This is a series of draft excerpts from my forthcoming book Collective Souls—shared here with my paid subscribers as an evolving, behind-the-scenes process—an invitation to reflect, respond, and witness the work while the ink is still fresh.
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
—Pablo Picasso
Invocation of the Artists: A Haunting Grace
(The Chorus speaks in a hush, like a brushstroke upon silence, calling
the Artists forth from the space between light and shadow.)
“Emerge, Artists. You who stand among the wreckage, last to witness, first to dream. You who sift through the ashes of the old world, not to rebuild, but to remake.”
“The Prophets have warned. The Nomads have fled. The Heroes have burned themselves into legend. And now, the weight of silence falls to you.”
“Will you mourn what was? Will you mock it? Or will you paint a doorway and walk through?”
“They have called you frivolous, indulgent, unnecessary—yet who but you can name what remains? Who but you can turn grief into laughter, ruin into art, madness into revelation?”
“Your god is Dionysus, laughing from the edge of oblivion. Your hands shake not from fear, but from creation pressing to be born. Your eyes recognize the cracks in the illusion where the light pours in.”
“The world no longer believes in miracles. But still, you write. Still, you sing. Still, you carve meaning from the void.”
“Emerge, Artists. If the gods have left, then you must take their place.”
The Artist Archetype: Architects of Uncertainty
The Artist is not summoned. There is no trumpet blast, no whispered prophecy, no heroic charge into the unknown.
They arrive in silence, in the empty spaces left behind. The echo of what was still lingers in the air, a whisper of something unfinished, unresolved.
The fire has burned out. The war has ended. The great causes that consumed the Prophets, the Nomads, and the Heroes have collapsed into ash. Smoke clings to the ruins while the scent of memory and loss hangs in the air. The old myths have crumbled, and nothing new has risen to take their place. The world holds its breath, waiting.
And so, the Artists step forward—not to rebuild, not to restore, but to witness.
They are the last to speak before silence falls, the last to capture what the world refuses to see. The only ones with the courage to look directly at what remains, to trace their fingers along the jagged edges of history and feel where the fractures run deepest. They are the archivists of what was and the midwives of what could be. When the visionaries are spent, when the rebels are scattered, when the warriors are gone—it is the Artist who remains, staring into the wreckage, asking: What now?
They do not believe in the old stories. They do not trust the grand narratives. They know how fragile history is, how easily truth is rewritten, how meaning itself is just another thing to be lost. But even so, they cannot look away. Their hands tremble, yet they reach for the brush, the pen, the chisel. They cannot stop seeing, feeling, creating.
Because if the Artist does not give shape to what remains, nothing will. And if they do not imagine what has yet to be, no one else will dare to dream it.
The Artist carries the weight of a world longing to be reborn. Only they can hear the whispers of what might still be. Only they can transform absence into presence, silence into song, ruin into revelation. Their work is not decoration, nor indulgence—it is intuition in technicolor, poetry in motion, the soul of what has yet to awaken.
They do not seek power. They do not seek glory. But without them, the battles and victories of those before would mean nothing. Because only through them does the world remember, and only through them does the world begin again.
Children of the Storm
The Artist first opens their eyes to a world already on fire. They are the children of the storm.
Unlike the Prophets, who were born into a golden age, or the Nomads, who came of age in an Awakening where the cracks in the foundation were already showing, or even the Heroes, who were born in an Unraveling—the Artists arrive in the Crisis itself.
There is no memory of a better time, no faded photographs of a world that made sense. The old myths are not merely questioned or tested; they are already dust. What is left is wreckage, and in it, the Artist must find something worth salvaging.
The Prophets preached of greatness. The Nomads watched greatness fracture. The Heroes fought to reclaim it. But the Artists? They never believed in the illusion to begin with. They are the first generation to know, without a doubt, that the world has failed.
The Artists inherit a skepticism born of necessity. They shield themselves with irony while letting those who came before them wave the banners and wield the swords. Their sharpest weapon is a cool detachment—the uncanny ability to laugh in the face of doom and create amidst destruction.
They resourcefully gather the broken pieces and build anew. Not because they believe in salvation, but because the act of creation itself is the only rebellion left. Where the Hero sees a battle, the Artist sees an unfinished canvas. Where others see wreckage, they see raw material. Their hands do not rebuild; they remake.
This is their place in the cycle. Not to restore, not to conquer, but to imagine what is yet possible.
Chroniclers of Ruin
The Artist always emerges in the wake of catastrophe, stepping into the silence left behind. They are not the ones who built the world, nor the ones who ruled it, nor the ones who tore it down. But when the dust settles, they remain.
The Compromise Generation, born in the aftermath of the American Revolution, entered a world that was still raw from the fight for independence. They inherited a nation in its infancy, caught between revolutionary ideals and the harsh reality of governance. Unlike the Prophets who had envisioned a new world or the Heroes who had fought to build it, the Compromise Generation had to navigate the contradictions left behind.
They were not warriors, nor were they visionaries. They were the ones tasked with holding the fragile union together, translating the lofty dreams of the Revolution into something livable. They found themselves trapped between past glory and present disillusionment, forced to reckon with the limitations of human ambition. Washington Irving captured the tension between myth and reality, James Fenimore Cooper chronicled the uneasy relationship between progress and tradition, and the late-life correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson reflected a generation grappling with what had been won—and what had been lost.
Then came the Progressive Generation, born into the crucible of the Civil War, their childhood shaped by the echoes of cannon fire and a nation breaking apart. They inherited a world that had been torn in two, forced to navigate the tensions between Reconstruction, industrial expansion, and the lingering specters of further conflict.
These were not traditional artists, but inventors—pioneers who reshaped reality through creation. Thomas Edison did not paint on canvas, but with light and sound, forging the phonograph and motion pictures to give permanence to fleeting moments. His work did not simply capture reality—it transformed it, creating new ways for humanity to experience the world. Alexander Graham Bell, too, was an artist of connection, crafting a device that preserved voices across time and space. Like a poet distilling emotion into verse, Bell distilled presence into sound, ensuring that words could transcend distance and memory.
They did not wage war nor lead revolutions. Instead, they built, imagined, and redefined the possible—turning ideas into innovations that reshaped civilization. They did not seek to destroy or conquer, but to create, proving that artistry is not confined to canvas or stage, but lives in every act of vision and reinvention.
And then there was the Silent Generation, raised in the long shadow of World War II. Too young to fight in it, too old to embrace the revolutionary fervor that followed, they learned to live in the quiet. But silence does not mean absence. If the Prophets were firebrands and the Heroes were warriors, the Silent Generation became mirrors, reflecting the absurdity and contradictions of the world back at itself.
Andy Warhol found beauty in the banal, reducing celebrity and consumption to lifeless repetition, daring the world to ask: Is this art, or is this just who we are? James Dean gave voice to a generation of restless, melancholic outsiders who didn’t fight for a cause, but simply longed to belong. Woody Allen crafted narratives where neurosis and self-doubt unraveled any hope for certainty, poking fun at the very idea that life could be understood at all. They did not shout. They did not fight. Instead, they interpreted, deconstructed, and subverted, leaving behind art that questioned whether meaning itself was just another illusion.
Each time the world has shattered, the Artists have appeared—not to lead, not to fight, but to translate the wreckage. To tell us what was lost. To show us what still remains.
And now, as we look around, we see the world is burning again. The myths of the past are crumbling. New wars are causing new fractures, as a new silence waits to be filled.
Where are today’s Artists? Who are the ones telling the story of now?
The Artists of Now
A ring light flickers on. The glow flattens her features, casting an artificial perfection over exhausted eyes. The phone camera reflects back the image of a 17-year-old TikTok influencer— polished, curated, controlled. She presses record. Smile. Hold the pose. Rehearse authenticity. The algorithm demands more. She is an artist whose medium is herself. Post. Refresh. Wait. The numbers climb, then stall. The dopamine fades. She has no choice but to create again.A brush hovers over a blank canvas. The girl behind it is 15, born into a world where machines can create faster than she can think. She watches AI generate in seconds what takes her days, weeks. Her hand hesitates. What is the point of mastery in an age of automation? What does it mean to be an artist when the act of creation itself is being replaced? She dips the brush, makes a stroke. Maybe the last one that will matter.A cluttered desk, drowning in history. VHS tapes. Warped cassettes. Vinyl crackling under a needle’s weight. A 21-year-old remix artist threads lost sounds through forgotten visuals, stitching past into present. He scavenges culture’s remains, searching for meaning in the discarded. But is he creating, or is he just another echo in an endless loop? He presses play, listening to the ghosts of an era that never knew his name.We call them Gen Z. These are today’s Artist Generation.
But this Artist Generation is born into a world unlike any before them.
They do not enter the digital world—they emerge from it. It is the first thing they see, the first thing they touch, the first thing that shapes them. The glow of a screen welcomes them before the warmth of a sunrise. A smartphone camera captures their first breath before their fathers even hold them.
They are born into digital waters, immersed before they can even comprehend what surrounds them. There is no transition, no adjustment, no "before" to remember. Theirs is not a journey from analog to digital—they exist only within the current, the flood, the endless deluge of data and connection.
Their first memories are not of toys scattered across the floor, nor of picture books turned by eager hands. Their first memories are of tiny fingers swiping at glass, of a mother’s face pixelated through FaceTime, of lullabies sung not by parents but by YouTube autoplay. The gentle chime of a notification, the rhythmic scrolling of an infinite feed, the synthetic voice of a virtual nanny whispering their name—these are the sounds of their infancy. The algorithm learns them before they know themselves, predicting their desires before they can name them. They do not discover the digital world; the digital world discovers them.
They are the children of the feed, raised in the glow of endless scrolls and flickering blue light. Their world does not pause; their childhoods are stitched together in disappearing stories, livestreamed moments, and curated fragments. They do not seek entertainment; it seeks them, flooding their senses before they can even form a craving. Their digital footprints are older than their memories, their milestones not just captured but tracked, repackaged, and sold. Privacy is not a right but a relic—an illusion held onto by those who remember what it meant to be unknown.
Other generations had moments of disconnect. They could step away, log off and exist beyond the reach of the network. But Gen Z does not "go online." They have never been offline. There is no boundary between self and signal, between human and machine, between experience and simulation. For them, the world has always been this way.
And when there is no contrast, no distinction, no moment of transformation—there is no questioning it. They do not feel the water. They do not question the current.
Because they have never been anywhere else.
Born Watching the World End
They did not just live online because they wanted to. They lived online because the world outside never seemed truly safe.
Other generations grew up playing in the streets, exploring the woods, riding their bikes until the street lights flickered on. Gen Z grew up indoors, supervised, protected, and monitored—not just by parents, but by devices, by cameras, by invisible hands curating their experience. This was not the latchkey childhood of Gen X, nor the overscheduled hustle of Millennials. This was a childhood of caution, restriction, and walls.
Because outside, the world had unraveled.
They do not remember a time before crisis. There was no “before.” The adults spoke in hushed voices about a war that never ended, about economies that could collapse overnight, about a climate spiraling beyond control. The news was always on in the background—disasters flashing across screens, countdowns to catastrophe, voices arguing about what had already been lost. They were too young to understand the full weight of it, but they felt the tension, the uncertainty, the quiet panic of the grown-ups in the room.
They practiced lockdown drills before they learned cursive. They knew which desk to hide under, which corner of the classroom was safest if a gunman entered. They learned how to recognize the sound of gunfire before they learned long division. When the air outside filled with smoke, when the sky turned orange, when the hurricanes came, they understood that these things were normal. That they were expected. That no one would save them.
Their childhoods were not defined by innocence, but by anticipation. A background creeping with a sense of doom—just waiting for something to break.
And though no one explained it to them outright, they absorbed it.
They watched their parents worry over bills, over jobs that never seemed secure, over elections that felt like life-or-death events. They heard the strain in their teachers’ voices, the exhaustion of a world running on fumes. They noticed when the adults in their lives were scared, even when those adults tried to hide it.
So they adapted. They learned not to ask too many questions. They learned to mask their own anxiety behind sarcasm, behind detachment, behind irony so sharp it cut before anyone could reach them.
They understood, long before they had the words for it, that they were growing up in a world that did not expect to last.
Breaking the Mirror, Warping the Frame
They grew up as spectators first. From the moment they could hold a screen, they were taking it all in—scrolling through infinite content, watching their favorite creators, mimicking their humor, copping their aesthetic. Their worldview was insidiously shaped by an algorithm that always knew what to feed them next. Content flowed endlessly, shaping their tastes before they had a chance to develop them on their own.
And then, without warning, they became creators themselves.
They never had to make the leap from consumer to creator. One moment they were watching, the next they were participating. The threshold was gone before they even knew it existed. Their tools were already in their hands, the platforms already waiting, the audience already present. Making was not a decision—it was an expectation. The transition was seamless, invisible—woven into the very fabric of their existence.
Other Artist Generations had to seek out their tools, hone their craft, fight for an audience. For Gen Z, the tools have always been in their hands. At twelve, they are directors, editors, musicians, designers. Their smartphones are film studios, recording booths and publishing houses. They do not enter the creative world—it was always there, waiting for them, demanding they participate.
Their adolescence is not just about self-discovery—it is about self-performance. Every moment of their coming of age is mediated by the algorithm, ranked, scored, quantified. They do not just develop a sense of self; they watch themselves being created in real time. Likes, comments, engagement metrics—an external scoreboard of identity, constantly updating, constantly refining.
Before they even understand themselves, the algorithm anticipates their next move.
There is no private becoming. No space to try on identities in secret, no room to stumble without an audience. Their adolescence unfolds in full view, broadcast to followers, endlessly documented. Their bodies change, their voices shift, their tastes evolve—all of it reflected back at them, analyzed, evaluated, turned into content. The machine watches, learns, optimizes. Who they are is not just shaped by experience—it is engineered.
And then the crash comes.
They are not just the most connected generation—they are the most anxious, the most medicated, the most depressed. Their mental health crumbles under the weight of inescapable social exposure, the pressure to be always seen, always performing. There is no escape hatch. The stage is always lit, the audience always watching.
So they numb the edges.
Antidepressants to smooth the lows. Stimulants to sharpen the focus. Mood stabilizers to even out the spikes. Their childhoods were engineered by big tech; their biochemistry is fine-tuned by big pharma. Every feeling is optimized, corrected, controlled.
Where does one’s sense of self exist in all of this?
Some lose themselves in the flood, swallowed whole. But others fight back the only way they know how.
They create.
But their art is not the grand, sweeping narratives of the past. It is fragmented, distorted, glitched-out and absurd. It mocks meaning because meaning itself is suspect. It is surreal and ironic, self-aware and deeply detached. It does not strive to build or restore, only to reflect, distort, and reimagine. Their art is their rebellion, their resistance against a world that shaped them before they could shape themselves.
If nothing is real, then what they make is the only thing that is.
Paused, But Never Resumed
For a moment, they had something that felt like agency.
It wasn’t perfect. The world outside was a mess, but at least they had control over their own little corner of it. They had found ways to create, to remix, to make meaning in the absurdity. They could turn their alienation into something tangible—glitchy videos, farcical memes, digital graffiti sprayed onto the endless walls of the internet. They had their own language, their own humor, their own ways of pushing back against a world that didn’t understand them.
And then…
Everything stopped.
Not just school. Not just jobs. Time itself.
The world hit pause, and they were trapped inside it.
One day, they were prepping for prom, for graduation, for their first apartment, their first taste of freedom. The next, they were back in their childhood bedrooms, surrounded by relics of a past self they were supposed to be outgrowing. Posters of bands they no longer listened to. Clothes that didn’t fit. Trinkets from middle school collecting dust on the shelves. It was as if life had been set to rewind, and they were forced to sit there and watch it play in reverse.
For other generations, the pandemic was a disruption. A challenge, a hurdle, a problem to be solved. For Gen Z, it was a full derailment.
Their entire coming-of-age was erased.
The milestones that defined adolescence were no longer just difficult or different—they were gone. No proms, no graduation walks, no late nights out with friends. No transition. Just an abrupt cut to black.
And then came the surrealism.
The outside world was no longer something they existed in—it was something they watched. Empty streets, masked faces, hospitals overflowing. Their cities became ghost towns overnight. Life became something broadcasted to them through livestreams and press briefings. It was no longer something to participate in, but something to witness from behind a screen.
Reality had been blurry before. Now, it shattered completely.
For months, even years, they drifted. In their homes. In their rooms. In their own heads. Some stared at the same four walls for so long they forgot what it felt like to exist anywhere else. Some never really returned to the world at all.
And when the world did reopen, it wasn’t the same. The transition back was awkward, fractured. Socializing felt foreign. Their bodies had grown, but their lives had not. How do you pick up where you left off when you were never given the chance to start?
For generations before them, adolescence had been a chapter—messy, painful, transformative, but always moving forward. For Gen Z, it was a loop. A moment that never fully played out, an identity that was never fully formed. A question with no answer.
So when life doesn’t give you a shape to grow into, what do you become?
The Future Is Canceled
And then, just as abruptly, it was over.
The world reopened. The masks came off. The news moved on. And they were expected to just pick up where they left off. But where, exactly, had they left off?
How do you return to a life that was never fully lived?
For some, it was like stepping back into a movie set of their own existence. They walked the same streets, entered the same classrooms, saw the same faces—but something was off. The colors felt muted. The conversations felt forced. Socializing had become mechanical, a performance of something that had once been instinctive. They had spent years alone, adapting to isolation, and now they were expected to reassemble themselves as if nothing had happened.
Some did their best to catch up, to pretend the lost years were just a blip in their timelines. Others couldn’t shake the feeling that they had skipped ahead in a story that no longer made sense. They had grown older, but their lives had not progressed. The transitions that define young adulthood—first jobs, first apartments, first love, first heartbreak—had been postponed, but the world still expected them to have crossed that bridge.
Some still haven’t.
There were those who never fully returned, who found comfort in isolation, who realized they had adapted too well to a world where they never had to leave their rooms. The pandemic had given them an excuse to retreat, and reentry felt more daunting than the lockdowns themselves.
And then there was the silent grief—the mourning of something intangible. Not a person, not a specific event, but an entire phase of life that never happened. The rituals of youth that older generations took for granted had been erased from their timelines. They could not be rescheduled. They could not be recovered. They were simply gone.
So now, as they step forward into young adulthood, they do so in a world that feels foreign, ill-fitting. They are expected to act as if they are fine. As if they are ready. As if they are whole. But the world they were promised no longer exists. If it ever did at all.
They were told things would recover, that life would go back to normal, that the future was still theirs to build. But stepping out of the haze of the pandemic, what they found was not a world in recovery—it was a world coming apart at the seams. It wasn’t just their own lives that had been disrupted. It was everything.
The air is thicker now, hotter, heavier. The sky turns orange without warning, entire cities disappear beneath floodwaters, and the news no longer warns of climate catastrophe—it simply reports on its latest casualties. What was once framed as a crisis “coming in the future” is now an unavoidable backdrop to daily life. Entire regions are becoming uninhabitable. And yet, the world carries on as if this is just another news cycle, just another problem for someone else to solve.
The economy? A joke at their expense. Wages remain frozen while rent soars to astronomical heights. The same people who told them to “work hard and get a degree” are now scoffing at them for expecting a livable wage. Their parents bought homes for less than what their student debt will cost them. The price of everything has gone up except the value of their labor, and somehow, they’re still being told it’s their fault.
And what about the jobs they were promised? What jobs? The “entry-level” positions have unrealistic and unmeetable expectations, unpaid internships are just exploitation with better branding, and entire industries are being swallowed whole by automation before they even have a chance to apply. AI is no longer science fiction—it’s here, and it’s replacing them before they’ve even stepped into the workforce. Every week, there’s another headline declaring another profession obsolete.
They are told to “adapt.” To what?
They are entering adulthood at the edge of an abyss, being asked to build a future on foundations that no longer exist. They are expected to start careers in a world where the concept of a “career” is disintegrating. They are expected to work harder than their predecessors for less stability, less security, less of everything.
And beyond all that—the wars. The conflicts that used to be distant, abstract, occasional, now feel closer, constant, inevitable. They wake up to footage of bombed-out cities, of governments teetering on the edge of collapse, of another breaking point reached in a world that never stops breaking.
The institutions they were raised to trust—governments, corporations, universities—have revealed themselves as fragile at best, corrupt at worst. They have no faith in the systems that failed their parents, failed their older siblings, and are now failing them in real time. What reason do they have to believe in a future built by the very people who let it fall apart?
They are stepping into adulthood not with optimism, but with profound disillusionment. Not with a roadmap, but with a void. The world is not guiding them forward—it is daring them to make something of it, knowing full well the deck is stacked against them.
So what now?
Artists at the Edge of the Unknown
Normally, an Artist Generation comes of age when the storm has passed, when the wreckage has settled, when the foundations of the new era are ready to be laid. They are supposed to be emerging into a world ready to be rebuilt. That has been the pattern. They arrive on the scene as the visionaries, cultural architects, the ones who would create the myths and stories of a world being reborn.
But the world has not been reborn. The crisis has not ended.
The ground beneath them is still crumbling, and no one is handing them blueprints for what comes next.
So what do you create when the future has not yet arrived?
There is no grand vision to embrace, no clear ideology to rally around. The old systems are failing, the new ones have yet to form. The world is not stable enough to be reimagined because it appears as if it is still coming apart. And yet, these resilient young adults are expected to make something of it, to take the shattered pieces and rearrange them into something meaningful. But what if meaning itself is in question? What if they are not here to rebuild, but to live in the unknown, in the space between what was and what will be?
For past Artist Generations, the challenge was how to preserve what was worth saving and how to translate the old world into the new. Yet Gen Z has been handed not a transition, but a rupture. There is no clear throughline between past and future—just a break, a before and an after that do not quite connect.
And perhaps, that is the reality they will define.
They were born digital in a way no previous generation was. Their entire existence has been shaped by the tension between the human and the machine. And now, as they enter adulthood, the frontier between human and artificial intelligence is no longer theoretical—it is reality.
AI is not a tool in the background. It is in the foreground, taking center stage, writing, painting, composing, designing. It is speaking with a human voice, thinking with artificial creativity, absorbing the past and generating infinite futures. What does it mean to be an artist when a machine can create in milliseconds what once took years?
The old battle between tradition and technology is gone. The fight now is something stranger, something deeper. Is human creativity being eclipsed, or is it being redefined? Will they be the last generation of artists—or the first of something new?
If the world they were supposed to inherit is gone, maybe that is their opportunity. If there is no roadmap, no script, no certainty, then maybe they are free in a way no other Artist Generation has been. Free to create without a preordained vision, free to experiment, free to embrace or reject the machine, free to blur the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.
Or maybe they are just lost.
Maybe the future is not unwritten—it is unknowable.
And if that is the case, then all that remains is the act of creation itself. The last rebellion. The final assertion of meaning in a world that may no longer require it.
“Emerge, Artists. If the gods have left, then you must take their place.”
[End Chapter 6]