Why did 2025 feel like a year lived in exile?

Across society, people sensed a quiet dislocation — a feeling that the world they knew no longer matched the world they inhabited. Institutions wavered. Narratives fractured. The pace of life accelerated beyond comprehension. Beneath the noise, something deeper was happening: modern culture had entered a form of exile.

The Writing on the Wall: A Cultural Autopsy of 2025 uses the ancient story of Daniel as a lens for understanding that experience. Not as a religious argument, but as a cultural framework. Daniel lived through the collapse of the familiar and the rise of the unknown. His life offers a model for navigating disorientation with clarity, integrity, and resilience.

Through eight concise, reflective chapters, this book explores:

• Exile as a psychological condition – why modern people felt unmoored even without moving.
• Integrity in a world of compromise – how small boundaries preserve identity.
• Cultural warning signs – the subtle signals of institutional fatigue and drift.
• The attention economy’s impact on identity – how distraction became a form of erosion.
• The collapse of grand narratives – why our old stories stopped working.
• The limits of prediction in an algorithmic age – what algorithms can’t see.
• Long-arc resilience – how endurance is formed over time, not in a moment.
• Redefining home after dislocation – what exile reveals about who we are.

This is not a book about crisis. It is a book about clarity — the kind that emerges only after the storm.