The world didn't end with a bang. It just… rotted quietly.
No fire from the sky, no thunderous apocalypse. Just a slow unraveling disguised as progress.
People still wake up. They still scroll through glowing screens, thumb after thumb, feeding on headlines crafted to spark outrage, fear, and confusion. They call it "staying informed." But nobody's really informed anymore—just overstimulated and exhausted. Truth has been stretched so thin it's transparent, and lies wear suits now, smiling on every network channel.
The cities hum like machines. Neon lights flicker over cracked streets, where the poor sleep in doorways built by the rich. Somewhere, a drone buzzes above a neighborhood that used to be called "safe." But safety is just another product now—like bottled air, private water, or a gated smile. Everything has a price, and everyone is for sale.
People still talk about hope, but mostly as a marketing slogan. "Hope" printed on billboards between fast food ads and crypto scams. Hope in hashtags and speeches. But when you walk down the streets at night, you can feel it—the silence behind the noise, the weight in the air. Hope died a long time ago, quietly, without witnesses.
The oceans are rising, but the markets are too, and somehow that's supposed to make sense. Forests burn, storms swallow towns, yet people keep scrolling, liking, posting, arguing. There's always another distraction, another reason not to look too long at the cracks in the foundation. Because if you really looked—if you really saw it—you might not be able to pretend anymore.
And that's the secret of this age: pretending. Pretending the system works. Pretending the leaders care. Pretending we're not all complicit in a machine built on consumption and decay. We pretend the next election, the next app, the next miracle tech will save us. But deep down, we all know—it won't.
Because this isn't a story of sudden endings. It's a slow suffocation. The world is dying in high definition, and we're all livestreaming the funeral.
Children grow up dreaming of likes and follows, not stars. They measure worth in attention spans. And every soul that dares to step away, to breathe, to question—gets swallowed by the noise. The system doesn't need bars anymore; it has screens.
And somewhere, behind all the flashing lights, the truth waits—patient, brutal.
We built a civilization that can't sustain itself.
We traded meaning for convenience.
And soon, when the last distraction fades, we'll finally hear the silence we've been running from.
The end won't come with fire. It will come with indifference.