Steven LaChance Blog

I saw this quote by Charles Bukowski, and it hit me like a brick to the skull:

“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls, and high school ideas.”

Damn.

It’s the kind of observation that lingers, sticking to the ribs of your mind long after you’ve read it. And the more you think about it, the more you start to see it—walking among the dead, the half-alive, the ones who move but don’t live.

We’ve all met them. Hell, we’ve been them. The ones who shuffle through life on autopilot, parroting whatever their preferred media outlet tells them to think. Their passions are pre-packaged, their outrage conveniently delivered via push notification. They’re the kind of people who say, “That’s just how it is,” as if reality is a factory setting they never bothered to adjust.

And then there’s the eyes. Or rather, the lack of them. Bukowski calls them “men without eyes,” and I know exactly what he means. It’s not literal blindness—trust me, I know a thing or two about that—but a kind of deliberate un-seeing. A refusal to look beyond the surface. Eyes that glaze over at anything too complex, too raw, too real.

Voices? Gone. Replaced with regurgitated soundbites and corporate-approved slogans.

Feelings? Manufactured, like the processed food they eat and the synthetic lives they live. They feel what they’re told to feel—outrage on cue, joy in doses, fear in bulk.

And the ideas? High school level, if that. Not because they lack intelligence, but because curiosity is a muscle they stopped exercising years ago. They clutch onto the same dusty beliefs they had at seventeen, afraid to confront the discomfort of growth.

So, what do we do with this?

Because let’s be honest—Bukowski’s not just describing them. He’s describing the risk we all face, the slow erosion of our own authenticity. The world makes it easy to slip into zombie mode. It’s comfortable. It’s efficient. It’s expected. But it’s also death by a thousand compromises.

Maybe the trick is to stay uncomfortable. To refuse the script. To question everything, even the things we’re most certain about. Maybe it’s about waking up every single day and choosing to see. To think for ourselves, to feel for real, to be inconveniently, messily, unapologetically alive.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s how we walk out of the city of the dead.