A traveller gazes blankly into a sea of identical black chairs in an airport lounge.
Without thought, she flops into the nearest one. Faceless people busily bustle into a passing blur as she half-listens for a boarding call she knows she’ll forget as soon as she hears it.
She’s nowhere and anywhere at once. She is in what Marc Augé called a non-place[1]. A transitional in-between zone that is devoid of any memory or connection. It’s manufactured, hollow; a void. In this, she will only ever be an anonymous traveller, just passing through.
In the late twentieth century, that was unsettling enough. But today, what if our minds have become non-places too?
Think about your day. Now think about the moments you skipped over, the moments in-between the ‘real’ moments, the idle scrolling, the half-read posts, that random auto-played video that just blurred on from the first. We spend hours each day scrolling through mental hallways with no doors and no windows.
You open your phone to check the weather.
Buzz. A notification pops up. You reflexively tap.
Blink. You’re watching a stranger unpack a haul of kitchen gadgets that you’re now totally convinced you can’t live without.
Blink. The time! It can’t have been 15 minutes, I was just checking the weather. There’s no way. It can’t have… and I never even checked the weather.
Sound familiar? You’ll forget a non-place as soon as you swipe to the next thing. You don’t leave a mark here, and it leaves no mark on you. The moment simply slips into the void, it disappears, leaving no trace. It’s like it was never there.
If Augé’s non-place is the supermarket or the motorway, our new mental non-places are the ambient buzz of notifications, the infinite feeds, the swirl of commentary that demands your attention but means nothing. Nostalgia is but a backdrop for marketing. As they say, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product, we know this. And yet, we passively let our attention be sold to the highest bidder for a fleeting flicker of novelty in return. Time slides away.
Supermodernity, Augé’s word for our fast, overabundant present, promised us frictionless connection and unrestricted access to the world. It delivered, in a way. But what we are in now is ultramodernity; the age of mental non-places that have been so perfectly engineered, that we don’t even notice we’re inside. We have jailed ourselves in limbo.
An airport lounge is a non-place precisely because it’s not meant to be remembered. In it, the traveler’s mind is already on the destination, on the ‘thing that matters’. But in mental non-places, when the destination is missing too, there is no ‘thing’ that matters at the end. Nothing matters.
The journey is all we have, but ultramodernity has stolen this too. We endlessly loop through feeds and tabs and updates, never quite bored enough to find something else to do, just eerily subdued. We are living in a perpetual layover with no departure and no arrival gates. Our lives are increasingly lived adrift in mental non-places: thoughts scatter, ideas evaporate, closeness slips through our fingers. The mind’s capacity to dwell, to hold still long enough to feel, to share presence with another, is fraying into noise.
We might not have lost our agency, maybe we’ve just stopped noticing we have it. In a non-place, you don’t choose where to linger. There’s nothing to linger for. In a mental non-place, the same is true. And yet: what if any non-place can be turned into a place? What if meaning is just attention, paid on purpose?
It’s uncomfortable to admit how much we’ve drifted. But noticing might be the start of remembering. After all, there’s no clear map out of the terminal. Keep drifting, and the void will grow. Or pause. Sit. Look around. Bring back the edges of thought. Where attention goes, meaning might follow.
There’s no quick fix for the mental non-places of ultramodernity, and not every one of them is a curse. Technology does bind us together in ways that matter. Yet when the mind drifts endlessly without intention, it loses sight of where it’s going. And, as the void expands, we don’t stop to wonder what it might swallow next. It quietly consumes more than just time, it eats away at what anchors us to ourselves and each other.
The words of Dickens (1859), have never rung truer, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”[2] The contradictions of ultramodernity cut deep, we are more connected than ever before, the world is at our fingertips; but these connections are hollow and we find ourselves painfully lonely. We travel further and faster, yet we feel unanchored, floating in limbo, torn loose from any place that feels like home.
Augé reminds us that places and non-places always exist side by side, but today’s ultramodernity threatens to tip that balance. We’re losing the ability to slip in and out of roles like lover and stranger, rooted and passing through. As that flexibility fossilises, we forget how to come back to the places that matter. When we no longer know how to inhabit true places, mental or physical, we drift in endless transition, cut loose from the stories and spaces that give life its texture.
But the mind, unlike an airport lounge, is not fixed. It can be reclaimed. Attention can be wrestled back from the infinite scroll. Conversation can flow without an algorithm to fuel it. A thought can be held, turned over, deepened, if we choose to pause and linger.
Perhaps the antidote to mental non-places is not grand revolution but small acts of noticing: a single thought pursued to its end, a quiet moment fully felt, an intention held longer than the moment between one notification buzz and the next. We might step outside the endless corridors and remember that our minds can be places too, relational, historical, and grounded in identity.
The act of noticing, the productisation of people, the fraying of the edges of thought, the quiet widening of a gaping void, is, in this context, an act of quiet defiance. Defiance against becoming the product. Defiance against herd thinking. Defiance against falling into the void.
Maybe that’s how we find our way out: not by rejecting ultramodernity entirely, but by learning to pause in its midst, to mentally mark a spot, to build meaning where there was none. If we can do that, then even in the most placeless of places, our minds need not be lost. They can still come home.
So here’s the choice: keep drifting, or fight to return. One keeps you numb, the other keeps you human. Neither is easy, every path is hard. Choose your hard.
References
Augé, M. (1992). Non-places: An introduction to supermodernity. Verso Trade. ↩︎
Dickens, C. (1906). A tale of two cities. Ginn & Company. ↩︎
