The Shape of the Problem
The first time it works, really works, something unlocks in my chest.
I’m lying on my couch in the dark, and I say out loud: “Hey, I need to respond to a friend I haven’t written back in weeks. Her name is Minjee. She reached out after my dad’s surgery to ask how I was doing. I meant to respond. I kept meaning to respond. Now it’s been so long that responding feels like a confession. Can you write something warm but not over-explained? Don’t apologize too much. Just... bridge the gap.”
My voice sounds strange in the quiet apartment. I’ve never said these things out loud before. The guilt about Minjee, the paralysis, the way those weeks became a wall I couldn’t climb. I’ve thought it, but hearing myself say it to the empty room feels like something has escaped.
Text appears on my phone. It’s not me but it’s close enough that when I read it I feel caught—like someone opened my skull and tidied up.
Hey Minjee. I’m finally writing back. Which I know makes me the worst. Dad’s doing better (slowly) and I’ve been in that post-crisis fog where everything feels like it’s happening behind glass. Bubble tea soon?
I paste it into iMessage. I send it. The name disappears from the list of accusations.
And I feel lighter. Actually lighter, like several layers of insulation has been removed.
I think: what else?
I see the kerning before I see the word.
The A and the V leaving too much air between them, and I’m not reading the sign anymore, I’m just standing there like a man who’s been personally insulted by a gap. I see the cookie banner where “Accept All” is a cheerful blue button and “Reject All” is a gray whisper three clicks away. I see the hotel shower faucet that looks like an Asian film and music award trophy and has zero indication of how to make water happen. I’ve stood naked in four-star bathrooms turning things that should not turn, pulling things that were not meant to be pulled.
In Seoul, 660,000 young people have registered as “resting.” That’s the official category.
They watched their parents work 996. 9am to 9pm, six days a week. The mortgages that swallowed thirty years. So they stopped. Not because they can’t compete. Because they saw what winning looks like.
I have, at weddings, been caught staring at a light switch.
In a Shenzhen apartment, a man watches a livestream of fish in a pond. Eight hours. No scanning. No list. Just a man staring at fish. They call it tang ping—lying flat. Minimum consumption. Maximum withdrawal.
It follows you everywhere. Into conversations where a friend is telling you something that matters and you’re nodding but part of your brain is redesigning the menu on the wall behind their head. You start rearranging other people’s sentences while they’re still talking.
The lying-flat generation looked at the gap between current state and optimized state and asked: who said this was waste? What if the gap is where life happens?
I understand what they mean.
The next morning I’m brushing my teeth and I say to Claude, mouth full of foam: “I recorded a voice memo to myself at 3am a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t listened back. Can you write me a kind but honest message from present-me to past-me, acknowledging that I probably said something I’m afraid to hear, and that it’s okay to listen?”
I’ve started talking to it constantly. In the shower. While on the J. The M. And the Z. In the three-minute gaps between meetings. The threshold for what counts as “worth saying out loud” has dropped to almost nothing.
At “peptide raves” in South of Market, tech workers in lab coats teach each other to self-inject.
The powder arrives from Shenzhen—same city where the lying-flat kids live—labeled “for research use only.” BPC-157 for recovery. TB-500 for inflammation. Oxytocin for social behavior. One OpenAI researcher called it “Ozempic for autism.” Users mix them with sterile water in their kitchens.
I notice the laminated QR code on the folding table. I notice the font choice—Helvetica Neue, the confidence of it. I notice the way “WAIVER” sits centered above the code and think about what it would take to make someone sign something this flimsy. The answer is: they don’t sign. They scan. Of course they scan.
“Why be really consistent at the gym for six weeks,” one tech founder asked, “if I could instead work 16 hours at my research job?”
You can’t patch your liver.
They haven’t stopped looking for friction. They’ve just run out of external surfaces. The scanning turned inward, applied to cells, to chemistry, to the meat that refuses to optimize. What they’re running from is the same thing the lying-flat kids saw: the suspicion that no amount of optimization will ever feel like enough.
Walking home from another unsatisfying, injury-rehab climbing session of only easy problems, I say into my phone: “I muted a group chat six months ago. These are people I’ve known for fifteen years. I watch their lives from a distance now. I know what they ate in Portugal, I’ve seen their kitchen renovation, but I haven’t spoken to any of them directly since February. The mute was supposed to be temporary. Can you help me figure out if I want to unmute, leave entirely, or say something honest about why I disappeared?”
What comes back is too organized. Tidy. It gives me three options with bullet points. It treats my absence as a problem to solve.
I say: “That’s not it. Just tell me what you think I’m actually afraid of here.”
The response takes longer this time.
You’re afraid that if you re-enter, you’ll have to explain the gap. And explaining the gap means admitting you didn’t have a good reason—you just slowly became someone who watches from a distance. The group chat isn’t the problem. The problem is you’ve been doing this with everything, and the group chat is just where you noticed.
I stop walking. I stand on the sidewalk reading it twice.
A woman passing by glances at me—a man frozen on the street, staring at his phone, clearly having received news of some kind.
In a way, I have.
The scanner section of this essay was supposed to come later. I had a structure. Peptides first, then lying flat, then the personal confession, then synthesis. Four clean movements, each building toward insight.
But that’s not how it happened. The kerning and the light switch kept interrupting the research. The man watching fish in Shenzhen appeared every time I tried to write about the man with a syringe in SF.
Same moment in history. Same overwhelm. Three responses.
One lies flat and watches the stream. One injects the powder and optimizes the self. I’m the one confessing my failures out loud to a machine, then sending its responses to people who think I wrote them.
I notice that I’ve started pre-filtering my problems. Before the thought completes itself—before I’ve even named the anxiety—part of my mind is already sorting: shapeable or not shapeable. Software-shaped goes in one pile. The rest stays where it is, unexamined, because what’s the point?
The list doesn’t end. The threshold for what counts as tolerable drops.
In bed, lights off, I say: “I registered an LLC seventeen months ago for a business I was going to start. The Google Workspace is still sending me storage warnings. The domain auto-renewed twice. Can you help me write an honest accounting of why I haven’t started, and whether the right move is to finally begin or to let it go?”
What comes back is reasonable. Thoughtful even. It asks good questions.
But midway through reading, I notice a glitch. Reddish-purple Claude error message. The line height is slightly off from the system default. And I think about the padding on the right side of the text field, and whether the engineer who built this chat interface ever stood naked in a hotel bathroom—
In Seoul, the resting kids have figured something out: the list was the trap. Not the problems on the list. The list itself. The act of listing. The way that noticing creates obligation.
But they had to exhaust themselves to learn it. They had to reach the end of optimizing before they could see there was no end.
The peptide crowd hasn’t learned it yet. They think the list is finite. That once the body is debugged, the scanning will stop.
It won’t. It always does.
There’s a phrase I keep looking for. Software-shaped problems names the problems that can be fed to the machine. But what do you call the friction that holds something up? The problems that lose their meaning when solved?
The unreturned text that, in its unreturning, was teaching me something about myself I didn’t want to know?
The voice memo I’m afraid to hear—what if the fear is the point? What if listening back would close a door I needed to stay open?
Load-bearing problems. Remove them and something else falls.
The lying-flat generation has a vocabulary for this—involution, neijuan, the endless competition that eats itself. They named the trap before they escaped it.
In a Waymo, stuck in traffic, I say: “What am I actually doing when I use you like this? What does it mean that I can describe a social situation out loud and you can produce something that sounds more like me than I can produce under pressure? What am I optimizing for?”
The answer comes back measured and careful. It talks about “cognitive offloading” and “reducing friction in communication” and “the legitimate use of tools to manage modern complexity.”
I say: “You’re being too nice. Try again, but be less reassuring.”
You’re training yourself to experience your own feelings as first drafts. Something happens—a friend reaches out, you feel guilty, you don’t respond—and instead of sitting with the guilt long enough to understand it, you describe it to me. Out loud, now. You used to type it, but that wasn’t fast enough. Now you just talk. You narrate your own paralysis in real time, and I produce a response that’s adequate. You send it. The interaction is resolved. But the guilt wasn’t examined, just routed around. You’ve gotten very good at producing the outputs of emotional processing without actually processing the emotion. The question isn’t whether this is useful. The question is what it’s doing to you over time.
The light turns green. The car behind me honks.
I don’t know how to stop scanning. I don’t know how to lie flat. The peptide thing—I understand the impulse better than I’d like to admit. The fifteen bottles of supplements on my kitchen counter murmur softly like a Greek chorus.
What I know is this: some friction is load-bearing. Some problems are holding up the structure. Some silences are doing work I haven’t examined.
I said out loud, this morning, to Whoop this time as I compulsively checked my recovery score, and before I was fully awake: “How do I stop using you as a way to avoid my own life?”
What came back was sensible. It talked about boundaries and intentionality and the difference between tools and crutches.
I didn’t send it to anyone. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, noticing the seam where two pieces of drywall meet and weren’t mudded properly, thinking about the contractor who left that seam visible and whether he thinks about it sometimes, whether it bothers him—
The next time you notice a software-shaped problem, notice what it cost you to notice.
The attention you spent. The other things you weren’t seeing. The way the scanning itself became the shape of your day.
And maybe ask, before you speak it out loud to the machine: is this friction I need to eliminate? Or is this friction I need to feel?
The lying-flat generation would tell me the question is still a trap. That asking it means I’m still scanning.
Last week, at a work thing at an alcohol brand’s in-house 41st floor bar, someone found me staring at a light switch.
“What are you looking at?”
The switch was poorly aligned with the cover plate. Maybe an eighth of an inch. Someone had installed it wrong, years ago, and no one had ever fixed it, and whether there’s a version of my life where I’m the kind of person who doesn’t see the gap—