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The modern economy runs on debt. Literally. Layered debt. Rolled debt. Repackaged debt. Debt on debt. And for decades, that debt didn’t detonate the system. It flowed into assets. Stocks, bonds, real estate. Anything with a yield, a chart, or a Zestimate. I think that arrangement isn’t collapsing; it’s calcifying.
I was once a child on the subway, holding onto my mom; a woman, panhandling with a baby swaddled against her chest and back, limped onto the car. Her skin looked gray with dirt, her eyes hollowed out by exhaustion. I asked my mom why we didn’t give her money. She told me to look closer. I leaned forward and realized the baby wasn’t a baby at all; it was a doll, bundled carefully to look alive. I asked why someone would do that. To get people to give her more money, she said, or something close to that. I didn’t argue. I accepted the explanation not because it felt kind, but because it made the scene click into place. It made the world readable, like someone had handed me a key and shown me where the teeth go.
AI isn’t coming for your job; it’s coming for the deterministic bullshit you mistake for one.
I feel completely disconnected from my life as a narrative. I know the moments that brought me here: I can point to them, name them, place them like pins on a map, but I don’t feel tethered to them. They hover around me like artifacts I once touched but no longer own. Each moment pops into the next without warning, without ceremony, without the courtesy of a transition. I can’t tell if this is a quirk of memory or some deeper character flaw, if it’s even a flaw at all. (My memory is good, just selective.)
Catherine, Atlus’s 2011 puzzle-thriller, follows Vincent Brooks—a man in his early thirties, paralyzed by indecision about marriage, adulthood, and desire. By day, Vincent drifts through conversations, torn between Katherine, his long-term girlfriend who represents stability and the quiet pressure of commitment, and Catherine, a mysterious younger woman who embodies temptation and escape. By night, he is trapped in recurring nightmares, forced to climb collapsing towers of blocks to survive. The game’s hook is simple but brutal: fail to climb fast enough and you fall to your death.