Hematite can sit there all day clenching its little iron-oxide fists, manifesting on vision boards, whispering affirmations like “I am forged”, and it will still be… a rock. A perfectly respectable, deeply unambitious rock.

The line: "​​No matter how much hematite tries, it will never be steel" works because it’s a mildly cruel metaphor for reality: potential is not destiny, effort is not alchemy, and wanting very badly to be something does not magically supply carbon, heat, pressure, and an industrial process. Steel isn’t hematite’s “best self.” Steel is what happens after hematite is brutally transformed by forces outside its control. Which is comforting or horrifying, depending on how attached you are to self-help posters.

So yes—some things cannot become other things, no matter how inspirational the montage music gets. Not everything is a “before” waiting to glow up. Some of us are just… the mineral we are.

Anyway, great sentence. Short, sharp, and devastating. Like steel. Not like hematite, which is doing its best and still failing quietly on a shelf somewhere.

If you squint hard enough and read Jung at 2 a.m. by candlelight, everyone eventually merges into a psychic Lovecraftian group chat that none of us consented to join.

At the reasonable end, Jung gives us archetypes, shared symbols, the idea that humans across cultures dream about similar stuff because we have similar brains. Fine. Sensible. Almost boring.

At the extreme end, though, the collective unconscious stops being a metaphor and turns into a damp, whispering netherbrain where your dream about teeth falling out is apparently the same cosmic event as an Aztec ritual, a medieval alchemist’s fever dream, and Carl Jung personally fighting a dragon in his journal. Suddenly your anxiety isn’t just yours—it’s the monster’s anxiety, echoing through the ages.

It’s basically:

• Jung (normal): “Your problems are symbolic.”

• Jung (feral): “You are a node in an ancient psychic organism that dreams through you.”

Which is a great way to feel profound while also absolving yourself of responsibility. It’s not that you’re confused and tired—it’s the eldritch psyche-tentacle acting up again.

Still, I’ll give them this: it’s a very stylish way to say “humans influence each other.” Much more dramatic. Much more tentacles.

Congratulations, you’ve accidentally reinvented anthropology while trying to start a fight on the internet. Human history is basically one long, transmutation arc: rocks → knives, sand → glass, mud → bricks, dead plants → coal → regrettable climate situation. We meet a mineral, give it a new name, assign it a job, and insist it’s always been that way. Very “identity is a social construct,” but with hammers.

So yes, societies are woke in the sense that they are constantly saying: you are not bound by what you were born as; with enough heat and coercion, you can become something else. Which is inspiring until you remember the process usually involves furnaces, exploitation, and someone getting crushed in a mine.

Also worth noting: humans didn’t just “trans” minerals—we projected meaning onto them. Gold became value, iron became strength, silicon became God (briefly). We’re alchemists with spreadsheets.

So sure, civilization is woke. It’s also exhausted, hypocritical, and built on the backs of rebranded rocks.