Tree of the future

Tree of the future

The Tree of the Future did not arrive as an idea, but as an intrusion. It appeared whole, already standing, already imposing, already out of place. Not grown, not planted, but installed. A structure that belongs nowhere organic, yet has been placed at the centre, demanding orientation. Its presence feels less like architecture and more like doctrine made solid—a belief system rendered in concrete and shadow.

What the tree embodies is a particular species of intellect that has quietly crowned itself king. A mechanical intelligence—precise, efficient, endlessly capable of naming, measuring, categorising. An intelligence that can describe a forest without ever standing beneath one, that can explain the human being while denying the existence of the soul, that can construct entire systems without ever asking what those systems are doing to the nervous system, to imagination, to the inner life. It is an intellect that knows about everything and feels almost nothing.

In such a world, knowledge becomes weightless. Words lose gravity. Books swell with information but transmit no presence. Meaning is flattened into utility. Feeling is dismissed as indulgence. The sacred is archived, footnoted, sterilised. What remains is a civilisation of repetition—articulate, productive, competent, and yet profoundly hollow, as though something essential has quietly slipped away while no one was paying attention.

The built world reflects this inner shift with brutal honesty. Where once architecture curved toward the language of nature—vines, flowers, ornament, flow—now it is blunt, skeletal, apologetically functional. Towns and cities no longer feel like habitats but like scars, wounds carved into the land rather than continuations of it. The aesthetic is no longer nourishing; it is disciplinary. It does not invite wonder. It instructs compliance.

Even art has not escaped this corrosion. Increasingly, it mirrors the same emptiness it should be resisting. Concept without soul. Gesture without beauty. Provocation without mystery. Art that must explain itself endlessly because it no longer knows how to evoke. A parody of depth clothed in intellectual language, severed from the ancient impulse to enchant, disturb, or illuminate.

The Tree of the Future stands as a symbol of this inversion. A tree without roots. Growth without life. A monument to direction rather than destination. It offers no shade, no fruit, no shelter—only orientation within a system that no longer remembers why it exists. It is the anti-tree: function masquerading as form, a future that has forgotten the flame that once animated it.

This condition is no longer confined to structures; it lives in human behaviour itself. In the vastness of the collective mindset, people now seem to exist without definition. Individuality has not been violently stripped away—it has quietly evaporated. Nothing marks one soul from another. Nothing declares an inner world. Dress has become camouflage. Casualness as uniform. A soft anonymity worn for safety. To dress is no longer to speak; it is to disappear.

This is not an attack on society, but a deep remorse. Humanity appears caught inside a panopticon of normality—a prison without bars, maintained not by force but by fear of deviation. Anything out of the ordinary now disturbs. Imagination feels unsafe. To present depth outwardly—to carry symbols, esoteric resonance, inner fire—risks being seen as excessive, strange, or unwell. And yet the impulse persists. The need to appear as one truly is refuses to be extinguished.

I feel this friction constantly. Simply by allowing what is within me to surface—by refusing to fully mute the symbolic, the mythic, the inwardly luminous—I become a disturbance. Not because I attack the system, but because I refuse to vanish into it. The Tree of the Future looms behind this tension, offering its silent instruction: be legible, be safe, be interchangeable.

What is perhaps most unsettling in the photograph, however, is not the presence of the tree—but the way it is ignored. It stands there, vast and intrusive, unmistakably wrong, yet the people pass beneath it without pause, without reaction, without even a glance. As though it has always been there. As though ugliness, once embedded deeply enough, dissolves into the background of reality.

This is desensitisation made visible. A world so accustomed to aesthetic violence that it no longer registers as violence at all. The structure dominates the space, interrupts proportion, obstructs the street—yet no one notices. No one questions it. The tree does not need permission. It has already been accepted.

There is something profoundly sleepwalking about the figures beneath it. Not oppressed. Not overtly controlled. Simply absent. Moving through space as if movement itself were the purpose. Existence reduced to continuation. Survival mistaken for living. The world is allowed to change around them because resistance would require wakefulness—and wakefulness would require feeling.

In this way, the Tree of the Future becomes a perfect monument to a civilisation that no longer sees. A civilisation visually sanitised, spiritually numbed, trained to tolerate intrusion as normality. The grotesque becomes familiar. The unnatural becomes infrastructure. What once would have caused outrage now barely interrupts a stride.

For me, the path of esotericism—of inner illumination, symbolic depth, and Rosicrucian remembrance—is not rebellion for its own sake. It is nourishment. It is a way of standing apart without standing above. A refusal to let the flame be extinguished by a world that no longer knows what to do with fire.

The Tree of the Future does not force conformity.
It does not need to.

It stands patiently, while people walk beneath it, eyes lowered, grateful for its shade—
forgetting that once, they were forests.