If you ever doubt how magical this world is, one day you will decide to go to a World Cup watch party in Oakland that you found online to root for a country where you spent two years trying to coax English out of the mouths of Cape Verdean teenagers. 1/7
Comfortably numb is a choice that presents itself as a condition.
"I just don't follow politics."
As if politics were a hobby, like birdwatching, that some people take up and others don't.
"I try not to think about things I can't control."
As if the boundary of what you can control were fixed by nature rather than by the accumulated decisions of people who chose to push it.
"I just focus on my own life."
As if your own life were sealed off from the systems that determine its conditions, as if the mortgage rate and the healthcare cost and the quality of the school and the air and the water were not downstream of exactly the political decisions you have chosen not to think about.
The numbness is not passivity.
It is activity.
It is the daily, effortful practice of not connecting things that are connected.
Of not following thoughts to their conclusions.
Of consuming the information and then releasing it before it can change anything.
This takes work.
People do not understand how much work it takes to stay numb in the presence of what is actually happening.
The anger that breaks through sometimes, the anxiety that surfaces at three in the morning: that is the truth pushing against the maintenance.
The numbness is not the natural state.
The numbness is what you build on top of it.
And you have to keep building every day.
Or the truth gets in.
The most brutal part is not that China is using AI to sort garbage.
It is that China has pushed waste management so far that the old problem has reversed.
China used to worry about having too much garbage to process.
Now some waste-to-energy plants are facing the opposite problem:
not enough garbage.
Previously sealed landfills may even have to be reopened, not because China failed, but because waste has become fuel, feedstock, data, and part of an industrial recycling loop.
This is what China does best.
It takes the ugliest, dirtiest, most ignored corner of urban life — garbage — and turns it into engineering, automation, energy recovery, environmental governance, and industrial optimization.
Even trash gets absorbed into the machine.
In many countries, garbage is where governance collapses.
In China, even garbage becomes a system.