To the life of hyper-fast meals (I wrote about the topic last week) we must add, as paradoxical and delirious as it may seem, the sedentary paradigm of delivery existence. While stress devours our soul in a kind of 24/7 temporality where every occupation demands more speed, when we arrive home, immobility stalks us. Translated into plain language; we live so overwhelmed by work and with our senses so exhausted due to obsessive connection to the internet and email that, once at home, well, you tell me who the hell is going to cook, read a bit, or even talk to their partner. The outside world is a perpetual GP, overflowing with music and noise, and we would like to reserve our home from the boom of the world to turn it into a sanctuary: but too often, either from fatigue or because we can't take it anymore, it ends up becoming a tomb.
With my life partner, in these situations of exasperating nocturnal laziness, we share the same apparition, an identical elephant in the room: "Come on, shall we order a Glovo?". The panopticon (yes, it's very scary!) often gets ahead of us and the mobile alert has already scanned the stomach gurgle with an alert suggesting we repeat an order of sushi or our favorite sandwiches. First, we feign stoic resistance: "no, come on, we have things in the fridge and then we end up throwing market vegetables in the trash." Pure and simple verbal fluff: we will end up falling. Hypocrites that we are, we establish the rules of methadone: "Well, let's order twice a week at most, okay?". Your aunt on a scooter. We will end up falling into the clutches of delivery existence at least four times. It's two clicks and half an hour: unbeatable.
But all of this has consequences, and neither the company in question nor our favorite restaurateurs should get angry with me (I send enthusiastic hugs to the sandwich shops Santo Porcello, Chivuo's, and Good Shit Vegan Kebabs, among many others). We go out much, much less. We stroll much, much less (strolling does not imply moving on foot through the city with an established direction; it is an absolutely different act; it means improvising, walking in the absurd direction that the feet decide, establishing disconcerting routes). This also means that our senses adapt. We look at the city less, much less; which means that its plurality of smells and sensations end up moving away from our tempting domestic predictability. The delivery existence is the lazy counterweight to the hyperactive office life: this Punyalada is not about moralizing or scaring people, but the dialectic in question is a bit like schizophrenia.
The delivery existence is the lazy counterweight to the hyperactive office lifeYou will wrinkle your nose with all the reason in the world. Lately, I've been coming up with quite pessimistic punyaladas and with some tics more than close to technophobia. I can perfectly hear the reader's voice telling me: "well buddy, if the existence of workdays seems stressful to you, please take it easy and, if you order too many Glovo during the week, then please cook despite how lazy you are, I lived through The War and I'm not crying in the corners". I accept the amendment, and I whip my back, but it's not easy and it's not cured by spending a morning at a spa or taking meditation courses. I know all this is first world problems, and blah blah blah: but, what can we do, they are ours. The existing traffic between life against the clock and a home where we subsist more and more quietly accommodating does not seem like a minor issue to me. We live between the sprint and the nap: and this worries me.
I don't offer solutions, coward that I am. I entertain myself trying to put thought contours to a problem. They say that's what my old profession is about, you see.
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