The Greatest Crime of Modernity? The Dialysis of the Imagination.

According to thinker Ahmed Paul Keeler, the greatest crime of modernity is the systematic destruction of childhood.

We are living in an era where children are being prepared for one primary role: to become little consumers. In the process, their childhood is being stolen, and their sense of identity is being profoundly confused.

Keeler identifies this process as a “dialyses of the imagination.”

Just as a medical dialysis machine filters a patient's blood, our consumer culture filters a child's innate creativity, stripping away what is authentic and replacing it with something artificial.

Think about it:We, the adults, have manufactured a consumer idea of childhood. We create plastic toys that beep and flash external imaginations designed to mesmerize. A child engages, is passively entertained, and then grows bored. The toy is complete; it demands nothing of them. The child’s role is merely to consume and discard, waiting for the next stimulus.

This has now escalated to smartphones and screens, devices that provide perpetual, outside engagement. This constant external stimulation doesn't feed imagination; it replaces it. It performs a dialysis, filtering out the child's own creative impulses.

Compounding this is the culture of "helicopter parenting." Under constant surveillance, children are rarely free to go out, explore, and crucially build their own world.

The result?

By the time they reach adolescence, around 14, they have had little chance to develop a strong, self-derived identity. Their rebellion, a natural and necessary step into adulthood becomes a desperate attempt to forge their own society from a place of deprivation, not discovery.

The challenge for us as parents, educators, and leaders is to reject this dialysis. To provide space instead of screens, tools instead of toys, and freedom instead of surveillance.

We must stop filtering out their imagination and start nurturing it.

May the yellow thread in my novel “Threads for Life” be our kids compass to carry them into a future that shines with wisdom, even in our absence.