Altoids by the Fistful

“Wh— what did you say?”

It’s close to six o’clock on a weekday afternoon and the bar is starting to get noisy with the after-work crowd. It’s entirely possible I misheard that last part.

“Altoids! I find the spearmint works a little better overall, but recently I’ve started switching flavors depending on the situation.”

I’ve worked with James—“Jim” as everyone on the team knows him—for a little over two years and I’m used to this dance now. He gets a kind of tunnel vision in his excitement about whatever shiny new thing has captured his attention. It’s usually pretty easy to shake him out of it.

“No, Jim, the part before that.”

He looks at me for a moment, inquisitive, before pushing his beer aside. “Here, let me show you.” He reaches underneath the table and produces his beige-on-brown Timbuk2 messenger bag. There is a small wet spot left behind from his drink, and the bag plops right onto it. I watch as one of his stubby hands unbuckles the outermost pouch while the other one pulls out a small green and white tin. I am obviously intended to see this as clearly as possible, evidenced by the way he places it front and center between us.

“Regular everyday Altoids, right? You take about four of them, maybe five.” He flips the lid open and traps the requisite number of small white mints between his fingertips, which he then pops into his mouth. “This is the trick; you gotta half-chew it first.” At least two tiny shards fly in my direction as he speaks these words. It is like listening to a slow K-turn executed on a road covered in gravel and seashells. Three more slow and deliberate chomps, then his bite eases. “Mmm.” The communication style switches to mime: an index finger raised in a “one moment” gesture, followed by an exaggerated point downwards while unzipping the main pouch of the bag. It takes a few seconds of rooting around before the star of this particular show is found.

My eyes barely have enough time to resolve the object under the dismal light at this end of the bar before it’s in his mouth. He’s chewing the full concoction now—mouth closed, thank God. The crunching softens, then fades into the din from a nearby table of sales bros laughing at their sales bro anecdote. Jim is looking at me with a kind of confident smugness I haven’t seen since I bet my buddy at Guitar Center that he couldn’t spontaneously play “Everlong” from memory. A bet I lost, I might add.

There is a degree of intentional spectacle to this, I’d have to imagine. Each jaw movement is deliberate. Precise. He does not break eye contact with me, though I desperately want to break it with him. I can’t though. The absurdity of the scene is absolutely hypnotizing. One final swallow, a smack of his lips, then he opens his mouth wide like a child proving that they finished all their vegetables and have earned their dessert. “Easy peasy, no problem.”

“That was…” It’s like a significant piece of my brain has just completely locked up. I’m just saying words without thinking, filling the empty air.

“A cat turd!” he proclaims, finishing my sentence.

A beat.

“You just ate a cat turd.” It’s all I can do in this moment to plainly restate the facts as I understand them, although the sense of alarm is definitely carrying in my voice.

“Yup, and it didn’t taste bad at all. The spearmint masks it completely. Watch, I’ll do another one.” My eyes widen in dread as I shake my head weakly. I didn’t want to see him do that the first time; I sure as shit don’t want to see it again.

“No, that’s alright,” I balk.

There is an awkward reach across the bag as he grabs his glass, tips it toward me in a silent toast, then takes a long swill. Whether he admits it or not, there’s evidently something that needs to be washed down. He lets out a contented sigh as the almost-empty glass thumps back down on the table. I glance down at the chicken wings and carrot sticks I had been picking at. A minute ago, they were kinda bland—merely okay by the standards of pub food. With the abrupt loss of my appetite, now they are destined for the dumpster out back.

He lifts the small tin of mints and gives it a little shake in front of my face. It sounds a lot more papery and a lot less metallic than I would’ve guessed. “Altoids. I’m not exaggerating when I say these have completely changed the way I work.” I follow this little miracle box as they get tucked back into the bag, the buckles snapping shut to shield them from the lustful gaze of an angry world. He pauses and looks up at me again. “Would you like to try?”

“No, Jim, I don’t want your cat turds.”

I don’t want your cat turds. Why did I say it like that? I don’t want anybody’s cat turds!

…Right?

“Completely changed the way I work,” he repeats mechanically, sliding his bag onto the empty seat to his left. I’m finding it quite difficult to look at Jim, so I instead follow the motions of the bag until it is completely out of my view. How many more are in there?

“I used to spend so much of my day on cat turds, psyching myself up, trying strategies that didn’t work, all the cleanup when I was finished. That’s all gone now. I can never go back to the old way.”

“I just… I mean…” My brain has started working again, at least superficially, and it has generated so many questions that I’m having a hard time selecting which one to ask first. “How long have you been eating cat turds?” A fine question for this moment, I suppose.

“What do you mean? I’ve always had to eat cat turds. Since I was a kid in school, on through college, in all my jobs… They keep giving me cat turds and I keep having to eat them, otherwise it starts to pile up and then things really get messy.”

His face turns slightly serious as he parses my expression, his head tilting in suspicion. “You eat cat turds too, yeah?” I choose not to answer that question. He continues anyway. “Sure. We all do. We have to, ya know?”

We all do.

Those words have been repeating in my head with the consistency of a drumline cadence. We all do.

“Walk sign is on to cross Pawk Avenue. Walk sign is on to cross Pawk Avenue.” I’ve heard this prerecorded voice, clearly belonging to the most disgruntled DOT Traffic Signals employee available at the time of this crosswalk’s construction, at least twice per workday for the last two years. It stirs up a half-remembered dream of a career spent shoveling dirt into a hole—something that feels more like the idea of “honest work” than what I get paid to do every day. I bet nobody on the construction crew spent an entire workday fighting around with brittle, poorly designed automation tooling like I did today.

I’m quickly but unintentionally refilling my conscious mind with the task I had gleefully abandoned when Jim invited me out to after-work drinks. Normally I’d be irritated to spend more of my waking life thinking about this stuff, but after what I witnessed at the bar I welcome any distraction at all.

“Okay. So, usually we have a string. This is one of many values inside a mapping type, within a list of similar mappings.” I’m narrating to myself silently, imagining little bits of JSON syntax stamped on rectangles that are kind of stacked on top of each other like playing cards. “But ever since the schema change in V3, sometimes the value is another mapping type that wraps the string we want…” I’m visualizing another square to the right of the existing one. This one is yellow, distinct from the light blue of all the others, and it never occurs to me to question why that is.

“But because this is actually YAML, and the value comes from a template call, both the string form and the mapping form need to be escaped and indented in a way that works in both cases.” I’m chewing on the problem in pretty much the same mindset I had during work, only now I’m walking across midtown instead of staring at a computer screen. “We could just revert that change, keep the value as JSON like it used to be and insert it verbatim… but DevEx owns that part and I wouldn’t want to have to fight to get that PR approved.”

“Piece of shit.” I speak that bit out loud without really intending to. I snap back into awareness of my surroundings and look around. Nobody was near enough to hear it. They probably wouldn’t have cared if they were.

It occurs to me that, whenever anybody asks me what I do for a living and I wave my hand and say “Computers,” this is what I’m trying to avoid needing to have to explain. None of these words are being used in a way that would mean anything to most people. If one were to take the time to carefully define them all and how they fit together semantically, they describe concepts so abstract and detached from any kind of tangible shared experience that you’d hit a second wall trying to explain that.

“Oh, but wait, we have the nindent function. I could just count up the indentation level of the outer list and… Ah, hell, I forgot this template is transcluded into pod and deployment specs and the nesting levels would be different between the two.” I briefly try to think of which chucklefuck I could blame this design on, but truth be told I rubber-stamped enough questionable pull requests in my time here that a fair amount of this situation is a mess of my own damn making.

Huh. I really do wonder what I would sound like trying to explain this to somebody who had no experience in the industry. I suppose if I was very excited about it, I might come across like an energetic kid going on and on about all the different Pokémon they know about and all the special attacks and vulnerabilities. But without that spark of passion, and in its place a jaded voice tinged with frustration and contempt, I would probably just sound like a raving lunatic. These words don’t mean anything. I’m not describing something that actually exists. I’m playing the part of an observer in a universe of little floating boxes, becoming physically agitated about a superficial difference within the yellow one, and none of it is real.

I’m definitely not feeling the passion on this one. This code runs deep inside a build-deploy pipeline that I have no hope of ever running directly on the computer I’m using. So I write the code, push it to CI, wait for a bunch of stuff I’m not interested in to finish running, then get to watch my change fail to work for either the stupidest typo that I never should’ve made in the first place, or due to some error that is so novel that even the search engines assume I must really be having some other much more popular error instead of the one I provided. It feels like I am performing surgery using a scalpel held by a boardwalk arcade claw machine, complete with the constant squawking and shitting of project management seagulls.

And even if I could concisely explain all of that to my hypothetical interlocutor, there’s the even higher-level question: Why? Why did we even make this change? What was so irredeemably wrong with the last two versions of this thing that we’re now doing it all again a third time? What exactly is the goal we’re trying to achieve here? I can’t really say. It’s a question I never asked, partly because I learned a long time ago that asking questions just causes friction. Just nod and shut up. Put a +1 on a sketchy PR and get it out of here. Don’t hold up the pipeline. Recover enough stamina to face down the next eldritch nightmare that slithers its way to the top of my Jira swimlane. “Sounds great, thanks.” Thumbs-up. Grit my teeth through to the next direct deposit, convince myself it’s not so bad. Do it over and over until some ill-defined end condition is met. I’ll know it when I see it. I hope.

I catch myself at the tail end of a sigh. I fake like I’m yawning to stretch my upper body for a second. Approximately every muscle in my back now aches.

There’s this very real sense that I don’t… I don’t want to solve this problem. There is no intellectual reward at the end of this journey. It’s not interesting to me. This isn’t something that needs to be fixed, because it’s not a situation that ever should’ve been permitted to happen in the first place. This is just a bunch of contrived nonsense that I must work through because the broader situation dictates it. It doesn’t matter if the solution is good or elegant. It doesn’t matter if it barely works. It doesn’t matter if it causes another problem that I stub my toe on in three weeks. It’s just… what I have to do.

I stop in my tracks.

These kinds of problems are my cat turds.

Unlike Jim, though, I can’t just cram a bunch of breath mints into my face to make this go away.

The “down” escalator into the train station is out of service, and it has been this way all summer. A pair of orange plastic barricades block the landings at both ends. I walk down two flights of stairs alongside a half-dozen other commuters. Having concluded that the template problem simply isn’t worth thinking any further about, I’m back on the cat turds. I understand what Jim was talking about now. This has been happening for almost my entire life, even going back to my days in elementary school.

All of the homework assignments that were blindly graded against answer keys from the back of a Teacher Edition of the textbook: Cat turds. College admission essays where I profused a longing desire to attend the distinguished universities that my parents and guidance counselor told me I should set my ambitions toward: Cat turds. Probably hundreds of cover letters submitted alongside job applications throughout the years, skimmed by perhaps tens of internal recruiters and hiring managers: Cat turds.

The notion that it was a good idea to manipulate highly whitespace-sensitive YAML data with the Go text/template package. CI workflows that take 75 minutes to reach the one step in the entire process that fails. Tools and interfaces that force-update and introduce breaking changes for seemingly no justifiable reason, removing or kneecapping features that were being relied on, with issue trackers guarded by thickheaded bots that dismissively auto-close feature requests that kindly ask for consideration for those use cases. Massively over-complicated software that tries to be everything to everybody, but in reality ends up being a gigantic lumbering pile of failure and frustration. Cat turds.

I used to love this stuff. I still do. Except… I don’t. Not lately, anyway. A long time ago, this was unquestionably what I wanted to do with my life. I would stay up late, pushing back my bedtime for a few more minutes with these glorious machines, hacking away on some little project. Then I’d get up early the following morning, excited to jump back into the project before my day out in the world began. I don’t even clearly remember what I was building toward, but I know it had basically zero utility or market potential. The point of doing the project was simply to do the project—to press through problems, to learn new things, and to end the day with more skills and experience than I started with.

At one point, I had the 7-bit ASCII table memorized. Just the decimal codes; I didn’t really understand the usefulness of the hexadecimal representations, and it never occurred to me that the hex values would work much better in mnemonics. I don’t know why I took the time to learn that. I never really used that knowledge in any real day-to-day work, and it began to fade from my mind as soon as I found some other pointless esoterica to wallpaper over it.

Look at me now, having to Google how to read a text file line-by-line in Python despite having done it a hundred times at this point. The knowledge is up there somewhere, I’m sure of it. I just can’t always think of the idiom in the heat of the moment. Just a little hint to jog the old brain, that’s all I need.

I often wonder what my Younger Self would think of me now, failing to remember a two-line snippet of code that you’d find in the first ten pages of any beginner’s guide to the language. He’d probably sneer and say I need to devote more time to studying. But I’m an adult with things to do; I can’t spend all my time just memorizing things just in case I might need the information someday. Oh, and by the way: Younger Self, if you were such a friggin’ hotshot, why did it take you fifteen years to finally wrap your head around regular expressions? What’s that? Because they were hard? So you spent all your time memorizing easy and pointless trivia rather than tackling anything that was genuinely challenging? And then building up a whole air of superiority based on the number of discrete facts you could rattle off, rather than their practical utility? What, were you trying to become a contestant on Computer Jeopardy! or something?

No wonder Younger Self grew up to be kind of an asshole.

I mean, I didn’t try to be an asshole. It’s just that I tended to gauge my own self-worth relative to others based on the only social currency we could accurately compare: the amount of “stuff” we knew. Some people memorize car engine displacements, others carry in their noggins enough digits of pi to resolve the observable universe down to the width of a hydrogen atom. I had a litany of command-line switches that I never used for anything, HTML character entity names for writing systems I couldn’t comprehend, and tales of tweaking settings deep inside the Windows 98 Device Manager just so I could brag about having been in there in the first place. I also at one time sincerely believed that maybe if I taught myself to—I’m picking one example out of many—decode Code 39 barcodes in my head, it would somehow make me cool and desirable during otherwise awkward social functions. (I did get reasonably good at it. All it takes is memorizing a couple of three-digit sequences. Having a teenager’s near-field visual acuity certainly helped.)

Everybody else who didn’t know those little pieces of nothing? They were the lessers. They didn’t put in the time to grind for this knowledge. They had never scaled the peaks of Mount AltaVista, nor had they knelt in the temple of the MSDN Library for Visual Studio on a banged-up pair of CD-Rs. I knew things they did not, therefore I felt I was higher-and-mightier than they were. I and I alone suffered for this knowledge. This attitude manifested itself in one of two ways: In the first case, I would barge my way into situations where my involvement wasn’t needed or appreciated, thinking I could “save” others from the pain I once had to contend with. More often than not, though, I would simply mock people for not knowing things—usually inside my own head, but sometimes outwardly on mailing lists and message boards. There were times when I judged a person to have failed to put in the necessary amount of work, so therefore they did not deserve to rise anywhere near where I considered my own level to be. It didn’t matter if the subject was deeply technical or a disagreement on the precise phrasing of a Simpsons quote. Somebody got something wrong, and it was my job to rectify that.

I feel bad for the people who worked on teams where Younger Self was the senior engineer. I was full of ideals and convictions back then. “No, we’re not doing that. We’re going to Do It Right instead.” I was full of piss and vinegar. “Here, give me that; I’ll just do it myself.” I was full of shit.

I now realize that everything I lorded over other people—all the things I gatekept without consciously understanding that this was what I was doing—I didn’t need to do that. It really didn’t help anything. For some number of people who interacted with me, I was the problem. I could’ve been more tolerant or forgiving, I could’ve said “let’s find out together,” I could’ve let other people have the fun once in a while. I could have minded my own damn business and saved everybody the hassle.

There were people out there who must’ve felt that I was their cat turds.

I’ll never be able to track down and apologize to every person I treated that way. And why did I even build that fiefdom and protect it so jealously? Why was I so insecure? Why did I have to always be right and have a ready justification for why everybody else was wrong?

It was just me, alone in my tiny sandbox, safe and secure behind my towering fortress of cat turds.

My usual train, the one packed so full that some riders have to stand in the aisles until after the first or second stop, usually leaves at 5:50. Now about three hours later, one can sometimes get an entire car to themselves. I settle down in a window seat looking out at the desolate platform. Evidently there aren’t all that many people interested in traveling across the river at this hour on a Wednesday evening. It feels nice to sit, despite the fact that I’ve probably sat for a cumulative ten hours—at least—over the course of this day.

As sometimes happens, another rider boards the train and enters what had up to this point been my personal rail car. He selects the aisle seat in the row directly in front of me. At least 110 other seats in this car, every single one of them empty, and his choice is to sit right here. Sigh. I could get up and move to another seat but I’m… exhausted. I’m here, I’m settled in, and above all I’m just completely out of ambition. I guess it’s fine as long as he doesn’t start playing music or TikTok videos without headphones.

A long blow from the locomotive horn, and the train begins to creep forward. Right on schedule. We’re in a tunnel deep below the city’s west side, and the view out the window is pitch black aside from the occasional glow from a mercury-vapor emergency light. On the wall beneath each of these lights, patches of graffiti framed by concrete pillars. I wouldn’t say I’ve memorized them all by heart; I can’t even read the tags on the majority of them. But they are at least familiar, and I’ve found some of them serve as convenient signposts along this portion of the trip. I’m not really paying attention to any of them tonight, instead I’m staring blankly at a little patch of window glass as the scene rolls past.

I refocus my eyes a bit and realize I’m looking at the reflection of a screen, or at least the top corner of one. I turn away from the window and find the source of the light. The man in front of me has opened his laptop—a chunky Dell Latitude or something very close to it—and perched it on a small lap desk fashioned from his leather bag. He opens a web browser and logs into a Microsoft account, one key at a time, hunt-and-peck style. It prompts him for his second factor and he shifts awkwardly in the seat to retrieve his phone. The login process succeeds and, after a few clicks and a fair bit of both of our finite lifetimes spent staring at loading spinners, opens what appears to be a Word document. I can’t read anything on his screen, which is more a testament to how wrecked my eyes have become than anything else, but I can see that there’s about four, perhaps five lines of unformatted text up there already. He strokes his chin while giving it a good read-through, then his hands take their position on the trackpad. Right index finger moves the cursor, left index finger does the clicking. The screen flips to another browser tab, his left hand gratuitously double-clicks on the website suggested by the first tile on the screen, and the page loads.

I never learned to tell any of these sites apart from each other. I see lots of people using the one with the spirograph logo. The one that looks like a cartoon butthole is also quite popular among some departments at my job. This guy is using the one that’s represented by a symmetrical color blob. Not that one, the other color blob one. Yeah.

He has opened a chat session that has evidently been going for some time. The text entry box at the bottom of the window waits patiently for fresh input. Letter by agonizing letter, the keys needed to express his thoughts are pressed. The most-pressed key, however, is Backspace. This man is, using the most generous language possible, not a particularly fast or accurate typist. In total, he enters about ten words before pressing Enter. A short moment later, the machine responds. Entire sentences appear in the time it took him to type a single word. Multiple paragraphs with subheadings and bulleted lists scroll into view. The screen fills completely with this fresh text. He looks at this for a moment, moves his hands back to the trackpad, and selects a complete paragraph. His finger presses down with immense force as he drags the selection area ever wider, as if his catch is in danger of wriggling through his fingers if he doesn’t hold the button down hard enough. He flips back to his Word document and pastes the paragraph. Then back to the chat window. He begins typing again. Slowly. Excruciatingly.

This cycle repeats several times, incrementally building his document up to four or five double-spaced pages in length. It’s not exactly a fast process, but certainly faster than if he had thought up and typed out all that content the old-fashioned way. It’s certainly plausible that he at least read everything that went into the document, but I wouldn’t be able to prove it.

He selects another piece of text, this one substantially smaller than the other specimens that he’d been handling up until this point. This one is pasted into a discussion thread on Teams. He waits a moment for responses, closes the lid, and the laptop goes back into his bag. The man stands up, wraps the strap over his shoulder, and walks to the front of the car as the train brakes to a full stop. This is where our paths diverge, it would seem. The doors open and he steps out into the night.

Alone in the train car again, with nothing interesting to eavesdrop on, my mind begins to wander again. I wonder what the purpose of that document was. Why was it being prepared? Who dictated that a half-dozen input phrases needed to be inflated into a thousand-word wall of text? Who was going to sit and read all of that, anyway? And for what purpose?

I really don’t know. But I do know one thing: It’s cat turds.

This guy obviously didn’t want to do that task. Whether that was due to lack of passion and interest, or lack of skill and ability, he had a cat turd to eat and he found a little pack of Altoids that he could use to get through it with minimal suffering. The people who have to read it? There’s a good chance they’ll be dealing with a cat turd too. Maybe they can choose to employ a chatbot to summarize it back down to his original inputs. Maybe it’ll even do a passable job preserving the essence of the guy’s prompts.

It makes sense why a person or group of people would flock to anything that makes life’s demands a little less difficult for themselves. You’d have to be pretty dumb to want to do a task like that manually.

There’s still the question, though. Why are we all eating cat turds? When did we all collectively agree that we were all a-okay with the idea that we had to subject ourselves to this constant grind of doing shit that doesn’t really need to be done to satisfy requirements that were put in place simply “because” and that seemingly only create more pointless work for other people (or ourselves!) to have to do later?

One of the defining characteristics of humanity is its ability to build and wield tools that make difficult tasks easier. One would presume there would also be a certain wisdom in knowing which of the difficult tasks were worth doing in the first place but… Well. When you presume, you make a pres out of u and me.

If I had known ahead of time that I’d be out this late, I would’ve brought a jacket. The early autumn air is calm but crisp, and my borough’s train platform offers very little protection from the chill. The crickets are still chirping, but their song has slowed substantially compared to how they sounded a few weeks back. I stopped parking at the station a long time ago—the monthly pass costs well over $150 now, and most days the parking lot is completely full before six o’clock in the morning anyway. It’s only a mile to the house, and this twenty-minute walk is pretty much the only exercise I get nowadays.

Once I cross the main boulevard at the four-way stop, it’s all suburban residential side streets. There is basically no traffic at this time of night in my sleepy little bedroom community. All the dogs have been walked, the kids have been put to bed, and the adults… Well, I’m sure there are at least a couple people around here drinking or smoking the memory of their cat turds away.

I’m no closer to anything resembling inner peace. I find I’ve grown to despise large swaths of the only thing I’ve ever been able to earn reliable income from. I tire of walking a path that has seemingly shifted beneath my feet to point toward a destination I no longer recognize. I’m embarrassed by the jerk my Younger Self used to be, and simultaneously ashamed of the energy I lost as I matured. I don’t really want to do most of what I have to do, while feeling a deep unsated need to achieve something that I have neither the stamina nor the freedom to pursue. At some point I’m going to reach down deep into the well of ambition to discover there ain’t nothing there to pull out anymore. And then?

Something percent of success is simply showing up. That’s roughly how the quote goes, right? I’ve heard seventy percent, ninety percent, hell, let’s call it seventy-eight. It doesn’t matter because it isn’t a real thing that can be measured in any objective way. The idea is to inspire people to at least try. Put your butt in the chair, log into Teams, trick yourself into thinking, well, I made it all the way here, might as well prune my stale Git branches or something so I can feel like I’m doing real work. Push aside distractions, shake off procrastination, kindle that tiny spark into enough momentum to break through whatever barrier is standing in the way of getting something done. If only that worked with any degree of predictability.

There’s a metaphor that talks about painting the backs of cabinets. The idea is that, when you’re putting paint, stain, varnish, whatever on some cabinets, there’s no need to paint the surfaces that face toward the wall. From the day the units are mounted, to a day forty years from now when they are ripped down and thrown into a construction dumpster during a subsequent kitchen renovation, nobody will see the backs of any of those cabinets. Painting them would be a waste of time and materials. Nobody would know if it was done or not.

“Yes, but I would know.” That’s something my Dad would often say. His tendency has always been to be overly thorough, exacting and precise in any craft he partakes in. Everything—from the doors in the house to the stripes cut into the front lawn—was always level, plumb, square, centered, polished, dust-free, squeak-free, fingerprint-free… He even demonstrated meticulous care in breaking down cardboard and filling up the waste bins at the curb. I still have no idea how he was able to raise two kids in that house without exploding from the chaos we brought.

Maybe it was genetic, or maybe I voluntarily developed it so my dad would be proud of me just like he was proud of the other things he made. Either way, I definitely started to take after him in those ways and I now recognize this same kind of care in myself all the time. Not just in the way I prefer all my clocks to read the exact correct time or my knack for always noticing the way the receptacle face isn’t exactly flush with the wall plate… but in a fundamental inability to not care about quality or craft. Even when the task doesn’t matter. Even if it results in an entire afternoon spent painting a piece of carpentry that nobody will ever see. I can’t not care.

All that stuff Younger Self struggled with—the self-superiority, the sense that I had to be the one who did it if it needed to be done correctly, the derision and borderline abuse I gave others—that was all just a big dogmatic ball of caring a whole lot about quality and craft, being rolled around by a kid who didn’t understand what to do with it. I had to work so hard to care so much, and these other people didn’t, and everything worked out for them anyway, and that wasn’t fair. Decades later, I still feel that way sometimes.

My parents still live in that house, surrounded by all the things my dad cared so much about. Aside from a whole bunch of trees that died and needed to be cut down to stumps, everything is still pretty much pristine. But if you start to look around, really scrutinize, you’ll start to notice some things have slipped. There’s a film of dust on the higher wall decorations. Some of the brass knobs are becoming tarnished. A few of the light bulbs in the hallway fixtures don’t match. My dad seemed tired the last time we talked, and more than once he expressed the sentiment that “everything he owns is falling apart.” Is it simply the onset of physical old age that has limited his ability to stay on top of these things, or is he beginning to leave behind his era of caring?

Now that I think about it, I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about how care factored into his career philosophy. I had always implicitly assumed that it was the same as it currently is with me: Work or play, it’s always there. Can’t turn it off even if I wanted to. But what if he could? What if all the care he demonstrated in projects around the house was compensation for all the things he deliberately avoided caring about at work? It would certainly explain how he was able to consistently sustain those standards. But then, that would mean that I modeled my own principles and tastes on a distorted view of my dad, untempered by whatever he didn’t let me see about his workplace persona.

How would I begin to—well, I don’t want to say “not care,” that sounds too extreme. But maybe… selectively care? To care about the things that matter, the things that spark passion and joy and remind me why I spent so much time practicing this godforsaken occupation. While at the same time recognizing the things that don’t matter, the problems for which the optimal solution is to stop insisting on having that problem in the first place. The kinds of tasks for which the 78% showing-up baseline score is plenty good enough. Tasks on which care would be utterly wasted, the cases where the cabinets are so irredeemably fucked up that the lack of paint on the back is the last thing anybody’s going to worry about. Those are the tasks that hurt the most, because I find it basically impossible to make myself care about them. It offends my soul to try to force it, and it drains me of all ambition to move onto the next potentially heartening opportunity. It’s a real problem, and I find it always has been: If I can’t care about it, I have an extremely hard time bringing myself to do it at all.

Well, I suppose that’s when I open a chatbot session of my own. “Hey there Chat. Uh, we’ve never spoken before but, uh… Well, my entire system of self-motivation just completely broke down but I still need to keep moving forward. Can you help me out of this bind?” There’s a whole discipline—they call it Prompt Engineering—that’s just a fancy form of throwing your hands up and pressing the Care About It For Me button. That’s pretty much how it works. Provide it with any cat turd under the sun, it doesn’t matter. Chat will gobble them all up for you like a coprophagic dog.

I’d be lying if I said the idea didn’t make my skin crawl a little. Every fiber of my being says that this is a weight to be borne by me and me alone. This is my cat turd to eat; they gave it to me. When it’s done, I can open my grinning maw and say without equivocation that I was the one who got through it. I painted the back of this cabinet. I worked way too hard and poured far too much of my blood, sweat and tears into this thing. And my reward for a job well done is… debilitating exhaustion, most of the time. Getting a fresh cat turd to eat tomorrow. And the day after.

Of course, Chat can’t really care. It does a passable job pretending like it cares, saying the words that convey the illusion of care to any reader not paying very close attention. Where do I draw the line between fostering real care, versus passing off a degraded third-generation photocopy of some tokenization of what may have at one point been somebody else’s care? Is the line simply the boundary between the tasks I’m excited to do and the ones I put off until I’ve depleted enough mental reserves to sorta care?

It really does feel like the average person has made a choice to abandon a great deal of care, at least in their professional capacity. Take a look around at all these people with their fake shit-eating grins, passing off a machine’s effort as their own and experiencing no consequences. Sometimes they’re rewarded for doing so. There are organizations that are beginning to mandate it now. These people aren’t eating their cat turds anymore, why am I still sitting here eating mine?

I round the final curve leading to the corner of my block. As I pass under the streetlight, I cast a shadow on the asphalt ahead. With each step it grows longer and more distorted. There’s a rustle from the shrubs bordering my neighbor’s driveway, and a small dark form emerges. It crosses the street halfway then abruptly stops. I stop as well. A pair of glowing yellow eyes look back at me. I stare at it, it stares at me. A possum, perhaps? Somebody’s outdoor cat? It’s just watching me, seemingly peering straight into my very soul. Can it see what I’m grappling with here? Is it passing judgement on me for thinking these thoughts? It sizes me up for a moment longer, turns its head, and becomes a black apparition once more. I struggle to track it as it continues across the street, and I lose sight of it entirely.

I arrive at home and shut the door behind me. Sunset was over two hours ago and it’s nearly pitch black in the hallway. I fumble around for the light switch, kick my shoes off next to the doorway, and hang my bag on its hook in the coat closet. Something grabs my attention, just above eye level, slightly overhanging the edge of the top shelf. I slide it out of its resting place and carry it into the kitchen. I sit down at the table and inspect it.

This object is a round metal cookie tin about twelve inches in diameter. Beneath a thin coat of dust, it is a deep red with a repeating pattern of snowmen and white snowflakes, and quite obviously once held winter holiday–themed cookies. I repurposed it many years ago to hold the only vice I currently permit myself to indulge in: a meticulously curated collection of all different types of chocolate candies. I remove the lid and set it aside. I survey the contents, a sea of differently-shaped naked chocolate morsels. I don’t remember why I chose to remove all the foil and paper wrapping before putting these in here. From my vantage point, everything looks vaguely the same—I can’t readily spot any differences between milk chocolate and dark, or those filled with caramel versus crème.

One particular piece near the edge catches my eye, and I carefully select it for inspection. It’s not a very pleasing color or shape—oddly asymmetrical. I roll it around between my fingers. There’s a hair on it. I hold it up to my nose and take a whiff, hoping to detect the aroma of the cacao. Try as I might, I can’t pick up any trace of its scent.

Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I smelled anything.