Everyone on the evening metro

Ride the metro across Dubai at seven in the evening and, instead of looking at a phone, look at the carriage.

A nurse finishing a long shift, still in her shoes for standing. Two teenage brothers sharing one set of earphones. A man in his seventies with a walking stick, being offered a seat and refusing it. A cleaner reading a paperback. A woman on a call in one language, switching to another to answer the child beside her. Somebody asleep. Somebody laughing at something nobody else can see.

Almost nobody in that carriage looks like the people on the screens above the platform. Nobody is lit like that. Hardly anyone is the age, or the shape, or the income, that the advertising seems to assume. Each of them knows something I do not, cares hard about something, and is quietly more interesting than any character in an advert.

Widen the view to the whole region and the gap grows. Most people have never been where the adverts are set. Many cannot afford what they show. A great many have concerns the adverts never touch.

For a long time, selling to everyone at once meant inventing a person everyone should want to be, and then selling the distance between that person and the rest of us. It worked commercially. It also taught people that they were behind.

But the picture was never the audience. The audience is in the carriage, and in the next one, and on the platform.

None of them is the average, because nobody is. Everyone is an exception, and that is perfectly fine.