Welcome to the liminal hellscape known as the Cairo International Airport. On January 9, a flight bound for Aswan decided to enter a state of metaphysical stasis, delaying its departure by five grueling hours. In any sane civilization, five hours of staring at a flickering departure board would result in a collective descent into quiet, dignified despair. But we do not live in a sane civilization. We live in a world where the void is filled with ‘Baduanjin.’ For the uninitiated—and consider yourselves lucky—this is a form of qigong exercise. For the weary travelers trapped in Cairo, it was an impromptu performance of synchronized geriatric fitness led by a group of Chinese ‘aunties.’

To understand the ‘Auntie’—or the ‘Dama’—one must understand the final boss of late-stage societal stagnation. These are women who have survived the upheavals of the 20th century only to spend the 21st colonizing every public square from Beijing to Paris with their portable speakers and unwavering commitment to communal dancing. They are a force of nature, as indifferent to your personal space as a tectonic plate and twice as loud. When their flight to Aswan stalled, they didn’t do what any normal, cynical adult would do—which is to say, find an overpriced bar and drink until the regional jet looked airworthy. No, they decided to ‘relieve fatigue.’

According to one participant, an auntie surnamed Chen, the group was united by their love of dancing and travel. This is the ultimate horror of the modern age: the weaponized hobby. There is something profoundly irritating about the refusal to be miserable in a miserable situation. The airport, by design, is a machine meant to strip you of your humanity and replace it with a barcode. By breaking out the ‘Eight Pieces of Brocade’—the literal translation of Baduanjin—these women weren't just stretching their hamstrings; they were performing a ritual of forced optimism that is as exhausting to witness as it is to perform.

Let’s analyze the ‘captivation’ of the fellow passengers. Media outlets reported that the onlookers were enthralled, even offering applause. This is a lie, or at the very least, a gross misunderstanding of Stockholm Syndrome. When you have been trapped in an Egyptian transit lounge for 300 minutes, your standards for entertainment drop below the level of a toddler watching a ceiling fan. You aren't ‘captivated’ by qigong; you are simply grateful that the silence has been broken by something other than the announcement of another delay. The applause wasn't for the grace of the movements—it was the sound of people desperately trying to convince themselves they were still alive. It is the same performative joy the Left uses to mask its lack of policy, and the same mindless group-think the Right employs to ignore reality.

The irony of performing ancient Chinese health exercises in an airport—the very cathedral of modern environmental degradation and respiratory illness—is lost on everyone involved. You are waving your arms to ‘improve the flow of qi’ while breathing in a concentrated cocktail of jet fuel and the recycled breath of five hundred other stranded souls. It is a masterpiece of the absurd. The aunties believe they are achieving ‘inner peace,’ while the airline bureaucrats are likely in a back room somewhere laughing at the fact that they don’t have to provide meal vouchers as long as the passengers are busy doing slow-motion karate in the gate area.

This event is the perfect microcosm of our globalized wreckage. An ancient culture’s physical therapy is repackaged as a time-killer for a middle-class tour group in a failing transportation hub in North Africa. There is no depth here, no profound cultural exchange. There is only the relentless, grinding machinery of the ‘experience economy,’ where even a five-hour delay must be curated into a ‘moment’ for social media. Auntie Chen and her cohort aren't heroes of health; they are the advance guard of a world that refuses to sit still and contemplate its own vacuity. If this is the future of travel—synchronized stretching led by retired tourists while we wait for planes that may never come—then perhaps the delay shouldn't have been five hours. It should have been forever. At least then we wouldn't have to pretend that watching a stranger do calisthenics is a substitute for a functioning civilization.