I order food from that app. The food is good—there are even a few healthy options. But communication is strictly one-way: the chatbot serves up standard answers, no matter what you ask.

It’s like asking the universe about your purpose and getting a deafening silence. Eventually, you shrug and get on with your life. With the app, though, the trick is to take precautions—so you never reach the stage of asking questions at all.

Just like you eventually stop asking where, exactly, all your tax money goes.

Life is hard enough with its built-in ending—and with paying taxes in between without ever getting a clear answer about where, exactly, they go.

Keeping your sanity from the start to the end is even harder. If the always-zero response from the universe to your basic question—why are you in the world? —doesn’t get to your sanity, the non-stop honking on our roads one day finally does.

Back to my food-app chatbot-induced sanity: I’m frantically typing an apology and explaining that I accidentally placed the order as a takeaway—7 km away at my office—when I meant home delivery. The bot has the exact same answer: the food is ready to be picked up. The bot is just hearing me, not listening to me. It felt eerily familiar

Some wise people have spoken of a time-and-space singularity where both time and space stop—something like that. I wish I could go back in time and change the delivery or just circumvent the distance. Some say it’s an illusion that time is running away, for time isn’t linear but circular. But with time, I’m starting to feel the hunger pains. I’m telling the universe that I choose not to suffer. There’s no appreciation, no answer. I’m left with the chatbot—at least a being with consistent boundaries, for which I feel very grateful.

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