There is an act, an almost forgotten and at the same time disturbingly mundane gesture, that winds like an invisible thread through the fabric of human interaction, a gesture that, when performed collectively and with a certain inevitability, reveals an oppressive sense of interdependence and unspoken desperation: touching the elbow of the person next to you, a gesture that, in its apparent simplicity, reflects the charged and confused urge for connection in a world that is slowly disintegrating.