What happens in the Antarctic might as well happen on the Moon. It’s so far removed from the living pulse of humanity that whatever “news” emerges from there already sounds like myth—glacial sagas recited by journalists who’ve never left their desks. Whether it’s penguins marching toward climate salvation or ice shelves “collapsing faster than expected,” the story always reads like something out of Hans Christian Andersen with a lab coat. And because the place is so remote, the line between truth and fairytale becomes elastic. Mix in a few fabricated “facts,” a sprinkle of digital snow, and who would ever know? If the world’s media doesn’t report it, it might as well never have happened.
But here’s the real enchantment: the things we should have seen by now, and haven’t. Big coastal cities that, according to decades of doomsday graphs, should have been long swallowed by the sea. New York’s lower Manhattan should be a coral reef of half-drowned Ubers and office chairs, an aquatic zoo patrolled by scuba commuters. Yet the tides remain stubbornly mundane. The same water level that greeted the immigrants arriving past Lady Liberty a century ago still greets the tourists today. Her pedestal is as dry as ever, her torch as useless against delusion as it ever was.
And it’s not just New York. You can find century-old photos from London, Venice, Mumbai—each with eerily unchanged horizons. No creeping apocalypse, no biblical flood, just humanity’s unbroken capacity for believing whatever suits its mood of the decade. We’ve been told for so long to panic that we’ve mistaken the adrenaline rush for knowledge.Maybe we’re all on anesthesia now—drugged by the steady drip of headlines and hashtags, numbed to the absurdity of the narratives we swallow. The fairy tales keep changing, but the ending is always the same: “Trust us. The end is near.” Meanwhile, Lady Liberty remains unbothered, ankle-deep in propaganda, not water.