Today we went to this coffee shop. And I love places like this. Over the years I have developed quite a lot of love for coffee—the smell of sweets, the warmth of the place, and so on. But today felt different. I would have loved it if we had visited this place five years ago; but honestly, not today, and that is somewhat a bummer.

One may come and ask: how can such a thing be possible—that I had always dreamed of our city having nice coffee shops and beautiful places with nice and amazing products; and just as the wish happens to come true, I grow to hate it? Well, I may have just started to understand.

The problem, you see, comes from the fact that it is no longer the coffee shop in the sense I would know. The previous understanding of a coffee shop has to be completely shattered for this new version to exist.

Imagine a coffee shop in the old days, where the place had identity and warmth. A coffee shop used to be a small business; it was operated by a few people who owned the place and were there. It wasn’t sophisticated in the sense we see today, and that made it possible for you to feel the authenticity. And also—question: why is it bad?

After the invention of social networks and the photograph-centric “spectacle” of places like Instagram, a game-changer happened. The coffee shop now had a competitive advantage if you took a photo and tagged the place. In those days, if you took a photo in a place like that, you would have made a clown of yourself—and worse, people would have become very angry with you. “Why have you taken a picture of me? Why did you photograph my place?”

Not only did this change, but owners started to realize something else: the more they decorated their places, the more free advertisement would happen for them. And so they started decorating and decorating, until eventually decorating became something professional, and the idea of taking pictures became extremely important. People started competing on having pictures of themselves on social media (as not everyone is born with the gift and resources of capturing real photography); hence the world changed.

New places would be opened with expensive décor—something so unusual in the previous sense of the world. And then, also, the existence of social media required that you eat beautiful food. Designing food became important too. Can you imagine how these things changed everything?

Instead of having a warm place, you now had to have a fully “designed environment,” optimized for capturing an “audience” within another universe (a.k.a. social media).

This made one thing very clear: doing this is not the kind of thing a small business without competition can do. And so these places became increasingly operated by corporations. Places were designed by third-party studios. Staff became professionals detached from the place. You could no longer go somewhere to see the owners. These sorts of luxuries faded over time.

And with that, the world became a whole other place. The place that used to have identity, warmth, and a sense of friendliness—something that felt like it was owned by your friend—became just another corporation with organizational charts and policies, branding, and affiliations we are too familiar with. You would walk into a place where you know no one; the staff is not only unknown, but even detached, and prone to change every time you visit. If you could order a homemade item before, now you are left with manufactured, identical items. One might believe them to be awesome—and I would also acknowledge their quality superiority—but they are, by all means, detached from humanity.

Yet this is not the end of all this. A new revolution is to take place here.

From a humane place to a cold Shop of Identity

If previously identity was something you had on your own, in the age of social media that was changed into something you could borrow for a moment.

Tintin shows a fairly strange scene in which he visits the USSR, and there the factories seem to be working nonstop. Upon his visit, however, he discovers something spooky about it all and tries to find the cause of all the walking sounds (as he does not understand them), only to find out that everything has been a prop.

What has shocked me is living in a world where it is now important to be visually stunning, but not practically important; and henceforth the world has changed into the stage and prop of social media. Here, the new generation of places doesn’t care if their services require anything special—but whether social media requires them.

And I believe this is how we ended up with the experience-centric lifestyle of today (even the fact that the word “lifestyle” now exists). When you are required to live inside the spectacle, and this life is conditioned by the metrics of social media, you are forced to make as many posts as you can. When you are measured by the number of experiences you have, the experience itself has to be optimized.

If you want to optimize an experience, what would be the essence? Well, a few things:

How expensive the experience is—in other words, how difficult it is for others to copy it. How easily can they also have it and thus render your experience “normal”? Then: how visually stunning it is. How good will it look on your profile? And finally—how will it show you?

Here, the experiences that shine are traveling—because it is visually stunning and hard to do, and also because it makes you an adventurous person. That is gold. Another thing is beautiful places. Years ago, I was shocked to learn that there are gardens you can rent just to take beautiful pictures. When photos become the currency, the background becomes an investment.

This is the reality of the world we live in. And so, in this world, we no longer need to have our own beautiful things—because ten good pictures of something that belongs to us are not as valuable as ten pictures of ten different things that no one cares whether we own or not.

This is when a coffee shop stops being a place you go to talk with your friend and becomes something else entirely: a place to rent your identity for the day. People go there so they can take their pictures and be somebody that day.

It doesn’t matter how they treat you, or whether they are nice or not. You go there so you can take your pictures, show the world that you can afford it—that you are fancy, and adventurous.

This is what I hate most about it. People go to these places to take profile pictures. This is literally people going there to buy identity, since our modern ways of living have perhaps made us forget that we had identities of our own—and that they were not for sale.

And the ship itself

Now, the other thing that is hard for me to handle in this world is that things are rapidly changing, and within these changes different aspects are hiding. One is that everything we know is made of many things, and there is a holistic relationship between the elements of each system.

Recently, I am experiencing the world in a fairly different fashion than before. It is no longer a static picture, but perhaps a stage in the making—like a chemical reaction. When you cook something, it transforms from state A to B in a few minutes. When something is boiling, the state is special, but you know it is temporary.

What I am seeing in the world feels like that: too much change and instability all at once, without ever arriving at a conclusion. If we take the “Cosmic Calendar” approach here, it becomes clear that what we are in—within humanity’s timeframe—is only a blink of an eye. But who knows how it will end?

In this great transformation, I see things shape-shifting like a ship of Theseus, over and over, both externally and within themselves. It feels like a poison destroying the things I loved.

Things have changed to feed “Profilicity” (Hans-Georg Moeller) instead of authenticity—and you can see it everywhere. LEGO was intentionally simple in design, made for imagination and play. The sets were named “LEGO Systems” and “LEGO Technic.” You would learn mechanics by playing with them.

These days, LEGO has turned into static “display” material—to make flowers and decorative objects. Boring.

Software used to be Photoshop, C++, Logic Pro—things you used to make things. Tools for creativity. Today, software means apps to reserve a taxi or buy tickets. They all feel poisoned in the same way as the USSR in Tintin: empty inside, made for pictures, display only.

Boring.