What if you wake up to a world, not populated by humans, but by cardboard models of humans?
The buildings you see, are but pitifully weak cardboard, collapsing in a single push. The humans: they do not move at all. They are no longer alive. They are just boards. Cardboard.
This could have been a dream. Except that... It is not.
Aren't we all cardboard? There is no denying to that. Human emotions are thin, just like cardboard. Human actions are insignificant, just like cardboard. Human existence is thin, just like cardboard.
But why do we see ourselves not as cardboard? We are, by the above traits, so much like cardboard, thin dessicated unwanted cardboard. Well.
I don't know.
The best explanation I could come up with is that we have evolved. Not that it gives any justifications to us for not being cardboard. We became "advanced" cardboard.
I suppose, however, "advanced" is a poor choice of an adjective. You see, this word carries a hint of amelioration, a mitigation of a problem. However, it is not the case. However "advanced" we are still cardboard: refusing to move in its stubborn array of wrinkled paperwork. We may have intelligent technology, proliferating populations, beguiling arts, vast economies, but we are still cardboard.
Cardboard form boxes. However, each side of the box cannot care less about the other sides. While the other sides are cut and scorched, as long as the one side is intact, they just dispose of the broken sides. No exceptions.
There once was a time when I believed that humans are not actually cardboard. I believed there was a kind of very intrinsic property that humans have but cardboard does not. It is called compassion. Some like to call it sympathy, some, feelings, and some emotions. But as I observed clearly, what I saw was an illusion. Just like cardboard models, if you look from a distance, it is perfect, impeccable. But just close up and see, and you will find inhuman pixels, boxes, glitches everywhere. No one wants theirs to be seen, but they exist. They are there just to prove that humans are cardboard. And when you push them slightly, they fall apart, revealing their bare bleak backside. Shocking, disgraceful.
Of course, the eventual fate of cardboard would be death. Cardboard thinks his tubes of paperwork is tough. But nothing is tougher than nature. Everything, big or small, conforming or recalcitrant, have to fall back on the hands of nature itself. Carbon atoms in the cellulose framework will break up, and the atoms themselves will perish eventually with the death of the planet, the sun, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe itself.
And, us being cardboard, will suffer the same fate too. No technology will save us. No scolding will wake us. No altercation will disturb us. No pride will boost us.
Pieces of cardboard, pieces of resistant unyielding cardboard, pieces of disgustingly decorated cardboard. All gone.
All asleep.
