The plastic wrapper on a banana
I went to the little shop down the road earlier to grab a bit of fruit, and some absolute lunatic has wrapped a single banana in a thick layer of clear plastic. A banana. It already comes in its own wrapper. Nature literally gave it a jacket you can peel off with your bare hands, but some corporate shitesack in an office decided it needed a barcode and a safety warning.
It proper sums up the entire planet right now. We have made the modern world so unbelievably complicated that you need a bloody user manual just to exist.
Everything is a process. Everything has an app. You cannot just go to a pub and buy a pint anymore; you have to scan a stupid little square on the table, download a bit of software, put your credit card details in, and agree to sixty pages of privacy terms just so some spotty youth can bring you a warm lager twenty minutes later. It is a complete piss-take.
The blokes back home love it though. They get a proper sweat on over complexity. They think because they have five different remote controls and a smart fridge that tells them when they are out of milk, they are living in the bloody future. You are not living in the future. You have just surrendered your brain to a bunch of tech nerds who are laughing all the way to the bank while you sit there trying to update the firmware on your toaster.
We used to just do things. If you wanted to see a mate, you knocked on their door. If you wanted to buy something, you handed over some cash. Now, you have to navigate a maze of passwords, two-factor authentication, face scanners, and cookies. It is psychological warfare designed to keep you so distracted and stressed out by the small shite that you do not notice your life slipping away.
They call it progress. I call it a giant trap for total muppets. They have created a society of banana heads who cannot function without a screen telling them how many steps they have walked or how many hours they slept. Imagine needing a digital watch to tell you if you are tired. It is embarrassing.
The whole system is built by pen-pushers who need to justify their miserable little jobs. They create rules, forms, and compliance procedures just to keep themselves busy. If things were simple, we would realise we do not need half of these bastards. So they make it a nightmare. They twist everything into a knot and then charge you a fee to untie it.
I legged it to the tropics to get away from that exact circus. Out here, if I want to go for a swim, I walk to the water. If I want a bit of fish, I buy it off a bloke on the beach. No forms, no apps, and sod all bureaucracy. The total potatoes back home can keep their smart homes and their complicated, rule-bound, stressful little lives. They have built a cage out of paperwork and they are proud of the lock.
Go log off and see if you can remember how to breathe without an algorithm checking your heart rate.