Cooper is looking at me with a level of judgment that I usually only reserve for people who park across 5 spots in a crowded lot. He is a 75-pound mix of stubbornness and golden retriever energy, and right now, he is refusing to understand that the yellow tape measure in my hand is not a very thin, very unsatisfying chew toy. I have a song stuck in my head-specifically ‘The Weight’ by The Band-and the line ‘take a load off Fanny’ is looping over and over as I try to figure out where his stifle ends and his hock begins. This is the promise of the modern world: everything can be made exactly for you, provided you are willing to spend 45 minutes wrestling a confused carnivore on your living room rug.

The Poetic Fantasy of Assets

The webcam’s tiny white LED is glowing, a miniature interrogation lamp I didn’t invite to the party. I am sitting here in a sweatshirt that has seen better decades, staring at the 13th slide of our quarterly strategy deck, realizing that my entire team can see me realize how much I hate this slide. It says, in a font that screams ‘we paid a consultant $5003 for this branding,’ that our people are our greatest asset. It’s a beautiful sentiment. It’s poetic. It’s also, based on the spreadsheet I have open in another tab, a complete and total fantasy.

We love the language of growth. We decorate our LinkedIn banners with it. We talk about ‘resilience’ as if it’s a superpower we can summon with a catchy hashtag rather than a resource that needs to be replenished with actual time and money. But the moment the conversation shifts from the philosophy of growth to the cost of growth, the room goes silent. It’s a specific kind of silence, the kind that usually precedes someone asking for a 33 percent haircut on the annual training budget because ‘we need to be lean this quarter.’

The thumb-swipe is a rhythmic, desperate tic. In the heavy, unmoving heat of a Phoenix bedroom, the air conditioning humming a low B-flat, a father watches the blue glow of his smartphone illuminate the frantic pulse in his own wrist. It is 2:12 a.m. Beside him, a three-year-old breathes in shallow, 42-count cycles, skin radiating a dry, alarming heat. The thermometer claimed 102 degrees, then 102.2 degrees, then 101.2 degrees on the third try, as if the device itself were hedging its bets against the coming dawn. This is the modern emergency room: a six-inch screen, a flickering connection to a forum thread from 2022, and the crushing weight of a medical decision that no one ever signed up to make.

Human bodies, especially small ones, don’t come with a manual or a shut-off valve, yet we expect parents to be master

My lungs are currently performing a desperate, whistling solo that nobody invited them to play. I am 44 steps into what the local signage describes as a ‘gentle incline,’ yet here I am, frozen in place, pretending to be deeply fascinated by a clump of moss that looks remarkably like any other clump of moss. I have my phone out, not to take a photo of the flora, but to provide a plausible excuse for my lack of forward momentum. To anyone passing by, I am a contemplative soul, perhaps an amateur botanist or a poet struck by sudden inspiration. In reality, I am an online reputation manager whose heart rate has spiked to 154 beats per minute because of a slight deviation in the earth’s crust.

It is a terrifying realization when it finally hits you. For most of my waking life, my body is nothing more than a convenient, if somewhat high-maintenance, vehicle for transporting my head from one Zoom call to the next. I treat it like a rental car that I have no intention of buying out at the end of the lease. I provide it with just enough premium unleaded-usually in the form of overpriced lattes-to keep the engine turning, and I take it to the ‘service center’ (the gym) for

The Evaporation of Status

The sweat is pooling in the small of my back, a cold, rhythmic trickle that feels like a countdown I can’t stop. I am standing on the platform of a rural station where the name is written in characters that look like elegant, impenetrable knots, and my phone-my lifeline, my translator, my surrogate brain-is flickering at a desperate 4 percent. I have a searing, sharp pain in my side that feels like a hot needle being threaded through my ribs, and I need to ask for help, but the only person here is an elderly man with a face like a dried plum who is staring at me with a mixture of pity and absolute terror. I try to mime ‘doctor,’ but I probably look like I’m attempting a poorly choreographed interpretive dance about a stabbing. This isn’t just about not knowing the word for ‘hospital’; it’s about the sudden, violent evaporation of my status as a functioning adult. I am 34 years old, I have a mortgage and a career, and yet, here, I am effectively a four-year-old in a grown-up’s coat.