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On Tuesday, Vadim was fired. It was done with the grace of a guillotine: swift, cold, and under a "thanks for your cooperation." Vadim walked outside. November slapped his face with a wet rag. His phone buzzed in his pocket — his wife asking him to buy peas and mayo. Vadim looked at the screen. He was thirty-eight, he had a mortgage on a concrete...
Pavel woke up at three in the morning with the thought that he was a counterfeit person. As if the real Pavel had gotten lost somewhere along the way. In the darkness, he fumbled for his phone and typed into the search bar: "how to know if you don't know how to live." Google suggested depression tests. Pavel closed the browser. At work, he was...
The best form of self-discovery is trying to explain yourself to others.
A mistake isn’t a blot on your biography. It’s a telegram from reality.
A modern person is not searching for love. They open a Project. Every Project arrives with a technical brief. Specifications designed to engineer safety. Height — "from", weight — "up to" so you can feel protected or showcase your status. Age — "under", to avoid colliding with somebody else's fatigue. Financial protocol — "no lower", to sidestep a...
That sound of the key in the lock. It isn’t just the sound of coming home. It’s the most honest sound in your entire day. It’s the click that turns off the version of you the world got to see.
Anya loved sliders. Not the soft cotton ones newborns wear. Anya loved the sliders inside her dating app. They gave her an intoxicating sense of control, as if she were not a lonely girl in a rented studio but a deity creating Adam with a single swipe. Swipe right: height from 185. Cut off the short men who could never fake a stone wall. Swipe...
When Fons first launched, the slogan was silly and honest: “Fon — the one who is always on your side.” At first it was just another clever AI helper on the phone. Then in the earbuds. Then in the lenses. Then simply everywhere you happened to be. Lev got his Fon at thirty. Until then he considered himself an old-school adult: real conversations,...
After Sasha left, Ira had three things: a cactus, the charger from his laptop, and the feeling that someone owed her money for time. The cactus stared from the windowsill as if to say, “I am not involved.” The charger lay on the table like a tiny piece of evidence. And the sense of debt was already serious. "Four years," she told the cactus....
Alexei was a brilliant architect. He just didn't build structures; he built worlds for other people. He knew how to listen. Not the polite nodding kind—waiting for his turn to speak—but listening with his whole being, as if he were an archeologist and another person's soul were an unexplored tomb full of treasure. He remembered everything. The...
He stood at the window and watched the rain. It was an ordinary, gray city rain. It drummed on the windowsill, slid down the glass in crooked threads, gathered in puddles on the asphalt. People outside hurried along, hid under umbrellas, hunched against the cold. And he stood there and envied the rain. He did not envy its freshness or its...
Sometimes you need to stop working on the problem itself and instead change the environment that keeps it alive.
Regret about the past is a mirror reflecting our dissatisfaction with the present.
The phone alarm rang at 7:00, just like yesterday and a year ago. Oleg, eyes still closed, reached out and slapped the button. Five minutes of silence. Then the alarm rang again. At 7:05 he sat up in bed, and the world obediently slipped back onto its rails. Bathroom. The rush of water. Toothpaste with its familiar mint taste. Automatic motions of...
Mark finished the final solo. His fingers, obedient as trained animals, raced down the neck, pulled a last, wailing bend, and froze. A heartbeat of silence detonated into a roar. In the glare he saw hundreds of raised hands, mouths open mid-scream, faces slick with sweat and awe. They got what they came for. He gave it to them. He smiled the...
He found it at the bottom of a box of old university notes. An audio cassette. Cheap clear plastic, a paper insert streaked with faded violet ink. Her handwriting. Tilted slightly left, with a tiny heart instead of the dot over the “i” in “Nothing.” He hadn’t seen that cassette in twenty years. He thought he’d thrown it away. Or lost it. Most...
Anna kept an editing room in her head. She didn’t so much live her life as she re-cut it after the fact. Reality was nothing but raw, awkward footage that ended up in the hands of her inner director-a cynical, ruthless genius who always knew how it should have been . Here’s today’s material. A park. A rare sunny day. She’s on a bench with a book....
Gregory didn’t suffer. Suffering was for the unproductive. Gregory was productivity incarnate. His life was a perfectly tuned assembly line for manufacturing a better version of himself. He was the Perpetual Student, and his soul resembled a meticulously catalogued library of certificates: “How to Scale Your Startup,” “Emotional Intelligence 2.0,”...