The writer sees humans as boomerangs that return to the same places, the same jobs, the same people day after day. Quoting the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, Sims accesses the idea of automatized perception and habituated memory—the notion that we can perform the same task so often that we forget the purpose behind it. The task becomes rote, loses all significance.
“The object fades away… We know it’s there but we do not see it,” Sims writes. He references Heidegger to explore the idea of muscle memory in the undead: Motion without purpose can never really matter.