Humans of the 21st century

[title card, showing a bleak cityscape]
Humans of the 21st century
A nature documentary

[a character holds a mic in an empty office building]
Here we can see their natural habitat, the office building.
Work has become their default state, leisure now requires justification.
In these vast enclosures of glass and steel, humans gather to perform a ritual they call meetings: elaborate displays of hierarchical superiority.

[a barren landscape with a city in the background]
At dawn, the great migration begins. Millions move in unison, willingly trapping themselves in metal cages.
They travel vast distances to identical enclosures, perform repetitive rituals then return to their nests to recover.
It is a truly astonishing display of endurance, rivaled only by its pointlessness.

[an empty fast food with a smiling balloon]
The dominant belief here is called growth, an endless expansion, much like a tumor, celebrated as a sign of health.
Notice how they worship numbers: profit, likes, followers, abstract totems believed to bestow meaning.
Their god is invisible, omnipotent, and perpetually in need of bailouts.

[a dense cityscape, with advertisements]
As their dwellings grow ever taller, so do their connections grow thinner.
The modern human is unique among species: it destroys its surroundings to build habitats it cannot afford to live in.
Every few years, they hold great ceremonies called elections, in which they choose new caretakers who look remarkably like the previous ones.

[an abandoned mall, a SALE banner hanging alone]
Each individual consumes more than they require, yet feels perpetually deprived, a behavior scientists refer to as the economy.
They engineered abundance, then invented poverty to balance it out.
Alas, the species vanished before understanding that progress was the name it gave to decay.

[an overcrowded concrete car park]
Fossilized advertisements suggest they were aware of their extinction.
They held special sales to commemorate it.
When the seas rose, they built waterfront condos.
When the water ran dry, they bottled it for export.
When the air grew toxic, they sold it in cans.

[a sunset on an oil field]
Historians now consider humanity an early experiment in self-awareness.
Results were inconclusive.
They achieved remarkable intelligence, but never quite figured out what to do with it.