I live a very alienating life. I’m lying here, in the bed in my tiny granny flat that often gets complements for being cosy & nice. Which it is compared to the average share house that most of my friends live in. But I am alone almost all the time, & this is partially because I live in a suburb with no train station. In a city that does nothing but build more & more large sprawling suburban minimalist shit holes made by wealthy developing companies. So young couples can enslave themselves to a large mortgage to live in a white-walled gyprock flat & delude themselves into the Australian version of the American dream.
You know we were never meant to live like this right? Our brains evolved while we roamed the world as 150 person nomadic tribes where we knew each member & had deep relationships with each other. Now even the best of friends or partners can’t spend more than an afternoon with each other without getting uncomfortable, & we simply cannot burden our fellow friends with our darkness; so we must seek professional help. That’s the logical, neo-liberal way now. Expertise everything, if you don’t have a degree you ain’t qualified to help your friend work through their issues. Besides there’s games to play & anxiety to quash through denial & drugs.
What’s weirder is how we kid ourselves into thinking that we don’t need human contact; especially through some kind of cringey self love justification. I’m kind of getting tired of people who post as ‘introverts’ on social media. Claiming solitude as their bliss while posting on Reddit, Tumblr & Instagram. You just don’t want to deal with your social anxiety, which we all have.
We are never very far from human contact with the phone near us all the time. But my God, maybe it’s just me but it just feels like a bump of cocaine. Soothing, energising yet lacking.
But I’m not really feeling alienated because of any of these things. It’s something more ethereal to me, it’s something I feel in my bones when I look out into the world & see so little innovation. I’ll walk down King Street in Newtown & see a hippie trinket store. The same tie die colour palette from Woodstock, the same fucking dream catchers & dreadlocked stoner at the counter. Further down is yet another bar with a tiled exterior & distinctly English tavern style decor with a fucking pokies section at the back labeled VIP, (Viciously Insipid Play-area), with no band, & no excitement. Just barely conscious fatigued workers too tired to wonder why their lives are shit.
It’s no better online, it’s middle management working professionals posting selfies & views from their weekend adventures, “entrepreneurs” contriving reasons to buy their products through pandering to some vague notion of self-development or corner cutting. Or it’s countless esoteric subcultures all following the same pattern respective of their niche. I wonder to myself. Maybe I’ve become so desensitised to novelty that I’m now jaded & unimpressed by anything that isn’t the equivalent to a speedball.
Although I’m projecting my own lack of intimacy no doubt, I think my point here is that we are all unconsciously creating a world where alienation is the new status quo, & my God when VR becomes sensory it’s only going to become more strange. I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed that I barely look into peoples eyes lately. Because I know that I’ll see the suffering in their eyes & it will break me right there. But you know that might not be such a bad thing, at least I’ll feel something.
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