You ever have one of those days where you realize that your brain is just a little bit broken? I’m having one of those days. The family and I were in a local discount supermarket and as we walk past the dish soap I see that an on-shelf promotion has resulted in the shelf being absolutely cleared.
My reaction to such a sight is to immediately take a photo and post it to the team’s Slack channel at work with the caption “Looks like someone priced that wrong”. It turns out, after working on supermarket projects for nearly a year just sort of breaks your brain.
I’m not sure if I’d call it a sense of appreciation. But I don’t see it as a place where I just get food anymore. I see it as a very poorly executed optimization problem.
I’m looking at the aisles thinking that they are in the wrong order. I notice that the there’s an odd number of aisles, so that after you serpentine your way through the store, you’re left to double-back on one aisle. I notice the planogram that some stocker left on the shelf and realize that the the store looks nothing like the planogram - and they dont even have half of the right variants of Coca-Cola to even make the planogram work.
It’s all just a little bit broken.
But does anyone care?
Probably not.
I mean the staff working the store definitely don’t care. But as I watched the little one try and climb into a freezer of samosas, a watched a clearly Korean employee talk to a clearly Chinese in the semi-fluent French of an immigrant trying to get by in this world. And in this tiny microcosm of the world I marvelled at the fact that everyone is just trying to make their lives’ a little bit better.
I don’t know, I’m in a bit spaced out today. I described it to N earlier as that feeling you have coming out of a spa or a good massage. After two days of horrible sleep, thanks to the antibiotics and pain killers post wisdom tooth extraction, I feel a little stoned to have a good night of nine and a half hours of quality sleep.
But maybe that isn’t so much a reflection on my sleep as it is a general malaise that seems to have come over me recently. I don’t feel terribly motivated to very much of anything just recently. For the longest time, I have defined myself by my work - and progression within it. But everything is a bit big, a bit abstract, a bit too long term at the moment to feel like any meaningful progress is being made anywhere.
Perhaps I should take a page out of the Italians playbook. Live more like a stoic and in the moment appreciating this moment, right here, right now. Instead of this American-esque obsession of progression, developing, bettering, always looking to the future. It’s probably the healthier way to be. But it requires reprogramming a lifetime of always focusing on the next thing.
Treating everything like a knife fight. Everything is life or death. Everything is a work in progress.
Should this be time for a grand revolution, and significant change in life. Or should I shut up and put the work in to get comfortable with where I am?