We used to share a sky.
Not just the one above us—though we saw more of it before the blue glow of screens—but a cultural sky: a canopy of stories, songs, jokes, and images that nearly everyone, in some way, recognized. You didn’t have to watch the hit TV show to understand its catchphrases. You didn’t need to love the summer movie to feel its presence in the air—on bus rides, in classrooms, at dinner tables. For a brief stretch of the late 20th century, we lived inside a shared story. It wasn’t perfect. It often reflected the tastes of the powerful and ignored the voices of the marginalized. But it gave us something quietly essential: a sense that we were all, in some small way, part of the same conversation.
Then, beginning in the early 2010s, that sky began to dissolve.
It wasn’t one event that shattered it, but a cascade: the rise of the smartphone, the triumph of the algorithm, the hollowing out of local institutions, and the slow, centuries-long elevation of the individual above the collective. We were told this was progress—more choice, more control, more “you.” And in many ways, it was. But freedom without connection is just another kind of exile.
What we lost wasn’t just common references. We lost the quiet assurance that someone else, somewhere, had felt the same shiver at the same moment—that a song on the radio, a scene in a theater, a line on television could stitch strangers together in a fleeting web of shared feeling. Now, we experience culture alone, sandwiched between distractions, curated by invisible code that knows what we like—but not who we are.
But this fracture isn’t new. It echoes a much older rupture—one encoded in our oldest myths.
In the story of Eden, the first humans live in seamless unity: with each other, with the earth, with the divine. There is no shame, no separation, no “I” apart from “we.” Then comes the Tree of Knowledge—not of evil alone, but of good and evil, of judgment, of self-consciousness. To eat from it is to awaken to choice… and consequence. “In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die,” the warning goes. Not with thunder, but with silence. Not with annihilation, but with alienation. They gain knowledge—and lose belonging.
That story isn’t theology. It’s anthropology. It’s the human condition in miniature: to know we are selves is to know we are alone.
The Enlightenment didn’t reject this myth—it secularized it. Reason became the new fruit. Autonomy, the new virtue. And for a time, this liberated us—from dogma, from tyranny, from inherited falsehoods. But over centuries, the ideal of the free individual hardened into something colder: the self as brand, the person as data point, life as a series of optimized choices. We were taught to prize independence so fiercely that we forgot: we are not islands, but archipelagos—separate on the surface, connected deep below.
The monoculture—the shared cultural world of the broadcast era—was never the Garden returned. It was a temporary shelter built on centralized media, mass production, and mid-century social cohesion. But it offered something real: a common language of feeling. When it collapsed under the weight of digital personalization and economic atomization, we didn’t just lose a way of consuming culture. We lost a ritual of togetherness.
And yet—here’s the paradox—its fall also made space for voices long excluded. The end of one shared story allowed a thousand others to rise. That’s not nothing. But pluralism without any shared ground can become its own kind of isolation: a world where everyone has a platform, but no one is truly heard.
So where do we go from here?
Not back. The old monoculture cannot—and should not—be restored. It was too narrow, too top-down, too blind to its own exclusions.
But forward—toward something new. Not a single sky, but a constellation of gardens.
Already, they’re growing: in neighborhood book circles, in community choirs, in mutual aid networks, in digital spaces designed for depth rather than distraction. These aren’t mass phenomena. They don’t trend. But they are real. They are chosen. And they are rooted in something the algorithm can’t replicate: presence.
Because beneath all our customization, our curation, our curated selves, we remain creatures who long to be known—not just as consumers, but as witnesses to each other’s lives. We still gather—not because we’re told to, but because we remember, in our bones, what wholeness feels like.
The Tree of Knowledge gave us freedom. But the Tree of Life—the one we were banished from—was never outside us. It grows wherever two or more people choose to pay attention, to care, to say: This matters. I’m here. You’re not alone.
We broke the garden. But we can still grow new ones— small, stubborn, and open to all.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s how we find our way back to the sky.