Great Forgetting: What Is Lost When We Stop Asking Why

Where has philosophy gone? How do we dare accept all this change without knowing if it’s good for us. Things are being missed – hugely missed – by our culture. We know it, we feel naked without it. Yet we advance. We don’t look up, pause; we move with the herd.  We are not tech. We are beliefs, ideas, values, identities, tribes, egos, spirits – all threatened by the exponential nature of technology. 

Today our world is undergoing an even more dramatic transition than ever before. Compared with the Industrial Revolution, this change is happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale—roughly 3,000 times the impact. Four fundamental disruptive forces converging simultaneously: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate collapse, and radical inequality.

There’s always been change—this is the nature of time and evolution. Technology has always been with us too. Never has it changed us this fast, this fundamentally.

Yet we’re not paying attention. Not really.

A Philosophical Void

To deal with change, there was always philosophy. 

Would Plato ever have allowed the smartphone rollout without massive public discourse on its impact? How it fragments our attention, pulling us from presence, from living—and for what? The average human attention span has shrunk to just 8.25 seconds. We check our phones 80 times a day while thinking it’s only 25. The mere presence of a smartphone reduces our cognitive capacity even when it’s turned off and face down.

Seneca would be focused on protesting these technological invasions, completely rejecting this wholesale effort to replace our consciousness with algorithms, our new unofficial mission of automation. Even broader than technology, philosophers—and economists—would never have allowed our driving economic construct where quarterly profits prevail over nature, over humanity, over the future itself.

The Height of Unconsciousness

Here we are: supposedly the height of enlightenment, where, unbeknownst to most of us, human and machine are merging. In the future we’re building, we become one with tech, and once we’ve used up this world, the richest will just leave it—up in smoke—to conquer new planets.

Dramatic but true. And yet, instead of questioning any of it, we end up asking ourselves: ‘Who am I now? How do I adapt to all this?’

We should be asking: *What are we becoming? What are we losing? What does it mean to be human when humanity itself is being redefined by forces we don’t understand and didn’t choose?*

Time: The Ultimate Denominator

One thing has not changed: time itself. In that sense, has technology made us more productive? Or has it consumed us with distraction, manufactured social pressures, and artificial urgencies, making us more stressed and unhappy with no more access to equality or freedom than promised?

Technology promised to give us time. Instead, it has been diluting time—fragmenting attention we don’t have, stealing presence we can’t recover.

The Great Disconnect

Where has philosophy gone? Ever since we split art from science, divorced right brain from left brain, philosophy has dissipated. The number of philosophy majors has been cut in half at America’s top universities. Humanities enrollments have dropped 50% over the past 30 years. 

How do we dare accept all this change without asking if it’s good for us?

Are we sheep then? Is this the height of human laziness or awareness? Is this what consciousness is destined to do—outsource itself?

What We Are Not

We are not tech. We are beliefs, ideas, values, identities, communities, spirits—all threatened by exponential change.

Are we not free-willed humans, designed to think deeply, to question, to keep this place habitable for the next generation?

The market treats philosophy as “useless”—a luxury we can’t afford. But what’s truly unaffordable is the cost of accepting transformation without contemplation. The cost of becoming something else entirely without noticing.

Questions We’ve Stopped Asking:

What does it mean that 30% of social media users feel anxious if they haven’t checked their accounts in two hours?

What does it mean that we’re training artificial intelligence to think for us while we lose the capacity to think for ourselves?

What does it mean that we’ve optimized for engagement over understanding, for speed over wisdom, for efficiency over meaning?

These aren’t abstract questions. They are survival questions.

The Species Question

“Survival of the species”—we fumble with the phrase without grasping its weight.

Physical survival? We’ve got that covered, for now. But what about survival as conscious beings? As meaning-making creatures? As philosophers, artists, questioners of reality?

If we succeed in creating artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, have we succeeded or eliminated ourselves?

If we solve climate change through pure technological optimization, but lose our capacity for wonder, for contemplation, for spiritual connection to nature—have we saved the world despite ourselves?

The Time That Remains

This is not a call to reject technology or retreat from modernity. This is a call to think.

Philosophy isn’t luxury. It’s emergency protocol for a species undergoing radical change without conscious direction.

The ancients understood: the unexamined life is not worth living. But we’ve gone further—we’re living the unexamined transformation of life itself.

We’ve automated everything except the most human capacity: the ability to step back and ask “What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What are we becoming? What are we losing?”

The questions remain: Who are we? Where are we? What’s next?