I felt as if I were in an exiled and floating world, isolated from all necessities of life except the one of buying things.
The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda knew the score. That exiled and floating world she’s talking about, it’s not some poetic metaphor, it’s the actual condition of modern existence… A feeling that everything solid has liquefied beneath us and all that’s left is the transaction, the exchange, the hustle. We’re all floating now, baby, untethered from anything resembling roots or permanence, and the only anchor we’ve got is whatever we can grab with our platinum card.
But here’s where it gets darker, where the romantic haze of Zelda’s observation crashes into something more brutal: What happens when that floating world isn’t a condition you can contemplate from a position of privilege, but the literal reality you’re born into? When your house floats because that’s all there is? When the water that suspends your entire community is dying, poisoned by the same forces that convinced us all that buying things could substitute for belonging to something real?
The spectacle of it all, and I mean spectacle in the Debordian sense, not the tourist-brochure sense, obscures what’s actually happening. We see surfaces, commerce, the exotic aesthetic of lives lived on water. We don’t see displacement. We don’t see thousands of people being erased because they can’t produce the right paperwork for land they never touched because their lives were always liquid.
See what that floating world really looks like.