The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.

The autopilot we don't notice

Bukowski probably wasn't being mean—he was describing something real we all notice: the way people can sleepwalk through their lives, following scripts nobody actually wrote down. Most days, most of us do exactly what's expected. We take the same commute, say the same small talk, scroll the same feeds. It's not that people are inherently dull; it's that the machinery of regular life has a way of flattening you into a template.

But here's the tricky part. Calling other people mindless is often a way to feel better about our own compromises. It's easy to spot conformity in crowds while missing how we conform ourselves—just in different ways, to different tribes. We're all shaped by what surrounds us.

The real bite in Bukowski's observation isn't that the world is hopeless, but that staying awake in it requires actual effort. You have to notice when you're on autopilot. You have to choose oddness, curiosity, or authenticity when everything around you rewards the opposite. Most people don't do this work. But most people also aren't aware they're not doing it. That gap—between being aware and being asleep—is where actual life lives.