The Price of Progress: Between Nostalgia and Noise

Sometimes I wonder if we got it all wrong.
If what we call progress is really just an elegant disguise for something else — for disconnection, distraction, and decline.

We wanted a faster world, a smarter one.
We got it.
But it came with side effects no one warned us about: the loneliness of constant connection, the addiction to endless scrolling, the death of patience, and the rise of anger as the universal language.

In my latest essay on Substack, I ask a simple but uncomfortable question:
Was it all a mistake?

I write about the crackle of vinyl records, when music was discovery, not algorithm.
About letters written by hand, when words still carried weight.
About a time when politicians had to be listened to — and because of that, they studied, they read, they learned.

Now, too many of them don’t need to convince us. They just need to provoke us.
Nationalism has become a product. Ignorance, a strategy.
Figures like Trump — and all the Trumps scattered around the world — didn’t invent this culture of manipulation. They simply perfected it.

And yet, this is not an essay about nostalgia.
It’s about awareness. About realizing how easily “innovation” turns into illusion when guided by greed and distraction instead of meaning and empathy.

We can’t rewind history like a VHS tape.
But maybe, we can still slow it down.
Maybe we can choose silence again — to listen, to think, to breathe.

If these thoughts resonate with you, read the full version of the article here:
👉 Was It All a Mistake? The Price of Progress

There, I go deeper into the question of what we’ve really gained — and what we’ve lost — in this race called the future.