A clip from a Craig Mod dispatch from downtown Tokyo.

Something happened in this last decade the world over — in consumerism and politics and city planning, in education (smartphones in the classroom) and the way we consume news (smartphones everywhere), in how addicted we are to dopamine (smartphones always in hand) and how incapable so many of us are of standing in quiet thought for even a ten-second escalator ride, in how there is an irrepressible and ravenous hunger to reduce complexity (“Vaccines, BAD!”) to the ten-second sound bite — that has infused the masses with a kind of thinking that, to those of us who aren’t eternally online, who haven’t binged Fox News for twenty years or who don’t clock six hours a day of TikTok, feels utterly foreign and unknowable. Not even in the “you’re just getting old” sort of way (though I’m sure there’s that, too), but more cleaving, more incongruous. There’s a growing collection of us who feel eternally gaslit, like the whole of the world has shifted into a configuration that can’t possibly be true, and yet here it is. These are our leaders? These are our policies? This is how we develop a city?

Posted mostly as a way of saying to myself no, see, it’s not just you.