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A man in a green coat is asleep and smells like vinegar. Nobody sits near him. The man next to me is humming a tune with no melody very loudly and very enthusiastically. It’s 11a.m.
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
― Alexis de Tocqueville
I don’t know if there is such thing as meaning, but I do know that there are degrees of meaninglessness; I do know that our automated, pre-packaged, silly way of living is getting more meaninglessness, is more meaningless than its alternatives. If we can’t approach infinity, we can approach zero. I look at the phone zombies around me — on the street, the subway, cafes, grocery stores: everywhere — and think: could they even muster a protest, a coherent intellectual response to an intellectual criticism? Probably not. We’re comfortably stupid and increasingly comfortable being stupid — and un-self-reliant and petty. I can’t imagine a phone-addict defending themselves philosophically, with words. We’re increasingly incapable of using words; we can only use pictograms, like little kids. We’re the cognitive chattel of unrelenting Internet commerce (and we don’t realize it).
Maybe I’m provoked by Halloween culture: adults my age (30ish) running around like their favorite 2006 suburban sleepover never ended (which is to say: trapped in the cozy materialist spirit of the Bush years).
