Virtus 👊 #038: The Mirror We're All Too Scared to Look Into
In 2100, Paris isn't the city of love anymore. It's a megalopolis where the past has been systematically erased. Not by war or invasion, but by apathy.
The Mirror We're All Too Scared to Look Into
I've been staring at this blank page for three hours now, wrestling with something I've never done before. I'm about to ask you to buy something. Not supplements, not courses, not some miracle morning routine that'll transform your life in 30 days. I'm asking you to buy my brother's book.
And before you roll your eyes and think this is just family loyalty talking, let me tell you why this matters more than anything I've written before.
My brother Liviu just finished his third book this year. It's only June. While most of us are struggling to finish a Netflix series or stick to a workout routine for more than two weeks, this man is out here documenting the slow-motion collapse of everything we think we know about civilization.
The book is called "2100." It's not science fiction. It's a surgical examination of where we're heading if we keep sleepwalking through the choices we're making today.
Here's what's keeping me up at night about this book: it doesn't feel like fiction at all. It feels like reading tomorrow's news today.
The Future Isn't Coming—It's Already Here
You know that feeling when you're scrolling through social media and suddenly realize you've been doing it for two hours? That disconnect between what you intended to do and what you actually did? That's the same feeling Liviu captures about our entire civilization.
We think we're making conscious choices about our future. We're not. We're just drifting, one swipe at a time, one convenience at a time, one small compromise at a time.
In 2100, Paris isn't the city of love anymore. It's a megalopolis where the past has been systematically erased. Not by war or invasion, but by apathy. By a collective shrug that said, "Why preserve what came before when we can optimize everything for maximum efficiency?"
Europe doesn't collapse because of external enemies. It collapses because it forgot why it existed in the first place. When you stop believing in your own story, someone else will write a new one for you.
America becomes the UCC—the United Continental Corporation. Not a country, but a business. People aren't citizens; they're human resources with performance metrics. The "Luxury Human Assets Division" manages the valuable ones. The rest get optimized away.
The Quiet Apocalypse
But here's what makes this book different from every other dystopian warning you've read: there are no explosions. No alien invasions. No nuclear winter. Just the slow, methodical replacement of everything human with something more efficient.
China doesn't fall to revolution. It falls to something far more devastating: people simply stop having children. Not because of government policy, but because they look at the world they'd be bringing kids into and collectively decide, "No thanks."
It's the quietest apocalypse imaginable. And it's already started.
Why This Matters to You Right Now
I spend my days writing about men's wellness, about finding purpose, about building resilience in a world that seems designed to break us down. And what I've realized is that most of our personal struggles—the depression, the isolation, the sense that nothing matters—these aren't individual failures. They're symptoms of a larger civilizational drift.
We're trying to build meaningful lives in a culture that's systematically destroying meaning.
You feel disconnected from other people because we've optimized human connection into digital interactions. You feel like your work doesn't matter because we've turned everything into metrics and KPIs. You feel like the future is hopeless because we've stopped believing in anything worth building toward.
The personal is political, sure. But it's also civilizational.
What My Brother Sees That We Don't
Liviu isn't just a novelist. He's a journalist who's spent decades watching how societies change, how cultures die, how the unthinkable becomes normal through tiny incremental shifts.
He writes about surveillance drones that don't look for criminals—they look for "behavioral and ideological deviations." About prayer rugs that monitor your devotion levels. About memory implants that let you edit your own past.
These aren't wild fantasies. They're logical extensions of technologies and social trends that exist right now. We already carry surveillance devices in our pockets. We already let algorithms decide what we see and think about. We already treat human attention as a commodity to be harvested and sold.
The only difference between 2025 and 2100 is that we've stopped pretending any of this is a problem.
The Book That Changed How I See Everything
I read an early draft of this book six months ago. I haven't been able to look at the news the same way since.
Every headline about AI advancement, every story about declining birth rates, every trend toward digital everything—it all feels like chapters from Liviu's book coming true in real time.
But here's the thing: this isn't a book about inevitable doom. It's a book about choice. About what happens when we stop making conscious choices about our future and just let momentum carry us forward.
Reading 2100 is like getting a phone call from your future self, warning you about the decisions you're about to make.
Why I'm Breaking My Own Rules
I've never promoted anything on this platform. I've built my reputation on giving you straight talk about wellness, relationships, and personal growth without trying to sell you anything.
I'm breaking that rule because this book matters more than my reputation.
We're living through the most important inflection point in human history. The choices we make in the next decade will determine whether our grandchildren inherit a world worth living in or a managed decline disguised as progress.
Most of us feel powerless to influence these big civilizational trends. But awareness is the first step toward agency. You can't choose a different path if you can't see where your current path leads.
What You'll Get (And What You Won't)
This isn't a self-help book. It won't give you seven steps to anything. It won't make you feel better about yourself or more optimistic about the future.
What it will do is make you think. Really think. About what we're trading away in the name of convenience. About what we're optimizing for as a species. About whether the future we're building is the future we actually want.
It will make you feel less alone in your suspicion that something fundamental is going wrong with how we live now.
And it might—just might—motivate you to make different choices about how you spend your time, energy, and attention.
The Mirror We Need
George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949, after witnessing the rise of totalitarian regimes. His warning helped us recognize and resist certain forms of tyranny.
Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970, predicting the psychological impact of rapid technological change. His insights helped us prepare for the digital revolution.
Liviu Alexa is writing from 2025, watching the slow dissolution of everything that made human civilization worth preserving. His warning is about a different kind of tyranny—the tyranny of comfort, convenience, and the gradual replacement of human agency with algorithmic efficiency.
This is the mirror we need right now. Not because it's pleasant to look into, but because it shows us what we're becoming before it's too late to choose something different.
My Ask
I'm asking you to buy this book. Not because you have to—there's no such thing—but because I believe it's one of the most important things you'll read this year.
You can find it at 2100.top
Let it disturb you. Let it make you question assumptions you didn't even know you had. Let it remind you that the future isn't something that happens to us—it's something we create through the choices we make every single day.
And then, if it moves you the way it moved me, share it with someone else who needs to see what we're really choosing when we choose convenience over meaning, efficiency over humanity, optimization over soul.
The future is still ours to write. But only if we're willing to look honestly at the story we're currently telling.
This is me, looking up at my older brother with pride, asking you to hear what he's trying to tell us.
Because some warnings are too important to ignore, even when—especially when—they come from family.
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We can’t possibly overlook the political changes in this country and around the world contributing to the slide toward darkness as democracy becomes tenuous and fascistic authoritarians rise to power. The dumbing down of the population combined with the rise of fact-free “news” reporting from Fox TV and a minority political party determined to dominate the majority by any means possible has given rise to an oligarchy of billionaires and technocrats more than eager to exploit the credulity of low-information voters. Added to this, the disdain for expertise and science, and the refusal in the face of facts from nature itself that the climate is changing in ways harmful to humans and everything else living. And we have a recipe for a very grim future. meanwhile, life goes on, and we as individuals make multiple choices a day as to what kind of life we wish to lead. I, for example, choose not to spend a lot of free time watching TV shows, which leaves me sitting in dumb silence in a group of individuals who apparently spend a great deal of time watching TV shows. I read a lot instead. I garden. I work out at the gym. Much as I love personal technologies, I also love simplicity. I cook healthy, simple food and wonder about people who are so busy they can’t even pause to fix their own or their families’s meal. IMHO that is too dang busy. Slow down, make time to enjoy how you will spend your limited time on this earth. None of us can control the outcomes of everything. But we can control how we live our own lives here and now.
I'll look for the book. The only thing I didn't agree with in your email post on this topic, is that 1984 is becoming a reality... we did not avoid it. Since 9/11, the US Government has become more polarized by two Socialist clubs that continue to wind up the people to see each other as the enemy; all the while usurping more and more powers and liberties away from the people, including spying on the citizenry and suppression of free speech.