Is our future being stolen by the fragility of the few?
By: Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero
I have to be honest with you.
I am not well.
I am not doing well.
There is a weight pressing against my chest, an emptiness hollowing me out like dry, brittle bones—bones that once carried a fragile hope. A hope as thin as glass, but a hope nonetheless. I could once stretch my mind forward into the future, not because I believed I had control, but because I trusted in a kind of continuity. Even in uncertainty, the world still felt safe.
Now?
Now, when I look into the future, all I feel is dread.
Nothing feels right. Nothing tastes the same. The wine no longer sings on my tongue, the weed oscillates between inspiration and escape, and food has become just another way to pass the time. The stories we consume—the ones meant to nourish the soul—have grown stale. Most media is designed to shock us into feeling something, but it rarely gives us anything to hold onto.
Except, perhaps, for Carol at the End of the World.
That show… it did something different. It confronted the certainty of endings. The world in the story is ending in exactly one year, and everyone knows it. They make choices based on that truth. There was something deeply refreshing about that.
Because the truth is, everything is fragile. Everything is fleeting. Everything has an expiration date.
That’s not just the nature of our lives—it’s the nature of time itself. Time isn’t a straight path stretching infinitely forward. It’s a loop, a spiral, an intersection of past and future that converges for just a whisper of a moment. And that whisper?
That’s where we live.
That’s life.
Whispers of love.
Whispers of possibility.
Whispers of experience.
It’s a fleeting breath of existence, and yet, somehow, within that breath, we have the power to be who we were always meant to be.
And that thought—that faint, glimmering truth—is the only thing still pulling me forward.
Because as I stand here, watching the institutions I once thought would outlast me begin to crumble, I still see a speck of light flickering in the darkness of an uncertain future. The future is always becoming, but we used to at least have a sense of stability in the present. That’s gone now. At least in the West, it feels like we’ve lost the belief that progress was possible. That we were on the verge of undoing centuries of oppression and bloodshed. That maybe—just maybe—our societies were beginning to wake up.
Wake up to the truth that there must be reparations for the trauma we have inflicted upon each other.
Wake up to the fact that we have the scientific understanding, the technology, and the capacity to heal the wounds left by history.
Wake up to the realization that we are all truly created equal and that no human-made label should determine who has the right to flourish.
For a moment, it felt like we were evolving. Like we had finally reached the threshold of a new humanity—one that could move beyond competition and into collaboration, beyond consumption and into collective action, beyond war and into feeding the hungry.
And yet, here we are.
Stagnant.
Not because we lack the ability to create a better world, but because a fragile, oppressive few cannot bear to lose their grip on power. Because they refuse to accept the truth that everything—including them—will eventually end.
So, yeah. I’m tired of this.
I’m tired of watching the world pull back from the edge of transformation just because those in power fear their own impermanence.
I’m tired of pretending that things feel normal.
I’m tired of wondering if I’m the only one who feels this way.
So tell me…
Is it just me?
Or are you feeling it too?
Rev. Dr. Marrero is the founding pastor of No Reservations, a faith community dedicated to radical authenticity, psychological healing, and spiritual transformation. A theologian, activist, and advocate for the marginalized, he challenges conventional faith models to create a space where introspection, justice, and divine connection intersect.
