What I Learned From a Story that Didn't Work
I tried to draft an indigenous science-fiction story over the weekend. It didn’t quite land — I’m new to Ancestral Futurism, and the narrative ended up reeking more of Jewish Mysticism. But the idea wouldn’t let go of me. Not because I didn't get it right, but because something was honest in the trying.
The story opens with three people, each handed an hour where the ordinary world stops being ordinary. Not magic, exactly. More like the moment when you read a book, then look outside the window and finally see it — the glass itself, the way light reflects on it, the palm prints you left before.
Steam rises from a cup. Footsteps echo differently down the hall. Paper rustles with intention.
The first person receives an hour and immediately begins calculating its worth. Before the experience has started moving through their body, they're drafting the framework. The taste of something real becomes market research. The face of a stranger becomes case study material. They photograph the steam not because it moves them, but because that image sells transformation courses.
They've learned to interrupt every profound moment with the question: "How do I package this for others?"
The hour becomes inventory. When it ends, they possess content without understanding its meaning.
The second person feels the weight of what they've been offered and steps back.
This is too precious to approach unprepared, they reason. It’s better to use this hour to study how others have navigated similar moments, building a proper framework for the next time.
They follow strangers who seem to be succeeding, take mental notes on their techniques, and research the proper methodology. They spend the time observing, cataloging, and constructing elaborate theories, all while remaining carefully absent from their own experience.
They turn the hour into a masterclass on meaning, the ultimate course on stillness, attending it as a perpetual student. When it ends, they have a detailed plan for next time.
The third person let the hour happen to them.
No agenda. No preservation strategy. They taste what’s in front of them as if learning to use their tongue for the first time. They listen to strangers the way children listen to thunderstorms — not for information, but for the shape of the sound itself.
They move when movement calls them. They speak when silence breaks open. They reach toward what's reaching back. Not because they've decoded some universal principle, but because they've stopped asking permission from the voice that always wants to know why first. They become indistinguishable from what they're experiencing.
When the hour ends, they can't tell you what they learned because they've become what they encountered.
We're all living inside that hour right now.
Not the magical version. The one where coffee grows cold while you check your phone. Where conversations happen around you while you plan your response. Where the texture of your life passes through your hands like water you forgot to cup.
The first person's tragedy isn't ambition — it's the reflex to monetise every moment of aliveness before they've finished being alive in it. They've trained themselves to extract value from experiences they never fully enter.
The second person's heartbreak is subtler. They want to live, they really do. But they've confused studying life with living it, mapping the territory with walking the ground. They're saving themselves for a readiness that arrives after the moment has passed.
The third person isn't special. They've simply stopped trying to be someone having an experience and allowed themselves to become the experience itself.
There's no technique here, no method. Just the moment the edge blurs because you stopped bracing against the unreasonable life.
Most of us cycle through all three positions within a single day. We pitch ideas over breakfast, scroll social media at lunch, and occasionally — for reasons we avoid to explain — find ourselves completely present to the taste of wine at night.
The question isn't how to become the third person.
The question is: who is it that decides you aren't already?