Thursday, November 27, 2014

The Modern Li(f)e

What I went through today:

Woke up
Lunch date
Explored an unfamiliar area (in my car)
Home, collected the laundry
Gym
Grocery shopping
Home, blogging this now
(Later)
Dinner
Watch TV while I fold the laundry
Paint/ Read
Sleep.

Whenever I was in between activities - traveling from one place to another or simply taking a break, a creeping sensation of hollowness sank in.  It's strange because you could hardly say that I am a lonely girl. 

I wonder if this is what the 'golden age' has come to.  We occupy ourselves with activity after activity - work, joining the gym, housework, socialising, et cetera, et cetera... in order to fill up this void.  I used to subconsciously meet up friend after friend to fill up my free time.  It's like, I was afraid to be alone with my own feelings or something. 

What is this?  Is this the result of our shaping the world into something we can't handle?  With modernisation and development, we compete with each other - our workload increases drastically and we are left with little more than work to keep us occupied.  But wait, I wasn't working today.  So what is it?

Marc Auge coined the term 'non-place'.  An airport is a 'non-place'.  A shopping mall is a 'non-place'.  The journey in between one place to another, is also a 'non-place'.  Judging from my schedule today, more than half my time was spent in a 'non-place'.  Could this have contributed to my feeling of hollowness?  Afterall, a 'non-place' is devoid of emotion and memory.  Maybe I've simply spent too much time in a space that does not make me feel anything. 

Or perhaps this feeling is, merely an invention of my own - and has nothing to do with the way my life is shaped, or the way my surrounding environment is shaped, or my schedule.


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