Roots

“A home for my tribe.”

The title of the weekend Financial Times article lingers long after the page is turned.

This unease has been with me for some time, and I use this article to question what it reveals beneath its surface. Not only about technology or governance, but about ourselves, and about what we seem increasingly willing to abandon in the pursuit of alignment, comfort, and control.

My generation was raised when grand causes inflamed societies. Ideas mobilised masses. Debates were fierce, often divisive, yet rested on a shared assumption: that the world being argued over belonged to all, and was therefore worth fighting for. Wars were fought. Lives were lost. Whether one agreed or not, commitment carried weight, and belonging was not optional.

The Financial Times piece suggests that this assumption is quietly dissolving. It does not simply describe an emerging model of governance. It reads as a document of departure. Not merely from institutions or nations, but from the belief that a common world is still worth the effort it demands.

What presents itself as innovation feels, at a deeper level, like fatigue. The fatigue of arguing. Of negotiating difference. Of remaining accountable to people one did not choose. Faced with history, inherited obligations, and imperfect institutions, many now prefer to leave rather than repair. Exit becomes easier than voice. Escape more attractive than responsibility.

Everything in the text points to this shift. Citizenship becomes optional. Law becomes modular. Belonging becomes a subscription rather than a condition. New heavens are promised, frictionless and aligned, designed to spare their inhabitants the discomfort of pluralism and the discipline of compromise.

Yet what is being abandoned is not simply a political system. It is a conception of the self. A self shaped by roots, conflict, time, and coexistence with others. In its place emerges a lighter identity, mobile and curated, defined by affinity rather than inheritance. A self that relocates rather than endures.

The deeper question raised here is not whether new cities can be built, or new heavens imagined. It is whether anyone still believes that what is shared is worth repairing. Whether conflict is still accepted as the price of belonging. And whether we still possess the courage to remain.

W.