The Ocean Is Not Empty

I wrote this late at night, it’s utter ridiculous I know. I enjoyed the spiral of talking stupid conspiracy about things in the sea.

Everyone feels something near the ocean.
Some feel calm.
Some feel free.
Some feel inspired to do yoga poses on cliffs while pretending they’re not worried about their iPhone sliding into the surf.

Personally, I feel watched.

Not in a paranoid, tin-foil-hat way.
In a something ancient just blinked at me from 8,000 feet down kind of way.

Because here’s the thing about the ocean:

It’s not blue.
It’s not friendly.
And it’s not full of fish.

It’s full of pressure, darkness, silence, and the unknown.

We treat it like a holiday destination.
But it’s actually a bottomless, mostly-unexplored, alien ecosystem full of creatures that:

• glow without heat,
• survive crushing depths,
• and in some cases, have never seen the sun.

We act like space is mysterious.
But we’ve mapped more of Mars than our own seabed.
We’ve sent rovers to other planets.
We’ve only explored about 5% of our own oceans.

You could walk into the ocean today
...and be closer to the edge of human knowledge than most astronauts ever will.

And the worst part?

The deeper we look,
the more the ocean starts to feel like it’s not ours.
Like it’s not empty.
Like it was designed to keep us out.

We Thought It Was Full of Life. It’s Mostly Teeth and Silence.

Most people imagine the ocean as a big watery jungle.
A colourful mess of sea turtles, coral reefs, and that one dolphin who’s probably smarter than you but still ends up in aquarium birthday photos.

But that’s just the top bit.
Like... the first 200 metres.

That’s called the sunlight zone.
It’s where almost everything you’ve ever seen in a nature documentary lives.
Nemo. Sharks. Stuff that looks like it was designed by a children’s book illustrator with a psychedelic side hustle.

After that?
It all disappears.

⚫ Welcome to the Midnight Zone

From 200m to 1,000m: the twilight zone — light starts to die.
Below 1,000m? You hit the midnight zone.

No sunlight.
No plants.
No photosynthesis.
Just black water, crushing pressure, and the distant sound of something moving that shouldn’t be.