The Third Age of the World: Beginning

Rolling the ball,
Rolling the ball,
Rolling the ball,
To me.
Kate Bush, “Them Heavy People”

Part of The Third Age of the World — return to the main guide for the full series and chapter index.

From Clueless to The Trueman Show

The modern world needs rethinking because we are rich in the one way that changes everything. Since World War II, mechanized farms and factories have pushed material scarcity into the background. Computers then moved into everything, making ordinary objects smarter, cheaper, and more capable. This is a genuine turning point in human history. When the hard physical work of survival stops dominating life, the old cultural machinery that was built to manage scarcity starts to look strange.

The immediate problem is not that abundance is bad. It is that a scarcity-shaped culture does not know how to live in an abundant world. For centuries we trained ourselves to treat life as a series of constraints: earn, comply, compete, keep up, endure. When the underlying scarcity eases, we often recreate it in social and economic form. Not because anyone is evil, but because the system is familiar and self-stabilizing. It keeps people busy. It provides status games. It supplies a sense of “necessity,” even when the material conditions that originally justified it have changed.

This can sound abstract to anyone who feels they are still struggling. But the struggle is frequently produced by the structure of the game rather than by the true difficulty of producing what people need. People work long hours to obtain money that is then exchanged for goods whose price is often dominated by manufactured value rather than the cost of making the thing. The friction is real, but much of it is cultural, administrative, and psychological rather than material.

One way to see this is to compare generations. In your grandparents’ era, a large share of work was plainly tied to producing physical goods and maintaining essential services. Today, far fewer people are involved in direct production, and many more work inside organizational loops that mainly exist to manage other organizational loops. Administration expands to administer itself. Whole careers can be built on maintaining procedures, managing perception, and defending turf.

When work becomes detached from visible usefulness, people lose the quiet security that comes from making something real, then pointing to it. In its place appears a constant need to justify one’s role, protect one’s importance, and stay close to the social circuit where reputation is manufactured. The result is often a life that is busy but not satisfying. People are pulled into commuting patterns, office rituals, and status maintenance that do not obviously improve anything, yet feel compulsory.

At the same time, modern economies become increasingly dominated by brand value. A product that costs very little to produce can be sold for many times its underlying value because the wrapper carries identity, aspiration, or belonging. Fashion and branding can be enjoyable in moderation, but a culture that treats these as central sources of meaning becomes vulnerable to anxiety and hollow competition.

Popular culture has been registering this for a long time. Clueless is funny because it depicts stress in a world where survival is not the issue, so the stress migrates into trivial hierarchies. At a civilizational scale, that shift stops being funny. It becomes a kind of trap, where energy is burned maintaining narratives, anxieties, and procedures that do not match the reality of our material capacity.

When we live too close to an agenda for too long, it begins to feel like reality itself. Work, scarcity, and constraint have dominated human life since farming began, and they have shaped how we interpret everything. So the question “What do we do with our time?” can feel unanswerable. It is not unanswerable. It only seems that way from inside a cultural frame that has trained us to see play, learning, and growth as secondary or indulgent.

Stories about stepping outside an artificial world have become one of the modern era’s recurring motifs. The Matrix dramatizes the idea that it is better to face a harsher reality than live inside a comforting fiction. It captures the instinct that authenticity matters. Yet in our case the irony may be reversed. The scarcer, drabber thing is often the constructed framework, while reality contains the richer possibilities.

The Truman Show comes closer to the point. Truman discovers his life is bounded by a set, scripted and managed, with a horizon that is literally painted. The moment of choice is simple and terrifying. Do you remain inside the familiar performance, or do you walk through the door into a wider world you cannot predict?

Magicians

Our culture already senses that something like that doorway exists. The difficulty is that we do not have a physical exit marked on a wall. The way out is a change in perception. That is why, across history, there have always been people who kept a wider perspective and tried to communicate it. Their role was not “supernatural” in the cartoon sense. It was psychological and conceptual. They carried a different way of seeing.

Because that way of seeing was unfamiliar, it was repeatedly misunderstood. Learning “real magic” in this older sense often meant unlearning mistaken assumptions more than it meant acquiring exotic information. The shift was experiential. It could take years, and the student rarely understood what the payoff would be until it arrived.

This gap in understanding created a persistent problem. Valuable ideas were distorted by literal-minded readers. Confusions then multiplied, and entire counterfeit traditions grew up around the fragments. Europe’s Middle Ages are an obvious example of this kind of cultural noise, not because the period was uniquely foolish, but because it was a time of intense translation, importation, and reinterpretation.

Some of the techniques that later helped build modern science were transmitted through Islamic civilization, where the study of the material world could be framed as purposeful. Among the ideas that travelled were practical tools (astronomy, algebra) and also methods for training attention and thought. One strand was described as alchemy, and it included a language of transforming “base” understanding into “golden” understanding.

It is easy to see how this could be misread. In a culture uneasy even with innovations like the numeral zero, a symbolic language about inner transformation could be mistaken for a literal program for turning lead into gold. The misunderstanding then feeds a feedback loop: coded writing appears secretive, secrecy appears sinister, and soon you get a theatrical folklore of demons, grimoires, and melodrama.

From a modern viewpoint, this is mostly noise. The important thread is that “alchemy” points to flexible perception and to the capacity of the mind to reorganize itself. When people develop that capacity, they start discovering hidden structure in the world. Newton is a good emblem of this, not because he was a mystic in a fantasy sense, but because he could see patterns and laws where others saw only events. The “magic” is the move from surface appearance to deep structure.

Language itself contributes to confusion. English is heavily noun-based. It encourages us to treat the world as a set of stable boxes. But the kind of thinking being gestured at here is often more process-based. It is about action, relationship, and transformation. When you try to describe that in a noun-heavy language, you tend to fall into metaphor and allegory. Literal readers then conclude it is nonsense.

So, alongside real work on perception, there grew a counterfeit performance of “magic” that looks like Buffy the Vampire Slayer: an aesthetic of power, secrecy, and supernatural bargaining. It is entertaining, but it obscures the central point. Real magic, as used here, is a change in the way reality is seen and therefore in the way life is lived.

Modern Magic

This book is about real magic, not the theatrical tradition. The surprising modern fact is that contemporary science and popular knowledge now contain enough conceptual material to make the older “magicians’” perspective understandable without the same long apprenticeship that was historically required.

That matters because the same culture that now has the capacity to escape scarcity-driven living also has the intellectual tools to do it. The underlying project is not a rejection of technology, but a reorientation of what technology is for. Tools do not decide the agenda. Perception does. When perception changes, the uses we invent for our tools change with it.

The chapters that follow move through ideas that are already present in modern life, then connect them to older writings and traditions, with the aim of building a coherent picture of a deeper way of seeing. The point is not to offer a new set of rules. Rule-based living had its place when survival and coordination were the primary tasks. In an era where machines can follow rules cheaply and tirelessly, the human task shifts toward expanded awareness, judgment, and creative participation.

If each person follows their best insight, the result can be more like an ecology than a factory. In an ecology, organisms do what they do, and the system coheres without central micromanagement. This is one of the hardest ideas for a scarcity-shaped culture to accept. It requires learning, again, that play, curiosity, and growth are not luxuries. They are central.

Enjoy.

Originally written in the early 2000s and refreshed for publication in 2026. Companion pages for each section expand the discussion and provide modern context.