Understandably I wasn’t in a very good mood in the next months. But something had happened to Anton too. After we stopped talking about the phenomenon, his smile too had vanished, and his face now looked broken. I was used to such changes: Anton often jumped from states of purest joy to mind-boggling despair, the change always instantaneous and easily noticeable, as if someone were switching their moods with a remote. But lately the remote was permanently switched to the “DEPRESSION” channel. Their constant changing of sexual partners had stopped, as well as the constant stream of funny stories that it generated.
Once when I came to see them I saw them standing on the sidewalk as if he was waiting for something to happen. I wanted to ask them immediately what was happening, but instead I sat next to them and waited for them to speak first:
“Engineer. Didn’t you support that evolution theory?”
“I find it meaningful, yes,”
I said it cautiously, expecting him to explode. Instead, he got annoyed:
“Of course you find it meaningful, but I’m asking something else: Do you think it applies now. To us humans. That the world we inhabit at the moment is one big progress machine, driven by the ‘fittest’?”
“And what if it is?”
“Well, nothing, I was just wondering what my role is in such a world?!”
“Well, it’s simple. So, when the circumstances around you change, you adapt to them, because otherwise you’ll die. In a way, the driver is your self-preservation instinct, or in other words, fear of death. Because that’s what the self-preservation instinct is—fear of death, right?”
“And?”
“Well, okay, now imagine some guy like me, who isn’t afraid of death, and lives as he WANTS, not as is best for him? If we’re just a more talkative version of animals, where is THAT PERSON’S place in the picture?”
It struck me how they were hiding under the expression “that person.”
“Well, aren’t you afraid of death?”
“I have no idea. Stop asking questions.”
“Sorry. That’s probably the only thing I know how to do.”
But, as usual, Anton had a point: why fight the machine? You cannot hurt the machine. You cannot make the machine surrender in fear (as machines don’t fear). You cannot kill it (cause it is not alive). Or enslave it, so it does what you want because it cannot do what you want because it does not UNDERSTAND what you want. So, the only thing you can do is to live with it. It is like a game in which you are forever trying to escape the robots that are chasing you. So, if you don’t want to play the game, than what would you do?
This was the question that I thought about while waking up on a certain Saturday morning which, which felt just like any other Saturday morning in the last couple of months, or indeed just like any other day, as I was working on weekends too. I couldn’t find an answer. Work was dull, but I couldn’t think of anything else that I could do. Curious was in deep depression and I didn’t want to talk to them, as talking to them made me sad as well, my other friends were also doing their own things… And so, I did the only other thing that I knew how to do for a whole day — I opened my laptop and I delved into my projects from work.
A few weeks ago I was at my first performance review with the owner of the company, a guy named Todor Strugački. Formally, we also had a board of directors, but, as I heard, they never vetoed his decisions. And why would they — he had been managing the company for more than twenty years already—from the moment he was 25 and founded the company until then, when he was 45. I had learned that all that happened with my rise was because he had liked me for some reason, and so I was very nervous him finding out how mediocre I really was, and (in my worst predictions) exposing me as the fraud I kinda was.
Before the review, I wished that I could explain to him what had happened to me with the time I wrote the initial version, and why he was wrong to hope that it will happen again. I wished to tell him something like: “Look, don’t imagine my ability (if it can even be called that) is like yours. You know the problems you might encounter along the way. I don’t. You are in full control of the situation – I can’t even control myself. I don’t know where I’m going, nor if I’ll get there or not. The fact that I wrote the code myself was an impulse that appears and disappears, like the headache that causes it.”
But when the meeting came, I realized that nothing could be more out-of-place. The meeting defied all my predictions, both bad and good — he neither criticised me, nor acknowledged my effort. As I found out much later, he had no WAY of criticizing or finding out that I am incompetent, as he was ever LESS competent that me—he hadn’t programmed in 20 years and he didn’t have a full working day since at least 10. His impressions about how good was I at doing my job were based only on what he heard from Anhela, who knew even less than he did.
So, there was no way for him and Anhela to know what I was doing and how was doing it. This is why, shortly after the meeting started, they interrupted my presentation, blurbed a few suggestions about the work we were doing and concentrated on the part that really interested them — deadlines. This was the part where they did have an opinion—both of them were not happy. They wanted all the stuff, whatever it was, to happen faster. This was the part where they DID criticise me. They called me off for being too nice to my colleagues.
At the end, Strugački started talking with a friendly tone of voice.
Hey, you seem tense. Relax, this is just a game.
And he winked at me. This wink looked like it provided a sort of resolution to the conflict, caused by Anton’s earlier speech. What he meant, although he obviously wouldn’t put it this way was: “Yes, you already see what the situation with us, with our whole society is: the machine is deathless, it is invincible, but it is not going to do anything to you, you see? In fact, you may get from it things that are actually quite good. All it takes is for you to follow some simple rules, and I already saw that you can do that. The situation is also kinda funny when you look at it that way. You don’t need to do anything, just realizing what the situation is would make you infinitely better off than 99% of people, who do not.”
This was the first time when I had seen someone from the work universe as having something in common with the people from my usual social circle. The first time that I saw someone at the office being distinctly… human. Being authentic, even more authentic than people like Anton, for whom authenticity was their whole posse. In one sentence, the man showed me a path forward that would allow me to do away both with my financial difficulties, and my existential problems, you may call them. All I had to do was stop taking myself so seriously.
At the end of the meeting I experienced a great sense of relief… However, it was not appropriate at all, as a matter of fact, this was precisely the time when I should have STARTED worrying.
From this meeting onwards, Strugački became something like a friend for me. We chatted a lot about different stuff, even personal things. He even did some favors to me— showed me how to orient myself in the Real estate market, as I had already accumulated enough savings to be able to afford a small flat. But the downside of this was that he was asking for more and more of my time. Whatever I was doing, I had to explain to him and recalibrate based on his expectations. And we had conversations all the time, including the time I spent at Anton’s house, where I was visiting frequently, due to the need to relax with a beer in hand in the middle of a long day, combined with the fact that I could afford calling a taxi to take me home at any time of the night.
But, as I hinted, I rarely relaxed — Strugački was chatting with me all the time, as if he wanted to make sure I’d never take my mind off work, because, of course this is all that he wanted from me (although he sometimes pretended to care how I was). “Work, work, work…” he used to say. But the word “work” was too vague. What I was actually doing. was managing HIS people, making HIS clients happy, making HIM richer.
A fact that, as you might suspect, Anton never failed to forget mentioning.
So, my situation was a bit funny, if you have the sense of irony: I would sit tired on Anton’s couch, stare at the spot on the wall where the TV would normally go (Anton, of course, didn’t have one) and trying to finish my beer, before Strugački inevitably calls, while Anton (they probably would deny that this happened like this, but don’t believe them) would make fun of me and call me a “bootlicker”, to use a non-explicit version of the insult, while his friends, who were again throwing parties all over the place, were laughing so hard that were spilling out their drinks on the floor. And every time I tried to say something to them, would trigger an ever bigger tsunami of laughter. Every joke that I would try to make up to get back to them would be met with a silence, as if all of them were members of a pact, made especially to exclude me.
There were days were I was sorry for them. There were days where I envied them and wished I was in their situation. But all the time I knew that ALL of us were crippled, all of us were robbed of that mythic vital force that was once the source of our happiness.
In the moment that we left school, in the hangover after our prom night, or at least at the moment when I left it (here I am speaking mainly for myself, as, for example of Curious it would have been long before, as he had stopped going to school way before the prom), we found that it (my vital force) was just not there. The feeling was so weird, for me, so unexpected… part of me was gone, it was as if someone woke up one morning to find that his nose ran away.
We knew full well that we could not even hope to have it go back again. So, we tried to replace it with something, they with “irony”, me, with “work”. Both of these things were, of course, pretty lousy replacements and so we had nothing to do but to laugh at each other, as a person who replaced their nose with a carrot, laughs at the one who replaced it with with a cucumber. Both of them were basically a variation of “Don’t take yourself too seriously”. But our situation WAS serious. And we probably had to acknowledge that at some point.