"I don't have to run like a crazy person today", I thought when I woke up this morning. And the first thing that came into my mind was a Red Bull can. I had taken a video while I was on the bus the other day. And wrote this: 

It was already empty when I noticed it. A Red Bull can lay on the bus floor — no crushing sign, its silver skin dull in the half-light. The evening was still young, that uncertain gray before traffic gathers slow speed. Many might have walked past it today or many decades, who knows, without a thought, but that evening, I saw it rolling on the floor. Maybe I was tired. Maybe I simply had nothing better to do than look. Or I was tired of looking at so-called grandeur.

Yes, it might be the reason, but it might have been deeper than that too. Every day is the same, nothing's changed. I leave my job at exactly 1:19PM, not 1:20 or 1:18 but 1:19PM. Walk on the same street, same side, same fast pace to catch another bus to another job. Same speed, yes. Same loathsomeness, yes. And I stop exactly at 1:23 at the traffic light at the same spot. Everyday. That same spot where I can hide myself from 40-degree hot weather, under the shop's roof, to wait for that light to turn 'go'. And then with the same fast pace I cross the road.

I waited for the bus. One old Greek man approached me and asked me something, but his accent was too hard to understand and I just shook my head like I understood him. I gave him one polite grin but I barely understood him. After 11 minutes the bus came. Everyone had settled quickly. I sat on the first row. My eyes went to a discarded can on the floor.

It wasn't beautiful. It wasn't even interesting at first. Just another piece of trash, anonymous, spent. And yet, there was something quietly magnetic about it — not aesthetic, exactly, but insistent. After that my surroundings became too quiet, like you had a faint explosion in your ear. My eyes fixed on that trash. That ordinary discardedness of being. It existed, and that was enough to ask for attention. The can had been part of someone's small story: bought, opened, drained, discarded. At that moment I went completely soaked in that can-being. A transaction complete. But the more I looked, the more that simplicity fell apart.

We don't tolerate stillness anymore. Stillness is failure. Everything — our bodies, our work, our days — must perform. Movement has become moral. You can almost hear the silent command running through the veins of modern life: stay awake, stay producing, stay on. Sleep is suspect; rest is indulgent. Be vigilant. Be productive. Don't look at the ordinary. But I felt that pressure even as I watched the can. First few minutes I felt I had to look away but the can had a strong Gargantuan force. It pulled me in. To its horizon. It had served a purpose — to push someone a little further beyond exhaustion — and now it was nothing. Its job was done, and it had been tossed aside, like fatigue itself, but its own fatigue—like being discarded—trapped my conscience. In a way it looked at my beingness that evening and reminded me of its territory. Ordinary territory.

That's when it struck me: the can wasn't trash; it was proof. It wasn't ordinary. It was beyond. A tiny fossil of human need. Whatever urgency had driven its owner — a late shift, an exam, a night of heartbreak or grind — lingered in it like an aftertaste. When I zoomed my camera, I could see now a faint dent near the rim, a sticky trace along the curve — tactile notes of impatience and speed. If you looked long enough, those marks told a story of someone negotiating with their limits, bartering hours they didn't really have. I gazed long into that can-being.

Once, energy was sacred. Now my head started to philosophize. I hate this part of my own. Why can't I observe things as things. "We prayed for it, sang it into being. The fires of ritual, the light of gods and punishment — Prometheus, Agni, even the burning bush." My head started to formulate its raw waiting, maybe that's the reason that can was there— to ejaculate my eyes over ordinary discardedness. Energy was revelation, dangerous and divine. Now we buy it 250 milliliters at a time, chilled and flavored. The sacred stripped down, canned, and sold two for seven when it's on sale. We don't even call it fire anymore; we call it fuel.

The irony isn't lost on me. I've bought that same fuel countless times, although it's a beer can. In the middle of writing deadlines, half-dead from insomnia, I've opened one with the reverence of a supplicant. That hiss of the can — that small metallic exhale — has sometimes sounded like salvation. For a few minutes, maybe even an hour, the world sharpens. Ideas move faster; meaning glows at the edges. But the price is always the same: a collapse delayed, not avoided. The body collects its debt later.

Sitting on the bus quietly, I felt an odd sympathy for whoever drank that Red Bull. I knew the transaction too well — the small prayer of caffeine, the quiet guilt of chasing alertness. The can felt intimate in that sense, almost embarrassingly so. It had been closer to someone than rest, closer perhaps than another human being. It started to remind me of Huxley. It had entered their bloodstream, becoming a part of their persistence, enabling their illusion of endurance. This might be Huxley's Soma, I thought. And then, just as quickly, it was left behind, stripped of meaning.

When I was younger, I used to think energy drinks were a symbol of ambition — of drive, success, productivity. They were sleek, metallic, efficient and expensive for my father's pocket. Now I see them more as symbols of exhaustion. When I pick one up, I'm not reaching for strength but for postponement, for a way to borrow presence from tomorrow.

Now let me be more precise on it. There's something philosophical about this tiny can. Heidegger would call it "present-at-hand." Once it's no longer useful, it reveals itself — loses the disguise of purpose and becomes pure thing. The illusion falls away. In that shift from function to residue, the object becomes strangely honest. It tells the truth that use had concealed: nothing lasts, not energy, not focus, not even need.

Yes, poor Schopenhauer would have recognized the scene instantly. The will, he may shout twisting his long moustache — that restless inner hunger — demanded wakefulness, and the can obeyed. But the will, never satisfied, would soon demand again. The cycle continues, a loop of wanting and consuming, needing and discarding. It's not evil, just tragic in its quiet futility.

And earlier, before being on the bus, I crossed the road without caution. I didn't even have time to be cautious. Modernity wouldn't allow us to take time and look around. It pushed you further, further into that absurd business. As soon as I reached the top of my thinking, there's Camus waiting for me, whispering from the fringe of absurdity: we know it's pointless, yet we repeat it. Anyway I went to the bus stop and then Camus inquired—'have you not yet drained yourself in this absurdity?' I stayed quiet, but the bus driver gave me an angry look even though I was not holding anyone behind me. He said 'hurry up, mate.'

Then what? For a fraction of seconds I was distracted by humanity's hurriedness and I gave him a nice nod then I hopped on. I sat down. Now we are on our story—lastly finished in Mead's way. That's how my eyes went to a discarded can on the floor.

What disturbed me most wasn't the waste itself or the branding's bravado — "gives you wings" — or "hurry up, mate," but the force of dependence. That proximity between human fragility and industrial stimulant. That hurriedness between more rush and even further. What use of it, that 'hurry up, mate'? While I was sitting I was thinking of the angry driver's face. This can-being had been closer to someone's trembling hand, to their racing pulse, than any friend or lover. It had intervened in their biology to keep them functioning in a world that doesn't let us stop. To drink it is to declare: I can't rest, but I must go on, like that driver, whose mind needed rest. He needed cure. Everyone needed a cure—from this unwholesome fatness. Relax and take a look. Gauge your breath and give your lung a bit of rest.

After a while, I stopped analyzing. I just sat there and watched. At that moment I decided to take a video. The hot wind rolled in when the bus stopped at the next stop. We drink, we work, we stay awake when we should give up for a while, but we don't. We push the same stone up the same hill, with caffeine instead of hope. Someone might pick up that can as a Sisyphean boulder. There's something absurdly noble about that — or maybe just absurd. The wind rolled the can an inch or two along the disabled area, then stopped. A bird landed on the bus stop sign outside, chirped once, and flew away. A few passengers got in. Cars passed, people scrolled through their evenings, the sky brightened, or darkened. The world continued, mechanized and indifferent.

The sun started to go down, as it always does, without Red Bull or ritual. It didn't need wings. It didn't need purpose. It simply disappeared. The can remained. Empty, silent, truthful.

I took a still photo before leaving. The driver said again 'hurry up mate'. It wasn't an artistic impulse; more a compulsion—proof that I'd seen it, that the encounter had happened, but I thanked him even. When I looked at the picture later today, this morning, it looked banal. A fine can under a bus seat. Nothing more. But I knew what it meant to me: a still life not painted but lived, a portrait of our fatigue as a civilization.

I know I will think about it next time when I reach for another beer can in some cheap liquor store. The hiss sound will be the same. The promise would feel smaller or greater! But it's still there, would be there— that quiet whisper of survival in aluminum form. That's what being human truly is: loving the objects that let us endure, even when we know they won't save us. Just love the earth first, take time and look around. It's beautiful. Don't just push with fake energy.

image credit: Photo by John Rae Cayabyab: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-holding-soda-can-3272394/