By The Warden of Common Sense
The women went to space—and instead of staring into the vast, silent mystery that swallows every pronoun, they stared back at themselves. Or at least, that is how the moment was framed: not as an extraordinary achievement of courage and science, but as an exercise in personal empowerment, a triumph of identity politics over gravity itself.
Let us speak plainly: something is terribly askew in the way our age narrates triumph. No longer is wonder directed outward, toward the ineffable majesty of the cosmos. Instead, the universe becomes a stage for the drama of self-expression. Five women float among the stars, and the headline isn’t the moon or the mission, but the social categories the travelers represent. It is not what they saw—but what they symbolize—that matters.
This is not feminism. It is solipsism dressed in a flight suit.
To question the framing of this event is not to deny the courage of these women. Nor is it to diminish the remarkable technological and physical prowess that spaceflight requires. But when we reduce their voyage to a parable of “representation,” we cheapen both the individual and the infinite. Space becomes just another canvas for our personal branding. “Look at me,” we say, even as we orbit something older and far grander than ourselves.
This is the inevitable consequence of a culture that has taught itself to see through the lens of grievance, identity, and symbolic validation. No moment can simply be anymore. It must be interpreted, filtered, and claimed. And always—it must be about us.
But the cosmos is not interested in us. It spins without apology. It devours comets and dreams alike. It whispers the same ancient question to all who dare to rise above: What are you, little creature? To answer that with a slogan is to miss the point. To insist that even the stars must clap for our social movements is to make a god of the self—and a rather small one at that.
So let us be grateful for the astronauts, yes. We can even be grateful for women who spent about 3 seconds “in space”. But let us not measure the significance of their journey by hashtags or identity boxes. Let us remember that space travel should humble us, not flatter us. That there are still things too big for ideology, too vast for politics, too sacred for slogans.
In Eyehasseen, we still look up at the night sky not to see ourselves reflected—but to remember how little we are, and how much we still do not know.