Daily life in dying empires is like one long survival-horror videogame. Only there's no save button.
If you survive -- and survival is now a lottery, determined more by sheer luck and preexisting familial-cultural capital than by education or talent -- you become a pack rat.
You can buy nothing. So you collect every random artifact you come across. Might be useful, later.
You have no power. So you dodge the terrifying monsters of the total system. They hunt us ceaselessly.
Everything once comforting and familiar becomes strange and distorted.
Your taste in music, literature and aesthetics narrows to what will replenish your energy-pack.
Baroque ornamentation gives way to annealed silicon, symphonies give way to hip hop, films give way to pixels.
No respite. No sanctuary. Just survivorhood.
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