It all started with a Heinkel He 111 in 1/35 scale. Looking at CAD images of the model kit, I found myself squinting at the stressed skin, wondering whether the exaggerated oil-canning was realistic – or whether the designer had simply gone a little overboard. From pieces of plastic, a bit of rivet detail, and suddenly my thoughts were racing far beyond the plastic model, from the miniature imperfections to reflections on the excesses of our entire society. In a funny, almost comic way, this single kit became a lens through which I began to understand bigger truths: how ambition, enthusiasm, and disregard for limits can scale up from a hobby to the planet itself.
I came to realism the long way round.
As a lifelong modeller, I began – like most people in the hobby – by being seduced by ambition. Bigger kits, finer detail, more dramatic surface effects, the promise that this one would finally capture reality in miniature. For years, the heart led and the head followed, if at all. Experience, however, is a patient tutor. Over time it taught me something counterintuitive: realism is not achieved by adding more, but by knowing when to stop.
That lesson did not arrive all at once. It came through misaligned parts, ruined canopies at the final hurdle, decals that silvered despite every precaution, and projects that quietly returned to their boxes unfinished. Eventually, enthusiasm learned to submit to judgement. The question ceased to be can this be done? and became should it be done at all? Measured realism – restraint, proportion, credibility – replaced spectacle.
Only later did I realise that this private evolution mirrored something much larger.
Today’s modelling culture increasingly celebrates excess. Enormous kits in awkward scales, hyper-exaggerated surface textures, detail piled upon detail until the object ceases to resemble the real machine it claims to represent. The intention is authenticity; the result is often distortion. Yet the appetite for more – more size, more parts, more drama, more novelty – seems insatiable.
It is hard not to see this as a reflection of the world beyond the workbench.
We live in a culture that mistakes accumulation for meaning. Cities choke with traffic, vehicles grow ever larger while carrying fewer people, shops overflow with goods destined for the landfill weeks later. Seasonal rituals of consumption are performed with quasi-religious fervour, even as we acknowledge – at least verbally – that the planet cannot sustain them.
This is why the behaviour feels unbalanced and unhealthy. Civilisations that believe in a future tend to build infrastructure meant to last, accept limits, and think in generations rather than quarters. Civilisations that do not tend to strip-mine their own foundations.
What is striking today is the disappearance of the future as a moral reference point. We are living through a profound shift in temporality – a collapse into what might be called presentism. Strategy, properly understood, implies long-term goals, patience, and obligations to what comes after us. Increasingly, however, both political and economic life operate as if the future were either radically diminished or no longer real.
Diplomacy, especially in its current American variety, offers a telling example. Where it once implied relationships built over time, trust accumulated slowly, and compromise sustained across decades, it is now often framed in transactional terms. Deals replace alliances; leverage replaces understanding. Even national security strategies read less like visions of continuity and more like balance sheets: what can be extracted, secured, or traded now. Foreign policy becomes a form of business conducted in the present tense.
Seen from this angle, consumer behaviour begins to make a bleak kind of sense. If the future no longer commands belief, restraint becomes irrational. Why conserve resources for a world one does not feel answerable to? Why accept limits when limits presuppose continuity? The feeling I had so strongly recently – of people behaving as though there were no future, and therefore needing to spend now – may not be a misunderstanding at all, but the logical culmination of a long historical development.
Nietzsche suggested that civilisation is a collective fantasy. If so, ours is a fantasy sustained less by belief than by momentum. We continue to act as though the future exists, while behaving in ways that quietly deny it. The contradiction produces a peculiar moral hollowness: motion without direction, consumption without confidence, power without purpose.
There is a story – widely repeated, and revealing regardless of its precise wording – of a political leader being asked whether reliance on finite fossil fuels was a concern. The reply was that it did not matter; by the time those resources ran out, he would no longer be around. Few remarks better capture the spirit of the age. It is not merely selfishness, but the explicit abandonment of intergenerational responsibility.
The planet is finite – materially, energetically, ecologically – yet we continue to behave as though finitude were an inconvenience rather than a boundary. We speak of sustainability while structuring our lives, economies, and politics around perpetual expansion. This is not a balanced or healthy trajectory; it is a self-destructive one.
Returning to modelling, the analogy becomes inescapable. The experienced modeller learns that not every kit should be bought, not every innovation embraced, not every surface worked to exhaustion. Energy, money, space, and time are finite. Satisfaction comes from choosing carefully, finishing well, and recognising when admiration from a distance is enough.
In this sense, measured realism is not only an aesthetic position but an ethical one. It accepts limits without despair. It values continuity over spectacle. It assumes – quietly but firmly – that the future matters, even if one may not personally inhabit it.
Civilisations, like models, cannot be built on excess indefinitely. At some point the structure warps, the joins fail, and detail overwhelms form. Whether we rediscover restraint at a collective level remains an open question. But at the individual level, one can at least refuse to confuse more with better, or immediacy with meaning.
That refusal may be modest. It may change nothing at scale. Yet it preserves something essential: the idea that realism – measured, finite, and conscious of what lies beyond the present – still has value in a culture increasingly determined to forget it.