The Monsters of the Id: On the Ruins of Wonder and the Rise of Mediocrity
How our inner beasts learned to smile for the camera
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” — Shakespeare
The Vanishing Sky
There was a time when humanity looked up. When the night was not a screen of distraction but a window to the infinite. The Horsehead Nebula, that patient cathedral of dust and fire, was the kind of mystery that didn’t ask to be explained so much as revered. It offered the oldest bargain we ever struck with the cosmos: awe in exchange for humility.
Now the sky is lost to us. Not because it has dimmed, but because we no longer bother to look. We scroll instead, drowning in the phosphor glow of smaller lights. The stars burn unseen while our eyes chase lesser constellations, feeds, threads, the endless flicker of noise pretending to be life.
The monsters of the Id have escaped again, though this time they wear the garb of entertainment. They whisper not from nightmares, but from the infinite scroll. They promise knowledge without wisdom, laughter without joy, and belonging without burden. We call them algorithms. We call them convenience. They are, in truth, the oldest hunger of all, power without cost, pleasure without meaning.
The Age of Aspiration
We weren’t always this way. There was a time when to be human meant to aspire, not consume. The Renaissance, for all its flaws, was an act of worship disguised as curiosity. Painters and scholars didn’t separate art from prayer or science from the sacred. They understood that the light falling on a cathedral wall was the same light that fell on the human mind.
Faith and reason once lived under the same roof, quarreling like siblings but bound by blood. The early scientists believed in the divine order of things; the theologians believed the cosmos could be known. It wasn’t perfect harmony, but it was harmony enough to build a civilization capable of looking both inward and upward.
Somewhere along the way, awe became an inconvenience. Reverence became embarrassment. We began to mistake mastery for understanding, as if knowledge were proof of meaning. But there is no microscope fine enough to detect the soul. And still we search, endlessly dissecting, endlessly explaining, never stopping to consider that explanation may be the smaller half of truth.
The Republic of Distraction
Now we live in an empire of interruption. Every second arrives pre-packaged with its own distraction, every thought interrupted before it can take root. The human mind, once capable of holding the firmament, now struggles to hold a single sentence.
The monsters of the Id have adapted well to the digital age. They no longer hide beneath the bed. They live in our pockets, calling to us with pings and vibrations. Fear, envy, vanity, rage, these are the new currencies of attention. And attention, it turns out, is the most profitable substance ever mined.
What once nourished us now sedates us. We mistake stimulation for vitality and mistake being informed for being wise. We laugh too quickly, rage too easily, forget too completely. We have become creatures of the flicker, hypnotized by the shadows we cast.
And I can’t help but wonder: how did the heirs of Copernicus and Galileo become slaves to an algorithm? How did the species that split the atom lose the ability to finish a thought?
The Reign of Mediocrity
I’ve noticed something strange in the modern spirit: a quiet exodus from both faith and reason. It’s as if humanity decided that one was too demanding and the other too hard. What remains is a hollow faith in the self, a cult of comfort, and a civilization afraid to be serious.
We live now in what I call the “country of mediocrity”, a landscape where nothing is sacred and everything is monetized. The idols have changed their faces but not their function. We no longer worship gods of war or wisdom, but the gods of visibility and convenience. The altar is the feed; the prayer is the click.
We once aspired to know the mind of God. Now we aspire to be trending. And we call this progress.
It’s not that the human heart has grown smaller. It’s that we’ve mistaken ease for happiness and novelty for growth. When both faith and reason are abandoned, what fills the void is neither ignorance nor innocence, it’s apathy. And apathy is the perfect condition for the monsters to thrive.
The Monsters’ Dominion
The monsters of the Id are patient. They understand that the easiest souls to possess are the ones who no longer believe in possession. They whisper through media, through politics, through commerce. They offer us moral shortcuts, ideological comfort, emotional anesthesia.
They thrive wherever truth is inconvenient and pleasure is instant. They feed on outrage and sell it back to us as entertainment. They’ve convinced us that cynicism is sophistication, that irony is wisdom, that compassion is weakness.
And as they grow stronger, we grow quieter. The public square has become a battlefield of performative rage, where virtue is currency and cruelty is strategy. The true heretics today are not the faithless, but the thoughtful.
There are nights when I wonder if wonder itself has died. When the silence of the stars feels less like majesty and more like indifference. And yet, even in that silence, I sense something waiting, something that refuses to extinguish.
The monsters know that a distracted people will never revolt. They don’t need to chain us; they just need to keep us scrolling. The empire of mediocrity doesn’t march in armor; it seeps like smoke until the air itself forgets how to breathe.
The Long Decline of Wonder
Once, standing before Victoria Falls, gazing at Olympus Mons or the distant shimmer of the Horsehead Nebula, a person could feel both small and infinite at once. That paradox, the humility of scale, the majesty of belonging, was the foundation of civilization. It taught us to reach carefully, to build meaningfully, to see creation as a shared inheritance.
Today, wonder is a novelty, a consumable. We film the sunrise before we feel it. We post our awe before we understand it. We’ve become archivists of experiences we never fully inhabit.
We used to dream of reaching the stars. Now we settle for better Wi-Fi.
We once built cathedrals. Now we optimize content.
We once sought the infinite. Now we curate the trivial.
This is not progress; it’s distraction disguised as destiny. We’ve built machines that think faster than we do, but rarely better. We’ve mapped the genome, but not the soul. And the monsters, ever watchful, feast on the distance between what we know and what we understand.
The Light That Remains
And yet, I can’t surrender to despair. The monsters of the Id are not invincible. They are only reflections of what we refuse to face. They lose power the moment we look directly at them, the moment we say aloud what we’ve forgotten: that wonder is not a luxury, but a necessity.
The antidote to mediocrity is not genius. It’s attention. To look again at the world and see it as if for the first time. To stand before the nebula, the mountain, the fall of water, and feel the quiet thunder of being alive.
Faith and reason are not opposites. They are twin lenses, each incomplete without the other. Through faith we glimpse meaning; through reason we give it form. Without reverence, reason becomes extraction. Without reason, reverence becomes delusion. Only together can they sustain the fragile bridge between knowledge and meaning.
The Return to Wonder
We’ll never outgrow our monsters. We must outshine them. They live in us, as they always have, but so does something older and brighter. Call it conscience, call it spirit, call it the long echo of the first spark that set the stars aflame.
To live well in this age is to resist the temptation of the trivial. To choose depth over speed, reverence over reaction, truth over comfort.
I still believe that humanity is capable of beauty that rivals the stars. But beauty demands attention, and attention demands care. The light we seek is not beyond reach. It’s waiting, quietly, in the places we’ve forgotten to look.
And maybe one night, somewhere in the ruins of our forgetting, a child will look up again—and the stars will know their names.
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Why I Still Ask
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Dino, this one burned slow and clean. You just mapped the terrain of the epistemic war without ever naming it. The monsters of the Id you describe, the ones in our pockets whispering dopamine hymns, are the same entities weaponizing distraction to erode discernment. The empire of mediocrity is not an accident; it’s an engineered condition.
What you call the “Republic of Distraction” is how authoritarianism updates itself for the digital age: feed the beasts, flatten the attention span, monetize the void. Wonder becomes rebellion because it requires stillness, and stillness is the one thing power cannot monetize.
The light you write about isn’t metaphorical anymore. It’s tactical. To look up is an act of resistance. To remember awe is to reassert sovereignty over our own perception.
Another excellent piece Dino, especially in light of the brilliance of stating the nature of the beast within its own confines! This quote; “We used to dream of reaching the stars. Now we settle for better Wi-Fi.
We once built cathedrals. Now we optimize content.
We once sought the infinite. Now we curate the trivial.”
This is absolutely true, and I’m old enough to remember when the wonder was more.
We bought a little place far west of a major town, outside of the light field and butted up against an area containing an observatory that requires no or restricted nighttime lighting. To look up on a moonless night is to understand just a little what is true worship. As a child I was fascinated by the Big and Little Dipper, Orion, Cygnus, even the Cygnus Rift! I can still see them but can’t remember the last time I bothered to look.
Thank you for reminding me 🙏