Return to Freedom: A Traveler's Thoughts on Life, Love and the Fate of the World by Mathijs Koenraadt

Author:Mathijs Koenraadt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction; Philosophy
Publisher: Morningtime
Published: 2018-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

8

Cities Are the End of People

“Cities are the end of people!” implored a Lithuanian woman in her twenties. She and her husband had returned to the Baltic countryside after spending a year struggling for a life in Paris. “We sometimes rented out a room in our apartment to tourists. The people that came to visit us were always excited about Paris, believing the city was very romantic. But we didn’t think Paris was romantic at all. Where we lived, people pissed on the streets. Only rich people that can have anything they want really enjoy it, but the majority of us either accept to live in shit or leave. We left.”

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The great number of faces we encounter in major cities bombard our senses. Faces cease to be attached to human beings, but to living furniture. They become moving wallpaper at the edge of our world. Reduced to things, we come to see the defaced masses more as a target for exploitation than as an opportunity for genuine affection. In defense of our sanity, we retreat into smaller, manageable tribes of like-minded people, our social cliques. It is delusional to think cities promote social progress. Instead, cities promote a continued perversion of society.

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Rather than experiencing nature, we spend most of our time living within the confines of man-made structures. We’ve shut ourselves in. We breathe air-conditioned air, experience in-door climates, interact with factory-built objects and gaze at artificial horizons, the roads, and walls of our concrete prisons.

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Urban civilization not only allowed for bigger populations of people to live together, but they also made the lives we can live smaller. Compared to nomadic hunters and gatherers, modern people have voluntarily boxed themselves in, forgoing the freedom to roam free. Nowadays, mega-cities demand that citizens pacify their innate, wilder urges. We achieve this by submerging our brains in, for example, tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, chocolate, drugs, or sugar. Young people seeking to escape the concrete boundaries of their cities drown themselves in alcohol, making them forget how boring the night would have been without it. Cities promote virtual entertainment as substitutes to real life. We watch televised soap operas to compensate for a lack of relationships. Social media occupies our attention spans in single-minute intervals. Not human touch, but push notifications make us feel needed. Someday, we will desperately try to wake up from this urban nightmare and realize we are already awake.

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If the rules of hunters can be as straightforward as to kill or be killed, the mantra of city dwellers goes to manipulate or be manipulated.

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When passing through a city’s financial district, we can already see what the cemeteries of the future will look like, each skyscraper aptly fitted with a staircase to heaven.

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Ancient Egyptians once built their great pyramids, but only to never build them again. We must accept the possibility that someday our insatiable urge to build skyscraper cities will also come to an end. Like pyramids, skyscraper cities will prove to be historical phenomena. Today, modern man questions the economic utility of pyramids.

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