The 20th and 21st centuries mark a turning point in humanity’s long struggle for self-understanding. Never before have we been so aware of power, ideology, and oppression—nor so critical of the systems that shape our lives. This relentless questioning is part of a process of self-understanding and self-critique that humankind has been carrying out for centuries.
This critique is not confined to political and social institutions; it extends to the very concepts and assumptions that underlie our worldview. The debates we can engage in today are only possible because we've deconstructed so much in previous centuries. Can you imagine arguing about gender roles in a time when you couldn't even say the Earth wasn't the center of the universe? It didn't even make sense. We stand here because we've fought against dogma for centuries. In Hegel's terms, we've become more self-aware and self-determining because we refused to repeat the same patterns of the past. We are perfecting the art of being free.
Yet this struggle for freedom is not just collective; it is profoundly individual. Tradition no longer dictates our thoughts with the same authority as it once did, leaving each of us in a tough position: free to form our own ideals, but also burdened with the responsibility of carrying that freedom alone.
This inner conflict reflects a broader historical trend: the rise of secularism. Whatever your take is on whether God exists—or even if it’s a question worth asking—there’s no denying the centuries-old rise in secularism and people straying away from religion. Hegel, Weber and Nietzsche already noted it in the 19th century, and it has only gotten more pronounced since. I don't mean this just because the unaffiliated numbers have risen in most countries, but also because even within certain faiths, the ways to express spirituality and customs have become freer and less restrictive, allowing the individual to develop a religious experience on their own terms.
And this process goes back even further. Renaissance humanism, though still enclosed in a strong Christian framework, made huge strides in breaking the chains of religious dogma and shifting the discussion from God to humans. Areas like cosmology transformed from a branch of theology into a science performed and perfected by men. Even within religious cosmology, thinkers like Marsilio Ficino stressed the important role of man, giving him a special place in the cosmos, a place where he could connect spiritually to God, the plants and the planets thanks to the divinity of his soul. The Enlightenment reduced the need for religion even further. Reason was man’s new tool to reconstruct ethics, epistemology and metaphysics from the ground up using his own hands.
The following centuries maintained this trend. The Industrial revolution, the birth of economics as a science, positivism and accelerated scientific discovery further shifted the discussion to man and his creations—technology and science. Meanwhile, political events like the French Revolution, the gain of independence from many colonies around the world and the abolition of slavery celebrated the worldwide victory of freedom.
Then came the 20th century, the rebel century, the century of feminism, the LGBT movement, anti-war protests, hippies, sex positivity and Rock-and-Roll. The cultural movements of the time showed a sensibility and fierce critical attitude towards the system never seen before. Whenever things grew so tense man was pondering whether to push the button and detonate the atom bomb, there was no God, no cosmology, no Athenian virtue ethics holding him back. It was an expression of his own will and nobody else's, his own ethical qualms and nobody else's, his own will to destroy and nobody else's. He felt more alone than ever. More powerful than ever. And that was terrifying.
These cultural movements were only possible thanks to the developments in academia. Critical theory—inspired by Nietzsche’s suspicion of truth and morality—provided a theoretical framework for understanding the underlying power structures of society through a historical lens. In a way, they sharpened our eye to find oppression and injustice, and movements like queer theory, feminism and anti-capitalism placed the weapons of these thinkers into the hands of the people.
And then came the internet.
Social media, the news and an ever-interconnected world allowed us to engage with places we never heard of, at a rate that was inconceivable decades prior. You can put on any news channel and check for yourself but I'll save you some time: most of them aren’t exactly fun to watch. Real-time awareness of the flood of catastrophes, wars, tyranny and crises across 193 different countries, paired with our brand-new injustice radar, is just the perfect storm to create the overwhelming perspective of the 21st century. You simply cannot empathize with everything going on in the world when everyday there’s three terrorist attacks, two civil wars and one hurricane. It’s too much, it feels too big and too fucked up to ever be fixed. It’s a world view marked by overwhelm and impotence.
It is no accident, then, that our era is often called “postmodern”. Truth itself is “post-truth.” We’ve already debated gender, race, colonialism, industrialism, capitalism, communism. Every battle feels already fought, every question already asked. What remains is not answers, but depletion.
And to make the feeling of living past everything even deeper, new threats emerged, threats that could end human life itself. Climate change and the use of weapons of mass destruction showed us that the literal end of the world was on the table now. Humanity’s fear of the end of the world has been embedded in mythology and religion for millennia, but now it finally feels real. Apocalyptic movies don’t seem so far-fetched anymore; they look scarily close to the news.
This just doesn’t feel like the century after everything, it really feels like the last century.
Another important trend of the leap from the 20th to the 21st century is economic production. The efficiency of today’s production chains, aided by technological advancements and the global trade of information, accelerated the speed the world operates at. New, flashier products, at new, cheaper prices with new, faster shipping became a society-wide compulsion. We cannot handle the persistent anxiety and discomfort of not being able to produce and consume. We must scratch the itch. This obsession has grown too strong over time and now there’s no way of ever completing the ritual for a final relief. To sustain this compulsion, we have come up with some intriguing apparatus.
We've constructed the greatest machine in human history. It doesn't have screws or bolts, nobody owns it and it doesn't live in a factory. It's everywhere and it's nowhere at the same time. You can't break it with a hammer or burn it down. You can't sue it, kick it out of your house or refuse to take part in it. You can close down the streets and slow it down for a while but it will pick up the next day as if nothing happened. It's an employee of every company and a diplomat of every government. Bureaucracy is a beast with its own will that escaped human control. If we all died tomorrow, it would somehow still be selling vacation packages and issuing construction permits.
This machine creates products at an unprecedented rate but it can't produce a single Amazon-packaged box of meaning. On the contrary, it produces advertisements and media to produce more. Production breeds production. It’s a recursive explosion. Bureaucracy has grown so big and mighty that corporations and governments feel impossibly large, unstoppable and inhuman. It’s impossible to feel part of these colossal organizations—even though we know they’re just groups of people, they really feel like they're more than that. You can even see it in the way we talk about them. They’re the evil, all powerful villains of the tiny 21st century hero.
But this hero is not only at odds with the outside. His insides are even more hostile. Even if the system feels alien and distant to him, he feels the production compulsion deep in his core. It twists his very sense of identity and makes him put production above his own welfare. Burnout, quiet quitting and the self-improvement obsession so popular on LinkedIn are all symptoms of this.
(Un)fortunately, there are plenty of analgesics for this ailment. There are more products than he can possibly consume, more social media content he can ever scroll through and more over-engineered foods his stomach can ever digest. They may not solve the root problem, but they definitely help him push through. Can you even say they're mass-control devices when they feel more like last-ditch coping mechanisms?
Oh, the 21st century! A time in history when secularism, capitalism and bureaucracy have all gotten old. Buying things got old, watching the news got old, having opinions got old. Everything got so easy and mass-produced that it feels empty. Material possessions, information and entertainment are so easy to overuse today that we're finally getting too much instead of getting too little; and it’s breaking our brains. We got so good at making life convenient that now we have to make things harder for ourselves just to feel something. The price of dopamine dropped, and now it floods the market.
We squeeze ourselves dry to build systems that alienate us and feel unreal. We're in a meaning crisis, but the difference this time is that we don't have God, tradition, community or cosmology to hold our backs. Each of us is alone, fighting against the machine and having to construct life and meaning from the ground up. Because following another's belief system isn't fashionable anymore. We have to be workers, sales agents and existentialist thinkers at the same time and it's a task too arduous, too monotonous, too soul crushing to bear.
This is the story of man, a story of liberation from kings, dogma, God and tradition. We fought for our freedom for centuries, only to find ourselves burdened by freedom itself. The 21st century does not enslave us with chains but with choice. The great machine we built runs faster than we do, and it no longer serves us.
This is the challenge that defines our time. If past centuries demanded faith or obedience, ours demands creation: the courage to carve meaning out of emptiness, to build lives that feel real in the shadow of systems that feel inhuman, to say yes in a world that only says no. The task is severe, but it is the price of being free.