CHICAGO—All the people out there, living their lives, cut adrift amidst a sea of faces in which they cross paths but never quite connect, where are they going, a new report inquired Monday. “So many people, moving here and moving there, going about their days, eyes downcast as they make their way…where, exactly?” the report read in part, observing how, over the course of their lives, every person on the sidewalk and on the road had lived through a distinct sequence of events that placed them upon a path, and every one of those paths had arrived here, now, at this very moment. “Though brought together, all these people—each from a different point of origin, each the resident of a conscious mind unknowable to the others, each possessed of high hopes, modest hopes, or no hope at all—remain isolated. Surrounded by multitudes and separated by no more than a few feet of pavement and the fragile barriers of a human body, they are ultimately, and always, alone. These are the impossibilities of closeness and of knowing, of life and of death.” The report went on to conclude that all the people, the ones right before our eyes and yet worlds apart from us, were probably just headed to work.