Do you ever get the feeling you’re trapped inside a loop?
Wake up. Go to work. Come home. Talk to your partner. Scroll. Sleep. Repeat.
Most people experience this sensation around Wednesday afternoon while staring at a spreadsheet. I experienced it while watching a man walk endlessly through a Japanese subway corridor and then several hours later being violently pummelled by 150 beats per minute of donk music in a nightclub in East London.
The revelation arrived somewhere between the film Exit 8 and a set by Gladde Paling at Vissa London in Colours Hoxton. As revelations often do, it arrived disguised as nonsense.
Act 1: Exit 8’s endless corridor
Earlier that day, I had watched Exit 8. The premise is simple and horrifying. A man is trapped in an endless underground passageway. Spot the anomaly and move forward. Miss it and you’re sent back to the beginning.
Exit 0. Again. And again. And again.
The corridor stretches on forever like a commute designed by a sadistic philosopher. Fluorescent lights hum overhead. Posters remain almost the same. Tiny changes become matters of life and death. The whole thing felt less like horror and more like Tuesday.
As I watched, I found myself thinking about work. About routines. About how many times human beings walk the same corridors believing they are travelling somewhere new.
The film understood something ugly about modern life. Sometimes progress is difficult to distinguish from repetition.
Act 2: Donk revelations
Then, a few hours later, I found myself standing inside Colours Hoxton surrounded by people who had voluntarily gathered to listen to music that sounds like the end of world was happening with style.
Vissa London was in full swing. The room vibrated. Sweat dripped from the ceiling.
Every track seemed constructed from the same handful of ingredients: absurdly fast kicks, euphoric synths and the immortal donk itself. That ridiculous offbeat bass sound bouncing through the room like a rubber ball fired from a cannon.
Donk music is loop music. Not metaphorically. Literally. Take a tune. Speed it up. Repeat it until the crowd achieves a higher state of consciousness. Then repeat it again.
Watching Dr Donk and Gladde Paling command the room, I realised nobody here was trying to escape the loop. They were celebrating it.
The crowd moved like a single organism. Thousands of tiny cycles nested inside larger cycles. Dancing. Sweating. Breathing. Repeating.
Nobody cared where the track started. Nobody cared where it ended. The point was the loop itself.
Suddenly, my mind jumped backwards twenty years. Teenage years.
Act 3: Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.
Back then I had become obsessed with Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle the way only teenagers can become obsessed with things. The films made almost no sense to me. There were satyrs and athletes and strange biological rituals unfolding inside vast symbolic landscapes.
I understood perhaps ten percent of what Barney was doing. Which, naturally, convinced me it was the most important artwork ever created.
What fascinated me was its structure. The films folded back on themselves. Their numbering and production order refused to line up. Meanings echoed across different instalments. Symbols reappeared in new forms. It felt less like watching stories and more like wandering around inside a maze. A self-contained universe forever circling itself.
As a teenager, I thought the work was about mystery. Standing inside a donk rave, I realised it was also about loops. The same loop I had seen in Exit 8. The same loop pounding from the speakers. The same loop that governs memory itself. Which brought me to another period of my life.
Act 4: Strange loops in London
London is where I first encountered Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.
I remember reading it on trains. In cafés. In shared houses full of aspiring artists and political weirdos. The book completely rewired my brain.
Hofstadter’s central idea is the “strange loop”. A structure that climbs through layers only to arrive back where it started. Like Escher’s impossible staircases. Like Bach’s musical canons. Like consciousness itself.
The self, Hofstadter argues, is a loop. Your identity is not a thing. It’s a process. A story your brain keeps telling itself until it becomes real.
At the time I found this exhilarating. Now I find it mildly alarming, because standing in that rave I became aware that my life itself seemed composed of strange loops.
Teenage me obsessing over Barney.
Twenty-something me reading Hofstadter on London trains.
Present-day me watching Exit 8 before losing my mind to donk music.
Different moments. Different versions of myself.
Yet somehow all connected. Each feeding into the next. Each returning to the same questions. Who am I? Where am I going? Am I moving forward or merely travelling around a larger circle?
Act 5: Ancient Greek time
The Ancient Greeks would have understood this. For them, time was cyclical. Seasons returned. Empires rose and fell. History moved in circles.
Christianity later arrived with its arrows and destinations and final judgements. Linear time. Progress. Endpoints.
Modern capitalism inherited that story. Always onward. Always growth. Always tomorrow.
Sanding inside Colours Hoxton as Gladde Paling launched another euphoric barrage of donk into the crowd, linear time suddenly felt ridiculous. Reality looked far more circular.
Breath. Heartbeat. Day and night. Work weeks. Relationships. Memories. Cultures. Civilisations. Even consciousness itself. Loops within loops within loops.
Epilogue: The joy of endless loop
The horror of Exit 8 is believing you’re trapped inside one. The joy of donk music is realising you already are. Perhaps wisdom lies in understanding the difference.
Some loops imprison us. Some sustain us. Some create entire worlds.
As I finally stepped out into the London night, ears ringing and brain vibrating at approximately the same frequency as the universe itself, I realised I had not escaped the maze.
None of us do.
The trick is learning which loops deserve to be danced inside, and which corridors are worth leaving behind.