One man in suit and tie brushes my shoulder. "Sorry." he said, before hurrying off, presumably to his workplace where he will work at until his life force has all but escaped from him. He is not alone. They are all over the streets; people who are nothing more than puppets of society, mannequins without souls. Their eyes were lifeless globes of void. There is no drive in those eyes - that drive has long since been devoured by the beast called Conformity. They work not towards anything, not for anything, but simply because they have to. I see it all, and wonder why more people are not seeing this. This is the zeitgeist of our society, a dead droning hive-mind moving towards nothing, striving towards nothing, but Thanatos. Gone is that brilliance of ages past, replaced by nihilistic hedonism and cruel realism. The self blurs in the backdrop of modernity.
Will I stand down, let the beast devour me? Or will I take my stand, my last stand perhaps, and battle? For all my heroism, I know deep down in the darkest reaches of my soul that someday I, too, will fall to the beast. I will succumb under the weight of Conformity, lose myself, and join them. Individual thoughts are never strong enough to face the will of the Crowd.
As the crowd at the crossroads continued to pass me, I felt my soul draining away. "It is the beginning of the end. I am joining this farce, and I wouldn't even notice soon enough. Very well, take me, you beast! Put the flames of my passion out!", I mused. I can already feel I fading away into We. My thoughts were slowly melding into the hive-mind. I felt myself disintegrating.
The crowd began to subside. The pedestrian lights turned red. I am alone once again. I felt my thoughts flowing back in. My evanescence began to lighten up. I could feel myself materializing again, breaking free from the Crowd. My existence is re-affirmed, yet my existence fades away. Society no longer recognizes me, but I do. I exist again, but We cease to be. My thoughts are my own, for now.
But in the recesses of my mind, I know. Someday, I will cease to exist.
I laughed as I mused and hurried off the crossroads.
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