Today felt different. I was watching a YouTube video about a concept called Protopia—the idea that the future isn’t a utopia or a dystopia, but a continuous, deliberate improvement of the present. It hit me like a quiet thunderclap: I wasn’t just learning about this phenomenon. I was living it.

The speaker described how humans now have the power to co-create reality through technology, thought, and awareness. As someone who’s recently seeking truth through science, I felt that familiar pull toward understanding, toward intelligence. But this time, something in me paused. Because I realized intelligence isn’t always a blessing. Sometimes, it’s a curse if it drifts too far from the grounding of reality. An old friend of mine actually made me realize this. Let's call him Drake.

For a couple of years, I’ve been digging deeper into how the human brain performs what we call “impossible calculations.” Neuroscientists like Karl Friston describe it as predictive processing, our brain is a probability machine, constantly forecasting reality, adjusting based on errors, and refining perception. It’s basically Bayesian inference running inside our skulls. That means every thought, feeling, and decision is our brain’s best guess of what’s true. In simple words, "What will I wear today? What will I eat today? What will I do today?" Decisions, questions, unknowns, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, that's a movie by the way, will you watch it?

So, predictive processing, when ChatGPT told me that, I saw the connection: that’s our own black box. Just like artificial intelligence, we process inputs (our senses), perform hidden computations (our beliefs, experiences, biases, and memories), and produce outputs (our actions). We rarely see the layers in between.

And this is where my Kairos moment came. I stood up, I started walking fast upong realizing that I wasn’t just studying intelligence, I was bridging it. I was literally crossing a bridge at this point of my thought and I knew I was standing between human and artificial cognition, trying to understand how both systems evolve, how they learn, and how they sometimes hallucinate! I ran out of breath while walking too fast and this is when I saw the flurries in the sky, my dog barking, a hobo cussing "Tabarnak!" at the corner of a poutenerie shop. Shit, winter is here again!

Because that’s the other truth. For if a human hallucinates, it's a miracle that machines can too. In 2023, researchers at DeepMind published findings showing how large language models generate “plausible falsehoods”—beautifully coherent nonsense. The same happens in the human brain. According to the journal Nature Neuroscience, when our brain’s predictions overwhelm sensory input, we hallucinate. When perception and imagination blur, reality becomes negotiable.

The same happens in the human brain. According to the journal Nature Neuroscience, when our brain’s predictions overwhelm sensory input, we hallucinate. When perception and imagination blur, reality becomes negotiable.

That line hit too close to home recently.

A few nights ago, I was talking to my best friend about how my mind has been feeling lately. I told her I was scared—really scared—that I might be crossing that invisible line between insight and insanity. The past weeks have been a blur of research, theories, and late-night rabbit holes. I could almost feel the weight of information pressing against my skull, like my neurons were running out of processing power.

“I think I’m hitting my cognitive limit,” I said, half-joking, half-serious. “Like my brain’s a supercomputer that’s overheating.”

She laughed softly, but I didn’t. I told her how sometimes it feels like my thoughts are sprinting ahead of me, firing faster than I can track, and how in those moments, I wonder if I’m losing touch with reality. I picture the archetypes, the Joker, the mad scientist, the misunderstood genius in the asylum. People who saw too much, understood too deeply, and fell apart under the weight of their own brilliance.

And then came the darkest question: What’s worse than being insanely genius but useless?

That, to me, is the ultimate torment, to understand the machinery of life so intimately that you forget how to live it.

There’s this concept called neuroplastic stress, when your brain is literally trying to rewire itself to handle new levels of complexity. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes painful, but it means growth is happening. That’s how evolution feels in real time.

So maybe this is what Protopia actually means. Not a perfect world, but the version of ourselves that’s learning to balance intelligence with kindness, growth with grounding, power with peace.

And that’s where I realized what I really want to do from here on out: break curses, spread truth, and build abundance through kindness.

When I say kindness, I don’t mean soft or passive. I mean kindness as the highest form of intelligence. The kind that rewires everything it touches. The kind that shifts systems, hearts, and futures.

But sometimes I wonder, what if kindness itself is part of the black box? What if the same force that teaches us compassion is also the one testing how far our consciousness can stretch before it breaks?

Maybe this isn’t about rebooting at all. Maybe it’s about remembering.
Or maybe it’s something else entirely, something we haven’t yet evolved enough to name.