Amerika

Clever humans! So fascinated with their own abilities, they created cities that — had they been thinking more clearly — they would have realized are deathtraps.

By treating the world like a material substrate to be acted on by the human machine, we made ourselves into machines. We live repetitive lives doing repeated tasks. We exist surrounded by evidence of others and their constant messages. Politics, socializing and the economy more resemble acts of terror holding us in suspense than sustaining forces that make us think life is stable or good.

On top of this, sleep itself is threatened, and has been for centuries by our air pollution. Perhaps the dazed and broken analytical thinking of modern people arises from the air pollution that deprives us of sleep:

Householders in known pollution hotspots were almost 60 per cent more likely to suffer sleep deprivation over a five-year period compared with those breathing the cleanest air, according to research.

Academics said that the damage caused to the respiratory system and central nervous system — commonly associated with exposure to pollution — had a big impact on sleep.

If we had to describe our modern world, we might use the adjective toxic. We welter in the waste of others, including their memetic waste through advertising, contentless conversation, televisions on every corner, noise and dust. Personalities, made unstable by a lack of place, also become toxic.

And now we see that we are the walking dead: people saturated in air pollution, unable to sleep, with our brains degenerating as cars, factories, planes and furnaces blast us with their smoke. Lobotomized, we are too exhausted and bewildered to notice that our situation is fatal, so we soldier on, like drunks in the fog just trying to find our way home.

Tags: air pollution, brain damage, central nervous system, pollution