Night is no more. It has retreated, a wounded leopard to the edges of the world, replaced by a perpetual, pale midday. An artificial dawn that knows no sunset. We have been taught to call this phenomenon “light pollution,” an aseptic term, straight from a manual, that dampens its apocalyptic scale. It is like defining the deforestation of the Amazon as a “decrease in leaf surface area.” Under this milky blanket, we pay a toll that is not merely poetic; it is physiological, economic, existential.

Money, before anything else. Cities, like feverish invalids, pour rivers of electrons toward the sky, a liturgy of waste. It is an economy that generates costs disguised as progress. Millions of streetlights, floodlights, neon signs that do not illuminate a sidewalk, do not mark a road, but instead draw a gigantic, useless lighthouse turned upside down. The light, meant to serve, has emancipated itself, becoming an end in itself, a propitiatory offering to the deity of Growth. It is capital evaporating, literally, into the ether, burning resources and increasing a debt, not to a bank, but to the very balance of living. A capitalism of light, which produces darkness.

And the body, this ancient machine, how does it react? Melatonin, the hormone of sleep and regeneration, is silenced. It is a biochemical assassination. The circadian rhythm, that inner music tying us to the Earth’s rotation, is overwhelmed by a pounding, bluish optical noise. We sleep, yes, but it is a poor, shallow sleep, a shadow of what it should be. In this perpetual twilight, the organism loses its north, and the consequences—insomnia, chronic fatigue, a vague but persistent unease—are the prelude to deeper ills. We have dimmed the stars and, in doing so, we have extinguished something within ourselves.

Then, the silent massacre. The nocturnal ecosystem, a realm of delicate alliances, has been torn open. Moths, hypnotized, spiral toward the flame until extinction, and with them dies a piece of pollination. Bats, lords of the dark, disoriented, struggle to hunt. Sea turtles, newly hatched, who for millennia oriented themselves by the reflection of the Milky Way on the ocean, now crawl, stunned, toward parking lots, toward death. It is a slaughter of innocents, a holocaust of insects and creatures whose only crime was to have evolved in a world that had darkness. The night was their day. We have stolen it from them.

And finally, the blindness. Over eighty percent of those born this century have never seen the Andromeda Galaxy. They have never looked up and felt that metaphysical shiver, that sense of cosmic vertigo which is the foundation of all philosophy, all religion, all true science. The starry sky is not a spectacle. It is a question. It is the most ancient textbook, the map of our journeys, the place from whence we came. By switching it off, we have performed a cultural self-amputation. We have severed the link with the sublime, locking ourselves in a small world, lit by neon, where the only horizon is our own.

Perhaps excessive light is just the fear of the dark. Fear of silence, of introspection, of what we might see inside ourselves if we only stopped illuminating everything outside. The true economy of light lies not in producing more and more of it, but in dosing it wisely. In recognizing that darkness is not an enemy, but a resource. A common good, as precious as clean water or pure air. Reclaiming the night does not mean regressing. It means rediscovering a rhythm. Accepting that a part of life, of regeneration, of truth, occurs outside our control. And that to truly see, sometimes, the lights must be switched off.