There Are Cities Full Of People Who No Longer Feel Real
I keep thinking about the way people walk down the street these days. It's not even that they're glued to their phones, though Christ knows they are. It's more like they're just following some script they didn't write. I'm looking out the window right now at this coastal town, just a week before I pack up my life and head off to the other side of the world in Latin America, and everything feels completely hollow. I'm not going to name where I am or where I'm going. There's no point. Everywhere's starting to look exactly the same anyway. Globalisation or whatever they call it. Just the same shops, the same plastic signs, the same blank looks on everyone's faces.
I can't shake the feeling that most people just stopped being there. You look into their eyes and there's nobody home, even if the lights appear to be on. I remember reading somewhere about how modern life fries the fuck out of your brain with all the noise and the constant notifications, and I think it's true. It seems to me we've all become ghosts in our own lives. I was in a wee supermarket the other day and the lass on the till was just a machine. She muttered the exact words she was trained to say, smiled the exact fake smile, and didn't even register me as a person. I'm not blaming her, mind you. I used to work in warehouses in south London as a student and I know what it's like to switch your brain off just to get through the shift. But now it feels like everyone's doing it, all the time, even when they're supposed to be having fun.
I suspect we're all just completely shattered. Psychological exhaustion, that's what a doctor would probably call it, or maybe I'm just talking nonsense? Still though, you can't tell me this is normal. Everyone's walking around the gaff like they're performing for a camera that isn't there. Or maybe it is there. We're being watched constantly anyway, cameras on every corner, algorithms tracking every single thing we buy or think. It drives you fucking mental if you think about it too much. I think that's why I quietly took myself out of the game a few years back. Stopped watching the news, stopped caring about the politics, stopped trying to fit into the system. It's all rigged anyway. Media manipulation, corporate nonsense, whatever you want to call it. It's just a massive circus to keep us distracted while everything falls apart.
I think about home, Scotland and the housing schemes in Glasgow where I spent time. There used to be communities there. Rough as arseholes sometimes, aye, but real. People actually spoke to each other. If someone was having a hard time, the neighbours knew about it. Now you can live next door to someone for five years and not even know their name. We've traded actual human connection for digital shite, and it's killing us. I wonder if that's why I'm moving again next week? Just trying to find a corner of the world that doesn't feel completely dead. I doubt I'll find it, to be honest. The rot's spread everywhere.
It dawned on me this morning while I was doing some laundry. I'm not even excited about leaving. I'm just numb. I think we've all been conditioned to feel this way. Too much information, too many disasters on the telly, too much economic decline. You just shut down because your brain can't cope with the weight of it all. So you become like the poor fuckers trying to survive in the cities. You put on the uniform, you say the scripted words, you pretend everything's brilliant when it clearly isn't. It's a strange atmosphere, it really is. Like we're all actors in a film that went on too long and no bastard remembers the plot anymore.
Maybe I'm just a cynical old wanker who's travelled too much and seen too much. I don't know. I sometimes think I should've just stayed put, stuck with a normal job, married a local lass and kept my kisser shut. But I couldn't do it. I saw through the illusion too early, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. You just become a bystander, watching the social collapse happen in slow motion.
Anyway, another new country next week, another set of streets full of people who don't feel real. I wonder if I'll ever find somewhere that feels alive again, or if that world's just gone for good. Still though, you've to keep moving, don't you. Better to be a ghost on the move than a ghoul stuck in one pitiful, shit place.