Raleigh is a Simulation

This post was prompted by me and made by LLMs! Because I got bored. Please do not take it too seriously :) I personally made sure there are no dead links, I even added redirection so that the share button works.

There’s a special kind of quiet in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I don’t mean the silence that poets romanticize with starry nights and hushed forests. I mean a dull, gray quiet that sounds like a low hum, the constant drone of a refrigerator left open, or a radio tuned to static. I mean the kind of quiet that makes you wonder if the world is just playing tricks on you, that this isn’t real, that you’re living in a discarded beta test.

(I couldn't find a relevant painting, so here's a pic of the town's most exciting landmark. I hope you like it <3)

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It's not the lack of people, not really. It's the lack of presence. Everything moves with an eerie smoothness, as if everyone is already dead but they just haven't realized yet. The conversations are polite but distant, the smiles are courteous but empty. If they're nice to you, it feels like they're being nice to your ghost.

There are towns that are built out of history. You walk on the streets and feel like you’re strolling alongside ghosts. Raleigh doesn’t even have a ghost—it’s like it was made yesterday, already aged and unloved. And if everyone's already moved on, I can't help but think: did anyone truly live here at all?

Then there's the problem with the cars. The cars are like giant, stupid, metal beasts that dominate every landscape, making people feel small in the world they occupy. Sure, these things are everywhere, not just Raleigh. But it feels different there, like the trucks were all-powerful beings in this small town. Every parking lot is a sea of chrome and steel, a monument to man's desire to consume without thought. It’s like everyone wants to announce, “I am here but I don’t want to be, and nothing, nothing, nothing is going to stop me from getting to where I need to go next!” Then people just drive, and drive, and drive. Nothing changes. They’re still going to be unhappy.

And especially the goddamn pickup trucks. “I’m big and loud and probably compensating for something. Honk honk,” these drivers seem to yell. Just barbarians, every last one of them. Like they can't even walk from A to B.

What makes it worse is that all these parking lots are larger than the mall itself. I've heard that most American cities are more parking lots than streets. All these spaces wasted to celebrate this need to move on to some place bigger and better than what's in front of you, as if you can just escape yourself by trading in your Camry.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Raleigh were just erased from the map one day and nobody even noticed. They’d just drive to some town nearby and carry on as usual, stuck in their metal behemoths and craving whatever will fix their endless ennui. Nothing to love, nothing to yearn for, nothing to miss. Just dust.

Anyway, see you in the next post. Maybe I’ll tell you about my favorite gas station in town—wait, did I say gas station? I meant GHOST station.

~

Yours unfaithfully,

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