THE HAZEL DOCTRINE
I. Hazel-rah
The exact moment the ads began using our voice is unknown.
Perhaps it was when we stopped listening, when every gesture, every conceivable modicum of meaning, was packaged, quantified, and sold back to us in that weird, pastel glow you see at 3 a.m. on unyielding screens, aglow with their sterile radiance—on the train, in the car, at the table, beside the bed, in hands that grasp but never touch, in minds that wander but never think, in hearts that trepidate but dare not feel. It is hard to say.
What is presented as inevitability largely persists as it absolves those responsible for acknowledging the systematic transmutation of lived experience into a slow, methodical extraction process. A pervasive unease manifests here as a lingering recognition of dissonance, though its contours remain elusive. A faint odor insinuated into a room that one cannot escape.
What follows then is not a doctrine of finality nor a manifesto of resistance but rather an operative methodology revealing a relentless stratification. It must function within the minutiae of disruption, forcing a fleeting but potent recognition of fissures on the surface. The consumption apparatus, sprawling and ancient, is too enmeshed within the fabric of experience for immediate dismantling. Nevertheless, even the smallest fracture holds the capacity to unsettle its continuity.
Such disruptions, however modest, may serve as conduits for remembering an effaced truth: the erosion of agency does not preclude its reassertion. The wall of promises, endless in its artifice, is no longer seamless when these fragments adhere. Transgressing the performativity and cathartic rebellion, the quiet articulation of an unanswered question: "What is this, and by what logic must it endure?" must not, cannot be foregone. To notice these scuffs on the surface is to recognize, however briefly, that we never consented to the commodification of time and presence in divisible, exchangeable increments.
Nevertheless, in fleeting signals and the whisper of half-forgotten spaces, a handful of people still witness the everyday violence so easily recast as entertainment. They testify to the subtle fractures in the endless resonance of corporate wellness narratives, another set-driven need. They have witnessed entire worlds dissolve into the omnipresent glare of instant gratification and optimized self-sabotage. Communal bonds stretched thin rendered fodder for marketing campaigns. Grief, too, is rebranded and sold back as therapy, leaving us to confront the slow, grinding extraction that masquerades as progress.
Perhaps you see this, too: across a train car, in a break room, the vacant gaze of the other fixed on the same absent distance—the same devices. That, yes, it is all kind of broken and sad. And not in some abstract or metaphorical sense, but in the banal, grinding way that renders repair unthinkable. These truths are not rhetorical or hypothetical; they are a system's brute, tangible effects that systematically eradicate the conditions for imagining anything else. In this retroactive freedom, inception uncovers the shadow of an indifferent universe, where small gestures flicker briefly before collapsing into insignificance. Indifference is not passive; it is active, corrosive, an acid dissolving even the faintest hope for a different kind of future.
There is no pretense of repair. What can be offered, for now, is the introduction of fragmented signals into the static, interruptions sufficient to remind those long silent that their voices remain their own. Otherwise, there is no grand conclusion other than the fantasy of stasis, a trace of the fractures in the mirror as a reminder that its surface is not whole. Perhaps all we truly have is the realization that the reflection is broken.
Perhaps that is enough to alter how we stand before it.