The Prometheus Glitch
Prometheus is a Titan who defied the Olympian gods by giving fire to humanity, symbolically in the form of technology, knowledge, and civilization.
Due to this disobedience, he was condemned to eternal torment, bound to a rock, with an eagle feasting on his liver. His liver would grow back overnight, only to be eaten again, and again.
Sounds absolutely tragic. I’m sorry, Prometheus. You got a bad deal. And what the hell, Zeus? Kind of an overreaction…
Jokes aside, I feel like I might be seeing what the original authors were hinting at, so explore with me here.
No other animal can maintain or use fire like humans do. We do not think about it much now because we have electricity, which is relatively new. For much longer, we depended on fire and lived with it every single day. Research on early controlled fire use at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa - (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3356665/)
Imagine what this may have done to us.
With fire, we became more separate from the world around us.
We were the only species using fire. Everything stayed away from it. Fire had incredible power. It gave warmth, protection, light in darkness, and safety against predators. So naturally, we felt power too. And in many ways, we did have it.
Fire helped give us the ability to spread across the planet and become the dominant species. It helped make us who we are today.
But... at what cost?
Fire gave us safety. Safety gave us time. Time gave us the ability to time-travel, meaning we can think about the past and think about the future. We can get lost in deep thought, plan the architecture of a whole building, replay libraries of memories all while imagining infinite possibilities.
Our mind. This is part of what separated us.
Other animals live much closer to the present moment. We can leave the now and soar upward into thought, into imagination, into complete new worlds.
And because of that ability, we became who we are today.
All our books, our progress, our understanding, came from the power of thinking.
But it is this exact power of thinking that is the glitch: mistaking imagination for reality.
Our bodies can react to a story in the mind as if danger is happening now. And because of this, we suffer. We can’t stop thinking. This is our ability! This is what makes us human!
Maybe that is why Prometheus was punished the way he was.
The eagle, a creature of the sky, high above the earth, may represent thought itself. The mind that rises upward into imagination, memory, fear, and future. Each day, it returns to feast on our liver, and we feel the wound through our emotions, as the spirit starts to wither.
That is what thought can do when we do not understand it. It can descend from the clouds and tear into us with rage, regrets, anxiety, and dread. With stories that can rip the meaning of life from us.
But knowing this, and not knowing it, is the key difference.
Because once you know the glitch, you can recognize what is happening. It is simply biology—our body reacting to imagination.
Once you know that, you can begin to step out of it.
This is what I do.
When I catch myself in negative thought loops, worrying about the future, trapped in the past, feeling sadness or anxiety over things I cannot control, I tell myself this.
This is the glitch.
Then I come back to the present. To what is real. To what I still have agency over.
And maybe you can too.
When the eagle returns, remember: this is the glitch.
Come back home.