Tariq Saeedi
We are all evolving, though not in the way Darwin meant. This isn’t about species adapting over millennia. This is about the person you were yesterday becoming someone slightly different today, and the society we inhabited last decade transforming into something we’re still trying to recognize.
The evolution that matters most isn’t written in our genes—it’s written in our choices, our habits, our beliefs about what the world is and what it should be.
But here’s what makes it complicated: we’re not all evolving at the same speed, and we’re certainly not all moving in the same direction. Velocity, physicists tell us, is speed plus direction. Apply that to human change and you begin to see why we struggle so much to understand each other. Your neighbor might be moving rapidly toward one vision of the good life while you’re accelerating just as quickly toward something entirely different.
A society might be racing forward technologically while regressing morally, or vice versa. The combinations are endless, the collisions inevitable.
And we’re not even consistent within ourselves. Inside each of us exist multiple layers of identity, each with its own trajectory. There’s the part of you that thinks as an individual—concerned with your own survival, your own dreams, your own small corner of meaning.
There’s the part that thinks as a member of a family, a community, a tribe—bound by loyalty and shared history, willing to sacrifice for the collective good however you define it. And there’s the part, perhaps quieter, that thinks as a citizen of a country or even as a human being without borders, concerned with principles and futures that stretch beyond your immediate circle.
These layers don’t always agree with each other. The individual in you might want one thing while the family member wants another. The patriot and the humanist might pull in opposite directions. And as we all move through time, these internal layers shift and evolve at their own rates, creating not just a single self but something more like a committee in constant negotiation.
Now multiply that complexity by eight billion. Imagine all of us, each a bundle of evolving identities moving at different velocities, bumping into each other in the confined space of a shared planet. The edges of one person’s becoming catch on the edges of another’s. Your rapid evolution toward secular individualism grates against someone else’s deepening religiosity.
A society’s embrace of technological progress collides with another society’s commitment to traditional ways of life. What looks like simple disagreement is often the friction of mismatched velocities, incompatible directions, and competing layers of identity all trying to occupy the same moment in history.
The conflicts we see—between neighbors, between generations, between nations—aren’t aberrations. They’re the natural consequence of evolution happening everywhere at once, without coordination, without a shared destination. We are all in motion, but we haven’t agreed on where we’re going.
Perhaps the question isn’t how to stop the conflicts or even how to resolve them. Perhaps it’s whether we can learn to recognize what’s actually happening when we clash with someone else. When you feel that grinding frustration with a person or a group, when you can’t understand how they could possibly think what they think—maybe that’s just the sound of two evolutionary paths intersecting at incompatible angles. Their jagged edges against yours.
Understanding this doesn’t make disagreements disappear. It doesn’t tell us who’s right or wrong, who’s evolving toward something better or worse.
Those judgments we still have to make, and we should make them. But there might be something useful in recognizing that we’re all in motion, all changing, all caught between competing versions of ourselves and competing visions of what we should become.
You can’t hold still. Neither can anyone else. The only choice is whether you evolve with some awareness of what you’re becoming and some curiosity about where others are headed—or whether you simply collide with everyone in your path, surprised every time by the impact, never quite understanding why it hurts. /// nCa, 24 December 2025