In a post-contemporary world, marked by accelerated technology, artificial intelligence, and the liquidity of perceptions, a fundamental element of human life has been silently eroded: common sense as the basis of reality.
Today, amid intellectual trends that encourage absolute relativization — including the relativization of reality itself — it becomes urgent to recall something simple and non-negotiable:
there exists a minimal, objective, basic, shared reality, without which no human mind can function in a balanced way.
This fundamental reality is not the product of opinion, ideology, or preference.
It emerges from the common experience of the senses, from coexistence, from language, from survival, and from the shared world.
Before any science, philosophy, belief, or theory, there is a shared ground, universally recognized by any representative group of our species.
This ground is common sense — and it is upon it that the very support structure of mental life rests.
Relativizing everything, including what is unquestionable for any healthy human being, is not a sign of depth; it is a sign of rupture.
When the mind loses the capacity to distinguish what can be debated from what cannot be dissolved, the result is a collapse of discernment, proportion, and meaning.
Common sense defines what can exist, be communicated, be perceived, be interpreted.
It is what allows us to:
- recognize the world as world,
- distinguish wakefulness from delusion,
- share language,
- establish relationships,
- build ethics,
- create community,
- sustain collective sanity.
Without this ground, everything fragments.
And today, in 2026, it is precisely this ground that is being undermined by rhetorical acrobatics, hyperinterpretation, and the dissolution of boundaries.
Therefore, if humanity wishes to operate any truly important, lucid, and valid change for the present time and for the years ahead, the first step is this:
Restore common sense as the foundation of reality.
It is from it — and only from it — that we recover judgment, proportion, discernment, and meaning.
It is in it that we find the starting point to rebuild coexistence, shared truth, and the very possibility of humanity.
A simple, direct, urgent message:
there is no possible future without the restoration of the common real.
Epilogue
When we “sophisticate” our perception of the sea and its infinite possibility of uncertain treasures or hidden elements beneath its surface, we begin to chase it desperately, drifting ever farther from the shore — the solid land, the safe harbor that once supported our feet.
We are drowning —
and there is no use projecting instruments, tools, or any floating object meant to save us from our own distraction.
For even if we have poured all our energy into the artifices of the mind to affirm ourselves, what saves us now does not materialize, or at the very least, is incompatible with the sea our clever pretension tried to adorn.
What we see is born of our own desperation —
desperation to spare ourselves, at minimum, the failure of an inevitable drowning,
or the agony of waiting, second by second, for miraculous help from elsewhere,
not from within.
Even if, for many, it seems better to drown than to admit the failure accumulated across nautical miles, the good news is that there are buoys, planks, rafts, and countless other structures around us — real, simple, available — that we may cling to as we return together to firm, safe, tangible land.
There is, therefore, a decision more urgent than attempting to deal with the extreme of a projected and unsustainable reality at the edge of collapse:
to abandon the projector that dominates us, pierces us, exhausts us, and seizes even our ability to survive.
There is a reality around us —
real, ours, pacifying in its shared ground —
which brings us back to the comfort of basic satisfaction,
to the most nourishing forms of energy and readiness,
and to the simplest agreements capable of reconnecting us to the shared stability we extend, strengthened, toward one another.
Without distraction.
Without loss of control.
Without collapse.
We do not need to drown.
Authorial Commentary — On the Epilogue
This epilogue presents itself as a poetic gesture, but it is in truth a gentle denunciation and a deep call to lucidity. The choice of the sea as metaphor is not merely aesthetic: it operates as a diagnosis of our era. The sea symbolizes the infinity of interpretations, promises of depth, alternative readings, and intellectual mirages that seduce the contemporary mind. By drifting away from solid land — the shared ground, the common basis, the minimal and non-negotiable reality — we begin to pursue illusions increasingly distant from ourselves.
The shore, here, is common sense: the point of contact with the simple, concrete truth necessary for mental and collective balance. When the text states that we “sophisticated our perception of the sea,” it exposes the modern tendency to adorn the real with projections, abstractions, and specters — a tendency that easily becomes escape. And when it says “we are drowning,” the epilogue does not speak of physical tragedy, but of a growing cognitive exhaustion — the inability to sustain one’s own navigation after losing the safe harbor.
The moment when “tools” and “instruments” appear reveals the contemporary trap: trying to solve a crisis created by mental excesses using even more mental excesses. The artifices of interpretation, salvific theories, and self-justifying narratives belong to the same system that caused the drowning. Thus, they fail. The text unveils this truth with subtlety, but in an objective way: what destroyed us cannot save us.
The appearance of “buoys, planks, rafts” returns the reader to concrete, symbolic, necessary reality: restoring the shared ground requires simple, accessible, human structures. The epilogue avoids the temptation of intellectual miracle; instead, it invites a return to the fundamental.
The central phrase — “to abandon the projector that dominates us” — is the hermeneutical key of the entire text. This projector is the mind exhausted by itself, the excess of perception, interpretation, and unrestrained imagination that no longer recognizes the healthy limit between depth and delirium. By urging us to abandon it, the epilogue proposes a return to perceptual sanity, interpretive humility, and the shared real that sustains human coexistence.
Finally, the statement “we do not need to drown” operates as a gesture of hope and maturity. It is not an empty promise; it is the recognition that there is a way back. That lucidity is possible. That firm land exists. That the real still awaits us — simple, pacifying, common — so that we may rebuild ourselves and one another.
This commentary arises from the understanding that the epilogue is not merely a literary closing, but an ethical act: an invitation for the reader to rediscover the point of equilibrium between imagination and reality. A reminder that depth is not found in the bottomless abyss, but in the ability to return home.









