Smallness

As time goes by, the world becomes smaller.

This is true for individuals, we age and as we do we grow to understand what’s going on around us better, mysteries are resolved, and we find more knowledge, more power, at our fingertips. But at the same time our options, the possibilities that once upon a time seemed limitless, shrink until we find ourselves helpless and isolated, trapped within the small lives we’ve built up around us like prison walls.

So too is it true for civilizations. We expand, and bring the world toward us, but as we do we’re more and more hamstrung by collective obligation until there’s nothing we can do that doesn’t feel somehow preordained. The more powerful an empire becomes, the more it paradoxically finds itself at the mercy of its very nature.

In this way, alone or together, we inevitably reach a state of utter helplessness, as the walls of our experience close in upon us. What once was boundless we bind, what once was open we close, and before long the world is at our fingertips. But the price of this access proves to be too much. Experience becomes a cheap, little thing, easily gained but ultimately worthless. The act of growth makes everything around us tiny, until finally there’s nothing worth having, nothing worth doing, and we sleepwalk through our little lives, lost in our own little worlds, remembering a time where things seemed big but on some level knowing we can never go back to that state of innocence ever again.

So in that way, I guess it’s true what they say.

It’s a small world, after all.

It’s a small world, after all.

It’s a small world, after all.

It’s a small, small world…