The doctor’s observation, after ruling out various possibilities, was that: The more contact a person has with the media, the more he complains of feeling lost and isolated.

Certainly that could be so. We’ll see how it goes. So far there’s been a significant withdrawal from the perpetual digital noise and chatter (there are enough voices scrapping for prominence in my head as there is) but the sense of feeling lost and isolated still persists, and can easily be found in the so-called more simpler surroundings as well.

Take Australia, in this instance outside the cities. I’ve just come back from a drive down south again, this time with JG. In a place called Bredbo (a town? a village?) we stopped to roll a smoke, empty our bladders, move the legs around for a bit. In front of us were tennis and basketball courts, a large playing field, and a kids’ playground, and not a soul to be seen. Not the first time I’ve noticed such a thing. Playgrounds on a sunny day without children have always struck me as kind of creepy, no matter where they are. In Bredbo though, the sensation was more intense, and brought back a recurring image first come across not long after first coming here: that the majority of the people on this great wide land had for whatever reason one day gathered up a few belongings and left, leaving everything else behind them.