TECHTONICS

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FUTURE

ISOLDE RAY

October 7, 2025

This contribution is not a seamless argument but a cascade of shards. Each fragment is a cut surface, a sliver of observation, laid one after the other until they accumulate into something heavier than coherence. The form echoes the condition it describes: a world without horizon, where time arrives not as continuity but as fragments endlessly refreshed. Like a terrible Twitter feed, the essay scrolls: image after image, aphorism after aphorism, repetition without redemption. In this atmosphere of presentism, God has died, the Future has disappeared, and what remains is the swollen instant, tyrannical and fragile.

---

God once stretched eternity across the heavens. To live was to move toward an infinite order, to endure in the shadow of a plan that outlived every individual. Pain was borne because it was inscribed in a story larger than life itself. Each death mattered only as a passage into a life without end.

When Friedrich Nietzsche announced that God is dead, it was not triumph but diagnosis. The sky had emptied, eternity had collapsed. Yet the hunger for orientation remained. Humans do not live well without a beyond. An empty throne cannot remain empty. Into the vacancy was raised a new sovereign: the Future.

The Future offered direction where God had offered eternity. It was not a promise of heaven, but a horizon of progress. It was called Development, Revolution, Enlightenment. It asked for patience, demanded sacrifice, justified discipline. To endure hunger, war, or exploitation was permissible because it led toward redemption in history. Children would inherit what the present could not yet deliver. The Future became the creditor of every present, the unseen account into which life made its deposits.

Every sacrifice was a loan. Work was carried out because tomorrow would pay interest. Hardship was endured because history was moving toward better arrangements. Generations invested not in themselves but in the descendants who would reap the harvest. The Future was the great economy of hope.

Groundhog Day was not a comedy. It was a prophecy.

That economy has collapsed. The accounts are closed. Progress is still invoked but without fervor. Development is pursued but without conviction. Revolutions are distrusted, utopias erased. The Future no longer organizes belief. It has not died with thunder. It has been canceled quietly, like a program removed from circulation, like a train erased from the timetable.

What fills the vacancy is the present.

The present was once a corridor, endured because it led somewhere. Now the corridor has been bricked up. The present has become an empire, swollen and absolute. It expands in all directions, demanding devotion. Everything must arrive at once. Delay is treated as failure, waiting as weakness, silence as unbearable.

The empire of the present does not lack content. Each instant is packed with images, notifications, fragments. Time is not empty; it is saturated. Yet the more it fills, the thinner it feels. Time is no longer lived forward but consumed in loops. The days do not lead toward anything; they accumulate like debris.

The rituals of this empire are familiar. To refresh. To scroll. To update. To check. These are not gestures of curiosity but compulsions of survival. The Future demanded patience; the present demands attention. Sacrifice once stretched across generations; now attention is poured into the instant and consumed without residue.

The present does not expand imagination; it contracts it. Fantasies once built new worlds. They projected revolutions, utopias, heavens. Now fantasies decorate the profile, polish the brand, customize the setting. Desire no longer moves outward; it loops within the self. What was once dream becomes upgrade.

6:00 a.m.—where the future goes to die politely.

The self becomes the final shrine. The body is monitored, steps counted, sleep tracked, moods measured. The mirror becomes scripture, the feed a catechism. The self is cultivated with the devotion once reserved for eternity or destiny. But this shrine offers no salvation. Every measurement reveals a deficiency, every optimization exposes a lack. The self cannot redeem itself; it multiplies anxiety.

In the absence of a shared horizon, bonds weaken. Communities fray, the polis fades, neighbors become shadows. Even intimacy contracts. The presence of another appears as intrusion, a disruption to the sovereignty of the instant. Care shrinks to the smallest circle, and often not even that circle is tended.

The paradox sharpens. Never has individuality been so loudly celebrated, and never has it been so standardized. Everyone proclaims uniqueness, yet profiles resemble one another endlessly. The cult of originality produces nothing but copies. What is called “self-expression” is often pre-scripted, formatted, anticipated.

The disappearance of the Future does not abolish time. It empties time of trajectory. Days do not move forward; they pile. Sacrifice becomes unintelligible. To give something up today once meant to secure tomorrow; now it is absurd. Only transaction remains: Everything must gratify immediately, yield instantly, return at once. Nothing is carried forward.

The patience that once built cathedrals is lost. Generations labored knowing they would never see completion. To plant a tree for descendants, to build for centuries—these gestures wither when tomorrow has no authority. Cathedrals are impossible where the Future has been withdrawn.

The loop is not punishment. It’s the present.

What replaces them are structures of instant obsolescence. Buildings erected to be demolished, products designed for short cycles, works of art produced for immediate consumption. Nothing is made for duration. Everything is temporary by design.

Memory follows the same path. It no longer carries weight across time; it collapses into archives. To remember is to search a database, to scroll a feed. Memory becomes external, outsourced, fragile. What cannot be retrieved is lost. Forgetting grows absolute because remembering has become mechanical.

Imagination too contracts. Where once it reached toward worlds that did not yet exist, it now tweaks surfaces already given. Dream has become design option. Vision has been reduced to interface.

The shrinking of time and the shrinking of space are bound together. The globe is connected, but the world is narrower. The common dissolves into parallel presents, each sealed, each absolute, each blind to the others. Globalization produces not universality but hyper-provincialism, where each lives in a personalized cage.

The burden that once fell on God, then on the Future, now falls on the self. The self must provide meaning, guarantee identity, bear the continuity once given by transcendence or history. It cannot carry the weight. It cracks beneath the demand. What appears is not salvation but restlessness, not redemption but anxiety.

Performance replaces sacrifice. Optimization replaces devotion. The self becomes a project without completion, a site of endless maintenance. Existence is turned into an infinite task, never fulfilled, always deferred within the present.

Desire, deprived of narrative, becomes craving. Once it was organized by stories of fulfillment—divine union, revolutionary triumph, progress toward equality. Now it has no horizon. Desire becomes perpetual appetite, circulating without direction. Consumption promises relief but only produces repetition.

History ended, but the alarm still goes off.

This condition is not emptiness but saturation. The present is stuffed with stimuli, overloaded with signs, flooded with content. But abundance creates thinness. The more that fills the moment, the more it feels insubstantial. Time bulges with debris and yet feels hollow.

God is dead. The Future has disappeared. What remains is the instant, bloated and relentless. Life no longer advances; it loops. The ladder has been withdrawn; time lies flat.

The empire of the present is tyrannical. It demands attention, consumes care, monopolizes desire. It leaves no space for patience, no opening for sacrifice, no horizon for imagination. Its cruelty is not violence but exhaustion.

Every ritual reinforces its dominion. The morning begins with screens, the night ends with them. The cycle repeats endlessly. To wake is to be summoned. To rest is to prepare for another summons. The day is carved into notifications, interruptions, alerts. The present becomes inescapable.

Even leisure is absorbed. Rest no longer restores; it is scheduled, optimized, branded. Vacations are organized as content. Sleep is tracked as performance. Nothing escapes measurement. Even pleasure is recorded, optimized, evaluated. The empire leaves no uncolonized terrain.

The loss of the Future is visible in language. Hope has become provisional, fragile, stripped of transcendence. It no longer means expectation of transformation; it means the wish to survive, to hold on, to avoid collapse. Hope has been reduced to damage control.

Faith has vanished from politics. Programs are promises without belief. Platforms are announced without conviction. Ideologies survive as costumes, repeated without fervor. Politics has become management of crisis without horizon.

The economy too reflects this contraction. Investment was once justified by growth, by the expectation of expansion. Now speculation dominates, driven not by confidence in tomorrow but by the attempt to exploit volatility today. The Future has been withdrawn from economics as well as from faith.

We built a world where every morning is February 2nd

Even art bears the marks of disappearance. Movements once defined themselves by visions of what had not yet existed. Now art reflects immediacy, circulates as content, depends on attention. It no longer claims to shape the future; it documents the present.

Religion has not returned in God’s absence. It has fragmented into wellness routines, private rituals, consumable spirituality. The sacred is domesticated, privatized, stripped of transcendence. What once reached toward eternity now polishes the self.

What remains is circulation. Time circulates, desire circulates, capital circulates, images circulate. Circulation becomes the substitute for trajectory: movement without direction, repetition without progress, accumulation without future.

This condition is not final. It is not catastrophe, nor apocalypse. It is atmosphere. To live now is to breathe the air of the present swollen beyond proportion, the air of time without horizon. God has died; the Future has been withdrawn. What remains is to endure, to observe, to inhabit the empire of the instant.

Presentism governs not only private life but public order. Politics once promised horizons. Parties and ideologies oriented themselves toward futures: a workers’ republic, a purified nation, a global market, a rational state. However misguided or brutal, they stretched the present toward something else. Now politics is the administration of immediacy. Presentism abolishes long projects. It replaces visions with crisis management, ideals with stopgaps, destiny with polling.

Campaigns still speak of tomorrow, but the language is hollow. Platforms are assembled like marketing slogans, tested against metrics of the moment. Promises do not point toward genuine horizons; they serve as temporary bait, forgotten once the next cycle begins. Governance becomes permanent improvisation.

The clock flips forward. The world does not.

Economics too is ruled by the instant. The Future once justified investment, construction, accumulation. Industries were built to last for decades, even centuries. Now speculation dominates. Markets chase volatility, not security. Value is extracted not from what will be built but from what can be flipped. The present devours the future before it arrives.

Finance embodies presentism perfectly: profits measured in milliseconds, strategies abandoned at the first fluctuation. Growth is still invoked, but the horizon is no longer decades, or even years. Futures markets do not bet on the future; they monetize the present’s anxiety about it.

Culture also succumbs to immediacy. Art once imagined new worlds. It belonged to movements that gestured forward, however clumsily. Now it circulates as content, measured by visibility, consumed in feeds. Its temporality is the instant of attention. The museum becomes archive, the screen becomes stage.

Presentism colonizes all. It abolishes patience, erodes sacrifice, weakens solidarity. It treats every bond, every labor, every creation as provisional. The world becomes a theater of short-term performances, updated and discarded. The only lasting power is the power to command attention in the moment.

Yet presentism, for all its dominance, is fragile. It floods every moment but fails to sustain any. It commands everything and yet provides nothing. Its power is vast but shallow.

The present is overfull yet weightless. Each instant is crammed with stimuli, yet none endure. Each memory is stored but not remembered, each desire gratified but not satisfied. Life becomes a torrent of moments, none of which add up. The empire of the present is both tyrannical and hollow.

Attention is demanded constantly, but attention itself thins. The more it is consumed, the less it holds. The present devours attention and leaves exhaustion.

Every day begins as if it never ended.

Desire under presentism is perpetual hunger. Each satisfaction produces not relief but repetition. Craving does not diminish; it loops. Pleasure is reduced to anticipation of the next refresh.

Even individuality, so loudly celebrated, is undermined. Profiles proclaim uniqueness, but the formats repeat endlessly. Each self is curated, optimized, performed, yet the result is sameness. The cult of originality yields uniformity.

Presentism abolishes hope but breeds craving. It abolishes sacrifice but multiplies anxiety. It abolishes community but floods us with contact. It abolishes direction but accelerates circulation. Its paradox is that it dominates while it corrodes, saturates while it starves.

The disappearance of the Future does not leave nothing; it leaves too much. The instant swells to fill the void, crowding out memory, devouring expectation. What remains is not eternity but repetition, not destiny but distraction.

To say God is dead was to pronounce the collapse of transcendence. To say the Future has disappeared is to describe the loss of direction. Together they define our condition: existence without eternity, time without horizon, life without pilgrimage.

He thought it was a course. It was just the present not leaving again.

We breathe presentism as atmosphere. We live inside its saturation. It shapes desire, politics, economics, intimacy. It abolishes distance, compresses duration, dissolves continuity. The world contracts to what can be consumed now, and what cannot be consumed is dismissed as irrelevant.

This is not the end of the world. It is the texture of our world. God is gone, the Future withdrawn. What remains is the instant: swollen, restless, tyrannical, fragile. To name it is not to resolve it. To observe it is already to stand, however briefly, outside it.

Isolde Ray (b. 1969 in Vyazniki, Russia) trained as a historian before abandoning narrative forms altogether. She writes only in fragments, convinced that the essay must mirror the broken temporality it describes.

Cover image: He woke up. So did we. Groundhog Day (1993–ongoing), dir. Harold Ramis