Imagine Tithonus, old Tithonus, sagging in skin and brittle in bone, trapped by Aurora’s misguided gift. Eternal life in a prison of withered flesh. Time turns, decades blur, but his body crawls forward in slow decay. And Aurora, still young, still radiant, like an eternal ad on the highway for some elixir of beauty, unchanging, untouched by the rot eating away at her beloved. This myth is a mirror, reflecting a culture frantically scrubbing, plucking, and preserving its facade, never daring to look into the cracked glass.

Western culture, the West, oh it wants youth in amber—a freeze-frame of its Golden Age, its timeless self. But youth fossilizes in the bones of the old, and there’s no medicine to keep the blood running. So here we are, selling eternity, this carnival ride, never admitting that Tithonus is still strapped in—spitting cicada song in some plastic cage for all to watch, barely remembered by the young who shudder at the sight.

This is a culture that built skyscrapers and shot rockets to the moon, chasing the big show, the big dream, the forever-young nation, drunk on ambition and fear of decay. Like Tithonus, the West lumbers on, a thin-skinned titan, longing to hold onto youth but refusing to acknowledge that time’s arrow only flies forward. The obsession with youth isn’t life-affirming, it’s denial. It’s the West’s own eternal trap—a world frozen in its own image, terrified to embrace the dark part of the cycle, the decline, the graceful fall.

And there’s the rub: decline. The Western mind flinches at the thought. Look away from the decay! Hide the lines, bleach the scars, banish the weak and the old. But without decline, there’s no rebirth, no transformation—just an endless echo of what once was. Aurora’s cicada, Tithonus’s endless buzz in the jar, the sound of a culture that can’t let go, can’t surrender to the natural rhythm. It’s not life; it’s endless half-life. And so, this culture hums on, a tired song in a gilded cage, circling the edge of eternity, unable to admit the truth: decline isn’t the enemy. It’s what gives meaning to every fragile, fleeting heartbeat.

Let’s pull back the curtain on this great Western pageant—the gilded lights, the endless parade, the muscle memory of a nation that still sees itself as young, handsome, unbreakable. Tithonus as its mascot, with his skin flaking away, his mind slipping further into a slow-motion fog. We’re watching a culture cling to its own mirror image like a talisman, a culture addicted to its own youth and speed and shine, unable to admit that time is no longer its ally. But here’s the paradox: by refusing to change, the West becomes the very thing it fears—old, brittle, haunted.

The fear of decline has metastasized, seeping into every ad, every headline, every promise of immortality in a bottle. Billboards scream that you, too, can freeze time, sculpt yourself anew, shed the years. But look closer, and you see Tithonus grinning back, locked in eternal stasis. These promises of youth are rotting on the vine, tethered to the same economy that chews up the young, spits them out, and hands them an empty map to a future they’ll never live long enough to see. It’s the sound of a culture that won’t loosen its grip, won’t allow the natural ebb and flow.

Meanwhile, under the surface, things fray. The Western dream is patched up with nostalgia and plastic surgery, grand speeches about a “return to greatness,” a grotesque, desperate effort to salvage an empire by injecting it with images of its own golden days. Like Aurora’s gift, it’s a promise with a curse baked in—eternal life that’s nothing but eternal decline, a machine that hums and grinds forward while the soul rots underneath.

But there’s another layer: by trapping itself in this cycle, the West is stifling its own children, feeding them the same promises that have already gone rancid. They’re told to believe in a future made in their own image, but they’re looking at the twisted, wisened face of Tithonus. They’re staring down a future that tells them, “You too can be immortal, just don’t ask for wisdom.” And so the West marches on, its young strapped into the ride, condemned to eternal adolescence, and kept from any real inheritance of meaning or direction.

Imagine Tithonus again, whispering from his cage, his words barely heard. If we could only listen, maybe he’s saying, Release me. Let me go. But this culture, this West, it fears that release as much as it fears aging, as much as it fears death itself. It’s built a prison out of its own self-image and thrown away the key. So, like the ancient gods who refused to grow, it has nowhere to go but further into the shadows of its own myth, clinging to a dream that died years ago, leaving only the shell, still singing, trapped in the cage.

Yes—the cricket, the grasshopper, the cicada. Let’s sink into that for a moment. Tithonus transformed into a creature of endless noise, his once-eloquent voice reduced to a mindless, buzzing hum in a cage. Here’s the genius of that metaphor: the cicada doesn’t sing because it’s young or alive in any meaningful way. It sings because it must. It’s the sound of survival, instinctual and repetitive, a desperate chittering in the dark. In that eternal buzzing, we can hear the Western obsession with filling every silence, shouting louder, clinging to life through sheer noise, a refusal to let anything fade gracefully.

The Western world, like Tithonus the cicada, chirps endlessly about its greatness, its exceptionalism, its golden past and its eternal youth, each buzz an echo of the last. It’s an endless refrain, a reminder not of vitality but of the inability to accept what comes after. And each year, like the cicada’s song, the tune grows thinner, more worn out. Just as the insect lives only for its repetitive chorus, this culture has become entrapped in its own myth, endlessly repeating it without transformation or growth.

Think about it: the grasshopper or the cricket thrives in bursts, seasonal, ephemeral—a cycle of life, growth, decline, and rebirth. But the cicada in a cage doesn’t have that freedom. Tithonus is transformed into a symbol of eternal sameness, trapped in his monotonous dirge, his voice shrill but hollow. Western culture, refusing its natural seasons, clings to an artificial spring, but the song gets emptier as it goes on. This is a culture addicted to the chorus of its own immortality, never daring to let silence fall, terrified of what the quiet might reveal.

In this metaphor, the West becomes a culture of cicadas, each generation louder than the last, each chant a little more hollow. It’s a futile scream against the march of time, a desperate attempt to mask the wrinkles with sound. But in that endless droning, there’s no new melody, no room for nuance or growth. Just noise. And in that noise, the beauty of age, wisdom, and acceptance is drowned out, leaving behind nothing but the empty hum of a myth stretched too thin to hold its own weight.

And so, the grasshopper, the cricket—they live, they die, they pass on the song to the next season. But the cicada in the cage, that Western creature of eternal noise, will never know the peace of silence or the grace of letting go. It’s the ultimate tragedy: a culture so fearful of its own decline that it traps itself in a cage of its own making, forever singing, forever fading, forever locked in its desperate, buzzing song.