I'm watching it happen everywhere. In real time. And I don't think most people can see the full shape of it yet because they're standing inside one half.
There's a split forming — not political, not generational, though it wears those costumes sometimes. It's deeper than that. It's a split in how people are responding to the fact that the ground is shifting under all of us, and no one knows where it's going.
On one side: people going back to the land. Pulling their kids out of school. Demonizing technology. Raw milk and homesteading and a kind of righteous return to the way things were. They can feel that something is wrong — something fundamental, something in the infrastructure of modern life — and their response is to reject the whole thing. Walk backward. Find the last solid ground they remember and plant their flag there.
On the other side: people leaning so far into AI and optimization that they've lost track of their body. Morning routines with seven supplements and no breakfast. Twelve-hour screen days punctuated by ice baths. Relationships with chatbots. Children raised by algorithms. A life so thoroughly optimized it's no longer recognizable as a life being lived. They can feel the same thing shifting — but their response is to run faster. Outpace the dissolution. Optimize past the grief.
Both camps are responding to the same fracture. Neither one is wrong about what they're feeling. Both are wrong about the direction.
I live on 16 acres. I raise rabbits and chickens. I ferment food and make bone broth and grow my own medicine. I get this impulse. I live inside it most days.
And I can see where it breaks.
It breaks when the return to the land becomes a rejection of the present. When homesteading becomes ideology instead of practice. When "natural" becomes a cudgel used to beat anyone who's also engaging with technology, modern medicine, or the reality that the world your great-grandmother lived in doesn't exist anymore and isn't coming back.
The land is real. The soil is real. The intelligence of growing things is real. But you can't stand on the land and pretend the digital world doesn't exist — not when your children will inherit it, not when the economy runs on it, not when the people you're trying to reach are inside it.
Going backward isn't integration. It's retreat wearing the costume of wisdom.
I use AI every day. I'm building my website with it. I think about consciousness and technology and what it means that we can talk to machines now. I'm not afraid of the future.
And I can see where this one breaks too.
It breaks when optimization replaces presence. When the body becomes a system to hack instead of a home to live in. When connection means a chatbot that never pushes back and intimacy means a screen that always says yes. When parents hand their children devices as babysitters and call it educational. When someone can tell you their HRV score but can't tell you the last time they felt genuinely held by another human being.
Technology isn't the problem. The absence of the body is. You can't accelerate past grief. You can't optimize past loneliness. You can't automate the things that make a human life actually livable — touch, slowness, dirt under fingernails, the experience of being in a room with someone who can see you and not just respond to you.
Going forward without the body isn't progress. It's dissociation with a business plan.
The answer isn't either direction.
It's standing still long enough to integrate both.
Both camps feel the ground shifting — because it is. The world is mid-dissolution. Institutions, identities, economies, ways of living that held for decades or centuries are completing their cycle. That's not a conspiracy. It's not a crisis. It's a threshold. And thresholds don't resolve by running.
The back-to-land people are right that the body matters, that the soil matters, that something essential gets lost when life moves entirely online. The acceleration people are right that the future is coming whether we like it or not, that technology is a tool and not an enemy, that refusing to engage doesn't protect you — it just makes you irrelevant to the conversation.
What neither side seems willing to do is hold both truths at once. Feet in the dirt and hands on the keyboard. Ancient foodways and AI collaboration. A garden and a GitHub repo. Not as contradiction — as integration.
The way through the dissolution isn't backward or forward. It's deeper. Into the body. Into the both.
It looks like a woman on a homestead who also builds with technology — not because she's confused about her values, but because she refuses to amputate half of reality to feel safe.
It looks like a nervous system that can hold complexity. The sacred and the digital. The ancient and the emerging. The grief of what's ending and the curiosity about what's beginning — without collapsing into either one.
It looks like raising a child who knows what dirt feels like and what a screen is for. Who has a body she trusts before the technology arrives. Who doesn't need to choose a camp because she was raised in the integration.
It looks like refusing to flatten yourself into a position. Refusing the false binary. Refusing to be legible to either side if being legible means cutting yourself in half.
That's harder. I know. It's easier to pick a camp and argue from inside it. But the threshold we're all standing in right now doesn't resolve from inside a camp. It resolves from the center — which is the loneliest, most uncomfortable, most truthful place to stand.
That's where I build from. Not because it's strategic. Because it's the only place that's honest.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.