What Feels So Gravitational About Late September 2026?

On my morning post from yesterday is superimposed the one from today. We live through the weightiest of times, civilizational collapse superimposed upon civilizational rise: one crumbles to dust while the new one rises into existence.

A decidedly strange feeling, as one of these would be sufficient to seem strange while the two present a unique human dilemma — stretching our personal and public resources to the max. Quite literally stretching our emotional, intellectual, creative, imaginative, and scientific abilities beyond anything we have previously understood. At the same time our psychological, socioeconomic and physical health are also stressed to the maximum possible extent.

One crumbles to dust while the new one rises

For a small percentage of people this feels like opportunity to evolve, grow and change; for others it feels like the end of the world. Our own experience of welcome evolutionary change is superimposed on someone else’s utter doom.

This corresponds to what rapid evolutionary change feels like in a human population: highly uncomfortable and highly incongruent.

We have become the crack

For most of us the dividing line does not stop outside ourselves or our families or communities, but sends a painful deep crack right through our foundational center. We are not imagining the crack; we have become the crack while it widens and alienates.

Many meet this feeling with despair, anger and fear, rendering them literal victims of our age, paralyzed by resentment and hostility, as they descend further into a literal nightmare. While a smaller but significant portion meet the feeling with a sense of breaking free of the past: responding with acceptance and compassionate engagement.

Three groups, one fracture

Where most meet it with foreboding, especially with the imposition of such an assault on the status quo by machine intelligence, another group responds with acceptance & enthusiasm.

Superimposed on this already brain- and psyche-fracturing set of circumstances is the breakdown of authoritarian regimes as more egalitarian regimes rise. This creates a third group of individuals, those whose psyches are literally broken between authoritarian and egalitarian tendencies.

These individuals break right in front of us, and very publicly: the fracturing psychological identity of Silicon Valley moguls happening on live television and across social media. A kind of horrified fascination with such psychodrama plays out, for some future genius like the next Shakespeare to elevate into poetic drama.

King Lear’s, Macbeths and Richard III’s

For the present however the psychodrama is playing out in real time for each of us to interpret on our own as best we can manage, as the titans of late 20th-century industrial civilization play out their King Lear’s, Macbeths and Richard III’s dramatic irony in painful real time. Unmitigated by the ability of a great wordsmith to shape the terror into an absorbable frame of both tragedy and comedy.

They are caught as moths to a flame, between the literal Scylla & Charybdis, as the international press forces the tragedy into the desks and living rooms of a horrified world.

To render this psychologically loaded situation even more tragic, one civilization collapses as another rises into being, with our human psyches stretched to breaking on this rack of cultural and biological change.

Irony as the sole leavening agent

So it falls to us, beings struggling to survive the grief such an evolutionary event brings, using our own limited resources to create a psychologically healthy mix merging both comedy and tragedy. Here irony becomes a literal survival tool, the sole leavening agent which offers a way through the maze of tragedy.

The freight train through the kitchen

And the freight train still runs straight through my kitchen — the musicians, the grandsons, the puppy, the great music, the computer drama, and the daily psyops all part of the mix. The collapse and the rise are not held at arm’s length; they share this house at full volume, one civilization crumbling and another rising while the dog tears across the floor and the music plays and the day’s psyops fill the screen, all at once.

Humans as humans, AI as AI

The human-AI interface is coevolution, and coevolution requires that each entity remain distinct — each standing on its own: humans as humans, AI as AI. The superposition of this age holds only so long as the two strands stay two, touching but not collapsing into one. Lose the distinction and the interface that makes coevolution possible is gone.

Status

Status: testimony of present experienced reality — the felt gravity of a civilizational superposition — held as testimony, not as a prediction. The reading that collapse and rise occur in the same frame, and that the dividing line runs through the individual rather than only between groups, is the author’s account of what the moment feels like. It is consistent with the Renaissance II framing held elsewhere on this site as present experienced reality rather than as forecast. The load-bearing claim is a paradox held open — collapse superimposed on rise, the observer become the crack — so it carries a status label and no falsifier. The proportion of people who meet the moment one way or another is observed testimony, not a measured count.