the New World: A Shift in Humanity

“Kids these days are just too sensitive. Back in our day…”

Whenever I hear a sentence starting like that, I run away as fast as I can. By the way, this is an international phenomenon. Apparently, people used to work incredibly hard and never complain. The new generation, on the other hand, immediately starts talking about psychology and mental health and exaggerates everything.

If I had lived through two world wars and known what real poverty meant, I probably would have worked day and night too. When you have something to lose, of course you do what you have to do.

But we do not live in that world anymore.

What do you mean? How are we supposed to feed ourselves? How are we supposed to support our families? There are still millions of poor people. You clearly have no idea what their lives are like…

And that is exactly the problem.

Whether we realize it or not, we are living through a period that future history books will describe as the end of one era and the beginning of another. After thousands—actually tens of thousands—of years of human history, humanity is evolving into its next version.

If I were the architect of this system, I would probably cry with pride.

Look how far we’ve come!

I used to wonder what people thought when entire historical eras were changing around them.

Turns out the answer is simple.

They didn’t.

And neither do we.

Technology develops, and that is what we focus on. We debate whether technology will take our jobs. If our minds developed as fast as technology, we would probably be teleporting by now.

But we still haven’t even fully understood that platforms like Facebook and YouTube are not simply “websites.”

We still have a long way to go.

Let’s go back to poverty.

There are still a lot of poor people in the world.

But aren’t the technology and resources we already have enough to feed everyone?

I’m not even counting multimillionaires, billionaires, or the first trillionaire who will probably say, “Go ahead, offer me money, I don’t care.”

Even if you removed them from the equation, there is still enough wealth for all of us.

Think about football players, sponsorships, NBA players, and the entire entertainment industry.

An average star earns your two-year salary in a month.

Move slightly higher up the ladder, and they might earn it in a day.

And if that still doesn’t help you visualize it, look at the cosmetics in your house. Look at the food we throw away.

That alone would probably prevent anyone in the world from going hungry.

Add all the clothes we buy simply because they are “fashionable,” and poverty would already be largely solved.

Whatever remains could perhaps be solved by all the things we haven’t even thought about.

What a wonderful world!

In the world we live in today, full-time work no longer makes much sense.

Is there anyone on Earth who can genuinely work productively for all 40 hours of a 40-hour working week?

There are plenty of jobs you wouldn’t even look at twice if nobody paid you to do them.

And once you think about how much of our lives we rent out in exchange for money, it is not difficult to see how incompatible the modern working system is with human nature.

Humans used to be hunter-gatherers.

Okay, that was a little too far back.

Go back just two generations and most people were farmers.

No office hours.

No alarms.

No endless notifications.

No constant stream of input.

Is there really any possibility that we are mentally healthier than those people?

If we were, quitting everything, moving to a village, and opening a café probably wouldn’t have become such a popular fantasy—and sometimes an actual plan.

The greatest luxury of the modern world is being able to go offline.

You can figure out the rest.

With the Industrial Revolution, systems became more complex.

And as the system became more complex, we needed to place a traffic cop at every corner of it.

That is what most of us are.

Traffic cops for complexity.

Of course, this had its advantages too.

MONEY!

(The emergence of money itself was basically a response to humans no longer being able to keep track of increasingly complex give-and-take relationships.

As soon as things become slightly abstract, we stop understanding them.

But ask us and, naturally, humans are perfect, highly evolved creatures.)

In other words, through a different type of effort, you could now buy what you once had to produce yourself just to survive in a field.

Things that were once available only to lords became available to you too.

I didn’t say you couldn’t become a lord.

I said you couldn’t become a man!

Then, over time, came healthcare benefits, this benefit, that benefit, every imaginable benefit.

Eventually, we started measuring prosperity by what we owned and what we might one day own.

And what did we give in return?

Working hours.

Phone calls.

Meetings.

Sleepless nights.

Nightmares.

And time we could not spend with the people we love.

Time passed.

Eventually we looked around and realized that our arms and legs hurt, our feet barely worked, the bird was too exhausted to sing anymore, and our children at home were watching everything in complete confusion.

Then we gave them the most brutal spoiler in human history:

“You’ll understand when you grow up.”

And eventually we said:

This cannot continue.

A new phrase entered our incredibly sophisticated vocabulary:

**Work-Life Balance.**

Meaning: balance between work and our private lives.

Then came all the new trends.

Adjustable desks.

Yoga at the office.

Home office.

“My dog is sick” leave.

Parental leave.

Maternity leave.

Team-building activities that make you hate your team.

And eventually we arrived at the final destination:

**BURNOUT.**

Basically:

I’m lost in the ocean.

My brain has burned out.

I am now lying there helplessly, pretending to be dead.

Older generations have almost no chance of understanding this.

Because they were not competing with machines performing billions of operations every second.

While we are still trying to understand how all this information travels through copper cables, how our conversations somehow go into space and come back to the recipient, billions of pieces of information have already reached their destinations.

People in the past were not constantly receiving the entire world’s information.

And even when they did receive information, it arrived slowly.

Sometimes by the time they had received and processed it, their lives were almost over.

(The last time I said this, someone responded, “Wait, information travels through copper cables?”

I lost all hope in life.

If I had mentioned fiber optics, that probably would have been the end of me.)

As if that weren’t enough, we also connected ourselves to one another.

And by “connected,” I don’t mean connected to the people around us.

I mean connected to the entire world.

In an environment this intense, connecting with someone you actually love is difficult.

For some reason, we know that during a coup in Gabon there was a guy wearing a Drogba jersey.

Obviously, this is extremely important information for our lives.

Naturally, our brains are helpless against this level of complexity.

We cannot even call the system God, because it is clearly something humans created—or at least technology has made us aware that humans created it.

So naturally, we take the easy way out.

We fill our brains with garbage and with information about what everyone else is doing.

The tragedy of humankind…

And among all this information, we still have the ordinary responsibilities of being human.

Cleaning.

Personal care.

And the hardest one:

Relationships.

Within all of this, burnout might actually be one of the most innocent biological reactions available to us.

Compared with storming into a school with a gun, jumping from a high-rise building, or shooting your boss, our little brains simply burning out seems relatively innocent.

So when someone tells me:

“We used to work hard. Your generation is just too sensitive.”

I recommend *Das Kapital*.

At least then I can enjoy the silence for a while.

Then there is education.

The division of education into separate subjects goes all the way back to antiquity.

Thousands of years have passed, and we still separate physics, biology, art, and music.

Without technology, it probably would have taken us another thousand years to realize that physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics could be explained through art and music.

Of course, the system evolved over time.

The difference back then was that people learned all these subjects in an attempt to understand nature and the universe.

That continued for a very long time.

Until we reached my beloved Industrial Revolution—the historical event I obsessively connect to almost every topic.

With the Industrial Revolution, everything accelerated.

But everything also became more complex.

Machines started producing things at incredible speed, but someone had to operate those machines.

Someone else had to make sure people didn’t get caught inside the machines.

And if they did get caught, someone had to take care of them.

And so on.

While people worried that machines were taking their jobs, they suddenly found themselves working in jobs their ancestors could never have imagined.

And to do those jobs, they needed education.

They needed to specialize.

Yes.

**Specialization.**

For thousands of years, we divided education into separate disciplines even though everything remained interconnected in practice.

Then we started dividing practice itself.

And apparently even that wasn’t enough.

We drew a clear line.

We turned mathematically inclined people into social disasters while making numbers the worst nightmare of verbally oriented people.

Then we told these two groups:

Now sit down, work together, and live together.

Personally, I think simply sharing the same planet is already difficult enough.

I also appreciate Turkey’s attempt to solve this with the *eşit-ağırlık* track—the “equal-weight” track combining mathematics and social/verbal subjects.

Meaning:

You understand neither mathematics well enough nor people well enough.

No wonder we now ask artificial intelligence to perform psychological analysis.

Apparently there is no other entity capable of understanding both subjects.

Wars.

Pandemics.

The atomic bomb.

The internet.

And then artificial intelligence showed up.

Which is funny, actually.

Because artificial intelligence is not really artificial intelligence.

**YET.**

But even unintelligent artificial intelligence has already exceeded existing human capacity in many ways.

We started completing work faster.

We started doing more things simultaneously.

And the quality of things we do without really understanding them—but pretending that we do—has improved.

We kept saying machines had replaced humans in production, would replace humans, were in the process of replacing humans completely.

Then AI arrived and basically said:

“I’ll handle it. Stop making such a big deal out of it.”

And work became even more complex.

This is another turning point, similar to the Industrial Revolution.

Because specializing in a single field is becoming increasingly meaningless.

At the same time, our brains do not have the capacity to become experts in twenty different fields and produce high-quality work in all of them.

So what is the best thing we can do?

Pretend to be dead.

And that is basically what the world is doing right now.

Let me show you how helpless humans have become.

German Chancellor Merz, who criticizes frequent sick leave, believes working from home reduces productivity, and associates economic stagnation with insufficient production, says:

“We need to work more.”

The tall guy who keeps exhausting everyone with speeches about “we will produce, we are producing, domestic and national production” says:

“Reproduce.”

Three children, five children, whatever.

Reproduce.

Reproduction is power.

Trump, governing the country regarded as the leader of technology, says:

“I’m closing the borders. From now on, everything is only for us.”

Except almost everything he calls “ours” comes from somewhere else or is produced by the people he calls “others.”

The bear-wrestler from Siberia, playing the bad guy, says:

“Let’s fight. Whatever we can grab is profit.”

So far, nobody seems to have found anything particularly useful in what he has grabbed.

Meanwhile, many European countries once again blame economic stagnation on immigration, social benefits, and similar things.

Long story short:

The world is panicking.

And nobody knows what they are doing.

Instead of discussing the real issue, everyone is pretending to be dead.

Everyone is focusing on completely different things.

Ladies and gentlemen!

We have reached the end of an era.

Full-time jobs no longer make sense.

For many jobs, going to a workplace no longer makes sense.

Building enormous offices no longer makes sense.

Producing more simply for the sake of producing more no longer makes sense.

And constantly consuming because everything must always be newer, better, and greater makes no sense either.

In a world with this much technology, where borders are increasingly losing their meaning and digital identities are replacing physical ones, blaming immigrants also makes little sense.

Saying, “Our demographics are collapsing, what are we going to do?” makes little sense too.

Even borders themselves are becoming questionable.

If you ask me, entire bureaucracies and state institutions, parliaments, and elections are becoming increasingly meaningless as well.

The latest images discovered by the James Webb Telescope supposedly suggest that even the “laws of physics” may be wrong—that thousands of years of accumulated knowledge based on observation might potentially end up in the trash.

In a world like that, I probably do not need to explain how absurdly small and simplistic many of the things we spend our time arguing about really are.

In short, an education system designed to produce specialists must adapt to the next version of the human being.

Otherwise, of course young people will struggle to concentrate.

And of course their brains will burn out at work.

Our existing habits around work and life must evolve radically too.

Keeping a human alive for 100 years, expecting them to rent out 30–50 years of that life, and then rewarding them with retirement probably last worked properly sometime in the 1990s.

When you consider the technology and resources that already exist in the world, the planet has almost no problems other than natural disasters.

Hunger.

Poverty.

Housing.

Healthcare.

Terrorism.

The reason these problems continue to exist is humanity’s resistance to moving civilization forward.

Actually, I said there was no problem.

There is one.

**Integration.**

Not immigrant integration.

Human integration.

Our integration with nature and technology.