The Weight of a Promethean Future
Prometheus was gifted with forethought. For him, the future was not an idea but a pressure weighing on his chest, because he could feel it pulling on the present. He saw humans fearing the dark, shivering in the cold and he took fate into his hands by mistaking the future for the present because he knew what was inevitable. When he stole fire from the gods and placed it into human hands he caused a misalignment between the inner time and the outer time because fire entered a world that had not yet grown into it.
While bringing civilisation, it also brought the permanent burden of consciousness that invited suffering. Once humanity began to create, they also began to destroy, having to live with the versions of themselves that the future reshaped in return. The idea of the future arrived before they were ready. Meaning came before capacity.
Zeus did not punish Prometheus out of vengeance, but for the cost of breaking the rhythm of becoming, for forcing evolution to skip a step, just like my mind that saw too far to live comfortably in the present, claiming my imagined future as if it was already there. My identity wrapped itself around the illusions I created, demanding life to unfold in a certain way, not allowing possibilities to expand.
I was constantly living under an existential pressure until my life started falling apart when I moved to the UK to study my master’s. While I thought I was going to have the best year abroad, my life collapsed after being admitted to a hospital in Reading due to a kidney infection. I didn’t know that severe infections worsened neurological conditions, leaving me no choice but to suspend my degree and come back home. Yet my grief did not start when my condition worsened. It started when the meaning I had attributed to the future collapsed, grieving the expectations I had, the future I imagined, the parts of myself I had poured into the life I claimed.
The deeper the future you build inside yourself, the deeper the loss will feel if that future collapses.
That’s why whenever I tried to let go, my longing quickly changed colours and turned into an ache of possibility because I tried to live in a future before my present self had the capacity to hold it safely. In return, life rebalanced by aligning my growth through collapse for my higher self to exist without splitting.
The future still arrived. Change still happened. But what changed me did not wait for my readiness. I became ready only by being changed.
2023 ended up being the worst and best year of my life. The year I hit rock bottom. The year I returned better than ever.
When I was forced to face my biggest fear, I realised one cannot truly lose what they never held.
The truth was simple yet profound. While I tortured myself by imagining every possible scenario and generating predictions, I wasn’t even there yet. I relied on the map too much, and instead of gaining direction, I lost it. The map I once held turned into a useless piece of paper because life is a maze and while self is constantly evolving it is rarely possible for one to be destined to walk on a single path. What serves our becoming is only what feels aligned in the moment we choose it.
What I lost wasn’t a future, but the illusion that life was waiting for me somewhere ahead. Stripping away from the illusion of who I thought I was meant to be allowed me to grow into someone who could carry more than I had imagined.
Suffering is not random cruelty. It is the friction through which a larger self is formed, not through the comfort of certainty, but through how uncertainty tests one’s limits.
Freedom can only grow if it is planted in the soil of uncertainty, flowering over time into courage that allows us to change our identities. It feels unbearable because it strips us of the illusion of control. But the real unbearableness arrives when we realise we cannot control how life unfolds, and that certainty is a false hope.
When identity is anchored in what “will be,” self-worth becomes dependent on what hasn’t happened yet. Emotional safety is postponed to “later,” and one begins living as if the future is more real than the present.
The future never arrives as the future. It only arrives as the present.
When I stopped outsourcing my meaning to some future rescue or to the false promise of “later,” life became urgent in a way it never had before.
Living ahead of the present creates conflict between mind and body, because you are no longer inhabiting life you are waiting for life to start while you are already alive.
When I started to flow with life instead of forcing control over it, I realised what lost was the shape I was never meant to keep.
Every age, every body, every life learns the same truth in the end: the path is made only by walking and no destination cancels wandering if one has the courage to continue.
That is the ancient struggle of rebuilding, again and again, until the end of our time, because the world carries countless horizons, and each one opens like a revelation.
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