A population numbed, dazed, present-but-not-present – had it happened overnight it would be a sci-fi horror movie. And if you looked up from your phone for long enough, you might notice it’s started already…
Nobody’s home. Not in the young woman with the big headphones cycling against the light. Not in the person in the middle of the crossing staring at their phone, or the person talking to someone who’s not there and ignoring the one they’re pushing in the baby carriage, or the distracted driver who doesn’t seem to notice those cyclists and pedestrians. So I move through a world of people who are not all the way there and sometimes hardly there at all – and who don’t seem to want anyone else to be there either.
Aversion to direct contact with others has become so normal in my home town – San Francisco, a city swallowed up by Silicon Valley – that I’ve become avoidant myself after too many encounters with people who seem to find it bafflingly transgressive to engage with any casual remark or question from a stranger, and mostly fail to respond. I wander in a city that feels ghostly, depopulated, even when bodies are on the street, and I feel like a ghost myself in the lack of acknowledgment, in others’ blank reluctance to utter even those tiny “excuse me” negotiations to get around someone or warn someone.
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