Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

What happens when the fiction we believe begins to fracture?
And once we see the cracks, how do we travel from fiction to truth?

More and more, life has become a commodity. Not just our labour, but our attention, our identities, and inner worlds. The political system and capitalism consume it like sugar, sweet, addictive, dissolving on the tongue while something deeper quietly decays.  Meanwhile, morality and ethics are tucked away in the booth, rotting like teeth left untreated.

We have become bandits to our own moral treasure, selling fragments of ourselves for a handful of coins that rarely hold their worth. Not always out of greed, but out of exhaustion, confusion, and the pressure to keep up. And all the while, social media buzzes words without thought, spreading insidious harm, shaping perception, modifying beliefs, a slow and subtle form of brainwashing dressed up as noise, where repetition begins to wear the mask of truth.

Fact-checking and critical thinking now feel rebellious!

Instead of warming ourselves by the meaning of poetry and careful thought, we let the fervour of passion that consumes dictate what feels right in the moment, with little concern for consequences. We chase immediacy of sensation and call it truth.

Somewhere along the way, we began to associate giving with lacking. As though generosity empties us rather than expands us. As though to offer something of ourselves is to fall behind in a race no one agreed to run.

But what if that is the distortion holding everything in place?

What do we need to bring meaning back into human existence, when so many live through screens, consuming endlessly, rarely pausing to ask: Is this truth, or just a well-crafted fiction?

“Lifelong” is not just a word. It is a lifetime. We all want to be witnessed, to matter in some way. Yet fewer seem willing to leave a legacy for others to build on. Without that, we become transient. Exchangeable. A commodity within life itself.

Learn from history. Read beyond headlines. Understand manifestos. Remember that you are not alone on this planet, even if the systems around you benefit from that illusion.

Because if we never question it, how would we ever know the difference?

©️Elke T.B. Stevens 27/03/2026