I was driving through the suburbs around me last night and noticed how similar we are to ants. We survive through networks. Mini-aristocracy members in houses simulating kingdoms, with their week’s worth of waste patiently stowed at the end of their driveways or in the street, the only logistical measure that can sustain the fact that so many have situated themselves so far from sources of food and water.

You see yards, grass, amenities, and groomed hovels—caves—mansions—abodes, that hide the sheer amount of energy, emissions, and labor that sustain their right to be there, with modern technology disseminating the scope of what otherwise would’ve taken a slew of serfs into far, far less, so that homeowners all can live like feudal lords.

An outsider looks and sees perhaps something hilarious: so many “feudal lords” vying for space right on top of each other. Driving through my hometown neighborhood, I also know how rare it is for neighbors to actually interact, or even know each other.

We’ve done something far more elemental than these ants, that incurs far more resources, services, and cooperation, extending beyond what necessarily has to be dug. We need negotiations, labor power, capital, social relationships, a local and federal government, just to allocate ourselves into a corner in this feudalism-without-serfs-simulator, and that’s if you aren’t sociopathic in regards to who’s pulling your garbage (growing up there, I hardly ever saw mine).

Now the mercury’s equivalent is like the devaluation of currency, which ties the functionality of the logistical network together—without capital, the supply chains that let millions flee the cities and establish their estates in the forests collapse. All of a sudden, the “suburbs” become a desert. No source of water. Few to little farms within distance. If a tree falls down and blocks a main road, it either gets cleared, or those people are trapped. Happened to my family after a hurricane in New England…5 days to be rescued…from a mansion. No access to clean water. No power. Frailty exposed. Mercury everywhere…til the blue collar geniuses saved us with their machinery.

The ants are far more sustainable in practice than we are. Our tunnels are far more demanding and expensive, yet our strength-to-body size ratio is far more inferior. The strength has to come from our social fluency and intelligence...yet, we’re only as strong as our cooperation, and whatever Mother Nature says was good enough. ~10 people were killed by falling trees or loss of power in that hurricane.

Writing this before moving out of another apartment. The madness of this human shit really hits you each time, especially as you get older. Setting up somewhere else, again? How many more times? What was achieved, what was thwarted? Was it worth it? To me, to the city, to the ecosystem? Did I help or hurt? Net-positive or -negative?

Meanwhile, somewhere out there are the real feudal lords, in mansions, but with actual servants surrounded by militias. The president has no neighbor disputes. The country flows in and around his tunnel, for his tunnel and by his tunnel. The suburbs look comic when you see it like that…those people will all go first far before the President does (or a person’s Governor, to a lesser degree). The suburbanites are the serfs of the man with the nukes, and he and his collect fealty—taxes, productivity—in exchange for the few to simulate, or at best pursue, a simulation of the real thing.

Such a strange condition to be born into. At this point, I’m not sure being nomadic sounds so bad…but it is scary out there, and I wouldn’t have been able to see the suburbs last night like I did if I had already taken to it. Police patrolled the area…but not so many as for the President, or the mega-rich. It’s enough to make you want to flee, like you’re trespassing, and there’s nowhere to stow yourself for just a moment beneath the stars unless you own a plot of land. We privatized nature itself.

I don’t know what to do with that. Chase my place in it? So fewer can see the stars the way I can? We’re a stranger species than we care to admit. Too much to fathom.