non-places

I’ve been spending a lot of my time in what Marc Augé refers to as non-places. Non-places are very subjective. A place to one person can be a non-place to another. A non-place is characterized by two things:

  • does not hold enough significance to the person to be regarded as a place.
  • humans maintain a sense of anonymity.

Places that I think of as non-places:

  • airports
  • hotels
  • movie theaters
  • shopping malls

We experience time differently in these non-places. I sometimes think about it the same way I think about cash. For some reason whenever I have cash it feels like free money, even though I worked just as hard for it. I don’t know why, but cash feels less valuable than having money in my bank account. This causes me to spend it in different ways.

Time in non-places feels the same way to me. I know it has the same amount of value, but I do not feel like it does. (which I think is in the vein of Mark Fisher’s idea of non-time… but honestly still trying to decipher what it is. 🤯)



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