This morning, a randomised selection of music offers me a particularly poignant soundtrack to my commute. Mad Rush, a solo piano piece by Philip Glass, emerges in my headphones the moment I enter the train.

I find a seat and take an extended survey of my co-passengers; normally this might involve little more than a cursory glance, at best—that is, if I even look around at all—but it’s interesting how the power of music can shift perspective and mood so easily. This particular morning, I glory in the diversity before me. My train line—which I frequently refer to as “the most gentrified line in Melbourne”—is overwhelmingly white and, during peak hour, middle-aged. What greets me when I actually reflect on the demographic today is a surprise.

This morning is different. Perhaps it’s been different for a while and I just haven’t noticed, but the nuance and variegation in the train’s populace fascinates me. Under the sway of the music, I watch as people sit and stare at their phones or out the window—as they always do—but for the first time in a long time I also wonder what might be going through their minds. These wonderful random people.

Mad Rush, somewhat characteristically of Glass’ work, is a frenetic, heavily arpeggiated piece which runs for almost 14 minutes; it rises, falls, rises again, across successive arcs, from slower reflective moments into soaring registers of agency, with nothing more than a single piano for instrumentation. It’s an extraordinarily impressive piece. While minimalist in its construction, despite its repetition the subtle alternations are also somehow incredibly full; this sense of deliberative and playful dichotomy can probably only be properly understood in the experience itself. My knowledge of musical theory is limited and so my vocabulary here is therefore also constrained. Listen to it, is what I’m actually trying to say.

The title is also appropriate in this context: modern habits of commuting; the tyranny of time; the general sense most people have of the looming obligation to be punctual—and to meet that commitment under great or even unreasonable pressure—leads to an inevitable cycle of “rush” which permeates our lives. Well, it certainly permeates mine and I spend a great deal of my energy attempting to resist it. Sometimes, the sacrifices one makes in order to undermine or outright refuse obligations do also functionally allay the necessity of rushing. It is obligation which predicates that sense of pressure.

Which makes the joy of the waves of speed, or lack thereof, in Mad Rush so enjoyable, and expressive: it is a reminder that life moves at multiple shades of pace, and that something “bad”, like missing a train, might also become something “good”, like an opportunity for reflection on other aspects of existence other than simply “will I get to work on time?”

Surrendering to the possibility of being late—that is, accepting that one will not achieve the metric of meeting the arbitrary numeric timestamp which has been decreed as the ‘appropriate’ time of arrival, and acknowledging one’s lack of control over it beyond a certain point—can be liberating if the embarrassment of the social obligation can be overlooked.

I should note: today I am not late. But that’s not the point. Today neither ‘late’, nor ‘early’, matters; I simply want to observe and watch my fellow beings on this train, and to wonder what their experience of life is like. Probably mundane, like mine, and in all likelihood focused on, or compelled by, the same forces which drive our habitual natures.

It reminds me of some graffiti which was once imprinted on a prominent wall near a station I am passing—and have passed every day on my commute for over a decade—until it was recently subsumed within a gigantic tag in stylised blobby writing. This colossal expression of self-importance—which I assume was completed in a single night—might itself be an impressive act of action under pressure; the obligation in this case being that the task needs finishing before the approach of daylight.

The old graffiti used to read something like, ‘courted hoard are you so bored? Why support this bloody war?’ I don’t think that’s it exactly but it is pretty close. It appeared the best part of twenty years ago in response to the era of reactionary stupidity which was manifest in the so-called “war on terror”, which Australia unanimously followed with the political equivalent of a knee-jerk reaction, and for well over a decade it was pointedly left unscathed by nearby graffiti.

It is now quite literally a marker of another time. A time still well within living memory, but a period when there seemed an agreed and universal sense of reality. That is, opinion variegated between approaches to specific problems rather than the argument being about the existential nature of the problems themselves, underpinned by an ever-increasing reliance on what amounts to little more than opinions derived from simplistic creeds, or perhaps pithy memes, and a corresponding disrespect for hard-earned but inconvenient fact.

Those words from the past are still vaguely apparent, though I doubt they can be understood or recognised by anyone who is not familiar with the original phrase. Subsumed, as I suggested. Just like the idea that there was once a kind of universal sense of epistemological actuality, around which we might hold common ground, and across which we might then argue respective positions.

Today, this once-call to action against violence is buried beneath a singular message without meaning, which by brutish volume alone has destroyed nuance and stifled detail beneath the hegemony of brash statement. In semiotics, it represents the adoption and maximisation of the plane of expression, almost without regard to the plane of content.

It is literally the sign of our times. For what is it that is signified other than the mere act of expressing volume itself? I would argue that the signified, if not completely absent, has at least reached the point where we can no longer derive meaning from it (which I would add is precisely the point of signifiers for whom magnitude is the primary product as opposed to, say, accuracy), and so all we hear is the volume, because there is no reasonable content to actually process. Without meaning, the “message” becomes detached and intellectually entropic. Chaos, basically, with no logical outcome other than despair.

At least I’m not late for work. Mad Rush is finished, and my mood shifts again with the flux of music. Now it’s Rage Against The Machine’s Know Your Enemy, but I could not have made a more appropriate choice if I’d tried.