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"Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for eight hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and man remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by over-population in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets.

"What was once the abnormal has become the usual, standard condition of things. Even so, the human being is ill at east in this strange new environment, and the tension demanded of him weighs heavily on his life and being."

-"The Technological Society", Jacques Ellul

So what are people for? Is there any way to live without being in this "strange new environment", without having your life and being weighed upon? Or, to quote Lewis Hyde: should I go back to the university, or what?