Before the feed. Before the scroll. Before outrage was algorithmically curated and distraction became the air we breathe, I wrote a short poem on human inertia. It ended with a line that now feels less poetic and more diagnostic: Heretical yore … without doing.
I wrote it in 1997. It seemed true then. It seems truer now, which is not a comfortable thing to sit with.
The poem is a muse on humanity — on the idea that we are asleep, that we carry extraordinary capability, and that by doing nothing we simply repeat the sins of those who came before us. It wasn’t political. It wasn’t technological. It was, at its core, existential. Nearly three decades later, its premise hasn’t changed. But the machinery behind it has.
You can read the full poem here.
What “Yore” Actually Carries
The word itself is worth a moment. Most people encounter yore only as a decorative archaism — the linguistic equivalent of a cobweb. But its roots are denser than that. It comes from Old English geāra, a genitive plural construction meaning “of years” — accumulated time, lived duration, inherited memory. Older dictionaries listed it as a temporal noun: former time, ancient time, time long past. That nuance has since been pruned away. What survives is a relic, frozen inside the phrase “of yore,” stripped of its original grammatical weight.
Paired with “heretical,” it doesn’t romanticise anything. It indicts. Every age imagines itself morally advanced. Every age quietly inherits the contradictions it refused to resolve. The banners change. The language evolves. The certainty — and the repetition — remain intact.
The suggestion of the poem was never that humanity is malicious. It was that we are asleep.
Before the Machine
In the late 1990s, passivity was analogue. Distraction required effort. Silence still existed by default. Reflection wasn’t a discipline you had to fight for — it arrived naturally, in the gaps between things.
Conflict moved at human speed. Tribalism was real but geographically contained. If we failed to act consciously, that failure was largely internal — apathy, habit, cultural inertia. “Without doing” meant simply not doing.
Something has shifted since then.
The Industrialisation of Attention
The early 21st century didn’t just introduce new distractions. It introduced systems optimised to harvest attention at scale. Platforms refined feedback loops that reward reaction over reflection. The smartphone placed this architecture permanently in our hands and never let go.
The shift wasn’t only technological. It was neurological. Attention became measurable. Emotion became monetisable. Outrage became a growth strategy.
We are almost never inactive now. We scroll, post, react, share. We are continuously engaged. Yet structural change — the kind that requires sitting with discomfort rather than performing in response to it — remains elusive.
This is the new paradox: endless engagement without transformation. “Without doing” no longer means inactivity. It means activity that never quite reaches the depth required for anything to actually change.
We are stimulated. We are not awakened.
The Illusion of Agency
One of the stranger features of this moment is how much it feels like participation. Expression is frictionless. Opinion is instant. Visibility is democratised. And yet the underlying patterns — tribalism, inherited grievance, moral absolutism — not only persist but accelerate.
Psychological research has long established that humans default to confirmation bias, in-group loyalty, and threat amplification. Digital systems don’t create these tendencies; they simply feed them constantly, at speed, with precision. The result isn’t new conflicts so much as an accelerated recurrence of very old conflicts.
The cycles described in “heretical yore” are no longer transmitted slowly through institutions and generations. They’re replicated at network speed, and they feel urgent and original each time.
Are We Worse — Or Just More Exposed?
It’s tempting to declare moral decline. But the long view complicates that. By many measurable indicators — rates of violence, literacy, life expectancy — the world has improved across centuries. What has worsened is perception, exposure, and the fragmentation of attention.
The village never sleeps now. We are aware of every atrocity, every injustice, every collapse, in real time. But visibility is not the same as wisdom. Awareness of a problem and the capacity to respond to it with depth and intention are very different things. We have vastly more of the former than we’ve ever had, and it’s not obvious we have more of the latter.
The difference between 1997 and today may not be that humanity has deteriorated. It may be that our contradictions are now continuously broadcast, and the noise makes it harder to hear anything clearly.
The Deeper Question
The final line of the poem remains the hinge: … without doing.
The failure it points to is not a failure of intelligence or capability. Humanity demonstrates ingenuity daily — technologically, scientifically, artistically. The failure is the absence of coherent, conscious direction. We react more than we reflect. We perform more than we transform. We inherit more than we interrogate.
If heresy once meant the courage to challenge inherited dogma, then the quiet modern heresy may be something far less dramatic: sustained attention in a culture engineered for fragmentation. The rebellion isn’t louder speech. It’s deeper listening. The awakening isn’t ideological certainty — it’s the willingness to sit with complexity long enough to actually see it.
The Question That Remains
The poem was written before the machine learned to sleep for us. It wasn’t prescient in the sense of predicting what was coming — it was prescient in identifying something that technology has since industrialised.
In 1997, unconsciousness was a human weakness. Now it is, in many respects, a business model.
The question this raises for anyone committed to coherence and conscious living isn’t whether technology is good or bad, or whether society is collapsing or evolving. It’s simpler and harder than that: can awareness keep pace with amplification? Can we observe our own reactivity before we reinforce it? Can we interrupt inherited patterns rather than rehearse them?
History doesn’t repeat itself because it must. It repeats because awareness fails to intervene.
In 1997, the concern was that we were asleep. In 2026, the concern is subtler. We are awake to everything — except ourselves.
The poem remains unchanged. Its context has only deepened.
