Every invention starts with the same vibe, ‘this will make life easier’. It starts with the same low-key flex: fire meant food no longer fought back, and night stopped being terrifying. The wheel saved our knees. Electricity killed the dark. The internet killed distance. Smartphones killed waiting. Each upgrade shaved off friction, effort, uncertainty. But here’s the twist nobody puts in the keynote slides: every time life gets easier, we end up inventing new ways to feel something again. And now here we are, paying money to run on treadmills that go nowhere, lifting iron to recreate work our ancestors were literally trying to escape, subscribing to apps that remind us to breathe, stretch, sleep, hydrate, and occasionally look up from the screen. And, ah, “Digital detox” is now a luxury product. Everyone’s talking about grounding routines, touch grass energy while holding devices that never stop buzzing. Progress didn’t fail. It looped so hard it glitched.
This is why Gates, Musk, and Zuckerberg don’t feel like just CEOs anymore. They feel like the new gods of how reality is supposed to work. Gates wants electronic tattoos on your skin tracking your body dynamics better than you can. Musk wants to skip the body entirely and wire the brain straight into machines with no screen, no delay, thought straight to action. Zuckerberg wants whole worlds where gravity, geography, and even physical presence are optional. These on-the-way tech aren’t just about products. They’re beliefs about what a human is. And right when life hits max easy mode, we start inventing difficulty again. History has seen this movie before. Humans always worship whatever they depend on. When survival depended on rivers, gods lived in rivers. When forests fed people, gods lived in forests.
When cities took over, gods moved into temples. When empires ruled, gods became imperial. Religion followed infrastructure. When Rome collapsed, Christianity hit not because it was a better idea in abstract, but because a god who suffered made sense in a world that was breaking. Monasteries weren’t escapism; they were damage control. Slow time, preserve knowledge and keep people sane. Fast forward. The Enlightenment killed God and replaced Him with Reason like the The French Revolution did. That didn’t last long. Industrialisation showed that reason could build factories and nightmares at the same time. Now look around.
Data is the new sacred text. Wearables tell you when to sleep, stand, breathe, panic. You trust a graph over your gut. Gates’ health tech isn’t evil; it’s just revealing something uncomfortable that if it can’t be measured, it barely counts. Musk’s brain implants are basically an ancient fantasy in sci-fi packaging: transcendence without discipline. Skip the hard parts and just upgrade the hardware. Every civilisation that chased shortcuts to enlightenment eventually crashed into the same wall. Turns out meaning doesn’t like being hacked. People figured this out way before Wi-Fi. Aristotle basically said: if life is too comfy, people get weak. The Stoics were like, “Let’s suffer on purpose a little so we don’t lose our minds.” In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna: do the work, don’t get addicted to the outcome. Modern tech does the opposite. It hooks you to numbers, likes, streaks, notifications with dopamine DLC that figures the levels in the brain, while reflection gets nerfed. Buddhism saw it coming even earlier. Wanting more doesn’t end by getting more. It ends by understanding why you want it.
When everything is instant, nothing sinks in. When answers show up before questions even load, wisdom gets replaced by info spam. We saved time and somehow ended up with none. Gen Z started feeling this, but Gen Alpha is growing up inside it, born into algorithms, raised by autoplay and brains trained on swipe, skip, refresh. But there’s pushback. People are into journalling, crystals, walks, analogue stuff, weird little rituals half-ironic, half-serious, fully telling. Gates, Musk, and Zuckerberg won’t disappear. Their tech will stay. But people start asking uncomfortable questions again: what’s enough, what’s fake, what actually matters when the Wi-Fi dies. Every civilisation hits this moment. When life becomes frictionless, people go looking for weight.
When everything is easy, meaning gets rare. So humans do what we’ve always done: we invent gods, outgrow them, and then quietly borrow the best parts back. That effort isn’t cringe.
The real rebellion now isn’t smashing phones or living in a forest full-time. It’s knowing when to log off, to stop optimising and to feel your body without tracking it. Above all when to exist without turning it into content. If Gen Alpha figures that out early, the next big upgrade won’t be a chip or a headset. It’ll be knowing how to live in a world that never stops offering shortcuts and choosing, sometimes, not to take them.