A Conversation We Can No Longer Avoid

A conversation is now underway.

It is taking place quietly across families, schools, universities, and institutions. It concerns the way the world around us is changing, the responsibility of parents and educators, and the preparation of the next generation. It is not only a discussion about technology or employment. It is a deeper question of formation: how human beings are shaped before they are asked to decide, to lead, and to carry responsibility.

At its core, this conversation is about something even more fundamental. It is about how societies produce meaning, and therefore about how human beings come to experience their lives as meaningful.

We are making history, whether we intend to or not.

For the first time in generations, several systems that once shaped meaning are weakening at the same time. Religion no longer plays the role it once did. Philosophy has retreated into commentary. Science is increasingly reduced to execution. Artificial intelligence is accelerating change faster than institutions can absorb. Apprenticeship, the mechanism that once transmitted meaning across generations, is disappearing.

Into this space, fiction has quietly moved.

When Fiction Takes the Place of Formation

Fiction is no longer a marginal activity. It has become a parallel life.

Alongside ordinary existence, marked by repetition, limits, and quiet disappointments, another life is now constantly available. It is cinematic, immersive, and responsive. It offers clear narratives, strong emotions, chosen identities, and instant meaning. It promises significance without waiting. What once belonged to the life after has been brought into the present, shaped to our preferences, and lived now.

This is not merely a cultural change. It is a shift in how meaning is produced, and thus in how societies answer, often without words, the question of what makes life worth living.

Religion never existed to entertain. It existed to form human beings. It offered a grammar of life. It taught how to live with limits, how to endure banality, how to accept uncertainty, guilt, patience, sacrifice, and hope. Meaning was not delivered instantly. It was cultivated slowly through time, ritual, restraint, repetition, and silence. Waiting mattered. Judgment mattered. Life made sense not because it was easy, but because it was oriented.

Philosophy played a parallel role. Where religion formed the soul, philosophy trained the mind. It slowed thinking. It introduced doubt and contradiction. It taught how to remain with difficult questions without rushing to answers. Philosophy did not promise salvation. It promised clarity, proportion, and measure. It helped human beings live without illusion.

Science entered this landscape not as an enemy of religion, but as its disciplined partner. Science explained how the world works. Religion asked why life should be lived at all. Philosophy helped define the limits of both. Their tensions were productive. Together, they shaped a view of life in which meaning was neither invented nor consumed, but patiently discovered.

The figure of Galileo Galilei reminds us of this balance. Galileo did not attack faith. He challenged authority over method. Scripture, he argued, was not a handbook of astronomy. Observation and measurement had their own rules. Theology spoke to salvation, not planetary motion. What followed was not a war between religion and science, but institutional anxiety faced with new limits.

It was a moment when boundaries were renegotiated, not destroyed.

This lineage continued with figures such as Albert Einstein and Alexander Graham Bell.

Both worked at the edge of imagination, yet remained deeply patient with reality. Einstein allowed ideas to mature slowly, often over decades, submitting them to doubt and mathematical discipline. Bell experimented endlessly with sound, failure, and silence before transmission became possible. For both, invention was not acceleration, but apprenticeship to resistance. Knowledge deepened meaning rather than replacing it.

What religion, philosophy, and science shared was resistance. Resistance of time. Resistance of reality. Resistance of mystery. None of them offered instant meaning. All of them required formation.

Life was meaningful because it demanded effort, judgment, and endurance.

Fiction breaks this structure.

Through films, games, and permanent story worlds, meaning now arrives fully prepared. Suffering is controlled. Progress is guaranteed. Identity is selectable. Death is reversible. Moral judgment is outsourced. One can experience courage, anger, sacrifice, or compassion without carrying responsibility.

Real life does not work this way. Effort does not always lead to success. Virtue often goes unnoticed. Love can fail. Time does not negotiate. Religion once helped people endure this gap. Philosophy helped them understand it. Science forced respect for it. Fiction removes the gap by replacing it with story.

Slowly, the imaginary life begins to feel more meaningful than the real one, because it offers coherence without cost. Meaning becomes something we enter, not something we build.

Imagination, Used Well and Used Poorly

Not all imagination is escape.

Inventors and builders were shaped by resistance. Ideas had to survive reality. Failure was formative. Meaning arrived slowly. Wonder was earned. Invention was not fantasy. It was disciplined engagement with limits.

Innovators reorganized daily life rather than metaphysical horizons.

Steve Jobs imposed discipline through constraint. He pursued the compression of space and components, forcing engineers to rethink form, proportion, and integration. Fewer parts meant greater coherence. Smaller space meant higher responsibility. His obsession with elegance was a moral discipline as much as an aesthetic one.

Jeff Bezos approached the world differently. He focused on logistics, access, and scale. His ambition lay in removing friction from everyday life, making complexity invisible. He did not redefine the meaning of life, but he profoundly reshaped expectations of speed, convenience, and availability.

Neither promised salvation. Both offered tools. The risk appeared only when those tools became total environments and speed replaced reflection.

Jules Verne represents disciplined imagination at its finest. His fiction was anchored in scientific plausibility, technical limits, and respect for what was not yet known. Discovery in his world required preparation, endurance, and humility. The future was not a spectacle to be consumed, but a horizon to be approached patiently. Verne taught that imagination could enlarge meaning without abolishing effort.

Walt Disney sensed that modern societies were losing shared myths and moral language. His response was symbolic repair. His worlds clarified good and evil, rewarded loyalty and sacrifice, and restored narrative coherence to fragmented lives. Importantly, Disney’s worlds were intentionally bounded. They were places one entered and left. They offered meaning without claiming to replace life itself. They were moral theatres, not alternative realities.

A rupture appears when imagination stops being symbolic and becomes governing.

The Elon Musk Differential

This is where Elon Musk introduces something genuinely new.

Musk’s ambition is not only scale. It is compression of time.

Where Steve Jobs compressed space and components, Musk seeks to compress timelines themselves. What once unfolded over generations is treated as executable now. Mars is not a metaphor. Artificial intelligence is not first a philosophical or ethical question. Narrative becomes road map.

This is not escapism. It is myth executed as strategy.

Musk learns by dismantling reality. He takes systems apart to rebuild them with fewer steps, fewer assumptions, and tighter logic. He refuses inherited answers. He works from first principles. This is apprenticeship in its most demanding form: direct confrontation with resistance, repeated failure, and relentless rebuilding.

In this sense, Musk is profoundly human. Like Jobs, he learned through friction, not simulation. But he is also an exception. What took him years of obsession is demanded from others at impossible speed. His systems scale output far more easily than they scale formation.

This is where the ladder breaks.

From Formation to Apprenticeship

Formation was never a private achievement. It was a social inheritance.

Religion formed through initiation and guidance. Philosophy through schools, mentors, and dialogue. Science through laboratories, peer review, and long submission to method.

In every case, formation required a lived structure that translated values into practice.

That structure had a name.

It was apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship was the bridge between knowledge and judgment. It slowed people down before giving them power. It made mistakes safe. It transmitted standards that could not be written down. It taught not only how to do things, but how to live with responsibility.

When formation weakens, apprenticeship does not disappear by accident. It disappears because it no longer has a foundation to stand on.

The Loss of Apprenticeship

Today, apprenticeship is compressed or skipped. Credentials replace formation. Early visibility replaces slow learning. Artificial intelligence now removes many of the entry level tasks that once trained judgment.

This is the real danger of AI.

AI does not only replace jobs. It removes the learning layer of work. Drafting, summarizing, first analysis, and routine reasoning were how judgment was built. These tasks were not trivial. They were formative.

If that layer disappears, people may produce outputs, but they will struggle to carry responsibility, and life itself risks becoming efficient but hollow.

Parents, Educators, and the Next Generation

This returns responsibility to parents and educators.

The next generation does not only need skills. It needs formation. It needs time, silence, effort, and supervised responsibility. It needs to learn how to think, how to judge, how to decide, and how to live with consequences.

AI must be integrated into apprenticeship, not used to bypass it. Output will be cheap. Judgment will be rare.

Education must shift from producing answers to forming discernment. From delivering information to shaping meaning.

Learning, Time, and Accumulation

Here Marguerite Yourcenar and Warren Buffett belong together.

Yourcenar reminds us that when institutions collapse, when power fails, and when meaning dissolves, learning remains the last inner act that cannot be confiscated. Learning preserves dignity. It restores vertical depth in a flattened world.

Buffett shows how that dignity is built. Quietly. Patiently. Through daily reading, repeated thinking, and cumulative understanding. Learning compounds over time, not through spectacle, but through persistence.

Together, they show that learning is both moral resistance and temporal discipline.

A Civilizational Perspective

At this point, Ibn Khaldun completes the picture.

Civilizations rise when discipline, education, and shared effort are strong. They decline when comfort replaces effort and stories replace discipline. Fiction is not the cause of decline. It is a symptom.

When formation weakens, societies narrate themselves instead of shaping themselves. Power becomes narrative power. Authority belongs to those who control stories and futures. Fiction limits nothing.

Where We Begin

This is where the conversation must begin.

Not with fear of technology.

Not with nostalgia.

Not with slogans about innovation.

But with the most serious question a society can ask:

How do we help human beings experience their lives as meaningful, in a world that no longer waits?

Parents, educators, and leaders must carry this together. Because we are not only preparing the next generation for work. We are preparing them for judgment, responsibility, and endurance in a world that will test all three.

That responsibility cannot be delegated to fiction, platforms, or machines.

It requires time.

It requires learning that accumulates.

It requires ambition that respects limits.

That is the work ahead.

W.