The future
Waking humans up: the mission
For Bairo Gonzalez, waking up is leaving autopilot: noticing your own time, your own choice and the help technology can give to those who decide to live.
Some people spend their whole lives with their eyes open and never wake up.
What he means by waking up
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez speaks of his own mission with a simple phrase: waking humans up. It can sound mystical, and that's why it's worth saying what it means in his life.
Waking up, for Bairo, is leaving autopilot. It's noticing that the day passing won't come back. It's no longer repeating "it can't be done" just because someone said it first. It's remembering that there's a choice even when it seems there's none. He isn't talking about an awakening you buy in a course. He's talking about what happened to him.
The man who slept while awake
There were years when Bairo lived asleep. An immigrant without documents in hand and afraid, he walked through the shadows of a country he loved. Then came the businesses that went wrong, the partners who pushed him out of his own ventures, losing everything with many people depending on him. In one of those winters, he says, he was broke, defeated, and still with a flame of hope and faith.
That's when he woke up. In the congregation where he heard stories of people who had come through the impossible. In the inner, personal search he tells about in the chapter The God of the impossible. In the silence he associates with the 1420 MHz frequency, the hydrogen frequency the whole world agreed to keep quiet so that the universe can be heard. He says that, in that silence, he saw his best version. And that, since then, he can't go back to sleep.
This is his experience, told as his experience. The faith that woke him, he insists, isn't a faith that excludes: whoever trusts their God of creation, whatever their belief, is right.
Waking up in a world of machines
In an age of artificial intelligence, the word takes on a new meaning. Machines can wake us up or put us to sleep. An app can give back hours of life or hijack them with infinite scrolling. An AI can teach us to think or think for us until we forget how.
The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called conscientization the process by which a person comes to see their own reality and to perceive themselves as capable of transforming it. It isn't about receiving a ready-made truth, but about learning to read the world. Bairo sees technology as a possible ally in this process, as long as it's used to widen one's view, not to replace it.
And the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, wrote that the last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any set of circumstances. Bairo read life, more than books, and arrived at something similar: no is the foundation of yes.
In the future he describes
He imagines a time when technology is designed to wake people up. An assistant that, instead of trapping the person on the screen, asks whether they've been out in the sun today. A platform that shows how much lifetime it gave back, not how much it took. A channel, 1420mhz.org, which he defines as a place of communication and elevation, where this is discussed calmly.
He imagines waking up becoming something collective. Communities that help each other off autopilot. People who, having come through pain, come back to reach out to those still going through it. He calls it a mission because he doesn't know what else to call it.
It's a vision, not a promise. No one wakes anyone up by force. The most one can do is open a window and let the light in.
A scene
A forty-year-old man, unemployed, spends his nights scrolling his phone until three in the morning. On one of those nights, he finds the story of someone who lost everything, was left without papers, lost partners and started over seven times. He reads to the end. He turns off the phone. He lies for a while looking at the ceiling.
The next day, he wakes up at seven. Not because something changed outside. Because something changed inside.