KEEPERS OF MEMORY

 Have you ever thought about people's past?

For example, I really wanted to know how my great-great-grandfather lived.

How did he spend his days, what adventures did he have in his life, and did he tell anyone about it?

I think everything was normal back then, and if it wasn't normal, it was accepted as part of reality and easier to digest. While fleeing, they might have crossed a river and his mother would have been swept away, his wife would have been kidnapped by attackers, and his child would have died of illness. He didn't say to himself, "No one should hear my story!"

For thousands of years, human affairs were divided into two categories: powerful people and powerless people.

The one who lacked power accepted that his story would not be heard. It was the powerful person for whom a chamber was built for his grave and on whose wall an inscription was written that he was a very good person and that they praised him. Because having a story required power and was a kind of gift.

A person who had no power had no story. Even when the powerless tried to pass on a story orally, it was about powerful people, not about their own lives. Their stories were about monsters, witches, healing, kings, and demons. From a certain point on, powerless people decided to write not stories, but their own thoughts. The framework was still the same — "the powerful person," or "another beyond me." But it was philosophy and logic, and the central voice was: "I suffered. From nature, from my body, from rulers, etc. And it's important for me to express this because I suffered."

This is a modern phenomenon. Because in the modern world everyone deserves to survive, and therefore everyone has their own story. Something we see on social media.

Even now, even if you go to the middle of the desert, you have an antenna, and human capabilities are moving towards evolution — but nature remains unchanged. It has not modified itself for the health of our bodies since thousands of years ago. It does not owe us anything; we owe it to nature.

In such a world, everyone is a nobleman, and everyone's grave has a chamber, and the walls are covered with moving pictures with sound. Some may grumble that there is no longer just one king in each region, as in the past, and that they see millions of kings around them. But that does not change the fact that human perception of life is shifting.

The foundation of people's culture, philosophy, and religion has always been related to what their perception of their own lives was. And now that perception has completely changed. No one is willing to be only a man of truth, or a man of nature, or a man of the times. Now everyone is going to be a prophet, and everyone is receiving revelation, and everyone is at the top of power.

But here lies the paradox of our age: when everyone is a prophet, who listens? When every story is carved into digital stone, do we risk forgetting how to truly remember? For centuries, memory was fragile — dependent on human breath, on firelight gatherings, on fragile papyrus and ink. Its fragility made it precious. Today, memory seems immortal, endlessly archived in servers and clouds, yet perhaps more vulnerable than ever. A power outage, a corrupted file, a forgotten password — and the prophet’s revelation is gone, as if it never existed.

Maybe the question is not whether everyone has a story, but whether anyone knows how to keep it alive. Because stories are not only about survival; they are about connection. My great-great-grandfather’s voice may be lost to me, but the search for it keeps me human. And maybe that is the truest form of power we have today: not to be kings, not to be prophets, but to be keepers of memory.