somewhere along the line i started doing this thing with google maps.
i would open my street, then the city, then the country, then that blue-white marble view where every private problem becomes smaller than a loading spinner. at a certain height my room was gone. the desk, the mug, the unread message, the little panic in my chest. all of it disappeared into pixels.
it should have been comforting.
mostly it made the mug look suspicious.
the trick works the other way too. zoom in and the mug stops being a mug. glaze, ceramic, molecules, atoms, forces. the solid thing gets less solid the harder you stare at it. the world does not break exactly. it just stops helping.
this is the derealization bit. not a dramatic mountain-top revelation. no robe. no thunder. just the moment in a normal room when the commute and the calendar and the stack of tabs on your laptop all look like props from a play nobody remembers casting.
i don't stay there long.
usually i recover by doing something local and slightly stupid. washing a spoon. answering the message. opening the window because the room has gone stale. drinking coffee that is already too cold to be good.
maybe that is not a philosophy. maybe the whole absurdity thing is mostly what happens when a mammal with rent and search engines notices scale.
still, the room comes back.
the mug is a mug again.
i drink the coffee anyway.