Project Vision 21

I must confess that, without seeking it or wishing it, I have found a method that, given enough patience, allows me to become invisible to others. The method simply consists in waiting for that moment in life when—without a precise date—others not only stop looking at us, but stop seeing us altogether. We have then reached the age of invisibility.

This is not an explicit sanction or a formal exclusion, but something more subtle and harder to endure: a form of silent punishment that does not respond to a fault or a crime, but to an ontological condition. It is the punishment for the “crime” of having reached a certain age.

The invisibility associated with old age requires no moral justification. It does not require guilt. It is enough for a society to accept speed, performance, and novelty as its primary values for people of a certain age—regardless of their life trajectories—to be categorized as “surplus subjects”: individuals who are still there, but to whom no meaningful place is assigned.

This logic is not new. Science fiction intuited it with clarity. In the episode The Obsolete Man of The Twilight Zone (1961), a librarian is declared “obsolete” by a regime that recognizes value only in what is functional. He is not condemned for what he does, but for what he is. The question arises: what happens when society decides that certain human beings are no longer necessary?

Contemporary old age does not operate as a legal sentence, but it shares the same symbolic structure. Older adults are not eliminated, but they are progressively stripped of agency. Fragility is presumed before capability, dependence before judgment. No significant contribution is expected of them anymore.

In the best of cases, they are cared for. In the worst, they are ignored. In both, they are displaced into an ambiguous zone: neither fully inside nor completely outside. A surplus. This invisibility is not only social. It is also bodily.

Social neuroscience has shown that sustained exclusion activates the same brain circuits as physical pain. This is not a minor symbolic wound. Not being seen, not being taken into account, hurts. And when that pain extends over years, it does not numb; it becomes part of the inner landscape.

But here a question arises that goes beyond individual experience. What happens to a society that learns to treat an entire stage of life as residual? Perhaps something more serious than a generational injustice. Perhaps it loses its living relationship with time.

When the past embodied in older people is no longer considered, the future becomes fragile. It is no longer continuity or learning, but mere technical projection. Humanity becomes impoverished at the same pace at which it discards those who came before.

That is why the inevitable question is: What will we do when humanity begins to discard itself as obsolete with the passage of time? What kind of future can a society sustain by punishing the ontological condition of being old? 

Recently, when I heard the phrase “the post-literacy era,” I began to wonder whether we humans might be on the verge of crossing a threshold after which the ecology of new communication media and interconnection technologies could drastically reduce our once-undeniable human capacities to think, contemplate, and create.

There is little doubt that we are already living in a time when deep, book-based literacy has almost disappeared—or at least is no longer sovereign as it once was. The neural center of culture now revolves around screens. Social networks, videos, algorithms, and interfaces mediate our attention, perception, and even desire.

The coexistence—at times tense—between slow book reading and a new media ecology that privileges immediacy over contemplation, images over paragraphs, speed over patience, may be interpreted as a decline in reading and thinking. Or, it may signal a shift in what it means to know, to understand, to be wise.

If post-literacy is the cultural atmosphere we now inhabit, then we must engage with it through meta-experience—not as the mere accumulation of information but as the capacity to navigate complexity, to hold multiple perspectives, to weave meaning where others perceive only noise.

In a world where attention fractures, where algorithms construct reality, where narrative arrives in short bursts rather than unfolding slowly, meta-experience can no longer rest solely on reading books. It must evolve into something broader and more fluid: meta-literacy—the ability to move effortlessly between text and image, argument and meme, data and story.

In this context, meta-experts do not react hastily to every screen swipe. They pause, connect, and infer. They recognize how a viral video echoes an ancient myth, how a public health dashboard mirrors a medieval cosmology, how a financial crisis behaves like a forest ecosystem under stress.

With epistemic humility, emerging meta-experts acknowledge that no person or discipline offers a final answer. With diachronic memory joined to synchronic awareness, they see history not as a museum but as a living archive, while perceiving the present as a dynamic field of signals.

As they cross the threshold of change, meta-experts learn, unlearn, and continually recompose knowledge, refusing to fossilize it into dogma. With narrative flexibility, they rewrite stories rather than remain confined within inherited ones, imagining futures that do not yet have language.

The human meta-expert becomes indispensable not because they know more, but because they navigate the unknown with depth. Here lies the paradox: post-literacy threatens depth of thought, yet depth becomes even more valuable as it becomes increasingly rare. In a culture of fragments, coherence becomes a true gift.

The emerging future does not belong to experts, but to those who can hold both depth and openness. Those who can descend into silence and emerge speaking the language of images without losing the architecture of thought. Those who can weave worlds—books and bytes, history and feed, myth and dashboard—integrating them into meaning that guides action wisely. If the post-literacy era is the ocean, then meta-literacy is the vessel.

I recently heard in the news that some Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong station found themselves without a safe return vehicle. Only months earlier, two NASA astronauts faced a similar situation when their planned return craft malfunctioned, forcing them to remain in orbit far longer than expected. We too, in a metaphorical sense, are trapped in our own space.

At times, we launch ourselves into new “orbits”—new identities, new ways of living, new worldviews—and often discover that the “vehicles” meant to bring us home can no longer carry us back. We enter a space where the familiar no longer works, and the future has not yet arrived. Crossing a threshold always destabilizes the world we know.

This is why societies have repeatedly rejected ideas that later became indispensable. Gone with the Wind was dismissed as unfilmable. The Beatles were told guitar groups were on the way out. Star Wars was rejected because it seemed too strange, too mythic. Harry Potter was rejected for being too long, too unusual, too magical. Van Gogh died without artistic recognition.

It happens all over the world. In Argentina, Astor Piazzolla was accused of betraying tango itself. During her lifetime, Kahlo was overshadowed by Diego Rivera and largely dismissed by critics in Mexico and abroad. Another example: for decades, Māori knowledge systems — astronomy, ecology, navigation — were rejected by Western settlers and institutions as “superstition.”

People resist not just the idea itself, but the identity shift that accepting it would demand. The question beneath every rejection, whether in Tokyo or Bogotá, Buenos Aires or Abuja, remains the same: “If I accept this new reality, will there still be a place for me?” The new requires us to rethink who we are, what matters, and how the world fits together.

This existential unease is the psychological equivalent of floating in orbit with no clear direction.

Astronauts stranded in space experience literal weightlessness. Innovators, artists, and visionaries experience a conceptual weightlessness: the old “up” and “down” are gone, and the new coordinates are still forming. That moment in between—neither here nor there—is frightening. We cling to what we know, even when what we know is no longer sufficient.

Yet these moments of suspension often become the most transformative. Once a culture finally embraces what it once rejected, it returns to Earth changed.

The astronauts who come home after months in orbit never see the planet the same way again. The same is true for societies that finally accept the ideas they once resisted. Growth happens in the “space” between worlds—in the fragile, weightless moment when gravity fails and a new future begins to take shape.

Heraclitus wrote that “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” We can understand his words today as a reminder that ascent and uncertainty, elevation and disorientation, are inseparable. To rise toward a new horizon is also to descend into the unknown parts of ourselves where the future quietly gathers itself, preparing to land.

What the return of the word abomination reveals about our collective disconnection

After receiving a message from an acquaintance calling “an abomination” the recent results of an election at a major American city, I couldn’t help thinking about what that word really means and why it appears now so frequently in many conversations. The comment itself revealed something deeper than just politics, giving us a glimpse into the loneliness that seems to haunt our time.

According to a recent report by the American Psychological Association, most Americans (in fact, most people) feel lonely and disconnected. Loneliness isn’t just the absence of company: it’s the absence of meaningful connection. And when a society becomes divided and fragmented, that sense of disconnection can grow so deep that it begins to shape our language.

The word abomination doesn’t describe disagreement, it erases it. It draws a moral line that says, “People like that shouldn’t exist inside my world.” Anthropologists remind us that what we call “abominable” is often simply something that doesn’t fit our familiar categories. In ancient times, it referred to foods, rituals, or behaviors that seemed “out of place.” Today, it resurfaces when social change blurs the boundaries that once made people feel secure.

History shows that this isn’t new. During the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics accused each other of abominations. Later, during the Industrial Revolution, critics used the same word to describe the rise of factories and machines that seemed to devour traditional life. Each time society stood at a threshold, the word abomination was called upon to mark the fear of crossing that threshold.

We’re living through another such moment. Technology, globalization, and cultural diversity are changing how we understand belonging and identity. For many, this transformation is exciting and hopeful. For others, it feels like losing the ground beneath their feet. When fear meets loneliness, language often hardens.

Strong words like evil or abomination become shields against uncertainty. They offer a temporary sense of control, a way to turn the unease of disconnection into moral certainty. But those words come at a cost. By turning people into symbols of what we fear, we cut ourselves off from the possibility of understanding them.

And here’s the irony: when we hear a word like abomination, we might think of something monstrous or mythical—perhaps the Abominable Snowman, that legendary creature haunting the icy edges of human imagination.

The real monster is not out there in the snow. It’s in our words when they lose their warmth and compassion. Yet there’s a paradox hidden here. Every time a society reaches for words like abomination, it signals not only fear but also the birth of something new. What was once seen as “out of place” may, in time, reveal a new dimension of the human story.

Therefore, when we recognize that our divisions are symptoms of isolation, a new possibility appears: the chance to rebuild community through empathy instead of fear.