Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
You know what’s fucked up? Here’s this sign. Had a purpose once. Maybe it warned you about riptides that could drag you out to sea. Maybe it told you the beach hours, when the lifeguards went home. Something useful. Something that might have saved your stupid life.
But now? Now it’s buried under stickers. Band logos. Brewery names. Some surf shop that’ll be out of business in one year. Energy drink brands. Skateboard companies. Local restaurants serving seventeen-dollar fish tacos to tourists who think they’re discovering “authentic” beach culture.
Layer upon layer of this performative bullshit, this aesthetic vomit that’s supposed to signify something. Rebellion, maybe? Local pride? The “scene”? But really it’s just noise. Commercial noise pretending to be counterculture. Dead Kennedys next to Patagonia next to some IPA that costs nine bucks a pint. It’s the uniform of people who desperately want you to know they’re not wearing a uniform.
The beautiful, terrible irony? They’ve completely obscured whatever that sign was trying to tell them. Buried the actual message under their desperate need to leave a mark, to say “I was here,” to turn everything into a mood board for their fucking lifestyle.
This is who we are now. We take something with meaning, even if it’s just a mundane warning about beach safety, and we bury it under branding. Under declarations of taste. Under proof of purchase. We colonize every surface with our consumer identities and call it culture.
The ocean’s right there. Infinite. Indifferent. Actually dangerous. Actually sublime. It’s killed thousands of people. Drowned civilizations. Swallowed entire fleets. It doesn’t care about your carefully curated identity. It doesn’t recognize the difference between a tech bro in a Tesla and a fisherman who’s worked these waters for forty years. It’ll take you both with the same casual indifference, pull you under, fill your lungs, and keep right on rolling. Those waves have been breaking since before we crawled out of the fucking primordial soup, and they’ll be breaking long after the last brewery closes, the last surf shop locks its doors, the last sticker fades into illegible nothing.
And we’re standing there, obsessing over which decal represents our personality better. Which brand validates our existence. As if any of it fucking matters. As if the ocean’s going to pause mid-tide and go, “Oh, wait, this one liked good music and local craft beer. Better show some respect.”
It won’t.
Nature’s going to swallow all of it eventually. The sign. The stickers. The brands they represent. The carefully constructed identities they’re meant to signal. The whole sun-faded, peeling, pseudo-rebellious mess will be gone. Rust and rot and salt air will reduce it all to the same molecular garbage. And when it does, when that sign finally collapses, when those stickers dissolve into toxic confetti in the sand, when the post itself gets claimed by the beach and buried and worn smooth, the ocean won’t even pause. Won’t mark the occasion. Won’t even notice the difference between the actual warning it consumed and the commercial garbage we pasted over it.
We’re cosmically insignificant. Every sticker is a tiny scream into the void: “I existed! I had preferences! I mattered!” But we don’t. Not to the wind. Not to the water. Not to the earth that’s going to grind our bones and our brands into the same indistinguishable dust.
We’re so small. So loud. So absolutely, pathetically convinced our clutter means something. That our marks will last. That someone will remember we were here, that we liked this band, drank that beer, wore those brands.
No one will. Nothing will. And honestly? That’s the only honest thing about this whole stupid photograph.