Still from Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)
Dear 2120,
I hope you’re settled. Because we’re not. We’re addicted to newness. New stuff, new looks, new versions of ourselves. It feels totally normal, but it’s actually a pretty recent thing, engineered by cheap fossil fuels and the insane growth they made possible.
How It Started
Fossil fuels powered more than factories. They rewired how we think about stuff and identity. When production exploded in the 20th century, buying things became who you are. “New” turned into shorthand for progress, success, basically everything good.
Cities powered by cheap energy became testing grounds for different lifestyles. Novelty stopped being special and became expected. Your identity became something you’re supposed to constantly upgrade.
Breaking Rules Became the Rule
Fast change made disruption a virtue. People who broke boundaries became heroes. The growth-at-all-costs mindset loved rule-breakers because they suggested more expansion was possible.
This logic runs everything now. Tech worship “disruption.” Culture chases the next edgy thing. If you’re not breaking something, you’re boring. Transgression went from rebellious to required.
The Reinvention Hamster Wheel
Global supply chains and social media algorithms cranked this into overdrive. Now we cycle through trends and identities constantly. Reinvention went from meaningful choice to compulsive behavior. Staying the same feels like stagnation. Change became convention.
You end up with this restless psychology where you have to keep reinventing yourself just to feel relevant.
When Reality Isn’t Enough
Umberto Eco wrote about how we became obsessed with making things that feel more real than reality. Prosperity stopped being about actual material comfort and became a vibe you engineer. We remake reality to be louder, shinier, more intense every time.
The ‘new’ is addictive because you can always design it to feel better than what actually exists. Culture turned into an escalation machine where each iteration has to top the last one.
The Dark Side
Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood shows where this psychology goes. Daniel Plainview builds an oil empire through pure conquest. He violates every boundary to expand and dominate. Competition defines his whole identity. He wants wealth for the myth of it, not what it provides. Prosperity as spectacle.
And where does it end? Isolation and self-destruction. That’s what happens when transgression becomes your whole personality.
What It Cost Us
This mindset gave us climate chaos, biodiversity collapse, and depleted resources. But it also did internal damage; constant restlessness, insecurity, loss of meaning.
Transgression used to challenge power structures. Now the system just absorbed it and uses it as fuel for faster cycles of consumption and novelty.
What’s Next
We need to rethink what prosperity, desire, and creativity even mean. Stuff like degrowth, regenerative design, doughnut economics: these show how novelty can come from restoration instead of extraction.
The goal is redirecting creativity and transgression, not killing them. Transgression can mean breaking with the logic of “more, faster, louder” itself. Reinvention can mean getting back to balance. Novelty can mean building things that actually last.
The 20th century trained us to crave endless newness. We escalated that into fake realities that feel more abundant than real life (Eco). We built a psychology of conquest disguised as ambition (Anderson).
The myth we inherited says progress has to break boundaries. Always. Forever.
But there’s a different way. Value having enough over having more. Depth over escalation. Sticking with things over constant reinvention. Transgression as refusing the destructive playbook we were handed, not as domination.
That’s the shift we’re trying to figure out. I hope for our sake and yours that it does.
Letters to 2120 