Must a human live only through the accumulation of the past?
Achievements, diplomas, résumés, titles, fame, the glory of a vanished day.
They ferment like a rotting photo album,
transmuting into pride,
adorning the self long past its expiration date.
Look around: this society is an exposition of tombstones—
monuments built from the past.
Everything is decorated with the boasts of what once was.
“He was brilliant back then.”
“She was beautiful in her youth.”
“Those days—they were golden.”
Clinging to such words,
people sip cheap beer, toast themselves,
and decay unnoticed, day after day.
Intoxicated by the narcotic of memory,
numbed by the anesthetic of nostalgia,
they willingly enclose themselves
in the cage called the suspension of thought.
Humans fear solitude; they reach for sympathy.
And so they stage the illusion of connection through shared memories:
“You remember those times too, don’t you?”
Fragile, fleeting, hollow bonds.
But deep down, everyone knows.
That sympathy is a lie.
A deception.
An illusion.
Step away for a moment, and the neighbor is nothing but a stranger,
a name forgotten by tomorrow.
And because they know this truth, they cling all the more to the
past.
Self-defense.
Self-preservation.
A flight from facing the future.
But human worth is not decided by what has been done,
but by what will be done.
The past is record; the future is will.
And will is the sole privilege of the living.
Yet still, the masses can imagine the future only as an extension
of the past—
as if building a house once more atop ruins,
even though beneath those ruins yawns an open abyss.
Those who chase the past will be culled.
Not by nature, but by time itself.
The irreversible has already begun.
It may not yet be seen.
It may not yet be heard.
But it is here.
With every passing moment, the plates of the age groan and shift.
And the tectonics called science and technology
will swallow all who cling to the past.
On that day, those who mocked—
“Such a future is centuries away!”—
will stand dumbstruck, stripped of words.
So open your eyes.
See the future.
Fix your gaze upon reality.
Think, calmly, fiercely.
Rise from the armchair of the past, and choose.
Choose what lies beyond the furious acceleration of our age.
Do not flee into the past.
Do not cling to the tombstones of what once was.
They will not save you.
This is the English version of the article → Japanese version（日本語版）