efficient flowers bloom

do you still get bored? the staring-at-a-wall, got-nothing-to-do, watching-the-fan-spinning, ice-cream-melting, slapping-mosquitoes, so-boring kind of boredom that used to spiral into daydreams and grow ideas like weeds through concrete, have you gotten bored?

people ask if AI will take our jobs. such an erroneous question. it already took so many things from us which we gladly handed out and will continue to do so under the disguise of individual growth and productivity which we've mistaken for how fast everyone else seems to be moving.

we hand it out to save time, i suppose. give up the thinking, waiting, boredom, the getting-lost-and-finding-your-way-back, in exchange for hours we swear we'll spend better later. but what is better? how do you plan to spend it? it's becoming a loop now - save time to spend it better, and "better" turns out to mean more, more output, more optimisation, more catching up on the thing you saved time to catch up on, time gets reinvested into saving more time, like a currency with nothing to buy.

and because i always hold contradictions in my head, i know the argument - none of this is a loop, it's an evolution as species. every hour someone stops reviewing literature manually is an hour pushing the edges forward somewhere else. a scale too large for one person to feel. knowledge is accumulating faster than it ever has.

the species is getting richer. that doesn't mean you are.

because richness like that doesn't rain on you personally. it rains somewhere over the whole field, and you're standing on one small patch in some corner wondering why your particular grass is still yellow. and if it gets too late to find the answer, your grass might die brown wondering why it didn't rain upon you.

you can watch the gardens bloom from a distance and wonder why you're still on a field with no flowers. it's not barren, the condition is fine - yellow and green but it doesn't have flowers. flowers are beautiful and there's no beauty in your field.

so you go looking for a seed packet, because that's what everyone tells you flowers need, and the packet is right there, pre-sorted by bloom rate and color and how fast the roots take and what not. you plant it and it's fast but it comes up looking like everyone else's flower, from everyone else's packet, it doesn't feel like yours. it was too efficient, an efficient flower, whatever that means. efficient flowers do not smell like anything.

from now on, your field will never ever stay empty. it will always be filled with flowers - blooming flowers, punctual flowers, efficient flowers, flowers that know their own blooming rate before ever stepping into the soil, flowers indistinguishable from the ten thousand other grown from the same packet in the same season by similar people who also chased speed and efficiency. the fields will never be empty. it would be so full that anyone from the roadside can mistake it, for the most beautiful garden one has ever grown.