Picture yourself as a pakistani immigrant working as an oil driller in oman. You have little to no contact with the outside. Your entire existance is working at the oil plant, practicing islam best you can and coming back to shore in one of these small "towns" nudged between cliffs so dry and barren they look like part of mars. The one thing uniting all of the various immigrants is islam, so these towns are essentially small mosques surrounded by the hovels of families. Everything comes by sea, the sheer cliffs are impossible for even bedouins to traverse so fish is the only thing native to the region.

Packaged like the imported food you arrive at the mosque to feel the warmth of humanity, maybe you have a very distant wife living in the town, maybe youre alone like many other men, maybe youre not even a pakistani but a hindu trying to mentally separate yourself from the sea of muslims you swim in daily. One night you see barefoot children playing football behind one of these mosques. The electric lights shine ontop of worn out cement walls, and as the settlement is so small and isolated, the night is pitch black. So the children playing football, the gravel and the walls look like the only thing that exists amongst an infinite abyss.

Do you embrace this existance? Do you see this moment of fresh air and sincere emotion as the most beautifull thing that exists in an empty universe? or do you deny it? do you obsess over the internet, the outside world, its wars and politics, and lament endlessly over your isolation from it all?

Who are you? where are you? does it even matter anymore? is there a God? is there anything beyond these mountains barely visible against the night sky? are your memories real, or has the world only come to exist now, here, right now?

The night air is thick with the buzzing of electric lights. They're not a memory. Youre not there of course. Youre here. Reading this

Picture yourself as a pakistani immigrant working as an oil driller in oman. You have little to no contact with the outside. Your entire existance is working at the oil plant, practicing islam best you can and coming back to shore in one of these small "towns" nudged between cliffs so dry and barren they look like part of mars. The one thing uniting all of the various immigrants is islam, so these towns are essentially small mosques surrounded by the hovels of families. Everything comes by sea, the sheer cliffs are impossible for even bedouins to traverse so fish is the only thing native to the region.

Packaged like the imported food you arrive at the mosque to feel the warmth of humanity, maybe you have a very distant wife living in the town, maybe youre alone like many other men, maybe youre not even a pakistani but a hindu trying to mentally separate yourself from the sea of muslims you swim in daily. One night you see barefoot children playing football behind one of these mosques. The electric lights shine ontop of worn out cement walls, and as the settlement is so small and isolated, the night is pitch black. So the children playing football, the gravel and the walls look like the only thing that exists amongst an infinite abyss.

Do you embrace this existance? Do you see this moment of fresh air and sincere emotion as the most beautifull thing that exists in an empty universe? or do you deny it? do you obsess over the internet, the outside world, its wars and politics, and lament endlessly over your isolation from it all?

Who are you? where are you? does it even matter anymore? is there a God? is there anything beyond these mountains? are your memories real, or has the world only come to exist now, here, right now?

The night air is thick with the buzzing of electric lights.