Colourful suitcases and plastic-wrapped backpacks slowly pass by, while the baggage belt is gently tapping its fast, repetitive rhythm. The big white number on a concrete pillar confirms that you’re in the right place. You look around. People are either texting their friends and relatives or pensively gazing at the conveyor. None of them are here in the full meaning of the word. You can’t see anyone talking, but you constantly hear a barely distinct murmur reflected from every wall in the hall at the same time. The ceiling is quite high, and you see a couple of rotating fans, but it is still a little stuffy.

One can’t be emotionally attached to a location like this because it is carefully designed to not carry any emotion except the occasional minor frustration of standing in line or the delayed baggage. Your baggage finally arrives. Following big “Exit” signs translated in several random languages and passing by annoying taxi drivers approaching you in the arrivals hall, you copy-paste the address of your Airbnb in the Uber app. In five minutes, Octavia drives you on a motorway directing the city.

The driver is kind and has a seemingly Middle Eastern name you forget two seconds after reading it. He doesn’t speak English very well, so his conversation attempts are short, straight to the point, and concerning only the ride or the flight. You look left and right but see no real conversation starter either. No religious or national symbols, no family photos, no scarf of the favourite football team, no card with a rock band or a hot actress from the 90s. The car interior is purposefully neutral to not accidentally offend anyone. You don’t hate it; you don’t like it. You don’t feel it at all. You pick up the phone to catch up with the messages.

Car stereo routinely plays The Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Tame Impala, and a couple of one-time wonders you’ve never heard before, blending together R&B, country, disco, and classic rock; they are playfully drawing from the East, West, and South, sounding modern and retro at the same time. Listening to it, you catch a momentary lapse of vague nostalgia every now and then, a bit of excitement, a slight melancholic touch. You time-travel through the last six decades in a minute, not staying in any one longer than a blink of an eye. Getting close to the destination, your driver gets a notification about the next ride nearby. Timer is ticking fast. He hesitates for a second and accepts. You arrive, take your suitcase out of the trunk, and thank your driver.

There’s a pizza place called Vesuvio, a Tommy Hilfiger store, and a small craft bar that is not open today yet. On the corner, you see a nifty local coffee house with a minimal logo on the panoramic window and no signboard. People on its terrace are relaxed, wearing vintage-looking t-shirts and aged jeans. They are talking, laughing, and gesturing, looking more like theatre decorations than living humans. A girl there makes eye contact with you and smiles. You smile too.

You find the keys in a small code-protected locker next to the door and go up your accommodation. The room looks clean. Birch shelves on its perfectly white walls hold a bronze statuette and a multicoloured stack of Wallpaper city guides — the kind of decorative book no one has ever bought to actually read. A brownish map of South America in a thin frame covers the wall, and an industrial lamp is hanging above the free-standing kitchen island. Well, the apartment is not tasteless and has a small handwritten card on the table. This interior could equally belong to the coffee house outside or to the open office space you will go to tomorrow morning. It’s nice, it’s clean, nothing to complain about. You unpack. Your baggage looks somewhat alien in this room. It looked better before you unpacked. In the mirror next to the entrance door, you notice your reflection and realise that it all would look even better without you here. You chuckle, grab your cardholder, and go outside for a walk.

A scratched metal plate on the next block corner says that in the last century this area used to be a factory workers neighbourhood, and the surroundings are proudly reflecting echoes of their past. You take a more thorough look around. You definitely can see it in details but don’t really feel it. Although, probably, that’s a good thing. You are comfortable here, like you have been here multiple times. It doesn’t really feel like home because there is nothing about you personally, but it is familiar; it is part of something you belong to. Something modern, global, vaguely defined but immediately recognisable. A culture that never got a name it would accept and never really claimed to be a culture.

You can see it in Berlin, Madrid, Moscow, and Stockholm. It’s been called “airspace,” “refinement culture,” and “the age of average,” but it’s neither space, culture, nor the age. Or, rather, it’s the intersection of them. Something atemporal, placeless, impersonal, contextless; borrowing from the locations, ethnicities, religions, and eras all around the world and throughout history, and neither disrespecting nor paying homage to any of them; intentionally ambiguous, so that it cannot even remotely be considered offensive; manifesting something while carrying as little meaning as technically possible. It’s good here once you’ve accepted it and if you can afford it. You have and you can. It’s nice and safe, and you always know what to expect. People in the coffeehouse are different now but together looking essentially the same as last time, just like songs in your weekly algorithmic playlist. You finish the walk and come back to your room. It’s going to be a good day.