2035

A day in the life

You wake up to a notification that your morning slop bowl has arrived.

You have it set up to come every morning at the same time because there’s no reason not to: with the automation of the production and delivery processes, the cost of slop bowls has converged on the cost of ingredients. It’s hard to justify cooking for yourself when the all-in price is three dollars of ingredients and a two dollar service fee.

Not that you could have cooked for yourself anyways: you spent the night in a lay-flat Tesla. Technically the main idea of these things is that you can fall asleep and wake up in a brand new city, but the real reason you booked it was because it was considerably cheaper than any of the available rooms for rent. You just had it drive in a big circle all night. Some conference in town drove the price of the rooms up too high. Not a big deal. The only reason you didn’t actually mosey along to another town yourself is that your friend is throwing his 46th birthday party tonight.

Almost everything you own lives inside a storage cube that is the volume of 1/16th of a standard shipping container (5ft × 4ft × 4.25ft). One big drawback of the Tesla thing is that there is no obvious place to deliver the cube, so it’s still locked away in an ambiguous location somewhere in the network, and you don’t have access to anything cool to wear. Luckily you just had a body scan done a few weeks ago so you can order a custom hoodie: made to measure, with a pattern of your friend’s face printed all over the fabric. It would have been nice to order a blazer but automated cut & sew can’t really handle fine tailoring. Should be done in time for the party.

You head over to the gym. These days you never actually work out—with the advent of retatrutide pills for weight and myostatin inhibitors for muscle growth you don’t really see the point anymore. But the gym has thrived by shifting its floor plan to reserve a small section for people to pose and film themselves, and filling the rest of the space with showers. Someone is checking you out in the shower but you decide to just ignore it.

Next is your hair appointment: this is by far the most expensive thing you will do all day, because haircuts are largely still a manual process. You chat up the hairdresser and she mentions that she lives with seven roommates in a two bedroom apartment. You shudder to imagine what it must be like sleeping in the same place every night. “That’ll be $200 please.”

Now you just need to find a place to be for the next six hours before the party. Normal coffee shops have a strict two hour limit, and every square inch of the public parks are covered in homeless encampments. You decide to pony up for a co-working space, but when you arrive the front desk is unmanned and you manage to sneak in without buying a pass.

After browsing twitter for a while you decide to roll up your sleeves and get a few hours of work in. Your job title is “click engineer”, AI subagents contract you to be a human in the loop for various compliance reasons. It’s a pretty easy job but not without risks. A computer can never be held accountable, but you sure can.

Finally your hoodie arrives, and it’s time to head over to the party. Most restaurants, including this one, don’t serve their own food anymore. Instead they charge a $15 seat fee per person, which your friend insists on covering: “it’s my birthday and I’m not letting you pay.” The waitress brings out everyone’s slop bowls plated up on real ceramic with a tasteful garnish on top: someone jokes about how the garnish probably cost more than the food.

Your friend seems touched that you managed to make it out. You cut the (homemade!) cake and open a few bottles of champagne, and start to remember how things used to be back in college... you don’t want to think about how long ago that is now. Your friend keeps refilling your glass. You talk about nothing in particular, but it feels like the realest conversation you’ve had in weeks.

You think about staying another night. Maybe it would be fun to spend the day together and catch up some more. You check tonight’s room prices... woof.

Maybe another time buddy.