8. The Landscape We Do Not Question

Every morning I could lean out of the window and look at what surrounds me. Buildings, streets, cars, traffic lights, shops, billboards, balconies with potted plants, antennas, air conditioners. It’s all there, in front of my eyes, and I recognize it immediately. I don’t need to interpret it: I’ve already learned it.
I know what a “street” is, what a “building” is, what a “neighborhood” is. 
I know this is an “urban landscape”. 
I know it’s normal.

And yet, every now and then, I find myself wondering: why doesn’t it surprise me? Why am I not struck by the fact that, in front of me, there are no stretches of forest, no freely moving animals, no constructions made of clay, wood, or straw?
I’m not saying there should be forests instead of buildings. I’m trying to understand why it feels natural to me that there aren’t.

There is something deeply interesting in this sense of naturalness. Because what we take for granted is often not natural at all — it has simply become natural to our eyes.
This feeling of normality doesn’t come from nowhere. It isn’t an original given; it’s the result of a long habituation.

We live immersed in certain lifestyles, certain landscapes, certain rhythms, certain social structures, and we end up perceiving them as the only possible way of being in the world. Not because we chose them, but because we were born into them and adapted to them. And what we adapt to for long enough stops looking like a choice.

This is how we stop seeing. Not because we are distracted, but because we are perfectly integrated.
Not in the sense that we no longer look, but in the sense that we stop questioning what we look at. Things no longer appear as one possibility among many, but as facts. Not as historical, cultural, political constructions, but as simple “reality.”

This applies to everything: to how we work, to how we move, to how we build cities, to how we inhabit time, to how we define success, security, freedom.
We move within a world that not only exists, but constantly educates us to perceive it as inevitable.

Henry David Thoreau expressed something very similar in Civil Disobedience, when he observed how human beings come to believe they need a complex apparatus above them — a State, a system, an organizational machine — in order to feel that life can function. As if, without that structure, everything would collapse.
Not because this has been proven, but because it is how we have learned to feel.
In a sense, what surrounds us is not just a set of objects and institutions. It is a set of silent messages that tell us, day after day:
this is the world.
this is how it works.
this is what is possible.
When I speak of an apparatus, however, I don’t mean only the State or its formal institutions. I mean something much broader and subtler: the ensemble of everyday practices, habits, implicit rules, languages, rhythms, expectations, invisible rewards and punishments that teach us — without ever stating it explicitly — how to look at the world.

It is not a power that commands. It is a power that forms.

Antonio Gramsci called this “cultural hegemony”: the way a worldview becomes so widespread that it stops appearing as a worldview at all. It is no longer perceived as one perspective among others, but as reality itself. As the obvious, reasonable, natural way of interpreting what happens.

Hegemony doesn’t tell us what to think. It teaches us what is thinkable.

It doesn’t just determine which answers are acceptable, but which questions are legitimate — and, above all, which are not.
This is why, when I imagine ways of living radically different from the ones we inhabit, they don’t simply appear to me as different. They often appear naive, unrealistic, disconnected from reality. As if they were an escape from the real world, rather than another way of thinking it.
So the question is no longer: which world is better?
It becomes: why does one feel real, while the other feels imaginary?

At this point, the connection with everything I’ve tried to explore in the previous texts may also become clearer.
When we talk about health, we tend to reduce it to symptoms to be managed.
When we talk about ecological crisis, we often reduce it to a curve to keep under control.
When we talk about well-being, we turn it into an individual performance.

In all these cases, the same thing happens: we focus only on what is immediately visible, measurable, manageable, and we lose sight of the system of relationships that produces those signals.

But there is another layer, even deeper, that holds all of this together: our distance from the real costs of what we call “normal.”
The reality we inhabit every day doesn’t present itself only as obvious. It also presents itself as neutral.
Streets, buildings, supermarkets, smartphones, production chains, illuminated cities, constant availability of everything — all of this appears to us as mere infrastructure of modern life. Not as a choice, but as a given.
And yet, every element of this normality has a cost.
We just rarely see it.
And when it is pointed out, signaled, shown, it almost always takes the form of a footnote. A short article. A news segment. A scrolling headline.
A kind of “journalistic mythology,” to borrow — loosely — a concept from C. G. Jung: stories we hear as narratives, not as realities that concern us. As if they belonged to another world, not to ours.

The ecological cost is distant. The human cost is hidden. The psychological cost is normalized. The relational cost has become invisible.

We live in a reality designed to protect us from contact with the consequences of what makes our daily life possible.
And this protection is not only material. It is perceptual.
We do not see, we do not hear, we do not touch.
Not out of malice, but through education.

And when these costs surface, they do so only in fragmented form, never as an integral part of the world we inhabit.
Big Tech corporations rely on rare earth minerals often extracted by workers — including children — under conditions of extreme exploitation; the fashion industry, especially fast fashion, depends on factories where people work long hours for minimal wages, producing garments meant to be discarded after a few weeks, fueling massive waste both in production and consumption; and even the food that fills our supermarkets travels thousands of kilometers through polluting supply chains, while monocultures and intensive livestock farming destroy forests and poison soils.

We have been trained to live inside systems that function only if we don’t look at them too closely. Only if we don’t stop to ask where what we use comes from, who makes it possible, what kind of world it builds, what kinds of relationships it consumes.

Perhaps, then, the issue is not imagining a different world.
It is stopping ourselves from treating this one as inevitable. Not to judge it, but to see it again. Because what appears inevitable is often nothing more than what we have grown used to. And what we grow used to for too long stops looking constructed. It becomes natural, obvious, necessary.

And yet, nothing we see every morning when we look out the window is neutral. Not the shapes of our cities. Not the rhythms of our days. Not the technologies we use. Not the landscapes that replace other landscapes.
All of this tells a story. We’re just no longer used to listening to it.
So perhaps the real question is not whether this world is right or wrong. But why it feels like the only one possible.
And perhaps, before searching for alternatives, we should learn to do something simpler — and harder: to be surprised again by what we call normal.
Not to escape reality, but to truly re-enter it.
Because only what stops feeling obvious can begin to speak to us again.
And only what speaks to us again can, perhaps, be transformed.