It’s probably the same story for anyone who has ever lived away from ‘home,’ maybe not with as much nostalgia. In a sense, the familiarity of being in a place you know, around people you understand, is irreplaceable. New buildings will pop up here and there, the city’s hottest hangouts will change their names once more and mass dementia will switch from one thing to another, but people’s attitudes, the life (or lack thereof) that makes a country what it is, will always stay the same.

Well, not this year.

This year, there is something very unfamiliar. This year, Cairo feels defeated. Despite the new roadworks, 95-octane gasoline and that gargantuan mall in Nasr City, there is a certain sense of surrender, like the whole city of Cairo and its people are broken.

It’s not something you can hear people talk about, although I suspect that if one listened hard enough, it would show; more precisely, it’s in what people aren’t talking about. It’s in the way people are still preoccupied with the attack of the killer locusts, meat prices and Yasser Arafat’s death, but not with the tsunami or the Iraqi elections.

I could very well be over-dramatizing, but from the outside looking in, it definitely seems like there is something different. And yet, it isn’t at all surprising. There is so much that has happened in the last year alone that one would have to expect the net result to be an overwhelming sense of submission. There is a general state of hopelessness and resignation, as if people’s concern for their own well-being has become so paramount, they’re lost in a case of pure self-consumption.

The assault has been continuous and overpowering. Economically, not much has improved in the past 12 months; if anything, prices have gone up for most of life’s basic necessities. After a long period of market uncertainty, the recovery from the “dollar crisis” is only now starting to bear fruit.

And yet, despite all of the Nazif government’s efforts, the average Egyptian still has no faith in economic change, thinking that this is simply another Cabinet with more talk and no show.

Admittedly, we have a certain ability for chronic pessimism, but it is easy to understand why most people fail to see the connection between macroeconomic policy and microeconomic gain when those gains have yet to materialize. When the means to provide for one’s own gradually become much harder to attain, it is only natural for attitudes to lean toward the desperate.

Yet for all the talk about how expensive cars have become or how difficult it is now to make ends meet, roads are busier and traffic jams take longer to overcome, and there is still surprisingly strong demand for those über-yuppie mobile phones and polyphonic ring tones.

Politically, Egypt probably like other countries in the region has to contend with unrelenting international pressure and the frustration of its own populace. US President George W. Bush’s re-election was followed by a wealth of opinions on the likely repercussions, and there was a mad scramble in the media to explain what would happen next. Despite all this, we’re still where we started: unsure of what will happen to Iran or how exactly America plans to ‘democratize’ the region.

Internal pressure to initiate democratic change comes from an equally uncertain source: the opposition movement, which seems adamant about deconstructing every positive effort that isn’t its own. In a budding arena of free speech, it seems that people’s obsession is still with criticizing the status quo, not offering viable alternatives.

In other words, the average Egyptian has to listen to and accept a barrage of critical rhetoric, yet very few outlets provide realistic substitutes capable of delivering any glimmer of hope. In effect, the disgruntled are stuck between a rock and hard place, and most people opt to squirm out of the debate altogether, rather than risk getting crushed.

What’s more, there is so much ‘noise’ from conspiracy theories and political scandals that it becomes practically impossible to tell fact from fiction. With solid information continuing to be a rare commodity, it only makes sense to disassociate from what happens around you only because there is no telling where the truth really is.

The last straw, so to speak, is the culmination of years of cultural vagueness, all the more heightened by America’s influence on the region. Egypt is suffering a serious identity crisis, a dichotomy between tradition and religion on one side and the ‘McCulture’ syndrome on the other.

At one point, it seemed a balance had been struck, but religious zealotry and rampant Westernization (to say nothing of those music videos) have brought this dichotomy into stark relief, and the ‘middle ground’ is slowly giving way to a very polarized society. Those who once occupied this middle ground are now being forced into one of the two corners, and the daily battle between the sides occurs mostly out in the open, on television and in the papers.

Adding to Egypt’s list of problems is endemic corruption the country’s rank amongst the most corrupt on the planet increased seven places in the last year alone. Alarmingly, even civil society has not been immune, which means the democratic process itself, yearned for by so many, and touted as the ‘next big thing’ by the government, is in itself sick.

Think tanks, unions and NGOs have not been far from scandal, weakening people’s faith in the very organizations that are meant to serve them.

But none of this is new. The Egypt I remember has always had its fair share of interesting and awe-inspiring news items. The farther I cast my mind back, the more I believe that, in essence, the stresses of being in Egypt are pretty much the same as they were five years ago. People have always died in microbus accidents, celebrities have always

had scandals, and there has always been widespread corruption.

What has changed? Has merciless financial uncertainty made it impossible for people to think of anything but themselves? Is it the persistent onslaught of political propaganda from all sides that has driven people into this reclusive, self-centered mentality? Could a collective culture that is unsure of where it wants to go lead to a general sense of aimlessness?

Or are we merely on the edge of a major shift for the better? Could this as they say be the calm before the storm? In all cases, I know for a fact that the weather plays a huge role in how people feel, and maybe it was just a bad idea to come home during winter.

In which case none of this is really happening, and everything is as we are so often told all right.