It begins with the small betrayals of the morning.
Paper towels that split everywhere except along the perforation, so thin now they don’t absorb water so much as push it around the counter.
The soap pump catches again. You press. Nothing. Press harder. Still nothing. Apparently even soap now requires negotiation.
In the living room, the television loses its connection because the network has changed its mind about functioning. Then, as a separate insult, it shuts itself off after three hours because of a timer we did not ask for, did not set, and apparently cannot be trusted to live without.
Even the machines we buy and live with aren’t really ours anymore.
They wake themselves in the night and update. They move things. Remove things. Replace the interface you liked with one you don’t. They fill their own memory, slow their own processors, drain their own batteries, and somehow call all of this an improvement.
Things that worked perfectly well yesterday are made steadily worse until, exhausted, we buy them again.
Planned obsolescence dressed up as progress.
I remember televisions forty years ago that simply stayed on.
They held their station. They glowed in the corner of the room. They did not require passwords, updates, permissions, agreements, accounts, subscriptions, or periodic reassurance that yes, you are still watching the television you deliberately turned on.
They stayed awake as long as we did.
Memory has become its own particular kind of grief.
I remember when a graham cracker tasted toasted and wheaty, not like a sweetened piece of packing material.
When chocolate was chocolate, not something described apologetically as chocolate flavoured.
When Alphabits and Cracklin’ Bran simply existed in Canadian stores. When you could walk through a grocery aisle without the strange suspicion that every movement, preference, purchase and hesitation was being collected somewhere and assembled into another version of you to sell things to.
It if stopped there, maybe we would just absorb it.
The shrinking packages. The disappearing quality. The five-dollar thing suddenly listed online for twenty. Less product, more packaging, worse ingredients and an expectation that we should somehow be grateful it is still available at all.
But it doesn’t stop with us.
Eventually, the knife lands on the small and the fragile.
It lands on Skye.
And that is where my irritation turns into something else.
How do you explain corporate yield to an animal whose whole world can depend on the tenderness of a leaf?
The orchard hay that should be soft arrives stiff and sharp as wire and puts five tiny punctures into a velvet eye.
The plump blueberry pieces become hard little stones. The greens become woody stems she cannot chew. The soft breakfast biscuits that reliably kept hunger away simply disappear, as though a medically fragile little life was never depending on them in the first place.
Everything costs more.
Everything contains less.
The chew rolls arrive like petrified wood and have to be broken apart with a hammer, which raises the fairly obvious question of what sort of animal is supposed to chew them.
The loops made of hay vanish for weeks.
And suddenly keeping one small creature healthy means searching store after store, website after website, trying to outwit supply chains and inventory systems that have absolutely no concept of what she needs this means.
The little neighborhood store disappears into the belly of a chain, and the odd little shelf that once carried the rare thing, the soft thing, the dependable thing disappears with it.
So now care is negotiated through an app.
You make quiet arrangements with gig drivers for wild dandelions because the system doesn’t recognize them as something a person might actually need.
In return, the system confidently delivers moldy cilantro, bok choy already dissolving into mush, fennel with every soft green frond inexplicably amputated, and fruit that looks as though somebody got hungry on the drive over.
This is progress, apparently.
The great fish eats every small fish in the pond and then expresses surprise when the pond becomes a miserable place to live.
It consumes the little stores, the odd products, the knowledgeable people, the extra bit of care. It processes all of it into efficiency, scale, shareholder value and quarterly returns.
And what comes back to us is thinner,
Harder,
Cheaper to make.
More expensive to buy.
Less human.
We are handed the brittle remains and told how fortunate we are to have so much choice.
And maybe that is the part I am most tired of.
Not simply that things are worse.
Not simply that they cost more.
But that maintaining anything soft, particular, beloved or vulnerable now requires constant vigilance against systems designed for everything except tenderness.
It is exhausting to love something tenderly in a world that keeps finding new ways to turn everything to stone.