Clarity is Resistance
Part I - The Pale Blue Dot
I write this today not from anger, but from grief. I write, in part, to remind myself that in a world spiralling toward noise and entropy, the very act of clarity, of slowing down and simply thinking, might just be the most radical form of resistance we have left. Not resistance in the dramatic, revolutionary sense. But the kind that says: I will not be swept away by the current. I will stand still and try, at the very least, to understand where we are, and what we’re doing.
Oftentimes I imagine what it would feel like to hover over Earth. To be weightless above Earth, looking back at that pale blue dot – Carl Sagan’s dot – suspended in the sunbeam. In that majestic view there are no borders, no flags, no gods - just one fragile atmosphere circling an ordinary star. From that perspective, everything we claim as absolute begins to feel like theatre. Our beliefs, our laws, our currencies… entire systems we build and then forget we’ve invented.
As Yuval Noah Harari reminds us, most of what governs our world is imagined. Stories we agree to tell each other so that we might cooperate, coordinate, survive. And when you really zoom out, and sit in that kind of perspective for more than a passing moment, it does something to the way you see things. It shifts your understanding of not just the world, but the people in it. It softens the contours of your enemies, shrinks the urgency of ego. It demands a different kind of humility.
But then, of course, I am pulled back down to reality and the weight of the moment, back to today’s headlines. In Ukraine, the war grinds on: over one million Russian casualties reported, a quarter of a million confirmed dead, with over 400,000 Ukrainian lives lost or wounded since the invasion began. In Gaza, the toll continues to rise (over 57,800 dead), with 531 killed just last week alone, and more than 130,000 injured. And today, as I sit down to write these words, the United States and Israel have carried out airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites (Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan) deploying bunker-busters and cruise missiles in what can only be described as a deepening of the regional fire.
And so I wonder, again, what it might look like if more of us chose to zoom out. If we let go, even briefly, of the familiar stories that keep us locked in cycles of fear and tribal loyalty. Because what we are witnessing, when stripped of political justification, is the same pattern repeated: we are still killing each other over stories. Religious stories. Ideological stories. Stories of fear and pride and power, written in the language of divine authority and national destiny.
Einstein once said that we have the intelligence to split the atom, but not the wisdom to untangle the knots in our own minds. That sentence echoes more loudly now than perhaps ever before. We are no longer just fighting over land or power… we are fighting over imagined futures, mythologised pasts, and the narratives we cling to in order to feel certain in an uncertain world.
What frightens me most is not the war itself, but the way it has become ambient, background, normalised noise. A low hum of destruction that we scroll past on our phones, note in passing, and then carry on with our day. And I keep thinking: what happened to our sense of wonder? To that innate human pull toward mystery, toward exploration, toward the unknown? I often wonder what the world would feel like if light pollution didn’t exist. If we could see the Milky Way each night the way our ancestors once did. Would we still do this to each other, if we were reminded daily of the cosmic vastness above us? If we could look up and see the universe, undimmed, unfiltered, would we remember that we are not enemies, but stardust? That we are, in some very real way, the universe becoming aware of itself?
And perhaps there’s some bitter logic to all of this. Entropy, after all, is the natural trajectory of systems left unchecked. It takes energy, intention, and consciousness to resist the pull toward chaos. But it can be done. Human beings, for all our failings, are proof of that. We are the improbable result of order emerging from chaos. And so perhaps the real question isn’t whether we are doomed, but whether we still have the will to resist that doom. Patiently, deliberately, and together. Because the alternative, the one we are drifting toward at unprecedented pace is not simply collapse. It is an amnesia and the slow erosion of wonder. A world in which we no longer look up at the stars, or out at each other, and feel the faint but vital tug of responsibility. The kind that reminds us that we are temporary, and fragile, and, despite everything, still here.
And if that’s true, then perhaps the task is not to win the war of narratives, but to tell better ones. To remember that we are not enemies. We are, as we have always been, storytellers. And we can choose what comes next.
- AK x
I kept nodding through the ache and awe of your words… especially the line about war becoming ambient noise. That hit hard. And yet, you didn’t leave us in despair. You offered clarity as resistance, wonder as rebellion, storytelling as the way forward.