Giveth and taketh, huh
I sit at my desk and watch the crane load kilos and kilos of bricks
My phone won’t stop chatting
but there’s nothing in my inbox.
“We are materially richer than ever before…And yet we are ontologically queasy.”
- Charles Foster
In the corner of my field of hearing I can hear the endless rustle of plastic bags being filled. It doesn't change, day and night it's exactly the same lighting. The only thing that changes are the shoppers coming and going. And the occasional drilling or beeps. Or that sound, like the hammering of tent pegs.
England for me
is uncanny valley
I am one of you / I am not
I am a good traveller
through the past
As long as the past
is neat, organised
& expansive
I have such a bad cold
this whole train journey,
I have only been able to breathe through my mouth
using my jumper as a tissue
The light from the bus
runs red and blue
it’s cheap,
but it’s beautiful
though I can’t pretend that I like it
when we leave two hours later
Sun going down among these cars
when will yours?
Maybe if you install yourself permanently
in front of your black screen
it never will -
mind you, you’re not far off at this point
and the distractions aren’t slowing down
As long as the corporations that govern you
keep clinking their champagne glasses
You life in one perpetual blue-lit rectangle
Sorry - not in, is.
The bears, the bats, the trees
calling you
but you’ve been clamping mechanics
on your ear drums and eyeballs
as long as they’ve existed
and I hate you for it, for what you’re doing
to you, your brain and your home.
Maybe I just need to find the teacher, the parent, the adult
who
forgot to tell you
that this world is shared.
Shared. But look, with a little carelessness;
a bump on the road when you’re texting
that changes the appearances of the letter -
you assume the world is meant to be Shaved.
Maybe you’re not even thinking about it,
swilling assumptions that don’t even get
the luxury of being acknowledged
If everything is on the screen,
it only lasts 65 seconds, 2 minutes max
and that timing, contrary to that of this bus,
has bled into to you.
All around you exists in simulacra, if this is your way of existing.
There is a baby over there
(she is gorgeous)
I could almost cry for the world that she doesn’t know yet
Keep it that way,
don’t let her be crushed like the rest of us
Unless she can find those
glittering moments
in between the flat pixels
the bus will never move out of this polluted city.
Hustle culture is the pinnacle of what I call a checklist existence, the ultimate form of a world in which every box we tick gets replaced by yet another one, the same way that e-mail inboxes are the ever-regenerating many-headed hydras that plague our daily lives.
We slay them endlessly, hoping that each slash of the delete key or reply button will get us closer to that mythic allure of “inbox zero,” a profoundly dystopian goal.
In that never-ending battle, which we always lose, the checklist itself becomes the achievement, an utterly bizarre, tragicomic approach to living—and yet one that, like most of us, I struggle to resist.
We are, too often, chained to our checklists, inmates held inside our own inboxes.
- Brian Klaus
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-red-queen-fallacy
