Los Angeles felt frightening to me in a way I never expected — vast, dirty, strangely empty, and somehow both overcrowded and completely desolate. So much of the city seemed to lead nowhere: endless roads, dead ends, parking lots, blank buildings, and neighbourhoods that could feel abandoned even when people were standing right in front of you. The people around me often seemed almost unreal, like FBI agents or NPCs moving through a set — watching, passing, disappearing, but rarely saying hello or acknowledging anyone outside their immediate orbit. There was none of the casual human contact I expected from a major city, or humans living honestly and openly with love; everything felt loveless, guarded, ungrateful, transactional, suspicious, and disconnected. I have also never met a person who truly loves Los Angeles whose relationship to the place made me want to understand it more. It is like Los Angeles attracts the evil in people and gives them a playground to be manipulative, evil, and destructive: misanthropic. Instead, the city has always seemed to attract people drawn to performance, power, manipulation, misplaced or lazy ambition, instability, and the endless reinvention of themselves and the destruction of others. Some of the coldest, cruelest, most psychologically unsettling people I have encountered seemed completely at home there and eager to ingratiate themselves against all morals and ethics. To me, Los Angeles feels full of dead-end people chasing dead-end dreams, convinced that the next introduction, the next role, the next image, or the next version of themselves will finally make the fantasy real. They behave as though integrity is immoral to their rise. What makes it all more disturbing is the sunlight. Everything is permanently washed in this beautiful, almost antiseptic brightness that should make the city feel clean, healthy, and alive, while underneath it I found something profoundly filthy, lonely, exhausted, and sad. Not to mention how impoverish the American people are, and how disturbingly disconnected those in Los Angeles are from the reality of their condition. The sun and scenery seem to make up for the corruption of the soul one has to negotiate being in such a depressing town. Los Angeles carries an unsettling philosophy: “it’s not what you are, it’s what people think you are.” For me, that made the city feel less glamorous than haunted — a place built around fantasy where the fantasy had somehow emptied the life out of everything underneath it. Where "goodness" and friendship is corrupted by impulsive demand for material success. Where one can determine who truly worships evil or lives among the realm of the blessed.