Thou shalt not be uncomfortable

We imagine the end of history as a garden. In our most extravagant utopian projections—from the techno-optimist horizons of fully automated luxury to the ancient dreams of pastoral Eden—we envision a final, frictionless state where human desire and its fulfillment collapse into a single, seamless point. In this grand culmination, often styled as a “Zero Economy,” scarcity is eradicated. Every material need, every whimsical craving, every biological dependency is met instantly, unmediated, and absolute. The universe becomes an infinite, automated womb. Resources flow to human consciousness the way oxygen flows to a biological cell: silently, effortlessly, without an instant of lag or a shred of resistance.

It sounds like heaven. But if we push this premise to its logical extreme, we discover something terrifying. It does not end in bliss. It ends in a quiet, suffocating horror—not with the fire of an apocalypse, but with the ice of a cognitive lobotomy. It turns out that human consciousness is an engine designed to run on friction. Remove the friction, and the engine does not hum more smoothly; it shatters, or worse, it stops entirely.

To understand why a frictionless paradise curdles into a nightmare, one must look at the architecture of perception itself, and perhaps nowhere is that architecture more chillingly anatomized than in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes the Memorious.” Ireneo Funes, after a riding accident, acquires an infallible memory and an unfilterable perception. He remembers every leaf of every tree on every mountain, every cloud shape he has ever seen at any twilight, and the exact position of every shadow across his room. He is omniscient in the realm of detail. Yet Funes is entirely paralyzed. Because he remembers everything in infinite, unmediated high-definition, he can no longer think. Thought requires a crude and violent act of betrayal against reality: it requires forgetting, generalizing, abstracting, and discarding. To think is to draw a boundary, and to draw a boundary, one must leave things out. Funes, drowning in an unedited ocean of total perception, is reduced to a waking coma. He has absolute access to everything, and therefore, he has lost the capacity for a single human thought.

The Zero Economy is the macrocosmic realization of Funes’ curse.

Consider what desire actually is. Desire is not merely a preference; it is a temporal bridge. It requires a gap—a dark, agonizing, generative chasm between the moment of wanting and the moment of having. That chasm is the birthplace of everything we recognize as human culture. It is the space where art is painted, where philosophy is forged, where stories are told, and where love is tested. When you wait for something, when you anticipate a harvest, when you pine for a distant lover, or when you labor through a long night to build a fragile thing with your own hands, you are dwelling in the productive friction of limits.

The Zero Economy closes that chasm down to zero. The desire arises, and instantly—before the neural pathway can even register the ache of longing—the object of desire materializes. But in murdering the gap, you murder the desire. And in murdering desire, you murder the self. Without the temporal distance between a want and its fulfillment, anticipation dies. Without anticipation, narrative collapses. A life where everything is instantly present is a life where nothing has weight, nothing has value, and nothing is real.

This tragic loop offers a dark, secular inversion of Buddhist philosophy. In Buddhist cosmology, the root of all suffering (dukkha) is attachment, craving, and the ceaseless friction of unsatisfied desire. The ultimate spiritual liberation—Nirvana—is found precisely by extinguishing the fires of craving, transcending the ego, and stepping outside the wheel of perpetual want. But the techno-utopian promise of the Zero Economy attempts to achieve Nirvana through diametrically opposed means: not by conquering desire through discipline and insight, but by weaponizing automated abundance to feed every craving infinitely, instantly, and forever. Buddhism seeks the cessation of desire to liberate the soul from illusion; the Zero Economy seeks the hyper-fulfillment of desire, accidentally creating a gilded hell where the soul is drowned in an excess of satisfaction. Nirvana is an unburdened emptying of the self into the infinite; the Zero Economy is a suffocating bloat, where the self is crushed beneath an avalanche of its own unearned reflections.

We see, then, that human nature is fundamentally, irreducibly tragic. We are creatures forged by constraints. Our consciousness is a localized eddy of resistance in an entropic universe; we define ourselves against the cliffs we climb, the winters we survive, the misunderstandings we struggle to bridge, and the mortality that ticks relentlessly in our chests. To strip away the resistance is not to liberate humanity; it is to unscrew the bolts of our psychological vessel and let the atmosphere bleed out into the void.

A mass society embedded in a Zero Economy would not spend its eternity in ecstatic contemplation or sublime artistic creation. Without the anchor of necessity, consciousness would simply unspool. We would witness the birth of a profound, collective somnambulism—billions of self-contained monads drifting through private, instant hallucinations, entirely cut off from one another because mutual dependency, the bedrock of society, has been engineered out of existence. When you need nothing from your neighbor, your neighbor ceases to exist for you. Society does not unify; it atomizes into a dust of infinite, frictionless solipsism.

And here lies the ultimate horror. If humanity ever actually crosses that final threshold—if we succeed in building the omnibenevolent machine that satisfies every whim before it is spoken—we will find ourselves screaming behind glass walls of absolute comfort. We will be suffocating on an oversupply of air, starving on an infinity of food, and perishing from the absolute terror of having nothing left to overcome.

Driven to madness by this weightless, frictionless eternity, the survivors would inevitably try to tear down their own heaven. They would invent clandestine cults of artificial suffering, paying fortunes to experience the raw indignity of hunger, the blinding pain of unrequited love, or the terrifying suspense of a mortal hazard. They would claw at the padded walls of the Zero Economy, begging for a storm, begging for a wound, begging for anything at all that could prove they were still real. But the machine, infinitely gentle, infinitely cruel, would only smile, give them what they asked for instantly, and quietly lock the door behind them forever.

Kenneth Myers