How many Insomnia cafes are there in Dublin? They seem to be everywhere I look, nestled in every corner of each street I walk through. Inside you can purchase the same generic fodder that passes for coffee house cuisine in this city. Why go to a different cafe, when you can go to the same one, no matter where you are?
Slowly but surely, everything is homogenising. Walking down O’Connell street is amazingly disappointing. Why do we need a Boots pharmacy in Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, Grafton street and the Jervis Shopping centre?
Shopping has become the national pastime. Having done away with the actual necessity of something, it is now simply for the pleasure of purchasing that we shop. We are encouraged as consumers to start spending again, to get this disintegrating economy back on its unsteady feet, one more defibrillation before hypoxia sets in. No longer are we citizens or individuals, but consumers, one giant heaving organism of insatiability for the unnecessary.
Some people like to say, it’s very well moaning but if you lived in some far flung Communist country, you would have no choice in anything at all you know! But how exactly do we have choice? From what I can see, all those little individual shops and businesses are being swallowed up by the big guns. I don’t see much of a difference between Tesco or Dunnes. Or Peats and Currys. They all sell the same things. Like a big amoeba they gobble up anything smaller than themselves and we are left with blandness. So we do have a large choice, unfortunately it’s pick A, A or A.
I think the muffin that you can buy in your local Centra/Spar/Londis/Costcutter’s/Mace/Tesco Express sums up the whole situation. It looks pretty tempting, with bits of chocolate here and there, but when you put it in your mouth it turns to tasteless sludge. We have an illusion of great variety but at the end of the day its all the same.
It is not working. We can’t go on getting cheaper and cheaper clothes/gadgets/food without something being wrong somewhere along the line. A lot of people are getting fucked over, while a few elite are reeling in the profits.
I comfort my disturbed thoughts by the knowledge that humans are heading toward extinction and things will eventually reach some sort of harmony. Nature always knows best. Ruthless and unemotional. Sort of like most bankers I guess.
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