Really liked this (German) post on X. Grok translation below.
I recently watched old VHS recordings – from American schools in the 80s. A student runs through the hallways with the camera, filming laughing faces, sunlight falling through dusty windows.
And as I watched, this strange feeling came over me, as if I were peering into another dimension.
Not into the past – but into a world that no longer exists.
Or perhaps into one that never existed for me.
The faces were different.
Relaxed, free, with a naturalness I don’t know. Without the tense self-observation that accompanies every movement today.
The people seemed whole.
Girls and boys laughed, made jokes, teased each other, and it was just real.
There was life that hadn’t yet started censoring itself.
I compared the recordings to photos from my own school days, with girlfriends and friends from my class. And I was shocked.
It was as if I’d been torn out of my own reality –
a moment that psychology calls existential dissonance or cognitive incongruence:
When the familiar worldview suddenly no longer fits,
and you realize that something fundamental has been lost.
In comparison, we looked like a column from a prison camp.
Our faces doll-like, posed. The smiles technically correct, but inwardly empty.
The eyes held no warmth – they were just there,
staring off into emptiness somewhere.
There was a certain cynicism to it.
In perceptual psychology, this is called contrastive perception – the moment when you first recognize the decay,
when you place what’s been lost right next to it.
I call this feeling the Silent Hill Effect.
Anyone who knows the game or the film understands: It’s the same world – the same streets, the same houses – but suddenly everything turns dark, dead, oppressive.
The fog settles over the town,
and something invisible has swallowed the living.
Once, humans were beings who experienced the world, felt it – in music, in culture, in encounters.
Today, they are observers of their own projection.
They no longer live, they document.
They don’t laugh, they post.
They don’t love, they perform.
And as we record ourselves in real time, reality fades like a tired magnetic tape,
where memory and echo overlap until only static remains.
What we lack isn’t technology, isn’t progress – it’s the authenticity of the present. The unfiltered, the spontaneous, the human.
We’ve multiplied everything,
except the feeling of being there.
Perhaps we’re not so far from Silent Hill after all.
Perhaps we’ve long been living in it –
in a world that looks like ours,
only without a soul.
I myself never experienced that time,
have no memories, no smells, no sounds – just the flickering recording on the VHS tape.
And yet it feels to me like a relic from another world –
a world in which humans were still real.
