When they decided to build these hidden passages underground as a means to move people around, they made it a space based on practicality as much as economics could provide - places one could sit on, bars one could hang onto - while the carriages roll forward to a previously predetermined destiny along an already planned path. Did it occur to them what it would be like to travel day after day, trapped in cattle carts with little to look at except badly designed adverts?

Each station was built at a time where it was customary to show off our human might, standing high and defiant against nature, so we created tall imposing concrete structures to prove a point, and anoint them with artwork that proudly displayed our intellectual superiority. It never occurred to us then that our intellectual capacities could keep changing, and that art could just be fashion, so everything looked 40 years out of date despite being glamorous on opening day.

A plump, older woman smiled at a mother and her young daughter, wrapped up completely in pink. A young girl walked in, the air around her folded in intensity as she arranged her hair and her things, then proceeded to spread a book on her lap. The people who weren't talking to one another wore white earphones that snaked from either ear to a hidden location deep within their puffy dark winter coats.

This is a temporary place, a temporary existence, so we scorn it as such - we live it as such.

Today, the tabloids tell us that elsewhere, other people are living more exciting lives: look who's having a new baby, who just got divorced, who just got married, who just got back together. They tell us these things so we can forget our own lives have any semblance of significance. Every now and again, the advertising on the walls change, just to give us a sense that time is plodding forward.