Disillusionment and dullness

Recently, even when I've got no expectations, I manage to impress myself with just how disillusioned I can become towards events. Recently, I attended a really excellent, energetic; and frenetic Machinehead concert which made me feel incredibly and vividly alive.

It wasn't a profound event. It wasn't life changing, earth shattering, or a turning point in my life. It was a fucking good time; and I'd love to have those fleeting moments again in the future.

I'm not here to write about something depressing, or even motivate myself, or someone else; out of a rutt. This piece of writing is about how; as I experience profoundly enjoyable events, the lustre, sparkle, and gloss that everyday life's banality once possessed grows duller and duller.

It isn't something you can polish to restore the shiny, either. I find decreasing satisfaction in things. A band recently released a new album. I'd enjoyed their prior music. Their latest offering? Not so shiny.

It is difficult to articulate exactly what I mean. Perhaps these interpretations of the material world are a chemically charged phase of "negative" emotions, or perhaps it is an exploration for the profound in the every day junk that passes by.

Yet, if you try to interpret and marvel upon, for instance; the exquisite way castors function on a hotel bed; people give you strange looks and shuffle away from the couch you're sitting on; which doesn't happen to have any castors to aid in moving it about the room.

Castors aren't usually shiny; but sometimes they are plated with chrome; which makes the plastic appear to be a more expensive material.

This sense of disillusionment at things tends to come from the knowledge that most manufactured objects are indeed a facade. Marble "sheets" on a bank's building are just that. The building itself isn't made of marble. Its an illusion. It is a dilution of the marble, palatial expanses of antiquity.

The hardware store isn't industrially styled because it works best that way. It's made to convey the image that its a working place where you too could forge Excalibur; given just the right anvil and hammer.

@nerdfury recently commented that cars are all the same, owing to economies of scale and what is most efficient.

Increasingly, this occurs with software, too, and games, and other digital media - there's a simplification in the hopes of attracting a particular niche market. It works in mass production environments like the automotive world, or your basic industrial widgets, nuts and bolts, etc; but there's no added cost in software to change some variables, or even randomise them to ensure that there's permeability for those who desire.

Standardisation can be a good thing - it would, for example, be very disappointing if you purchased screws to repair something; and they were just the wrong size. Consistency is good in some arenas, but in others, its not so great.

Do 400 people want to wear the exact same tie-dyed shirt?

With each and every experience I have, new; repeated, old; the disillusionment, and dullness seems to flourish. Perhaps, one day, within that steely, grey cloud of cynicism, profound colours will emerge and I'll see the capitalist society that surrounds us as something else.