Long After My City Goes Dark

Have you ever woken up thinking, “Okay, I’m awake. Now what?”

It’s one of those days for me where I felt the need for a sense of purpose for waking up. As I always do.

For most of my life, my Focus and Pleasure Districts have had a bit of a wiring problem. The roads were there, but the fuel trucks did not always deliver enough dopamine. So, I learned to go looking for fuel myself, chasing exciting ideas, novelty, music, and connection. Anything that could give my districts a quick boost has always been my way of getting the next drop of dopamine.

Then one day, the Movement District started running out of fuel too. This time, the problem was not with the roads that carried the fuel. It was one of the city’s main fuel factories quietly shutting down. Unfortunately, the head of this district did not manage to keep the factories running to postpone the collapse by at least 30 to 40 years.

The breakdown came too early, eager to meet me when I had only lived one third of my life.

This brought forth two problems at once. As the mayor of this city, I am wired to seek dopamine yet I live in a place where the supply lines are cut short.

Some days, extra tankers from outside the city bring enough fuel to light up both the Movement and Pleasure Districts. Other days, the supply is thin, and no matter how hard I search, the tank runs dry.

I have never been lazy or undisciplined. I have always worked hard to play hard, except the play always ended too quickly compared to the exhaustion I carried from doing double the work just to keep the lights on, which was never enough for me.

When I saw the tiny old lady sitting across from me on the Piccadilly line, hands wrapped around her bag on her lap, I saw the most compassionate expression in her eyes. I watched, addicted to the sight.

She smiled at everything and everyone around her with a look of curiosity that offered quiet hope planted in her eyes. The kind you only see in three-year-olds eager to discover a completely new world.

I think there isn’t much difference between infants and elders. Both are curious. Both wait to be cared for.

Infants are curious because the world is new.

Elders are curious because they have learned to appreciate a world they have spent a lifetime in. Through all the versions of themselves they have carried, each stage has offered a different gaze. And when it is nearing the end, they begin to praise the beginning and everything in between.

I do not think I appreciate life to the fullest.

My life has always felt like training in a boxing ring where my coach, who uncannily looks like me, keeps yelling,

“Come on, Rocky, is that all you can do?”

Some days I am overly stimulated by the joy of waking up to a sunny day in my own bed, just being me. Other days, I wake up to London grey, dragging myself from bed and thinking, “So?”

I either need the rush of overstimulation or the strike of an external spark to give my life its meaning.

The idea of living an ordinary life has always felt suffocating to me.

When I was little, I used to say my purpose in life was to make a difference. But if I am honest, that did not come from the right place.

My desire to make a difference was rooted in ego. I could not make peace with dying unnoticed, with leaving no legacy behind. I needed the world to know I had been here.

I would be lying if I said I do not still feel that way.

The only time I have ever found real solace in this reality, when I stopped trying to dress it up or make it look noble, was when I read Milan Kundera’s Immortality.

Kundera makes it painfully clear that the immortal version of ourselves is not the one we consciously curate, but the one that lives in the memories, perceptions, and sometimes distortions of other people.

What makes Kundera’s take so unsettling is that it injects the idea of a whole life lived trying to secure a legacy, only to realise it will be authored by everyone except you.

Does that mean immortality is the accidental inheritance we leave behind in the minds we pass through?

I might dedicate my life to crafting a certain image, but once I am gone, that image is no longer mine. How it remains is shaped through the minds of others, refracted into countless versions I cannot edit or approve.

Those imperfect, incomplete fragments are my immortality.

As an extrovert, energised through human interaction and connection, dopamine drives me toward conversations, glances, and the tiny collisions where something passes between two people and leaves an imprint. Every spark of connection, every shared laugh, every quiet recognition is a truckload of fuel my city spends without hesitation.

Every surge of joy, every streak of curiosity that lands deeply becomes a landmark in my city.

Perhaps the life I found worth living was not only to feel alive in the moment, but to leave markers in myself, in others, and in time.

That elderly lady on the Piccadilly line was not aware that her quiet smile and eyes full of hope would be written into my memory and now, through my writing, into the memories of others.

She made her way into my immortality ledger.

My chase was never for the thrill alone. It was to keep adding to the constellation of moments that will glow long after the city’s main factory goes dark.

If you’re reading this, I want you to take a moment and ask yourself:
What are you actually living for?

For me, it’s my city. To leave it beautiful and bright. Its lights still burning long after the factory goes dark.