They never sleep, and we can’t dream.

I woke up again, god knows what day it was this time and did what I do in my ritual now in the morning.  I looked upon the glowing screen on my phone at the notifications. The harsh glow of the rectangle that is all and will be all shone upon my eyes in its uncompromising way, making me squint in the dark.

A few dozen emails, automated and now summarized against my will by the phone. God forbid I use my meager intellect to figure out the meaning behind these automated alerts.  Most were just Comcast giving me the week’s rundown for the various sites at work about whatever supposed security threats they blocked.  Most of it’s just garbage anyways, the firewalls don’t sleep on the job, and as long as those licenses are paid, it is just another layer of the onion in protection.

Doing what we mostly have to do as primates stuck in our own self-made hell, I roused myself from the bed and went to the bathroom.  Gotta get rid of the bad water, and put more good water in, in a never-ending cycle of water replacement. 

Honestly, I didn’t want to get up.  I didn’t want to check my phone.  I didn’t want to know what the hell was or is going on.  I just wanted a few more minutes of sleep, that blessed activity that robs us of a third of our lives (or in my case more like a quarter or less) just so we can think a little better during the day.  I didn’t want to check my little glowing rectangle.  I didn’t want to get out of bed to piss.  I didn’t want to go to work.

But I also don’t want to starve.

So I got up, did what I had to, took my dozen or so pills (most of which are vitamins that I probably piss away anyways, but there’s a few minor prescriptions I have to take because it keeps me from meeting the cosmic gardener sooner rather than later), and then went over the other alerts on the phone. Reddit, Discord, E-Mail, etc.  All there on the other phone.

Oh, that’s right, I have two of these demon rectangles.  One for my enslavement at my career, and another for personal torture.  Gotta keep that work/life balance in the banality of capitalist evil and such.  Whatever.  Anyways I roused myself out of bed for the last time, got dressed, and forgot the drive to work.  I was just sort of, there, again. 

I don’t know when my dreams got so dull.  Somewhere between the constant anxiety of trying to make sure that I don’t make a mistake at work and trying to keep a level head about stupid bullshit that annoys me, I think I lost my ability to dream bigger than myself.  I used to dream about changing the world, about being something great and big, about megalomaniacal plots to fix everything… now I dream about 8 hours of sleep, an extra day off, and maybe one day having a house I can call home.

During the night though, these machines that are built on the words of the dead and the stolen works of the living were “thinking”.  Or at least that’s what we pretend they do.  They sat all night, and will sit all day today, burning away electricity and using up potable water for cooling. They will consume resources and more and more computers built to be LLMs or other generative “AI” will come online and strain our grid even further.

Somewhere a data center is pulling more power than a town or hell even a small city just so it can learn to replace another worker, take another job from another artist, or do some stupid inane bullshit like make a dog portrait of the God Emperor from Warhammer 40k.  It is usually fucking corgi isn’t it?

They won’t replace the owners, of course.  Why would they replace themselves? No, much easier to replace middle management and the workers with machines that have no comprehension of what they’re doing.  I am sure that won’t come back to bite us on the ass when your Teladoc hallucinates that you’ve got a tumor in your left toe because you stubbed it or whatever bullshit will happen when these “models” break down.

So fine, sure, you find yourself at work just like me, and you tell yourself it’ll be fine.  It’s always worked out before, right?  I mean, we’re really good at lying to ourselves, it’s one of those old survival mechanisms to keep us going.  

I’m about McFuckin’ done with the “going” now. 

The background noise of climate devastation becomes a little less easy to ignore.

It’s February and for some reason it’s 70 Fahrenheit outside.  It should be 20, with a foot of snow.  It is Spring weather in the dead of Winter.  It’s hotter than it should be, and again, you start to feel that little klaxon of fear in you.  You probably push it down just like me because you’ve got to make it through another day.  You’ve got to get home, and do whatever bullshit it is you need to get done, and you’ve got to keep on going.

But it’s 70 in the dead of winter, so what the hell is going to happen next? The planet can just burn as long as some capitalists have their quarterly numbers look good, I guess. So your day goes by, maybe it grinds, maybe it is too fast… or maybe it is like my day? You know, a quick boring day where you had too much to do, felt overwhelmed, and bored by it all at the same time.  Maybe that’s just depression, but you’ve got a therapist for that on Friday, so we just have to keep pushing on.

Remember those dreams you had when you were younger?

What dreams?  Yeah.  Me too.  They’re all faded like bad wallpaper exposed to the evening sun for twenty years. You can make out the lines, but the pigments are all faded and you might be able to piece it together again if you really try but oh shit, an alert on your phone! 7-11 sent you a message that you can’t clear until you log in their app and open messages and manually delete it!  Wait, what were we thinking about? Oh well, it probably wasn’t that important.

What is important is that Windows has decided you need AI on your desktop, or Google has decided your Gmail needs Gemini, or some other website has decided you MUST HAVE the AI tool.  So it opens, or installs, or pops up in front of what you’re doing and demands your attention! LOOK AT ME YOU SIMPLETON! DON’T THINK ANYMORE, FOR I SHALL THINK FOR YOU! It sits there, waiting for you to use it.

Maybe your workplace forces you to use the environmental disaster tool, or maybe you’ve become so attached to offloading some of your cognitive load, it has become your coping mechanism to let something finally take away the burden of the freedom of choice.  Whatever the case, here it is, man’s own man-made wonder/god, waiting to cheerily glaze whatever it is you’re about to say to it, and probably hallucinate on the way to a conclusion that is wrong.

This machine, well, network of machines, it never gets tired. It never dreams like we used to dream.  It doesn’t get old, it just gets replaced.  It doesn’t feel the erosion of its usefulness fade away as it loses more and more of its soul to the grind of this world – it can’t.  It is the perfect little tool to replace you one day, after all.  It greets you cheerily as always.

It doesn’t care about you.

It never could care about you.

You need to make money to buy food, to afford shelter, to maintain your car, and to make progress on that retirement you know you’ll never get to use.  It only needs to eat your data and spit out whatever it thinks you want to read. It doesn’t have anxiety. It doesn’t have fear.  It doesn’t have love, or hate, or ecstasy, or despair.  It just keeps chewing data, power, water, and this world, all in the name of profit.

So you get home, and maybe you take a moment to read your state-sponsored propaganda… oh, right, sorry, your “news from independent outlets” and see that another one of these cursed data centers is coming online soon. You may see some words about water usage, I mean shit, they have a ton of water in… Arizona… I guess.  Don’t dwell on that, it’s not like the aquifer that feeds the west is drying up because of mismanagement or anything. Don’t think about the water usage, or the impending resource scarcity over something you cannot survive more than two days without. I said don’t.

Stop it.

Everything is fine.

You have work in the morning.

Don’t think about what’s coming in the future, just focus on tomorrow.

By the next day’s afternoon, Friday looks like a long way away still.  Your brain feels hollowed out on day two of this wretched week in our modern world.  Mine does anyways.  Too many tasks. Too many systems demanding attention. Too many demands on demands on layers on layers on top of each other until everything is heavy and easy to ignore in its inexcusable and inescapable dementia inducing demand on your already screaming frontal lobe.

So maybe you need a quick escape?  Doomscrolling on your little rectangle that tells you everything you need to know offers a quick way to disengage the brain. But there it is again. AI generated text, pictures, videos, at the cost of only a few gigawatts, a “few” hectares of water, and god knows how much carbon being unleashed from its ancient stores into our choking atmosphere.

Some of the AI generated garbage gives you pause.  It is getting harder to tell, you have to learn more signs, you have to learn more ways to sort through the real and the not real.  The task is harder because every day that goes by, the AI generation is a little better. Each day is the worst it will ever look.  Each new day is another slight iteration toward the perfection of engineering a reality that isn’t yours anymore.

By the end of the third day, maybe you’ve gone numb.  I usually do.  Sometimes I don’t, at least at night.  When my head is supposed to be on a pillow, sleeping away all the bad, I lay awake.  I lay awake and I stare at the ceiling, or at the backs of my eyelids.  I think about things that I shouldn’t, I dwell on things that they tell me not to dwell on, and I sometimes feel the feelings that I am not supposed to feel.

I think about the day I gave to a system that will replace me the moment it can to save a few dollars.  I think about the tiredness I feel that goes beyond mental and physical exhaustion.  I think about how the last twenty years of my adult life have been spent feeling so tired of it all. The pervasive weltschmerz that has grown into my soul with tendrils and roots ‘round my heart and into my brain… so much weariness.

Maybe like me you feel too tired to care, and you’ve been too tired to care for a long time – and yet you cannot help but care still. This thudding in your chest, this feeling of  the collapsing world crushing your insides… maybe like me you’ll take another beta blocker to help calm things down and try to get some sleep. 

Lying there, you cannot help but think about the future, about what will be, what can be, and what may never happen. You and I stare into the void of the oncoming storm, without hope, without the fear you used to feel, the dull certainty that it’s all going to end one day.  The music already stopped, but people keep dancing their little dances, and you haven’t the heart to stop them. We’ve read enough history and theory. We’ve lived enough of it to know. The machines will keep growing, the planet will keep heating, the workers will be told to adapt as always, and be blamed for their own displacement.

Maybe like me you’ll hope it was all a dream and you can wake up tomorrow back in a place of comfort and belonging.

And maybe like me… you’ll wake up and realize you can’t dream anymore.

You will get up after a bad night’s sleep, if sleep even came. You have to keep moving. What else would there be to do besides starve? There it is again. Your rectangle illuminating your bedroom and blasting your eyes. Alerts. Notifications. E-Mails. Another reminder that the dream of a dream was just that, and another day must go by.

The machines do not sleep because they do not have to.

You do not dream because they are trying to dream for you.

Maybe it’s a good day to call in sick.