When People Disappoint You, Make Lunch!
A human-made Shroomami, a charred broccolini–pepperoni collaboration, and how to stop arguing with the universe.
IT’S A NEW YEAR, so let’s start by being completely honest with one another: People are disappointing. We just are. The truth is, it would be weird if we weren’t.
It’s part of our job. We’re flawed mortals, put here to stumble around and (presumably) evolve—not magical wizards or loyal robots or superheroes or centaurs or any of the other hopeful fictions that our flawed but lovely human minds create in order to distract us from . . . all the disappointments. Both large and small.
For example: Why can’t I fly? We’ve been hearing about jetpacks and flying cars in “the future” for as long as I’ve been on this planet, but if you go to your nearest window and look up at the sky you’ll find exactly zero flying cars or jetpacks. I still have to walk to the end of the driveway to get my mail.
What a bust. If there were a complaints box for our earthly existence, I’d stuff it full of slips of paper that said: Liars!
So, obviously, space colonization never happened, which explains why I’m not writing this from a utopian settlement on Mars with my robot dog at my side as I swallow salad pills. Instead of the future we imagined, we got something else entirely: billionaires floating in space with their friends, swallowing Skittles.
And down here on earth, we aren’t even close to the fantastical electronic, push-button, leisurely life that was going to replace all the 9-to-5 toil left over from the Industrial Revolution. Now, everyone just works all the time, 24-7, even when they’re in bed or watching a movie or having dinner with you (“Let me just answer this one email”). The advanced technology that was meant to set us free has instead imprisoned us.
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And these are just the material disappointments. It appears that the future we were promised wasn’t necessarily wrong about technology—it was wrong about people.
We innocently hoped the spellbinding internet would bring humanity together and foster global understanding. But—forgive us, we are only human!—we just couldn’t resist using it instead as a portal for lurking and obsessing—keeping track of people we’re mad at rather than picking up the phone and telling them why, ordering more miracle face creams, instantly finding the name of that actor from that movie we saw that time, and, eventually and most unfortunately, falling prey to preposterous conspiracies and outrage.
And it often seems that even when we put our heads together, to try to make the world a better place, we end up like Wile E. Coyote, chasing our one true dream in life off a cliff rather than stepping back and wondering if we might be doing it wrong.
But I probably need to step back myself. Anyone who has been reading this newsletter for a while knows that I get “this way” every six months or so (or is it every other week?), despite the fact that I’m madly in love with this dazzling horrifying world. And this has been a particularly overwhelming year.
But I also know that unlike the internet and machines, humans at least have the capacity for self-improvement—and, most importantly, the capacity to hope, which may be the strangest and most beautiful thing we do.
So when I catch myself mentally installing a complaints box for all of humanity, I eventually take that as my cue to breathe deeply, stop arguing with the universe for a minute, and look around for something smaller I can actually do without getting mad.
For instance, I used to be an enthusiastic devotee of the fast casual salad company SweetGreen, until I started noticing that I was paying a lot of money to get upset. I won’t go into it, but let’s just say I corresponded with them several times—which is what you’re supposed to do when something or someone disappoints you: Speak up, communicate, give them a chance.
But nothing changed, so I stopped going. I’ve read that they’re now using robots in place of humans.
