by Dr Rahim Said
For five minutes last weekend, in the heart of glitzy, hyper-lit Manila, I was abruptly plunged into the kind of existential crisis modern man isn’t prepared for.
It wasn’t a war, an earthquake, or a coup d’état. It was — wait for it — a power interruption.
Now, in any other context, five minutes is nothing. The time it takes for your coffee to cool, for your Grab driver to circle the block twice, for your spouse to remind you of something you swore you’d already done.
But when you’re sitting in a sparkling new hotel room by Manila Bay, your wife mid-way through Pride and Prejudice, and you’re in the middle of a serious WhatsApp negotiation with a business contact in Dubai — those five minutes feel like eternity with an attitude.
Every time the TV blinked off, the emergency lights flared up like a horror movie jump scare, the air-conditioning wheezed to a stop, and the tiny green ‘online’ dot next to my friend’s name turned ghostly grey. The television, in its infinite wisdom, displayed a chirpy message: “Please check your Internet connection.” As if I was personally responsible for the collapse of the Philippine grid.
My wife, undeterred by decades of knowing how the story ends — Lizzy Bennet gets her brooding man — was visibly annoyed that she’d be denied that final Kiera Knightley embrace. Because some stories are so familiar you need to see them play out again, just to feel whole.
But while she fretted over 19th-century courtship rituals and I worried about closing a deal that was already slipping through my digital fingers, it struck me how utterly fragile our lives have become.
Here we were, sitting amidst all the trappings of modernity — 300-thread-count sheets, 50-inch smart TV, high-speed Wi-Fi advertised as “blazing” — and a simple flicker reduced us to two anxious, blinking mammals, waiting for the fire to come back on.
And therein lies the moral of our times.
For all our glass-and-steel towers, our cloud servers, our 5G bragging rights, we remain a species wired for panic the moment the screen goes dark.
We measure power now not in dynasties or currency but in signal bars. We are conditioned to believe that permanence is a feature of modern life, and yet a brief blackout reminds us: it’s all still precarious.
I could forgive this happening in a remote kampung or a creaky colonial-era hotel. But this was beside the largest mall in Asia, an epicentre of air-conditioned consumerist zeal. A place that surely runs on backup generators capable of outshining a small nation’s GDP.
And yet — darkness.
When everything sputtered back, my chat reconnected with a sheepish “Sorry, bro — where were we?”
My wife got her climactic embrace, and the room cooled again as if nothing happened. But the unease lingered. Would it recur while we slept? While I brushed my teeth? While she caught the epilogue?
The philosophers of old warned the world would end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Today, it’s more likely to be a spinning wheel, a frozen screen, a “No Signal” warning that feels like a slap to the face.
This small, ridiculous episode by Manila Bay isn’t just a travel gripe. It’s a cautionary tale for our times. A reminder that for all our AI, cloud storage, and smart homes, it takes one flick of a switch — literal or metaphorical — to reveal just how unprepared we are for silence, darkness, and disconnection.
The moral of the story? In a world so drunk on connection, maybe the occasional blackout is good for the soul. If only to remind us that sometimes, the only real emergency backup you have is your own sense of humour.
The views of Dr Rahim Said are entirely that of his own, a columnist who thinks that modern civilisation will end, not with nuclear war or a killer virus, but with a Wi-Fi outage during a Netflix finale
When the Lights Go Out: A Modern Parable for the Hyperconnected Soul
by Dr Rahim Said
For five minutes last weekend, in the heart of glitzy, hyper-lit Manila, I was abruptly plunged into the kind of existential crisis modern man isn’t prepared for.
It wasn’t a war, an earthquake, or a coup d’état. It was — wait for it — a power interruption.
Now, in any other context, five minutes is nothing. The time it takes for your coffee to cool, for your Grab driver to circle the block twice, for your spouse to remind you of something you swore you’d already done.
But when you’re sitting in a sparkling new hotel room by Manila Bay, your wife mid-way through Pride and Prejudice, and you’re in the middle of a serious WhatsApp negotiation with a business contact in Dubai — those five minutes feel like eternity with an attitude.
Every time the TV blinked off, the emergency lights flared up like a horror movie jump scare, the air-conditioning wheezed to a stop, and the tiny green ‘online’ dot next to my friend’s name turned ghostly grey. The television, in its infinite wisdom, displayed a chirpy message: “Please check your Internet connection.” As if I was personally responsible for the collapse of the Philippine grid.
My wife, undeterred by decades of knowing how the story ends — Lizzy Bennet gets her brooding man — was visibly annoyed that she’d be denied that final Kiera Knightley embrace. Because some stories are so familiar you need to see them play out again, just to feel whole.
But while she fretted over 19th-century courtship rituals and I worried about closing a deal that was already slipping through my digital fingers, it struck me how utterly fragile our lives have become.
Here we were, sitting amidst all the trappings of modernity — 300-thread-count sheets, 50-inch smart TV, high-speed Wi-Fi advertised as “blazing” — and a simple flicker reduced us to two anxious, blinking mammals, waiting for the fire to come back on.
And therein lies the moral of our times.
For all our glass-and-steel towers, our cloud servers, our 5G bragging rights, we remain a species wired for panic the moment the screen goes dark.
We measure power now not in dynasties or currency but in signal bars. We are conditioned to believe that permanence is a feature of modern life, and yet a brief blackout reminds us: it’s all still precarious.
I could forgive this happening in a remote kampung or a creaky colonial-era hotel. But this was beside the largest mall in Asia, an epicentre of air-conditioned consumerist zeal. A place that surely runs on backup generators capable of outshining a small nation’s GDP.
And yet — darkness.
When everything sputtered back, my chat reconnected with a sheepish “Sorry, bro — where were we?”
My wife got her climactic embrace, and the room cooled again as if nothing happened. But the unease lingered. Would it recur while we slept? While I brushed my teeth? While she caught the epilogue?
The philosophers of old warned the world would end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Today, it’s more likely to be a spinning wheel, a frozen screen, a “No Signal” warning that feels like a slap to the face.
This small, ridiculous episode by Manila Bay isn’t just a travel gripe. It’s a cautionary tale for our times. A reminder that for all our AI, cloud storage, and smart homes, it takes one flick of a switch — literal or metaphorical — to reveal just how unprepared we are for silence, darkness, and disconnection.
The moral of the story? In a world so drunk on connection, maybe the occasional blackout is good for the soul. If only to remind us that sometimes, the only real emergency backup you have is your own sense of humour.
The views of Dr Rahim Said are entirely those of his own and he is a columnist who thinks that modern civilisation will end, not with nuclear war or a killer virus, but with a Wi-Fi outage during a Netflix finale
WE