I do not live in France (though I have family ties there) but here in Australia I pass by a dozen or more cameras between my house and the train station, another dozen at the station and more still watch me on the platform. As get in the doors, another camera, and as I sit down, two more.
30 at least track me as I get off in the city and easily 20 observe the five minute walk from there to my office.
It makes by depressed.
One day someone is going to understand that for many people privacy is a fundamental part of their mental well-being and treating everyone like potential threats all the time, everywhere they go and in everything they do, reduces the health and standard of life of the whole country.
Last Thursday I decided to tally the cameras that I walked past on the daily commute described above - going in the other direction. I literally lost count.
It may be more indicative of my mental health than anything else but by the time I got home I was wet-eyed and genuinely considering taking my own life. As a side note, I decided that it was probably time to start taking my medication again but even today I sit here again with that feeling again. It is not an exaggeration to say that this situation I find myself in every day is one that makes my life more unhappy.
Our 'modern' Western societies have become something that is just so fundamentally opposed to something I hold to be of vital importance to my happiness: the ability to retain my privacy and, so far as is possible, my anonymity. That these things are forcibly taken from me simply in the act of living threatens to overwhelm what little strength I have left.
Marcus Aurelius - taking from Epicurus - said in his Meditations that no pain is both unbearable and unending: if it is unbearable then it ends us. This extends to pains of the mind as well and is seen when the simple act of living becomes so distressing, so joyless and so without reprieve that it is unable to be borne any longer and so makes an end of us.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
