Today, I experienced the fastest way to go nuts from our technologically developing society to an extent that I almost felt like I was a psycho who was just unleashed out of his Cuckoo’s Nest into the horrors of reality.

So what and how long does it take to transform a 21 year old me into 81 a year old madman who grumbles about the extent to which our society has become, and the scarce state of the modern human condition in general? Well, the recipe is simple:

  1. Live 3 months in a rural area with minor access to technology
  2. Read a good portion of Karl Marx’s Capital (just this book might suffice to go mad)
  3. Take daily walks in nature (not to necessarily ‘enjoy’ it, just contemplate on how alienated your are from it)
  4. At the end of these 3 months, go to the nearest international airport

On the fourth step, I felt like I was in an alienating ‘futuristic’ technology dystopia filled in neon lights, banners, screens, advertisements, and so on. With sympathetic looking people walking through the airport terminal, with whom you hope to establish eye contact, but since they are constantly gazing down at their phones, your existence does not even occur to them — as if they are aliens who were castrated from all earthly feelings.

As I passed through a long line of walk-escalators, there was a looping 20-second commercial playing on lcd screens throughout its whole length; hundreds of which extended throughout the ~500 meter walk that I had to make from the train station to the terminal of Fiumicino airport in Rome, Italy. This 20-second looping movie-clip commercial, which I granted permission to commodify my mind during the ~40 times that I had to re-watch it; depicted the ultimate fetishized commodification of nature, that perhaps only schizophrenics only dreamt of. It was a mozzarella cheese commercial; with cows in green fields, an utopian representation of nature, and a lady with teeth whiter than the way death is black — who takes a bite of a commodified mozzarella, made out of nature exploitation and lactose from millions of hormonally dysfunctional cows who live their short 6-month lives in factory slaughterhouses. But at least the stock prices of these global food corporations is going well.

The commodification of all spheres of human life is truly noteworthy, and while I was aware of this previously, it all now revealed itself to me. The human is turned into a quanta that is directly hooked to the capitalist machine that quantifies and determines desires, sentiments, personalities, fears, and wants. Humans are reduced to mere symbolic representations on corporate quarterly earnings, and while this is the darkest state of nihilism that humans might find themselves in, our fetishized global culture consumes commodified form of existence, and is too numb to think about the state of this human condition. This is the slavery of our commodity-fetishized futurism capitalism.

But very soon I’ll be back in New York, and join the commodified consumer-herd-mentality while most likely forgetting the comprehension that books and moments of solitude with nature have gifted me over the summer.