Breaking Down in the Sludge

Once I saw a mail delivery truck limping down the road in the manner of having a broken axle. Bump, bump, bump. It brought to mind a shopping cart with a bad wheel that thumps annoyingly down the grocery store aisles. In the early 2000s, it was one of those smaller, boxy mail trucks unlike the sleek Postal Service-branded vans that roam my neighborhood today. I watched it thunk along, stopping every few yards for its driver to reach through the window and into a mailbox perched next to someone's driveway. As long as that truck was basically capable of driving, its mission would continue, but it clearly needed repair.

That's the first time I, as a young adult, was struck by the fallibility of the systems we humans have created for ourselves. The mail comes every day, dependably, and that's how it has always been and should be. You generally trust your letter or package to be picked up and handled correctly by untold pairs of hands until it reaches its destination, no matter how far. We've probably all heard stories of letters addressed to an obscure recipient, like "brown house at the end of the street, somewhere in Northern Connecticut" that miraculously find their targets thanks to the genius and persistence of letter carriers. If true, that would seem to signal a flawless enterprise with multiple layers of communication ensuring that no mail gets lost. The hiring process selects only the most dedicated servants to maximize your convenience. Heck, maybe there's even a central database cross-referencing real street addresses with adjectives that regular people might use to describe their location, so that all you need to do, as a mail sender, is sloppily write your recipient's name and a short descriptor of where you think they live. Then this miraculous quasi-governmental service agency that is the Postal Service will take care of it for you.

I was raised in the eighties and nineties, a prosperous era in the US when everyday life didn't seem to contain so much sludge, or so I'm told. Sludge, which is a term I believe I learned from the podcast host Alex Goldman, alluding to Freakonomics Radio, refers to all the bureaucratic friction we face in the modern world. And a lot of friction there is. Need help modifying a hotel reservation or online purchase? First wade through the company's IVR prompts, then wait for an available agent while listening to a looped ad spot for the company to which you've already sent money. When you get connected to a person, then, it might be the wrong person and they might need to transfer you to someone else, starting the cycle all over again, including reverification of your identity and a restatement of your problem to this new person who didn't communicate with the first person. Then they'll try to upsell you, and finally they'll try to get you to answer a customer satisfaction survey before you get to hang up. Managing health insurance claims, I have to imagine, is ten times worse with the additional steps of verifying benefits and wrestling over billing codes and authorizations.

There are so many things we need to opt out of, and so many times we need to advocate for ourselves in ways that only make sense in a world ruled by corporate greed. The incentive for any big company, whether it's a hotel chain or retailer or insurance carrier, is not necessarily in favor of helping the customer. The profit motive dictates that sludge be thrown in our path at every opportunity, slowing us down on our way to realizing any sort of human benefit. Want to enjoy a silly video on the Internet? Sit through 30 seconds of ads first. Want to have your cancer treatment covered by insurance so you don't go into debt? Set aside a day every week to make phone calls and fill out forms. I believe those wildly different scenarios are points on the same spectrum of enshittification.

I digress. The point is, I grew up in an era where shittiness and cracks in the system, and the resulting cracks in our sanity, were much less evident, at least to me, growing up white and middle-class. My mom told me once that being an adult wasn't so hard, as far as getting by in society. I believed that things were set up in my favor (which they mostly are, at a high level) and that stuff just worked. So seeing a mail truck that didn't work properly was jarring. Aha—these processes that we rely on every day can just break down, can't they? It's humans, fallible humans, who designed the postal delivery system and built the vehicles that are meant to carry the mail through every kind of weather. Cars break down and people drop things and postal carriers, not to mention all public sector workers, have bad days at work like anybody else. I've gotten letters that arrive inside a ripped envelope, postcards delivered with tracking stickers covering the sender's handwriting, and countless pieces of mail addressed to people who do not live with me.

I'm not saying that a poorly maintained Postal Service truck is a symbol of societal decay; there are plenty other signs of that, from shitty corporate behavior to AI slop to orange-skinned tyrants. The janky truck is simply a reminder that most of as just doing our best, and sometimes "sludge" arises naturally. There is no divine directive that mail delivery be flawless, that our electricity never goes out, that we get from Point A to Point B intact, that we sail through life with maximum convenience. The only near-perfect capacity we have as humans is to take care of each other.