Pocket Dispatch from Office of Human Value

Keeping score:

2023-07-18 21:54

Pocket Dispatch From A Cafe Where People Are Studying

The young man across from me at the cafe is studying. He has announced this with a collection of multicolored highlighters, a stapled copy of textbook pages in impossibly small font, and a sweatshirt from a varsity team. He has announced he is concentrating by placing Bluetooth headphones in his ears that look like rotten candy from a movie theater.

But when an indie rock song plays over head, he betrays himself. He is drumming now, and precisely. As he mouths the lyrics, he performs the intricate ostinato with his pens as he reads. He knows the fills, the ghost notes, the rests. He follows the dynamics. He is air drumming on the ride cymbal when it’s actually hi-hat, but I suspect this is to avoid taking the absurd step of actually crossing his hands over the text he is studying.

At any rate it is clear there is nothing playing in his headphones. The rotten Dots are a farce. He only wishes not to be disturbed with conversation. This is ironic both because no strangers are striking up conversation in this cafe, and because it has freed me to do something arguably worse: Observe him intently, record my impression, and publish it on the internet.

2023-04-01 12:28

Pocket Dispatch On Deoptimizing My Life

The economy gigified right as I became a parent and my free time disappeared. My enthusiasm for tech, combined with my impatience, made me embrace the burgeoning culture of Everything On Demand. As transportation networks and delivery platforms overloaded with VC cash stormed legacy industries and crushed incumbent competitors, I cheered them on. The old school failed to innovate and someone came along to eat their lunch. I didn’t sympathize with the losers whining about it.

Of course we now know the innovators’ advantage was partly artificial. The gig platforms prioritized user—and worker!—acquisition over profitability, and hoards of eager investors subsidized that approach with miles of operating runway. Whom exactly was the customer remains unclear.

But it was thrilling at the time. Uber launched in 2011, and before the year was up, my wife and I sold our cars and moved back to Chicago. If we needed to drive, we rented Zipcars by the hour. Within a year and a half, we ordered our first groceries on Instacart, eliminating the need for a car almost completely.

Around the same time, we joined Amazon Prime. Now everything came to us, and we converted most of our consumable needs into subscriptions.

In 2014 we moved to a duplex in a lush neighborhood on the north side where we would later start our family. From our daughter’s arrival in 2016 to our son’s infancy during the Covid pandemic, the business of life I handled in our house increasingly resembled inventory management. I timed subscriptions to our rate of consumption, adding a buffer supply in some cases that I optimized to our available storage. This was a boon during the early pandemic toilet paper famine of 2020, but was a lifesaver in less dramatic ways even before: Guitar strings. Rechargeable batteries. Paper towels. Diapers. Liners for the diaper pail. Wipes. Tear-free shampoo. Hand sanitizer. Masks.

Many of the changes this wrought were predictable—and endless onslaught of packages, a fleeting sense of time recovered through convenience. Some were surprising, though: Dinner conversations became an exchange of product links as mutual compliments of home decor gave way to inevitable Amazon confessions.

The explosive growth of packages piled on America’s doorsteps gave way to an explosion of package waste and theft, and the traffic on inner city neighborhood streets became clogged with trucks from every carrier and the thieves who follow them. And then the stories of mistreated Amazon warehouse workers emerged, along with reports of Amazon’s union busting efforts.

Still other changes were so subtle it took a decade and a pandemic for me to notice them: With so few obligations—and eventually few opportunities—to leave the house, serendipity dissipated from my life. I not only stopped supporting independent and local businesses, I hardly knew which ones still existed.

I also stopped walking to do errands, and it showed on my body and in my mood. Our collective sprint toward idle consumerism promised us more time to do the things we love and value, but ultimately made me someone who did very little.

But then we got vaccines, then boosters, then more boosters, and eventually the veil dropped between me and the world. After nearly two years living in a part of Ohio where we could afford more open space and fresh air, we moved back to Chicago in the summer of 2022. I rekindled my love of city and neighborhood on foot. I walked to a store and bought a pack of toilet paper small enough to carry under my arm. Then I carried it four blocks home.

It wasn’t just suboptimal, it was completely inefficient. It may have been cheaper to buy in bulk online, but I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t updated my spreadsheet recently. (For a long time I thought of Amazon Prime as cheaper than buying in stores, but that theory had stopped holding up to scrutiny in recent years.) But I didn’t worry about the toilet paper getting to us on time, didn’t wonder if a thief would mistake the box for something valuable, and in fact didn’t have a box to contend with at all.

I kept this up for days, then weeks. I not only tolerated the inefficiency of short grocery lists and casual Target runs but relished it. It wasn’t long before I started running into friends on the sidewalk and recognizing strangers from the neighborhood.

We canceled our Amazon Prime membership, then Instacart. (Then later rejoined.) I noticed I was walking a ton, feeling happier and healthier, using my phone a tiny bit less, and getting my city legs back. My feet throbbed at first, but it didn’t last.

These little errands I do on foot instead of online afford me the serendipity of running into a friend on the street. Even when we only have time for a high five without slowing down (looking at you, Steve) is the kind of urban pleasure I’ve structured my life around. Why pay for a membership to an unsustainable service that denies me this experience?

I’m beginning to think the rhythm of my inefficient life will make it longer.

Photo 1 by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Photo 2 by Delaney Turner on Unsplash

2023-03-07 14:20

Pocket Dispatch from the Fire Lane

I am racing out the door to take my three-year-old son to school. Everything is breaking and nothing is quite right. Toys are everywhere. They don’t dot the landscape, they are the landscape. The floor crackles with food and dust. The robot vacuum has a dead battery, as always, because its docking station too is another loose gadget that scoots around the floor instead of having a fixed home of its own. I curse, reinstall the vacuum on it to charge, and return to the kitchen, where the dishes pile up on every surface and the dishwasher is broken.

I had intended to deal with some of these things while my son slept this morning, but he did not sleep. He opened the bathroom door while I was on the toilet to tell me this. “Can today be a short nap?” He hadn’t slept at all. My morning work was canceled and would inevitably replace some or all of my more important afternoon work, if I let it.

Normally I would look forward to clearing my mind with the long walk to and from my son’s school, even with the intensely cold weather. But I’ve had a persistent dull pain in my leg for a week, so walking now makes me miserable. Without the mile-long walk to each school where I drop off and pick up our children, I am left to use our car. Navigating big city traffic at rush hour with two children talking at once is stressful, and driving a walkable distance causes me existential guilt. Then there is the likelihood of losing my parking spot at home.

In these moments, when minor annoyances have pushed me to the end of my rope, my negative emotional arousal causes me to rehearse imaginary arguments. I become impatient and irritable to real people in real life, and to those in my mind. For years this madness would catch me by surprise and accelerate a cycle of negative emotion. But now, with time and experience, medication and therapy, I am able to recognize shouting matches in my inner monologue as simply a symptom of stress. I can observe the symptom from a healthy distance, even as it’s affecting me negatively, and often I can remind myself that I can choose what to think about.

In these moments, my jaw clenching for no reason, I say to myself, “Relax.” I say it out loud, if necessary. Or, “I get to choose how I feel.” This is mostly true, most of the time. “I can go to the office right now and just make art if I want. I can put down this dish and this brush, ignore this mess, and go pick up an instrument.”

I drive my son to school, walk him inside, collect a kiss, then walk back to the car. Next I will drive to the busiest intersection in the center of the busiest part of my neighborhood and pay too much to park the car for an hour. I’ll go inside a cafe to write, even though I have a perfectly good work environment and a better keyboard in my home office. At least in the cafe the dishes are someone else’s problem, and the chaos outside, in full view from my seat at the counter, is a play I could watch forever.

It’s easy, I now realize, to recognize radiating rage as a symptom of mental unwellness. How else can I resent so much about an active, urban existence I have so carefully cultivated? But everyone’s biggest problem is their biggest problem, and it is our divine right to be miserable.

2023-03-01 14:37