They stole something from you before you could name it.

And charged you to get it back.

I've spent 15 years studying ancient systems—Zoroastrian fire temples, Sufi circles, Indigenous councils, monastic economies. Not as tourism. As forensics.

I wanted to know: What did humans have for 10,000 years that we suddenly don't?

Here's what I found:

They stole your rituals.

Every transition humans ever faced had a container. Birth. Death. Adulthood. Marriage. Grief. Seasons. Elders held space. Communities witnessed. The individual was metabolized back into the whole.

Now? You announce your promotion on LinkedIn and wonder why it feels hollow. You grieve alone in apartments, pathologizing the darkness instead of letting it initiate you.

Therapy is $200/hour to do what village elders did for free.

They stole your elders.

We warehouse the old in facilities and wonder why the young are directionless. Every ancient culture knew: wisdom isn't information. It's pattern recognition across time. It requires wrinkles.

Now your elders are influencers. 26-year-olds teaching "abundance mindset" from rented Lamborghinis.

They stole your silence.

There used to be spaces without input. Walking. Waiting. The hours before sleep. Darkness literal and metaphorical.

Now every gap is monetized. Podcasts in the shower. Screens in elevators. Notifications as the modern prayer bell—calling you back to the machine, not to yourself.

You haven't had an uninterrupted thought in years.

They stole your death.

This is the big one.

Every traditional culture put death at the center. Memento mori. Ancestor veneration. The skull on the monk's desk. Not morbid—clarifying. You knew the frame, so the painting meant something.

We hid death in hospitals. Sanitized it. Denied it.

And in doing so, stole the only thing that makes life urgent.

Now you scroll infinitely because infinity feels possible. You optimize for decades you're not guaranteed. You delay living because death isn't real until it's yours.

The terror isn't dying.

It's dying without having lived—and suspecting, at the end, that you knew better all along.