When people picture collapse, they imagine something dramatic: alarms blaring, floods rushing in, fire and ruin. But that’s not how it usually happens.
We didn’t lose the sacred all at once. There was no alarm, no collapse, no flood warning us. It was just a slow leak. The leak matters, not because the past was better, but because what leaked out was the texture of being human. We traded tangible, lived experience for convenience. We outsourced memory, attention, and imagination to our devices, and in doing so, we let those muscles atrophy. When the sacred is gone, life doesn’t feel fuller, it feels thinner, flatter, like something essential got drained out.
I think about the little things we no longer do. There was a time when you memorized phone numbers because you had to carry them in your head. A time when you traced a map with your finger before leaving the house, memorizing turns and landmarks. Now we hand our phones to strangers to type in their number and let the device remember for us. Now we ask GPS to guide us through towns we’ve lived in for years.
We’ve also lost something quieter: the ability to touch the sources of our own story. For most of human history, wisdom, memory, and truth were carried in tangible forms like letters, journals, and original documents. To read them was to touch the past directly. Now we rely on summaries, interpretations, and filtered fragments delivered through a screen.
That slow leak didn’t just drain our memory. It drained our connection. We outsource not only our numbers and directions but our presence, our creativity, our sense of wonder. And it’s not dramatic enough to notice, until you look back and realize whole rooms of your life are empty.
The Truman Show was a comedy when it came out, but in hindsight it feels prophetic. A world where every moment is orchestrated, every view filtered, every connection manufactured. That’s not fiction anymore, that’s Tuesday night scrolling. The screen tells us what to buy, what to fear, what to dream about, and we call it choice. Meanwhile, we leak away the very things that make us human: our silence, our curiosity, our imagination, our soul.
The danger isn’t that someone stole these things from us. It’s that we traded them for convenience. Step by step, click by click, distraction by distraction, we chose ease over depth, entertainment over meaning, simulation over the raw and sacred texture of life.
But here’s the truth: the leak can be stopped. Not by throwing out your phone or raging against technology, that’s just noise in the other direction. It starts with noticing. With reclaiming one small sacred act at a time. Write a letter by hand. Memorize a number. Sit in silence long enough to hear your own thoughts instead of a feed telling you what to think.
We lost the sacred slowly, and that means we can reclaim it slowly too. One choice at a time.
Burn The Script 