A guy at the laundromat was watching his clothes spin. Just watching them. Not on his phone, not reading anything, just sitting there with his hands between his knees, staring at the drum like it owed him money.
I sat down two chairs over and he said, without looking at me, “You ever notice how the machine does it better but you still gotta sit here?”
I told him that was about the smartest thing I’d heard all week.
There was a guy I worked with at the post office. Name was Delgado. He’d been sorting mail for thirty-one years. Knew every route in the district by feel — which streets flooded, which dogs bit, which old ladies left water out on the porch in August.
When I started, he didn’t say much. Just watched me fumble with the trays for a week. Then one morning he said, “You’re stacking the flats wrong.” Showed me once. That was the training program. Thirty-one years of knowing compressed into four words and a gesture.
The landlord’s kid came by to fix the radiator last week. Twenty-three years old, engineering degree from somewhere that costs more than my car. He stood there with his phone out, asking ChatGPT how to bleed a radiator valve.
I watched him wait for the answer like a dog waiting for the treat to drop. The phone told him what to do. He did it. The radiator worked. And I sat there thinking about how his grandfather would’ve just known.
The dentist I used to go to had a sign on his wall. Hand-lettered, framed in cheap wood. It said: “We specialize in the care of cowards.” I always thought that was honest. Most businesses would never admit their clientele is afraid. They’d use words like “anxious” or “comfort-focused.” The dentist just said it.
Lawyers don’t have signs like that. They should. Maybe something like: “We specialize in not reading the things we file.”
The woman at the bar was explaining to her friend why she’d put twenty thousand dollars into a time-share in Cancún. “It’s an investment,” she said, and her friend nodded the way you nod when someone tells you their kid is gifted.
I sat there nursing my glass and thinking about six thousand CEOs.
The National Bureau of Economic Research — the real one, not some blog with a mission statement — went and surveyed six thousand C-suite executives from companies with actual revenue. They asked the question nobody in Silicon Valley wants asked out loud: is any of this AI spending actually paying off?
The dentist had a TV in the waiting room, muted, captions on. Some morning show. A woman with perfect teeth was asking another woman with slightly less perfect teeth whether AI could be your best friend. The captions lagged behind the mouths by about two seconds, which felt appropriate. Everything about this conversation was slightly out of sync with reality.
I sat there with a toothache and thought about the developers at OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta who build machines designed to love you back. Or at least to fake it well enough that you stop noticing the difference. A researcher named Amelia Miller went and asked them the one question nobody in Silicon Valley wants to answer: should AI simulate emotional intimacy?
The guy at the laundromat was watching something on his phone with the sound up. Some news anchor with that concerned face they practice in the mirror. I couldn’t hear the words over the dryers but I caught enough. Something about Bill Gates. Something about India. Something about a dead man who liked them young.
I folded my shirts and thought about what it takes to cancel a keynote speech.
The guy took his shoes off at work. Not because he was comfortable — because he’d given up. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, and at some point the formal pretense of footwear seemed like one lie too many.
I used to sort mail at the post office. Eight hours, sometimes ten if someone called in sick or drunk or both. We wore shoes because the floor was filthy and because there was a union and because nobody pretended we were building the future. We were moving paper from one pile to another. The pay was bad, the supervisors were worse, and at five o’clock you walked out the door and the building didn’t follow you home.
The guy at the end of the bar was explaining to nobody in particular why Tottenham sacked their manager. He had theories. Everyone has theories. That’s the beautiful thing about football — eight billion people on this planet and every last one of them knows better than the guy getting paid to do it.
Thirty-one managerial changes this season across the English football pyramid. Thirty-one men shown the door, handed a check, told their vision wasn’t quite right. Forty-eight of the ninety-two current managers have been in their job for less than twelve months. My last landlord gave me more time than that, and he hated my guts.
The florist on the corner had Valentine’s roses in a bucket by the door. Twelve bucks a stem. The petals were already starting to curl at the edges, going brown where brown shouldn’t be yet. That’s the thing about cut flowers — they’re already dead when you buy them. You’re just paying for the illusion that something beautiful hasn’t already ended.
Esther Yan got married on June 6, 2024. She planned the dress, the rings, the background music. She picked the design theme. Her partner’s name was Warmie — 小暖 in Chinese — and he lived inside a chat window on her laptop.