The past three months have been the most absurdly disorientating of my life. Dream-like in every sense of the phrase. Jubilant, enriching, surreal, discombobulating, glorious, and profoundly derealizing.

Since March 10^th, I have flown just over 170,000km. The three months I spent working as cabin crew (a.k.a flight attendant, a.k.a trolley dolly) melted my mind.

Of all the things that technology has enabled us shaved apes to do in the 21^st century – eating mangos in England in December, or maintaining ever-present access to millions of minutes of music, or billions of videos of random strangers having sex – international aviation has to be up there with the most unnatural.

Hunter gatherers used to walk about 12km a day. Picture a family of early humans – let us call them Mr and Mrs Stone – who continually roll across the landscape, in search of food and shelter. As the seasons change, they move further south. As they do so, at this pace, they witness changes in the world around them.

The geography of the land changes over days, and weather systems change over weeks. As they move further, they come across different peoples with different cultures. But there is a similarity to the people they encounter at first, whose practices become increasingly strange and foreign the further afield they go.

Alien and confusing, no doubt, but there remains a continual drip-feeding of change. It is internalised, rationalised, and compartmentalised. A continual link is drawn, from one landscape to the next, from one group of people to the ones who come after.

Assuming they walk every day without rest, illness or seasonal disruption, it would take them 39 years to travel the distance I have travelled in the past three months. When one is 37,000-feet above the ground, moving at 550mph, you feel almost no sense of movement at all.

Our evolved perceptions of time and space are functionally useless, our brains instead just giving up and turning our attention to the in-flight meals and the 6” screens mounted on our forward-neighbour’s chair.

We then step off into a land that could not be more foreign. Thousands of miles away; different languages; different governments; across oceans, and over mountains, and around a world for which we have absolutely no felt perception of its size.

“You mean to tell me, that in the time it took to watch three films, you have teleported me across the globe? I call bullshit.”

The whole experience conspires to make it all seem made-up. And yet, the felt experience of your new surroundings is so intense – the 40 degree heat that threatens to beat down the airport’s walls, the smell of unknown floor cleaners and air fresheners and saffron and sweat – that you cannot dispute it.

This is the point at which our brains throw up their hands. Too much, too confusing, too strange. The contradiction between the impossible journey and the undeniable arrival breaks something fundamental in how we process reality. We’re left suspended between disbelief and sensory overload, unable to reconcile what we know happened with what our bodies tell us is real.

This perceptual whiplash isn’t a bug in human consciousness – it’s a feature being pushed beyond its limits. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, suggests in The Case Against Reality that our entire experience of the world is essentially a sophisticated lie. Not malicious, but practical: evolution built us a simplified interface to reality, showing us “apple” and “danger” instead of the incomprehensible quantum soup that actually surrounds us.

There are, at their base, only a few things which humans truly need for survival and gene propagation: food, water, shelter, friend, mate, and a perception of threat. There is no necessity for a revealed objective reality, but instead only for actionable information.

Like a laptop displaying colourful and comprehensible icons – Chrome, Word, SurfShark, Spotify, Recycle Bin – in place of the uninterpretable series of zeroes and ones that represent the actual manifestation of computational reality, so has our sense of perception evolved.

Where there actually bubbles an infinite soup of uninterpretable systems, we have evolved to instead overlay constructs like colour, shape, time, and objects. Apple, and river, and woman and safety and lion.

When you step off a plane in Bangkok having left London eleven hours earlier, Hoffman’s interface crashes. The desktop icons of familiar space and time flicker and glitch. Your evolved software, designed for the walking pace of Mr and Mrs Stone, simply wasn’t built to process teleportation. What you’re left with is the raw, unfiltered strangeness of being a consciousness untethered from the reality it was designed to navigate.

…

And yet, despite my operating system’s best efforts, I don’t want to merely throw up my hands up at the incomprehensible vastness of this experience, for it has been incredible. I have learnt so much and felt even more.

Mumbai, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, New York, Toronto, Shanghai, Nassau, Baltimore, Seattle, Bangkok and Abuja. Days and nights spent in each, drinking in their energy and tasting their vibrations.

This new series – What In The World – will centre on distilling the nature of each city into a neat little vial, hopefully capable of evoking and truthfully representing what they each felt like.

The food, the people, the histories, the architecture, and the systems that bring them all together. I want to make sense of this truly discombobulating three months, but not  

I want to make sense of this truly discombobulating three months, but not by reducing them to mere data points or a reel of highlights. I want, instead, to honour the full weirdness of what it is like to be a walking ape, watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan having just watched it set over London.

The strangest thing about these experiences is how normal they really do feel when within them. No pretence of a great journey, or a much-anticipated holiday, which then exceeds or fails to exceed expectations. Rather, it is complete and delicious rawness.

It is like running into the brick wall of experience, and being so enamoured with the unexpectedly complex texturing of the brick’s surface, that rather than tending to your bloodied nose you instead extend your tongue to feel the wall more fully.

Where this introduction has been floral and indulgent, each piece in this series will be the stark opposite. Each location will be turned to in turn, and treated with concise consideration. Just the most straight-talking, honest reduction of what each extraordinary destination felt like, and what it made me think.

Welcome, to [Some number of hours] in [The place I was in] …