Pull the thread.
Open to collaborations, commissions and conversations.
I have this feeling that something is coming. Not in a prophetic way. I'm not reading tea leaves or building a bunker. It's quieter than that. A low hum under everything. A sense that we're heading toward something, and nobody can tell you what it looks like. If you feel it too, you're not alone. I think most of us do. Here's what I've been thinking about it, from my studio.
There was a time when the future was easy to imagine. It wasn't necessarily going to be great. But you could picture something. Now I try to imagine four years from now, which is nothing, and my brain just gives me the spinning wheel. The future hasn't disappeared. It has just stopped loading.
It's not that we don't know what to worry about. We have too many options. AI. The economy. The climate. Whatever was trending this morning. One headline says AI will erase millions of jobs. The next says it will bring an age of abundance. Some days I'd almost prefer one clear catastrophe. At least you'd know what to prepare for. Uncertainty isn't one fear. It's all of them at once, with none of them confirmed.
Give me bad news, and eventually I'll figure out what to do with it. Give me possibly bad news, and I can dwell on it for months. Uncertainty leaves the door ajar. And your mind keeps wandering back in, adding new furniture every time. Modern life is very good at handing you more furniture.
Uncertainty doesn't always make us wiser. Sometimes it just makes us desperate for anything solid. Which explains the appeal of people who claim to know exactly what's coming. Who caused it. What happens next. They have the charts. They have the proof. They usually have a three-hour podcast. “Nobody really knows” is one of the hardest sentences to live with. But a straight line drawn through fog is still a guess.
There's a word for this feeling: liminal. It's the in-between. You've left one state, but you haven't entered the next one yet. I don't think many of us still believe in the old version of the future. Work hard, things improve, retire, rest. But nobody has drawn the new map yet either. The old map no longer works, and the new one hasn't been printed. That's where we're standing.
Here's the contradiction I can't shake. I don't want things to collapse. I like electricity. I like hot water. And still, when I look at how modern life is organized, part of me thinks: this can't be the final draft. It's like saying, please don't burn the house down. But if we're rebuilding anyway, I've sketched a few ideas. We're not only afraid of the future. Some of us are waiting for it to settle an argument the present can't.
We do a smaller version of this in our own lives. Once I finish this series. Once the work sells. Once things calm down. Then I'll finally enjoy it. Every time I got close to a destination, another one was standing right behind it. My piece Futility lives right here: a wall cracks and falls, and an identical wall appears behind it. Forever. The effort never ends, and the destination never comes. There's a name for this too: the arrival fallacy. The belief that happiness is waiting at the next destination.
It's like being on hold with your own life. Every few years a recorded voice reminds you your call is very important. The music loops. You keep waiting. Life keeps refusing to clear its schedule for you. And now we're doing the same thing on a bigger scale. Waiting for AI, the climate, the economy to finally make sense before we start living properly. How long do you stay on hold before you realize nobody is coming back to the line?
Part of this feeling might come from the device in our pocket. Everything, everywhere, all the time, delivered straight into our nervous system. In bed. On the train. In the bathroom. You check: something happened. You check again: something else happened. It starts to feel like history itself is accelerating toward a cliff. Maybe it is. Or maybe it's what humans have always felt, just at a volume no human was built for. Big changes are real. But the phone turns the volume all the way up.
There's an idea I keep returning to. Instead of waiting for the whole world to change, build a small version of the world you want to live in, right now. For me, that's my studio. I can't fix the future. But I can make a room where things are made slowly and with care. Where a painting can move, listen and loop. Where the work means something to the person standing in front of it. The future probably won't arrive in one big reset. It arrives in pieces. And some of those pieces we get to make ourselves.
Maybe something huge is coming. Maybe we're living through the start of a real transition. If so, we'll find out soon enough. The phone will make sure of that. But it's easy to spend years believing the important part of your life is somewhere up ahead. I don't want to do the same thing with history. While we keep checking, life keeps happening. So I'm going back to the studio. What are you building now, instead of waiting?
YEKTA.
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overthink(paint)ing
Open to collaborations, commissions and conversations.