The Oldest Fire

“He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still he cannot help rushing about.” - Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, 1879

Tolstoy wrote A Confession at the peak of his fame and the depth of his spiritual crisis, a man who had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and had more success (and recognition) than almost any writer alive, and was falling apart anyway. Not from failure. From the absence of meaning inside the success. The question destroying him was the simplest one: what is any of this actually for? He couldn’t answer it. So he kept moving, writing and rushing, as stopping would require sitting with the fact that he didn’t know.

He was describing himself. Turns out, when we think about it, he was describing us too.

We are rushing about. Faster and louder and more productive and more connected than any society in human history…..and yet more lost. We have filled every silence with digital content, every gap with a notification, every moment of potential stillness with the next thing the algorithm has decided we need to see, go and do. We have mistaken motion for direction and connection for presence and the feeling of meaning for the thing itself. We are posting through it, often after a sauna or a cold plunge….

And the evidence of what the rushing costs is not abstract. It is a beach in Sydney on a Friday morning in March.

I walked past Archer Park at Bondi. Someone had painted a Menorah on the wall near where the gunmen opened fire in December. Fifteen people killed at a Hanukkah celebration. Families. A ten-year-old girl. One of the most recognisable symbols of Australian life. The sun, surf, the easy tolerance of a country that used to believe in something called the fair go….and now it is a place where a painted Menorah on a wall is a reminder of anything but what Australia used to be…

And it isn’t only at Bondi…

Australia’s birth rate dropped from 1.9 in 2013 to 1.5 in 2023….the lowest ever recorded, the largest annual fall since the early 1970s. This is not a blip but a direction. A generation declining to reproduce at replacement level, which is not primarily an economic decision, whatever the economists say. It is a statement about the future. About whether people believe, in the most visceral and irreversible way available to them, which is, tomorrow is worth showing up for. And the reason they don’t believe is not because of childcare or house prices (those are the presenting problems). The real problem is a generation raised on screens, algorithms and managed connection has never been truly known by another person and has no framework for building the kind of life that makes the future feel like it is worth inhabiting.

And when this happens at scale, the vacuum fills with whatever is loudest. Enter, One Nation polling at numbers that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Antisemitism on university campuses and public transport. A political centre hollowing out while the edges harden. A national identity that used to feel (whatever its contradictions) like something shared, and now feels like a negotiation between people who have stopped trusting each other. A generation of young Australians whose political formation is happening not through lived civic experience but through TikTok algorithms serving the distilled grievances of American culture wars, imported wholesale, applied without translation to a country with a completely different history and a completely different set of problems.

A civilisation rushing about. Confusing itself more with every step. Unable to stop.

Professor John Carroll at La Trobe University has spent decades mapping what he calls the saviour syndrome - the deeply human need, in a post-Christian West stripped of its shared framework of meaning, to find someone or something to show the way. We are saviour-seeking in an age of unbelief. Desperate for the thing making sense of the disorder. Finding it, increasingly, in the wrong places; in outrage, in ideology, in a man on a podcast who has never met us and wouldn't recognise us on the street but speaks to the loneliness so precisely it feels like revelation.

I want to propose something which will sound reductive, but it isn’t. The disorder starts closer to home than anyone wants to admit.

It starts in the bedroom.

And I don’t mean as a metaphor, but as a mechanism.

Genuine intimacy between men and women is disappearing. Not in one dramatic moment but in a thousand small decisions, like the phone checked under the table, the half-listened conversation, the non-existent eye contact, the quickie that replaced the evening worth remembering. The heat building between two people fully in the same room is becoming rarer. And its rarity is not a symptom of the cultural disorder.

It is its engine.

When people stop being genuinely known by another human being, they stop being able to build anything that lasts. Families. Communities. Civilisations. All of it is downstream of the bedroom and it all depends, at the most fundamental level, on two people willing to be seen.

And we have built a world perfectly engineered to prevent it. I want to show you what I mean, not with data, but with a room.

---

The Room

It was Melbourne, late autumn, pre-covid. An investment group conference….the ones which used to run until two in the morning before the industry got cautious about what happens when you put finance professionals and corporate credit cards in the same bar. The CFOs were finding it harder to justify the five-figure nights to the board. The dinners got earlier and something that used to happen in those rooms stopped happening.

The sessions ended at six. By seven we were at dinner….twelve of us around a long table in a steakhouse in Crown Towers, the lighting was low enough that everyone looks slightly better than they really were. Oysters first, with Pol Roger Vintage Champagne, the bubbles doing their job. They brought out three côte de boeufs, two kilos (multiplied by three) of dry-aged bone-in ribeye, blackened at the edges, bloody at the centre, the cut naturally arrives on the bone with theatre of the wait-staff. There is nothing subtle about a côte de boeuf. It is carnivorous and primordial. It is the cut that strips a dinner table of its pretensions and reminds everyone sitting around it exactly what they are and exactly what they want. They poured a Barossa Shiraz, it was The Old Bastard. The host had chosen it and the label matched him better than he knew. He was a weathered man in his fifties trying to flex, covering the dinner and eyeing our clients’ funds across the table. The wine was from old vines, it was full-bodied, fine-grained tannins that the côte de boeuf further smoothed, taking the wine from magnificent to spectacular. People reached across each other. Salt got passed without being asked for. The table got louder.

By nine the table had thinned to six. Someone was still gnawing on the bone, it is to be said, she was completely unselfconscious and completely animal about it. By eleven-thirty it was four of us in one of the casino bars - Crown never closes, which is either a civic failing or a public service depending on what you need at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday - and the conversation had moved somewhere it hadn't been at dinner.

She had been in sessions with him all day. Across the long table at dinner she pushed back on something about where a particular investment trend was actually headed, not the consensus version repeated ad nauseam by experts who had all read the same research paper and were claiming it as their own, but her version, different and sharper and delivered without hedging. He pushed back. She pushed back harder. Her glass was still half full. His had been refilled on multiple occasions without him noticing. The other two of us at the bar had drifted into our own conversation somewhere around the second bottle. Neither of them noticed when we stopped.

The heat between them had been building since the beef.

It had nothing to do with the meat on the table…

This is what nobody talks about when they talk about desire. Not the physical fact of it, but the way she held eye contact a beat longer than the conversation required, the particular quality of her attention when she was making a point she knew he would contest. The desire was inseparable from the conversation. The intelligence was the foreplay. The pushback was the foreplay. The specific pleasure of a woman who actually gives a shit….not the careful performance of it but the real thing, the kind that makes her lean forward and cut you off mid-sentence because your argument is wrong and she intends to tell you exactly why. That's foreplay and it is the oldest kind.

They were at the bar until two in the morning. We were back in meetings at seven.

I am told nothing happened. There is a code…an old, unglamorous, professionally sensible code which says you don't let desire onto the same deal sheet as the day job. It is correct and it is also the reason they both walked back to their hotel rooms with the tension and frustration of a heat that built properly and had nowhere to go.

What was in the bar at midnight were two people who had stopped managing. No screens, no theatre, just the actual people, visible underneath the day which, had preceded them, the conversation generating heat the way it does between a man and a woman when neither of them is trying to control the outcome. Rooms like that used to exist regularly without anyone having to plan for them.

The investment group is conservative now. The dinners end at ten. The bar is an optional extra, with many going back to their rooms to doom-scroll or Facetime their kids. The CFO says the côte de boeuf is too expensive for the corporate-credit-card.

And I don’t think it’s only them.

---

The Distance

In Australia, more than two in five young people aged 15 to 25 feel lonely. In 2001, 18.5 percent of Australians aged 15 to 24 were classified as lonely. By 2020 that had risen to 26.6 percent. This is a trend that has been building since 2008, long before the pandemic arrived to accelerate it. Globally, weekly sexual activity among adults aged 18 to 64 collapsed from 55 percent in 1990 to just 37 percent in 2024. One in four young adults reporting zero partnered sex in the previous year. This is double the rate of a decade earlier. Nearly half of Gen Z adults have never had sex at all.

Everybody has a theory; the apps, screens, cost of living. The fact that nobody goes to bars anymore, or the bars close at ten because a nanny-state council complained, the insurance got expensive and somewhere along the way a late night stopped being a feature and started being a liability. All of which are real. None of which is the thing underneath the thing.

The thing underneath the thing has been there since the beginning. Before the apps, the algorithms, before every ideology currently being used to explain why men and women can't seem to find each other anymore. It predates all of it by about a hundred thousand years and it will outlast whatever comes next.

The fear of being seen, completely naked and found wanting.

And I am talking about in the bedroom. In the moment the dress drops to the floor and she stands there in black lace lingerie looking at him without looking away, and the question underneath the silence is not whether he finds her attractive - he does, they both know it, the whole evening has been nothing but that - but whether he can actually see her. Whether his attention is present enough and specifically directed enough that her body finally believes it is safe to arrive fully. Whether he will be present to what is actually happening in the room or whether the theatre will continue under the sheets the way it continues everywhere else.

She undoes his shirt button by button. His belt. His suit trousers drop to the floor beside her dress. They stand there looking at each other and neither of them says anything because neither of them needs to - the permission has been building since the heat began, since the eye contact that held too long and neither of them broke. The heat built was always going to end here. The question was never whether. The question was whether either of them was capable of being fully present when it did?

That question is the oldest demon’s territory. The cellular belief, felt in the body before it is articulated by the mind, that the authentic self, the one with the desires and the needs and the contradictions and the particular history of every time this didn’t go the way it was supposed to, is not safe to bring into this room. And so another self gets built instead: competent, controlled, going through the motions of desire the way it does with everything else. It is a convincing performance but it is tiring and lonely…

Most people never put that self down. Not even when the dress is on the floor and the permission is real and the heat has been building for hours and there is nothing left between you and being seen. The oldest demon follows them under the sheets and as body finds rhythm and presses into body. It does exactly what it does in every other room….monitors the impression, manages the distance and makes sure nobody gets close enough to see the gap between who they are and who they are performing themselves to be.

The bedroom is the one room where the performance was supposed to stop and yet for most people it doesn’t…

The woman who has never actually orgasmed with a partner - not because the mechanics were wrong but because she has never been genuinely seen. Never been in the presence of someone whose attention was so unrushed and so complete and so specifically directed at her that her body finally believed it was safe to arrive fully. Her whole life she has been told that sex is about the body. What she has never been told is that the body follows the attention, and the attention has to be real. Fake it and she fakes it. That's the whole equation. Genuine attention, being fully present produces something else entirely. Something her body has been waiting for and has not yet been given permission to have…

The man who has learned the choreography without ever understanding what the dance is for. Who fakes desire the way he fakes everything else in his life; efficiently, compellingly and completely alone inside it. Who hits every mark and says the right things and does what the situation seems to require and then lies there afterward in the particular flatness of a man who did everything correctly and felt absolutely nothing, wondering, not for the first time, what the hell is wrong. Nothing is wrong. He was just never there.

And sometimes they are both not there. The hookup that is technically successful and emotionally empty. Both people scrolling their phones twenty minutes later, slightly more alone than when they started, neither quite able to name why, both reaching for the screen because the screen at least doesn’t require them to be seen.

This is the pattern. The bedroom is both the wound and the place the wound comes from.

---

Men and women are retreating from each other in ways that are now showing up in the polling data. Young men and women show the largest partisan gap of any age group, swinging in opposite political directions. This distance between them is wider than it has been in a generation. Researchers have identified what they are calling heteropessimism - a disenchantment with heterosexual relationships marked by irony, detachment, and pre-emptive disappointment. Women are opting out of relationships they experience as requiring more than they return. Men are retreating into online communities that confirm their resentment rather than addressing its source.

Both here are nursing legitimate wounds and have decided the wound is the other person's fault, but neither is going to heal that way.

Women are right. A significant number of men have never learned to be genuinely present with another person but have never developed the emotional range real intimacy requires. They [some men] have ever done the internal work allowing them to see a woman clearly rather than faking desire at her. Women are right to be tired of it. Where they go wrong is concluding retreat is the answer - heteropessimism or opting out entirely is just the oldest demon winning by a different route.

Meanwhile, men are right too. Something has shifted in the relational landscape and left many of them genuinely lost. They are without the social frameworks or the emotional vocabulary or the rooms where they used to through trial and error, learn sideways, through proximity and conversation and the particular education of being around women who pushed back and meant it. The loneliness is real and nobody is talking about it honestly. Where men go wrong is thinking resentment is the answer - the manosphere or the algorithm or the man on the podcast who finally seems to “get it” is also just the oldest demon winning.

This is where Carroll's saviour syndrome gets its teeth. A generation that has never been genuinely naked with another person. Who has never sat in a bar past midnight while the conversation found its own direction, never let the heat build without reaching for the phone to manage the discomfort of it. These people do not know what meaning feels like from the inside. Only what it looks like from the outside. And the algorithm is very good at the outside. Creating outrage that feels like conviction or ideology feeling like identity or even the tribal belonging feeling like community. None of it requires being seen. All of it requires only holding the correct positions for the correct audience and receiving the dopamine of collective validation in return…

It is meaning without the nakedness…which, is really boring…

So what you end up with is a group of young Australians whose political formation comes from American TikTok. Who knows the language of US culture wars fluently and the history of their own country barely at all. Who has strong opinions about things that happened in Washington and no framework for understanding what is happening in their own suburb.

The dating app promised to solve the problem of proximity. Where you put available people in front of each other at scale and let desire do the rest. What it actually did was turn desire into a managed process. The profile curated for maximum appeal. The swipe reducing another human being to a binary - yes or no, left or right, the infinite complexity of a person compressed into whether the ‘curated content’ performed. Efficient, low-exposure, and stripped of the one thing making desire what it is…the particular vulnerability of wanting someone before you know whether they want you back. The unguarded moment. The conversation running past midnight in a bar in Melbourne because neither person wanted to be the one to end it.

The app removes the vulnerability, it also removes the heat. And it should be noted, the people who built these apps have investors expecting ever increasing daily, weekly and monthly active users (and thus revenue) to keep growing. So like the casino at Crown, they never really want you to leave, so the app keeps you swiping...

And then, because of course, Silicon Valley invented the AI companion. Someone there looked at a generation too frightened to be seen by another human being and thought: what if we gave them a chatbot which would never leave or judge, or need anything back (other than $35AUD a month), and called it connection? Brilliant. The AI companion never finds you wanting. Never has a bad day. Never needs anything back. Perfect, by every measurable standard, which is precisely the problem….because what you actually need has never been measurable. It can't see you, it can only reflect you and a mirror, no matter how sophisticated, is not a room.

The birth rate is 1.5, because the bedroom is empty and the algorithm is full.

---

The Way Back

There is a space that exists between two people before anything is named.

Before the move is made or not made. Before the conversation becomes a decision. In the eye contact that holds a beat too long. In the conversation that keeps finding reasons to continue. In the shared plate of something, a côte de boeuf at a long table in Melbourne, a bowl of miso at two in the morning in a ramen bar, a lamb shoulder pulled apart with bare hands at a kitchen table in Perth. Anything that requires physical proximity and the intimacy of sharing food with someone you are becoming aware of.

Anthony Bourdain, equally genius and troubled, dead at 61 in a hotel room in Strasbourg, he understood this. Not about sex. About the table. Though probably about sex too. The best meals he ever wrote about were not the most technically accomplished. They were the ones where the room was right and the people were present and the food gave everyone something to do with their hands while the real conversation happened underneath the surface one. The food was the vehicle, but creating the space for the presence to form was the point.

The heat that builds between a man and a woman in a room like that, when both are serious, both fully present, the conversation somewhere neither planned, that heat is not incidental to desire. It is desire. The most complete and honest version of it. Not just the physical event but the thing underneath the physical event. The genuine contact between two people who have allowed themselves to be seen…

That space, the honest, truly naked space between two people who have both decided, without saying so, to stay in it, is the hinge of intimacy.

It requires almost nothing to produce. Two people. A room. Enough time. No screens.

Carroll asked who will save us now, that is the wrong question.

The right question is the one Tolstoy couldn’t answer in 1879 and we are still not asking. Not what will save us, but what are we actually for? The answer has never required a movement or a content creator with four million followers. It has always required the same thing. Two people in a room, getting genuinely naked with each other. Not just the clothes. The rest of it. The fear. The history. The version of themselves existing before the management begins. This is where the next generation comes from. Not just biologically. Philosophically. The children of people who knew how to stay in the room when it got hard. Who understood the most important thing one human being can do for another is to actually see them, and how much harder and rarer it is than it sounds.

The Menorah on that wall at Bondi was put there by someone who understood something the gunmen didn’t. That you can kill fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration and the Hanukkah celebration continues. That the flame burning eight days on one day’s oil is not a miracle about oil. It is a statement about what happens when people refuse to let the darkness be the last word. You can try to extinguish it. It lights again. It has always lit again. In every room where two people decided to actually show up for each other - at a table, in a bed, in a bar in Melbourne at midnight - something passes between them that outlasts everything trying to prevent it.

The Menorah is still painted on the wall.

The heat builds the same way it always has. Get in the room and mean it.

— TK