I told my parents that going to a near abandoned mall was experiencing the personification of the death of consumer capitalism. I was wrong...
It isn't the death of consumer capitalism. It's the loss of human connection, the loss of something we as a society valued. In the mall I see every friendship I have ever had that has grown apart. I wonder, was there a time when a group of people stopped meeting at that mall every week...then every month...then once a year, and then for the last time?
Time is linear. Our affections are not, and yet they are constrained by the borders of time and space. The space is not lost, the people are.