An Inconvenient Man

Imagine you're eating your favorite dish, but it doesn’t taste like anything. You feel absolutely nothing. You don’t smell it, don’t sense its temperature, don’t taste the salt, pepper, or spices—everything is the same, lifeless and indistinct. Keep imagining. You’re talking with friends—or rather, acquaintances. You discuss boring topics that don’t interest or affect either of you, but you do it to fit in, to follow the rules, to be like everyone else. You laugh at unfunny jokes, exchange empty, lifeless phrases, and life goes on. You meet a woman who seems to reciprocate your feelings. You feel something akin to joy, maybe even love, but it turns out that sex with her is monotonous and emotionless, and life together is bland. It turns out she doesn’t care what happens to you, what you want, how you’re doing, or what troubles you. She doesn’t care about you at all. At work, everything seems to be going well—if that’s what you’d call it. You’re given an office with a big window, introduced to colleagues, and your boss invites you over… Everything seems fine, you should be happy, but the work doesn’t bring joy. The smiles are fake, the people are phony… You’d almost be ready to die, since you don’t even feel fear, and there’s nothing left to lose. But even that isn’t possible because you’re immortal. Then you spot a light at the end of the tunnel—you hear music somewhere deep in a basement, far away… You do everything you can to reach that place, to visit it even for a moment, just to feel something. You smell freshly baked goods. You manage to sneak a bite of a just-baked berry pie. You taste it, feel its warmth, but the happiness lasts only a fleeting instant… Those around you look at you curiously and begin to feel something alive inside—maybe curiosity, maybe love, maybe something that reminds them of a long-forgotten sense of life. But this isn’t beneficial to society. The system thrives on creating robots that obey commands and perform their assigned functions. The system is cold. It doesn’t care about your feelings. You become inconvenient to this society. You’re a troublemaker, you disrupt the usual order, you’re uncomfortable to this world, you force people to feel, to confront their needs, to look deep into their own souls. Isn’t it easier to live on autopilot, to exist within a system created by someone else, to be no different, to be like everyone else… But you can’t anymore, and they cast you out.