This is not satire. This actually happened.
A Swiss newspaper recently reported on citizens complaining that they had to wait up to two hours to enter a public swimming pool.
For international readers, this requires a small cultural translation.
In Switzerland, public outdoor pools are a major summer institution. They are called “Badis,” a Swiss-German nickname for municipal swimming pools. Almost every second village has one. And if one pool is overcrowded, you can usually drive fifteen or twenty minutes and find another one. Or a lake. Or a river. Or some absurdly beautiful mountain stream that looks almost offensively idyllic.
In other words: this was not scarcity.
This was convergence.
Thousands of people independently decided that they absolutely needed to spend the afternoon at the exact same public pool at the exact same time as everybody else.
Then they encountered the physical consequences of all making the same decision simultaneously and experienced this as oppression.
“We had to wait two hours.”
As though Swiss authorities had rounded them up by force and transported them to mandatory recreational bathing facilities. As though helicopters circled overhead announcing: “Citizens are reminded that afternoon leisure remains compulsory.”
But of course nobody forced anybody.
That is the philosophically interesting part.
The queue was not imposed by dictatorship. Nor by natural disaster. Nor by genuine lack of alternatives.
The queue was generated by the people standing inside it.
In a deeper sense, they were protesting against themselves.
And this is where the story becomes revealing far beyond swimming pools.
Modern people increasingly experience self-created inconvenience as external injustice.
The decision itself remains radically personal: “I want THIS pool.” “I want THIS atmosphere.” “I want THIS exact social scene everybody else also wants.”
But once the downside appears, the psychology changes instantly.
Now it becomes: “How could this happen?” “Why was this organized so badly?” “Why didn’t somebody do something?”
Nobody asks the obvious question: If waiting there was truly unbearable, why didn’t you simply leave?
Because leaving would require a psychologically uncomfortable sentence:
“I voluntarily chose this.”
Complaining is emotionally easier.
The complaint transforms a personal decision into public grievance.
And this is why the newspaper matters so much.
The article is not merely information. It is absolution.
The moment the inconvenience appears in the media, the suffering becomes socially validated.
Now the citizen no longer feels like somebody who made a mildly ridiculous leisure decision. Now he becomes a victim of circumstances.
But underneath all this lies something even more important: mimetic behavior.
People increasingly learn what to want by observing what other people want.
The crowded pool becomes attractive precisely because it is crowded.
And the queue itself becomes part of the validation.
If people could simply walk in immediately, many would subconsciously begin wondering: “Why is nobody here?” “Did I choose wrong?” “Is this place irrelevant?”
Scarcity, even self-generated scarcity, still functions as a prestige signal.
The crowd becomes reassurance: “This is where life is happening.” “This is where significance is.” “This is the right place to be.”
And once somebody has already waited thirty or forty minutes, another mechanism takes over: sunk cost.
Now the person is no longer merely choosing. Now the person is defending an investment.
Leaving would not only require admitting: “I chose this.”
It would also require admitting: “I wasted my afternoon following the herd into something stupid.”
Complaining is psychologically cheaper.
The newspaper then completes the ritual.
Without media coverage, the event remains what it really was: a mildly ridiculous leisure decision.
But once the article appears, the experience becomes elevated into a civic drama. The citizen is no longer merely somebody standing voluntarily in a queue. He becomes the protagonist of a public failure.
The media launders self-generated frustration into institutional legitimacy.
And Switzerland makes the entire phenomenon philosophically cleaner than almost anywhere else because the alternatives are so absurdly abundant.
This is not Mumbai. Not Cairo. Not genuine scarcity.
This is a country where almost every village has its own pool and where beautiful swimming spots appear with the frequency of pharmacies.
People are not converging because there is only one option.
They are converging because everybody else is converging.
That is the key distinction.
And perhaps this reveals something much larger about modern life itself.
More and more people seem to navigate existence sideways rather than inward.
Where is everybody going? What is everybody doing? What is trending? What is the place to be?
Then they follow the convergence point, arrive together, overcrowd the place together, become irritated together, and finally complain together.
Everybody IS the queue while simultaneously experiencing the queue as something imposed upon them by reality.
Traffic works the same way. Social media works the same way. Tourism works the same way. Housing markets work the same way. Even entire careers and lifestyles increasingly work this way.
And perhaps that is the real curse of our time: people slowly losing contact with their own internal compass.
They no longer ask: “What do I actually want?”
They ask: “What are people like me supposed to want?”
For me, an empty pool sounds perfect. Space. Silence. No queues. No endless territorial negotiations over twenty square centimeters of grass.
And most importantly: no need for collective confirmation that I am in the “right” place.
But many people experience emptiness differently.
An empty place can feel socially unvalidated. A crowded place feels confirmed by collective attention.
The crowd itself becomes existential reassurance.
And once that mechanism fully takes over, individuality slowly begins dissolving into mimetic synchronization.
People move together, desire together, consume together, panic together, complain together.
Then afterward they experience the consequences of collective imitation as though those consequences mysteriously arrived from outside themselves.
Which is why the overcrowded Swiss public pool is funny in a way that goes far beyond swimming.
It is a tiny model of modern mass psychology.
The crowd is simultaneously the attraction and the grievance.
And increasingly, the meaning of life itself seems to be outsourced to wherever the crowd has already decided meaning is happening.