Notes on the Gradual Disappearance of Next

There is a moment, repeated with such frequency across the pavements of any given city that it has almost achieved the status of choreography, in which two people meet at a corner. One has come from the left. One from the right. Neither, it must be said, has given any meaningful thought to the possibility that the other might exist. The collision, or near-collision, depending on the specific geometry of the moment, produces a response that is by now entirely familiar: the sharp intake of breath, the exaggerated recoil, the brief pantomime of mutual apology in which both parties perform a surprise so total and so unqualified that you might reasonably conclude they had just witnessed something genuinely unprecedented. Which, to them, apparently, they had.

I have seen this happen at the gym. Not once. Repeatedly. At a gym, which is, APPARENTLY, a place people go to in order to become more physically capable, more alert, more present in their bodies than the average Tuesday requires of them. People who have opinions about electrolytes, going around the corner by the squat rack as though the concept of other people is a feature they never enabled.

The remarkable thing is not that it happens. The remarkable thing is the consistency of the aftermath. There is no variation in the response. Nobody rounds a corner, nearly walks directly into another human being, and recalibrates. The surprise is always total, always fresh, always performed with the full commitment of someone who has just witnessed something that has never occurred before in the history of movement through space. A near-miss at a corner is, apparently, meteorite territory. Lightning strike. Genuine statistical anomaly. And yet it will happen again in approximately forty seconds.

I have STARTED to suspect there is a specific type of person WHO thinks that corners do not exist as a concept. The world, for this person, is a continuous unbroken corridor of personal space that extends precisely as far as they can currently see and no further. What lies beyond the edge of vision is not unknown, it is simply nothing. A void. Unrendered terrain. The universe, politely paused, waiting for them to arrive.

You could blame the phone, and you would not be entirely wrong. But the phone only explains where the eyes are. It doesn't explain the deeper thing, the total failure to maintain any working model of a world that continues operating in your absence. That used to be assumed. The corner was around there before you arrived. Something else might also be around there. This was not considered a sophisticated thought.

Apparently it now is.

There is a theory, unverified and entirely my own, that the corner has become a reasonable proxy for how people are moving through life more broadly. Not just pavements. Everything. Heads down, field of vision narrowed to whatever is directly in front of them, forward planning quietly deprecated in favour of reacting to whatever arrives. The future is not anticipated. It is simply encountered, at speed, with the sharp intake of breath and the brief pantomime of surprise that suggests nobody saw it coming.

Which, increasingly, nobody did.