands.

What do you think?
Is there a particular statement that jumped out at you? Why?