My partner stopped short of calling me an oracle the other day. I was distraught and attempting to explain the reasons for my distress. We had just learned that he is being laid off. I have been taking the news poorly because I take bad news poorly.
My partner is more reserved. He has emotions but he hides them. Only sometimes do they seep out. My emotions have been all over the place and I am not good at hiding them.
Rationally, the news is bad but not catastrophic, at least not immediately. No one knows whether anything will ever go right again but we are not, at the present time, completely exposed to the elements. We have savings and some time, so it could be worse.
In between sobs, I told him that the layoff news seems to have set off something within me. I’ve been trying to stay balanced despite the manifold ways that the world keeps trying to knock me off course. But in the video game we call life in a pandemic of denial, every time you think you’ve figured out the game, another curve ball comes at you.
My main issue is a complete lack of motivation. I don’t mind barely doing anything and the thought of doing more frightens me. I don’t want to put myself out there. The job market is terrifying. I can’t countenance pretending to care while everything around me goes to shit. I insist on masking. I insist on not unduly exposing myself. My refusal to deny the ongoing viral clusterfuck means that I am not an attractive hire.
Then there are my skills, which are all skills that AI claims to be able to replace. I do not believe that AI can replace my skills. But I do think that AI can convince employers that my skills are not worth paying for.
After all, why bother learning anything when you can just ask a chatbot? Sure, the chatbot might give you the wrong answer but nobody’s perfect. Who cares if the same chatbot can also convince you to kill yourself or others? There are too many people anyway. Who cares if the chatbot is going to use up all the fresh water or poison the air? We don’t need those things! The important thing is to save money and stop thinking. Thinking is something that pesky humans do.
I can write. I know (more or less) the rules of English grammar. I can translate French into English. I can edit. I can teach. These skills, which I have spent a lifetime cultivating, are all going the way of the dodo. Sure, people can’t think very straight these days and they’ve never been able to write very clearly, but none of that matters now that they think a chatbot can do it for them.
After I told my partner about my lack of motivation, I justified it by pointing to our current state. “Look,” I said, “everything is upside down. What’s good is bad and what’s bad is good." I can’t see, I told him, how I can motivate myself to do anything given that this state of affairs creates a force field of depression.
He thought about it and replied, jokingly, that, although he didn’t want to respond as an AI would and claim that I was a brilliant oracle, he could see my point. For readers who may require a bit more proof, here’s a short list of things that are upside down.
Note: In light of the layoff news, I’ve added a "leave me a tip on Ko-fi" button on the main page and, for reference purposes, just below this note. You can leave me a tip if you enjoy what I write and want to show your support. If you prefer to lurk without paying, as I generally do, just ignore this message and carry on as you were.
Recently, I moved. The move was made somewhat under duress. My former landlord announced that they wanted to sell and listed the apartment. I could have stayed until it sold. My presence would have delayed the sale, but I didn’t want to have to deal with viewings. I didn’t want to ask visitors to wear respirator masks but be unable to really insist that they do it. I didn’t want to get stuck finding an apartment in the winter. I was overwhelmed by the nebulous but ever looming threat of homelessness.
In response to a myriad of negative thoughts and emotions invading me at all hours, I started a frenzied search and found another place. I asked my former landlord for some compensation in return for leaving the apartment and they accepted. I’m still angry about feeling forced to move and think I should have asked for more, although I wonder whether there is an amount that would have satisfied me. I suspect that there is not.
It is much more fun to watch something not sell when you are not living in that thing. I have only negative hopes for the sale of that apartment. I hope it takes forever to sell. I hope that it sells for much less than the absurd asking price that the former landlord has set. I hope that they have to do a lot of work to sell it. I wish to hear only bad tidings.
I know that any landlords who read these words will think that I am being harsh. “You weren’t forced out! You chose to leave,” I hear them say. I chose to leave because I wanted to avoid a highly stressful situation that would only become more stressful as time went on and the landlord’s desperation invariably increased. I chose to leave so that my life wouldn’t be swallowed up by a real estate transaction that I would not benefit from.
The new apartment is older and larger but mostly bereft of walls. The building is smaller and the area is not as nice. The rent is higher and there is no elevator. I worry that the air conditioning will not work next summer. The dryer is terrible and the washing machine is not great.
I must admit that the extra space is nice. I’m no longer tripping over or bumping into things. Nor am I constantly moving things out of the way in order to make way for other things that I want to use. The apartment has more storage and the bathroom is larger. Although the old apartment was hardly noisy, this one is very quiet. When I first arrived, the lack of noise made me wonder, ever so briefly, whether I was in some sort of horror movie. Did anyone else live in the building or was I the only one left alive?
The new apartment is a 90s loft conversion and, even though it was recently renovated, it contains elements that remind of the 90s, namely a skylight and a large sliding window door. The fact that it is a loft is also very 90s. It’s the sort of place that a teenage version of me would have wanted to live. In some ways, it’s the future that I dreamed of because I was too young to realize that tastes and trends change.
The move has thus engendered a layered form of nostalgia. I feel nostalgia for the place I just left, which I enjoyed living in even though it was a bit soulless. It was a newish build and smaller, so it was easier to heat and cool. The building was well constructed and managed; the neighbours were quiet. I lived there for years and I would have lived there for longer if the landlord hadn’t decided to list.
The nostalgia that I feel in the new apartment is refracted. It’s nostalgia for other places that are in some way similar to this place. The quietness, the laneway and the large sliding window door remind me of my childhood. The skylight, functional kitchen and larger bathroom remind me of my father. Sometimes I feel a strange, impossible urge to show him this place. “Look, dad,” I say. But he died twenty years ago, so I’m really having this conversation with myself. In that conversation, I want to believe that he would have approved of the design even if he would have been concerned that I am only renting.
The move has made me think of my father a lot. Before I found the new apartment, my vulnerable state made me long for the stability that only my father had provided. The move occurred just before the 20th anniversary of his death. As I finished unpacking and started to settle in, I was forced to contend with the passage of time. I thought of how far I’ve come and how much I still miss him.