escalators and thoughts

all is quiet on new year's day...

it's an uncanny experience, wandering through the emptied streets of chatswood when the shops are shut.
in fact, something profound came to mind as i escalated up from the carpark to the ground level of the chase. something profound, but i'm not entirely sure what it was.

it was a feeling before it was a thought.

a feeling of letdown. similar to that when you return to a place of your childhood which is perfect in your memory, but when you come back years later, it's just a hollow shell of that memory. or when you really, really crave an incredibly specific food - only to buy it and bite into a semi-stale and bland piece of mediocrity...

a feeling similar to that. not so much because the vacated shopping mall had let me down in any way.
more a sense of something being revealed for what it was.

then came the words: a city is not a bunch of buildings - a city is people.

for all its crazed appeal and spending-frenzy-induction abilities, there was just a resounding tackiness to the seven levels of peach and gold wallpaper. without the lights, without the buzz of intersecting lives and fleeting conversation, this monolithic enterprise of materialism was just a bunch of tacky, dull columns and escalators.

the insanity of the compulsion to buy things has been overwhelming me. partly because it feels so cliche and token to be overwhelmed by such a repulsion. but it is more and more apparent. it's the old yet 'progressive' way to now fill the insatiable stomach of unfulfilled desire.

we long for things, inexplicable things. so we keep feeding ourselves the newest stimulation, to keep ourselves preoccupied from attending to the deep dissatisfaction which is festering by the day somewhere inside us. we're not entirely sure where it resides, or what has caused it, or what will displace it, or fill it, because we don't know ourselves well enough to investigate. we don't even know where to start. we're repelled by the traditional starting points, because they seem to cliche and we're cynical, and we scoff at the "alternative" ones, because, well, honestly, we'd probably look a little loopy.

but that's the thing. be skeptical, by all means. if that skepticism leads you to investigate things thoroughly. but cynicism cripples hope and possibility, and leaves a distance between you and actually doing something to change the situation.

the inaction bred by cynicism is devastating, not only to you, but to others.
a stagnant society is an inward-looking society. and not inward-looking in the self-examining reflection kind of way. introverted in the selfish kind of way.

a city is a people.
what kind of a people are we?