Half-Life

Took a job in Fremont, an hour away, in a sterile, unpeopled high-tech office park at the end of the Bay. The office is an open cube farm. The routine: asborb flourescence in Cubicle 76. Don't move a muscle.

Having been a happy, if spottily engaged, home-based contract worker, it is interesting, in the most detached, clinical, observational sense, to measure the effect of full-time employment in that sort of environment. It's a kind of semi-life, a bit like being on life support. Or perhaps in suspended animation (like movies about space travelers to far galaxies who are kept alive but unconscious [and unaging] for 50 years until they arrive at the Antares 12 system and all wake up unchanged and rub their eyes and have coffee and go out and get eaten by an unsightly alien): there are always plenty of tasks, so one doesn't think about one's personal life, or about anything much at all, in fact, except for the matter at hand. An operation, of course, in which one has no personal, moral, or aesthetic stake. And so one's brain is slowly emptied of all inherently interesting, individuating content, while the body is weaned off of its prior dependence on sunlight, oxygen, and physical movement.

The irony here is that, even though this is a patently unhealthy way to live, a hospital-like, environmental simulacrum that limits the body to 5% or 10% of input/output capacity, I believe it is in fact possible to remain alive in this manner for 400 or 500 years. I mean, consider a tree. What has the tree got to do but just, you know, be? It doesn't get to run around and engage; one can put a cubicle around it, and it will likely live to be 300+ years old. All right, trees do get sun and oxygen, but still, I think, being part of your life, by definition impossible in a career like this (particularly with the cyborg-friendly 10-hour days start-ups run on) is what is fun and evolutionary, even if it is also what triggers the aging process and eventually kills you.

On the other hand, perhaps this kind of employment is more like being frozen. Cryogenics. A Ted Williams thing. Or is it more like being freeze-dried?

Which begs the question: in 3-5 years, can I just add water?