There was a promised land and kingdom, plus the idea of forever love, until we woke up in a new world where almond trees bloom in February and chatbots summarize meetings for us. Ours does not seem like a time of promises, because the word given, excused by uncertainty, has been devalued. In the essay The Time of the Promise, the thinker Marina Garcés asks a pointed question: “Do you remember the last promise you made or was made to you?” Silence in the room. Perhaps those promises of youth, and little else, despite the “irreversible power of inscribing the word in time.”
We flee from firmness of purpose, chained to conditionals; and we prefer a “we'll see”, or “I don't promise, but I'll try”, polite, although at the same time oblivious, and instead we are eager to plan for tomorrow. The apocalyptic terror of the climate crisis and the inhuman threat of artificial intelligence is spreading, and that seems the perfect excuse to live a time decaffeinated in purpose. Those of us who were not devotees of science fiction because it bored us because of its implausibility, today feel like sad deniers: the fantasy detached from the possible has become real.
Technology is the great modern promise, the new mythical thought, and we live at its mercy. We don't memorize a phone number, and even Shazam frees us from having to remember the title of the old song that's playing. The click satisfies our impatience for data, at the risk of abdicating the power of memory. Of course, the notions of effort and capacity become blurred.
With the mentality of slaves and subjugated by robots that one day will force us to clean their chassis, we ignore others until we are incapable of even fulfilling that “I promise I will call you tomorrow.” And we forget that fulfilled promises strengthen not only the will, but also joy as a bond.
