Concrete Jungles
I walk through the concrete jungle today, the same route I walk every morning, waiting patiently at crosswalks until it’s clear enough for me to safely jay walk, and I’m surrounded by hundreds of my closest friends, so strangers, and we silently break a law together that would get us fined about $300 in Australia, but we don’t care. We're not in Oz anymore. This is what we do here. And we do it every day. And I walk, grateful it's Friday and I can trade in my suit for sneakers and jeans, and I look around for something awe inspiring, a building, a church, a person, a view through the clouds, anything, just something that I think is beautiful, hoping something will make me change my mind, that something will make me believe that I don’t have to move across the country, or chase dreams around the world, that I don’t have to give up on here and now, in this city, this world that I feel like I was thrust into against my will, without much choice, and have never quite caught onto, in order to be happy. But I don’t find anything. History surrounds me, and yet it feels lost somehow. So far removed from where I am today, and what this place has become. What’s the use of Paul Revere and the Minutemen and reenactments and duck boat tours when we now spend too many hours at the office, in our multi-billion dollar buildings, buried behind computer monitors all day long, to make barely enough money to buy better drink than the $1 beers at Coogan’s?
We’re surrounded by people every day and we don’t even know their names. The lady on the bus. The guy who shares the elevator. Even our neighbors. We don’t even know the people who live and work in the same buildings as us. Strangers are above and below us always, and yet we accept that knowingly. And even if those people could become our friends, we don’t pursue it, because this is the real world. It’s not college anymore. Gone are the days of instant friends, founded solely on proximity. And gone are the days of the small towns, familiarity and the block parties of our childhood. Gone is the town where everyone knew everyone. And why did that have to go away in my life? Why did my life have to be here? And why can’t I accept the choices that brought me to this point? Does anonymity make people happier in real life, even when they’re famous and counting likes behind the screen? Why do we hide behind cell phone screens and headphones absorbing content created for us and not by us?
Why do we accept the way things are, the steady paychecks, the absurd rents? The mounting rates of depression and anxiety? We search for answers, but do we find them? Do we figure it out? Do we ever stop wanting more? We reject religion, but do we actually have an alternative? Why do we accept the way we are, instead of pointing fingers at the way things are? And why do we look around and blame the world and circumstance, before we look in the mirror?
We’re surrounded by people every day and we don’t even know their names. The lady on the bus. The guy who shares the elevator. Even our neighbors. We don’t even know the people who live and work in the same buildings as us. Strangers are above and below us always, and yet we accept that knowingly. And even if those people could become our friends, we don’t pursue it, because this is the real world. It’s not college anymore. Gone are the days of instant friends, founded solely on proximity. And gone are the days of the small towns, familiarity and the block parties of our childhood. Gone is the town where everyone knew everyone. And why did that have to go away in my life? Why did my life have to be here? And why can’t I accept the choices that brought me to this point? Does anonymity make people happier in real life, even when they’re famous and counting likes behind the screen? Why do we hide behind cell phone screens and headphones absorbing content created for us and not by us?
Why do we accept the way things are, the steady paychecks, the absurd rents? The mounting rates of depression and anxiety? We search for answers, but do we find them? Do we figure it out? Do we ever stop wanting more? We reject religion, but do we actually have an alternative? Why do we accept the way we are, instead of pointing fingers at the way things are? And why do we look around and blame the world and circumstance, before we look in the mirror?