I don't believe we live in a simulation. But I understand why the idea refuses to go away, because somewhere around 2016 the plot stopped making sense and nobody bothered to fix it. The writing got lazy and the show just kept running.
Look at the actual sequence. A reality television host won the American presidency. A virus killed millions of people while a large share of them insisted, sometimes right up until they were intubated, that the virus was a hoax. A full-scale land war came back to Europe and the world lost interest in about the time it takes a season of television to air. Then software that could write working code and produce passable art showed up, and a good part of the internet decided the real emergency was that it might one day write an offensive limerick. It is 2026, the world is still here, and it has mostly just gotten stranger in ways that stopped being interesting to me a while ago.
What unsettles me is how fast any of it turns into background noise. A genocide went out live on TikTok and Instagram, frame by frame, and inside a year it was one more thing in the feed between a recipe and a workout. Elon Musk bought Twitter, the most important platform for public argument there was, and ran it like a personal account, and we adjusted. Governments aim face recognition and phone surveillance at their own citizens, who keep posting their entire lives by choice, and that adjusted too. The thing running all this normalization is plain exhaustion. You cannot stay angry at everything at once, your body will not let you, so a story that would have held the front page for a month in 2005 now gets a day and a half before the feed moves on.
I don't think this is apathy. Apathy is a decision, and what I'm describing is closer to a circuit breaker tripping when the load gets too high. The attention you were born with was never specified for a world that delivers a fresh catastrophe every few hours, so it does what any overloaded system does and starts quietly dropping inputs.
Here is the shift I keep coming back to. Conspiracy theories used to be entertainment. Area 51, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, the sort of thing you argued about at two in the morning and forgot by lunch. Now they are load-bearing political infrastructure. They win elections, they justify wars, they take public health systems down with them. QAnon was barely a theory at all, it was a distributed role-playing game that quietly ate a lot of people's parents. People have always believed strange things. What changed is that the bar for strange moved so far that ordinary skepticism and genuine delusion now live on the same street. Planes spraying something over the population sounds unhinged until you read about the programs that did versions of exactly that. Your phone listening to you sounds paranoid until you look at how ad targeting actually works and notice it lands on the same result as a wiretap whether or not a microphone was ever switched on. And nobody left standing, not the press and not the regulators, has the credibility to walk out and mark the line between the two.
Step back and look at the supposed world order, a few aging powers leaning on one another and hoping it still reads as a system from a distance. The United States is in decline. Not collapse, the slow kind, the third-century-Rome kind rather than the fifth. It still owns the largest military, the reserve currency, the companies your data runs through. What is draining out is the soft power, which was always the part doing the real work. Whatever moral standing survived Iraq did not survive bankrolling the leveling of Gaza, and you cannot run human-rights seminars over that footage and expect the rest of us to keep nodding along. I say us on purpose. I am writing from outside the West, where most of the people watching this actually live, and from here the hypocrisy is not subtext anymore. It arrives in the same feed as everything else, in real time.
China is not the juggernaut the breathless 2010s coverage promised either. The demographics are brutal, the property sector is a slow-motion default, and youth unemployment got bad enough that the government simply stopped publishing the figure for a while. You do not message your way out of any of that. But winning outright was never the requirement. China only needs to be the option that shows up without a sermon attached, and for a lot of governments that is plenty. "We will build your port and your power grid and we will say nothing about how you run your country" is a genuinely strong pitch when the alternative arrives with a lecture. It reads very differently when you are the country being courted rather than the one doing the courting, which is easy to see from where I sit and apparently invisible from Washington.
Russia spent whatever strategic logic the Ukraine invasion started with on the sheer incompetence of carrying it out. The war grinds on because wars are far easier to begin than to end, and nobody with skin in it has an exit that doesn't look like losing. Europe is wealthy, comfortable, extremely well-medicated, and visibly unsure what it is for in a world that no longer runs on the rules it spent a century drafting. And then there is everywhere else, Africa and Latin America and South and Southeast Asia, where most of the living humans actually are and where the next few decades will actually be settled, and which Western coverage remembers mainly when there is a coup or a famine photogenic enough to send a correspondent.
On AI, ignore the people selling salvation and the people selling extinction and look at the thing in front of you. What arrived is genuinely transformative, in the boring way technology is actually transformative, which is that it rearranges the economy slowly and along the lines of who already owns things. It lets fewer people do more work. In a sane arrangement that would buy everyone shorter hours. In the one we have, it means layoffs while the gains flow to whoever holds the equity. That is a distribution question wearing a technology costume, and we have been losing distribution questions since somebody invented the granary. AI did not start this fight. It just put its boot on the scale.
The part I find genuinely strange is the order of the worry. There are very smart people running a careful seminar on the dangers of a superintelligence that does not exist yet, while the AI that does exist is already pointed at surveillance, propaganda, fraud, and the quiet deletion of people's jobs. The building is on fire and the discussion is about whether the fire might someday become self-aware.
Under all of it, the institutions built in the twentieth century are failing because they were designed for a world that is gone. Nation-states, the UN and its agencies, newspapers, universities, all running on code written for inputs they no longer receive. Trust has drained out of the whole apparatus, and the tools you would normally reach for to rebuild it are those same failing institutions, so there is nowhere clean to start. The climate is doing exactly what the scientists described thirty years ago, on schedule, and each flood and each fire still gets reported as a surprise. Wealth has concentrated to a level that would have embarrassed a Gilded Age baron, and the machinery meant to check it is owned by the people it is meant to be checking.
Most people are simply tired. I want to be careful with the word, because tired here does not mean lazy. It is the specific exhaustion of a treadmill that keeps speeding up after you have already worked out there is no stop button and nowhere it was taking you.
I don't have an uplifting place to land this and I am not going to fake one. No closing instruction to vote or organize or go outside and touch grass so everyone feels a little lighter. Large systems change slowly, usually through a great deal of pain, and often only once the pain gets too big to ignore. That is not bleakness for effect, it is just the record. The end of slavery, the vote for women, the eight-hour day, civil rights, every one of them arrived after long and ugly and expensive struggle by people who mostly did not live to see it pay off. If that reads as grim, good. The grimness is more honest than the kind of comfort that talks you into accepting what you shouldn't.