Imagination had begun to feel less like a capacity and more like a requirement. Something to be produced. Manifested. Delivered. As though it could be summoned on cue. That was the first misreading. To manifest imagination, more often than not, was to manufacture illusion. A surface arranged to resemble freedom, while remaining carefully managed beneath. Machines had altered the rhythm of thought. Algorithms did not think. They sorted, predicted, amplified. Yet people learned to follow them closely, adjusting language, posture, even conviction to remain visible. Creativity bent itself toward what travelled well. Imagination learned how to perform.

The contradiction was difficult to escape. Many believed they were resisting digital power by remaining active within it, by mastering its rules, by feeding it constantly. Popularity was mistaken for autonomy. Reach was confused with release. In the effort to evade judgement, submission only deepened.

Analytical habits flourished. Metrics, optimisation, trend alignment. These were rewarded. Critical thinking, which asked why something should exist, whom it served, and what it displaced, became inconvenient. It slowed circulation. It resisted affirmation.

They let that settle. What passed for imagination increasingly resembled compliance dressed as freedom. What appeared as independence was often dependence rephrased. The illusion endured because it remained productive. As they rose to leave, she remarked that the most difficult task now was not dreaming, but thinking without being watched. He agreed. Imagination still mattered. But without the discipline to question its conditions, it risked becoming another output, refined for a system indifferent to what it quietly replaced.