We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.
- Alexander Hamilton
'Colossal blackout' on Iberian Peninsula shows 'how dependent our society has become on electricity'
Back to the Stone Age: A Power Outage Exposed How Pathetic We've Become
Last week, two entire countries—Portugal and Spain—were swallowed by sudden darkness. Vast regions lost electricity.
Trains, airports, banks, phone networks, cash machines—all dead. And suddenly, millions were forced to do the unthinkable: walk, talk to each other face to face, help strangers, pay with cash.
In Lisbon and Barcelona, videos showed people dancing in the streets, playing cards, listening to battery radios. It looked like a festival.
But don’t be fooled. According to experts, this fragile calm can only last about 72 hours. Then comes the chaos. The anarchy. The animal beneath the skin.
This wasn’t just a blackout—it was a brutal slap in the face to our so-called evolution.
Headlines screamed: “Thrown back into the Stone Age!” as if that were the worst fate imaginable. But here's the thing: maybe we should shut our smug mouths for a moment.
Because the people of the Stone Age had skills we’ve forgotten—or worse, outsourced to gadgets, apps, and algorithms. They could start a fire with stones and dry grass. They knew how to make a bow from yew wood. They used herbs to heal wounds. They read the weather from the sky, the wind, the behavior of animals. Their survival wasn’t automated or outsourced. It was earned.
And us? We fly to the moon. We chase immortality, build machines to out-think us, erase diseases with gene editing, and bow to artificial intelligence like it’s a new god.
But let a few power lines go down, and we’re toddlers without diapers—helpless, angry, and screaming for someone to fix it. If the outage lasts more than three days, we descend into madness. That’s not evolution. That’s delusion.
This blackout should have been a wake-up call. Instead, it became another meme.
We’re told the real question isn’t if such a failure will happen again, but when. And when it does—when the batteries die, the canned food runs out, and the WiFi drops to zero—we’ll learn just how empty our "modernity" really is.
Our precious civilization is a sandcastle built inches above the tide. And the tide is rising.
Let’s be brutally honest: the digital age has turned us into glorified pets. Fed by delivery apps. Cleaned by robot vacuums. Entertained by screens we can’t stop stroking.
We don’t fix things, we replace them.
We don’t build, we buy.
We don't even talk—we “react” with emojis.
Cooking, sewing, reading, arithmetic—once basic human skills—have been handed over to machines and specialists. The Thermomix cooks. The app delivers. The algorithm curates our news and matches us with mates. We’ve become tourists in our own lives.
Even reproduction—one of our most primal instincts—has been sterilized by self-help slogans, fertility clinics, and the cult of personal growth.
In peacetime, our libido shrivels. In pandemics or blackouts, we rediscover the urge... barely.
We’ve gained “free time” thanks to technology. But what do we do with it?
Sit. Scroll. Stare at screens for ten hours a day. Tell our kids it’s bad for them while we binge another dopamine drip from Netflix or Instagram.
We’re too tired to read, too numb to feel, too distracted to connect.
It’s not that we’re bad people. It’s that we’ve been hacked—mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
Every platform we use is designed to keep us dependent, passive, and buying. They are digital cigarettes, engineered addictions.
So what do we do?
Start here:
🔌 1. Digital Detox is Not a Trend. It’s Survival.
Unplug one day a week. No excuses. No “just one quick check.” Use that day to walk, cook, fix something, talk to someone you love. Make it sacred.
🪓 2. Relearn Primitive Skills.
Fire-making. First aid. Water purification. Foraging. Tool repair. Basic survival is not just for preppers or "weirdos." It’s insurance against collapse—and empowerment against helplessness.
🧠 3. Mental Strength Over Machine Dependence.
Your phone is not your brain. Your GPS is not your instinct. Practice going places without it. Solve math without a calculator. Read a map. Navigate by stars.
🛠️ 4. Reclaim the Hands.
Do things without outsourcing: Cook from scratch. Mend clothes. Build something. Garden. The hand is the original interface—and it connects us to our humanity.
🗣️ 5. Talk Like It’s 1994.
Face to face. Eye contact. Vulnerable. Unscripted. Real conversations are our most endangered cultural artifact. Relearn the art of presence.
🪨 6. Make Peace with the Past.
We are not above the cave people. We are their descendants. We carry their DNA. And they may have known something we’ve lost: how to live simply, cooperatively, and consciously.
We don’t need to reject technology. We need to stop worshipping it.
Electricity should serve us, not enslave us. Social media should connect us, not consume us. AI should assist us, not replace us. And when the lights go out—as they will—we must know how to light a fire in ourselves.
Because the ultimate outage isn’t about losing power.
It’s about losing who we are.
Further Reading & Tools:
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Primitive Technology (YouTube) – Silent tutorials on bushcraft and survival
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The Lost Art of Letter Writing – Because words are more than text
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Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport – A manual for reclaiming your time