A life with no narrative to drive forward

“I’m astounded to see us wanting to stay on this badly when there is no future for us here,” she whispered across the table, her chin resting in her palms, her elbows carrying the weight of her exhausted head.

A limp paper straw hung indeterminately from her lower lip, harmonising with the defeated timbre to her gaze.

Her tongue was covered in a taste of blended hay, only more bitter.

Among a long list of regrets she had, one was how she had been in her matcha phase at the time everything fell apart.

The consequence of this seemed to be that she was liable to suffer from this green potion until her last day on the planet; a day she played with the thought of in her mind in unhealthy ways.

She claimed to not mind seeing that day coming any time soon, at this point, and she didn’t shy away from reminding him this almost on the daily.

“Our present is our future,” he replied in a low voice, doubtful that this actuality appeared as comforting as he had hoped.

His encouragements had turned hollow weeks if not months ago, about the same time he had stopped believing in them himself.

They stared at each other for a momentary eternity, sharing the same tacit gaze they had thrown over this very table for the past two hundred days plus.

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By now, the two padel players consuming their regular orders at their regular table at their regular club understood they were living a life with no narrative to drive forward, going through this together with planet Earth’s ever shrinking human species.

A Groundhog Day type of situation in which everyone experienced the same thing but speaking up about it seemed to be one’s direct way to trouble, which was why individuals in the millions played along as if nothing.

The billions?

Already a thing of the past.

Didn’t even take a month from when things went South, but now the extinction took place at a lower pace.

Every human being would at any given point be a target, and no one knew who was up next, let alone why, but it was as if the eagerness to displace and kill for the sake of displacing and killing had weakened, which spared a fortunate individual here and there.

It even seemed as if humans were needed in this world in some capacity to uphold some level of normality.

Equally wanted and unwanted.

One’s ticket to another day appeared to be avoiding causing a stir.

So that’s what they all did.

Deliberately repeating habits and frequenting whereabouts as true to their lives of before as possible, with immense forced adjustments to take into consideration.

From one day to the next, they’d all been made redundant from the job market, for one major thing.

One morning, hordes of humanoids had strolled into receptions, offices, cafeterias, gas stations, government buildings, train stations, airports, shopping malls, factories, warehouses, power plants, construction sites, nursing homes, hospitals, fire stations, farms, mining sites, and what not.

Confidently going about occupying a truly diverse set of roles as the most natural thing, meticulously 1:1 replacing every human worker by a robot in a strike of real world copy and paste.

In a moment and a half, bewildered pilots were ripped out of cockpit seats, and startled receptionists got pushed sideways off of their counters.

High-end Japanese knives were snatched from the hands of horrified line cooks otherwise minding their own business over boards of morels and julienne’d spring onions.

Digital nomads in trendy café spots were dispassionately shooed away from their own laptops by metal alloy figurines their own size.

All of this obviously caused an initial level of panic difficult to fathom did you not see it with your own eyes.

Screams.

Piercingly loud ones, at it.

Scuffles.

Various means of tumultuous expression of resistance and a lot of running around in the style of headless chickens.

But as concerned species uncovered that the consequences of acting out were rather harsh and swift in this new world order, they quickly learned to conform as if their lives depended on it.

A whole new game of survival of the fittest.

Having stepped into involuntary early retirements, humanity had to find new ways to appear busy.

Inexplicable halts came across as suspicious; anything that could look like plotting or planning.

So did engaging in new activities and new social interactions, or spending too many hours outside of society’s sight, and the list goes on.

The beings who were still around at this point tended to start every morning and finish every evening in their respective homes, but not spend too vast amounts of time there between sunrise and sunset.

Most of them were conducting the same main activities every day, running roughly the same amounts and types of errands every week.

Neither too many, nor too few.

Not any two too extraordinary ones within the same fortnight; persistently striving to not go so far out of their own ways that they would draw attention to themselves.

It was exhaustingly complex, yet strikingly simple.

Play the game well, live another day.

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The issue with this game, though?

There was no sense of play to it.

Sameness.

Dread.

A whole lot of sameness.

A whole lot of dread.

Our two padel players, and most others still hanging on, had upscaled their hobbies and the frequency in which they were conducting other leisure undertakings such as eating out, taking slow walks in their areas, gazing over a nearby lake, feeding ducks, and the like.

Reading and re-reading their favourite books on benches in local parks.

Revisiting the same spots over and over, never exploring a new neighbourhood.

Lounging over lattes to kill time.

Anything to avoid causing stirs.

The trivialities were carried out with so much assumed indifference that most of the bunch who had made it till here, day 211 post the launch of the new world order, deserved Oscars for their performances.

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Like clock-work, our padeleurs arrived at their club at 10:35 every day in expectation of their daily two-hour game at 11. She arranged her ponytail and he sprayed it with the same amount of hairspray as every previous day – about three seconds on each side – before they both changed into trainers and started warming up backhands and forehands, smoothing into soft volleys at the net and higher-paced flats from the back of the court.

The precision of their shots had reached levels they could only have yearned for in the old world order.

At 10:51, Jim and Josh got in with the train, took out bottled electrolyte mixes from their backpacks, and entered the court.

This left about nine to ten minutes of informal rallies through all directions and angles of the court, before, again like clock-work, at 11:01, the “for the serve?” sounded, and Jim would initiate a ball over the net they all paid particular attention to.

Who would start today’s game was one of the rare unknowns left in the new world order and a glimpse of daily amusement to all four of them.

Back in the days of 40+ hours of weekly work commitments, playing padel every day was something the four could only have dreamt of.

Yet here they were.

Getting better every month at a sport they’d been flamingly stagnant at for years, against opponents who improved correspondingly, allowing the rally average per game to increase by at least a shot or two a week.

Passionate hobbyists turned semi-professionals overnight.

Although, to be fair, does the concept of professionalism carry any value in a world in which fiat currencies had turned powerless and you could literally order any meal from any restaurant and pick up any item to your liking from any store, as long as they were plausible choices benchmarked against your life in the old world order – a parameter assisting you in abstaining from causing stirs?

No, professionalism didn’t mean a thing here. The concept in its entirety had gone down the same drain as many other convictions and value systems guiding your path through the old world order.

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Our two racket athletes didn’t know much about their opponents despite spending about 133 minutes with them daily, before Josh and Jim would ritualistically shake their hands and take off by 13:05. At about this time, our team in question would go upstairs, request their daily ration of poke bowls, fries, a large diet coke for him and an iced matcha tea for her, then stroll downstairs to freshen up and back upstairs to ingest their order.

Engaging in much conversation with their opponents felt risky, as their social connections had been built around their shared sport and relatively last-minute before the world order shifted.

A few things they had picked up on so far was how Josh seemed to have sorrowfully lost several close family members to the new world order, and that he was going through significant mental fights to keep himself together.

One could only hope that the padel games provided him some sort of comfort.

Jim’s old tennis elbow had flared up and turned chronic thanks to their daily games, something that should have motivated him to take a break long ago, which he had for good reasons refrained from. He remained such a good sport that you wouldn’t be able to tell from his smash that he was in devastating pain. Other items occupying his mind probably assisted in hiding the discomfort even to himself.

Everyone fought their own battles these days.

It spoke to both Josh’s and Jim’s disadvantage that they hadn’t in time built the habit of having lunch at the club before taking the train back to their respective habitations only to leave them soon again after quick showers, because, like everyone else, they had no interest in staying out of sight of society’s eyes for any extended period during the day.

The club was rather lively around lunch, providing a certain level of daily recreation in a world deprived of this very element.

A lot of beings shared the space, knowing little to nothing about most of the others.

Deliberately not engaging in anything that could look remotely like grouping up.

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Countless times, the padelistas had sat here, deliberated situations that would’ve been worse to be caught in than this exact one, iced matcha and all considered.

They explored the mental image of losing Jim or Josh (which, realistically, could happen any day), leaving them with a court of three players playing games that would never remotely be the same, in a world where this would in fact be amongst their smallest issues.

They imagined truly horrendous situations, as if they weren’t already inside of one.

Like being chosen to be on some execution panel in charge of deciding who should go next, for example.

Or simply having access to the lists, knowing what was to come.

And they imagined random, non-extreme, merely consistently irritating scenarios.

Like for a lifetime being caught crocheting in a stinky, moth eaten sofa with cat fur and ladies and gents forty-plus years older than themselves serving bergamot tea with disturbingly many sweeteners while engaging in forced conversations and watching all 44 episodes of Keeping Up Appearances on repeat.

They imagined having been at the foot of a big lifestyle change when the new world order went into effect, such as having bought a dream home but not yet received the keys, or booked tickets to travel to another continent.

In such a situation, what would one really do?

Would following through with the plan or sticking to previous customs look least suspicious?

A realistic best guess is that you’d never find out, were you to find yourself in such a situation. You’d probably automatically go into the bucket of those to get rid of first.

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At a quarter to three, the padelistas would get up and get on with finding ways to spend time for the remainder of their day until dusk would commence and mark the end of their shift as Punch and Judy.

As soon as they had locked their front door behind them, they would want to snuggle up and cry as only cartoon crocodiles know how to cry.

Saddened. Fed up. In a state of having downright had it and wanting to release a portion of the heaviness before it would grow so big they’d no longer be able to carry it.

But even something as simple as that was out of the question, because obviously you cannot show up red-eyed in life tomorrow without arousing attention, the thing in the world you‘re trying to avoid by every means of your being.

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From a post-apocalyptic love story, you may have expected kisses and caresses, and you are probably longing for a happy ending to soothe your internal distress.

But beware that these expectations come from your life in the old world order.

In a world in which you find yourself caught in a loop you have no clue if you’ll ever manage to leave without losing your life, you have also lost most of your motivations as you knew them.

Staring indifferently at your chosen one from across a cafeteria table on day 211 is a sign you’re keeping up in an above-average sense of the term.

Post-apocalyptically lovingly doing what it takes to see another day together.