The portrait of the urban man, "why comfort is dangerous, similar to the Lotus Island in Homer's Odyssey" — and what we can do on Monday morning — on a Friday in May as an argument.
'He throws his rubbish out of the window in the hope that nobody sees him.'
It is half past seven in the morning, a Friday in May, and I step out the door with a simple intention: the market. Not a delivery app, not a supermarket with white lights and ambient music calibrated for mild anxiety. The market. The one with faded awnings, with the smell of pickles and warm bread mingling in the air like an old promise, with people who know your name and with conversations that have no hashtag and end with no call to action.
I take the same road I have taken for years. Botoșani on a Friday morning has a particular rhythm — it is not the rush of a large city, nor the drowsiness of a town that sleeps in. It is something in between: a community that wakes, recognises itself, exchanges a few words, and moves on. A human rhythm, pre-digital, resistant to optimisation.
I am not sure I realise in that moment that this day will become, in my mind, an argument. A counter-argument, more precisely. Against a portrait I have watched grow around me like a sophisticated weed: the modern urban man, comfortable to the point of disalignment, at ease to the point of emptiness.
The Coffee Kiosk: the Morning Rule
At the kiosk in the market there exists an unwritten rule that everyone observes without ever having discussed it: you do not rush. Not even if you have a meeting, not even if your phone is buzzing in your pocket, not even if rain threatens from somewhere to the north. You sit, you drink your coffee, you listen.
Mrs Ileana, a retired accountant from an enterprise that ceased to exist thirty years ago, tells me about her granddaughter who moved to Cluj. 'She found good work, she likes it there, but she told me she feels lonely. She has colleagues, she goes out, but she says she has no people. Do you understand?' I understand perfectly. Colleagues are not people. Contacts are not community. Cluj-Napoca, or Bucharest, or any other city of a certain size, offers stimulation, opportunity, speed — and withdraws, in silence, something that has no good name in modern vocabulary: belonging.
Beside us, Costică — a plumber, around fifty-five, with hands that have seen more of the world than any LinkedIn profile — remarks that his daughter 'is on the phone all day, but if she drops a spanner at the kitchen sink, she rings the plumber'. He laughs. It is not a bitter laugh; it is more the laugh of a man who has accepted the absurdity of the world with a serenity that psychologists in Bucharest would call resilience and would charge one hundred and fifty euros a session to provide.
Nobody at this table talks about artificial intelligence. Nobody uses the word disruptive. Nobody has a framework for the problem of the granddaughter in Cluj. They have something else: sedimentary experience, humour, the patience to hear an answer before giving one. Things that, in certain urban circles, have come to be regarded as inefficiencies.
I drink my coffee to the last drop, as one should. The coffee from the kiosk is not specialty, not single-origin from Ethiopia, it has no notes of black cherry and cocoa on the finish. It is coffee. It is good precisely because it does not try to be a narrative experience.
The Bakery: Bread as a Social Act
Ten metres further on, the bakery. Friday morning means cheese pastry [plăcintă cu brânză, a traditional Romanian baked pastry with a soft cheese filling], warm, with the edges lightly scorched in the way that only old ovens know how to scorch — that is, precisely enough.
I queue. There is a queue. Nobody seems bothered by the existence of a queue. That alone is a civilisational indicator, if you like: the high-efficiency urban dweller no longer tolerates queuing. A queue is a waste of time, an affront to the flow, something that apps promised to eliminate. And they have largely eliminated it. Along with the exchange of glances, the muttered joke, the precious piece of intelligence that 'today's batch came out better than usual — the lady used thicker cream.'
The baker — let us call her Mrs Maricica, for that is the type of name that survives in bakeries with real ovens — knows what I usually take. Which means I have come often enough to become a regular feature of the place. There is something profoundly human about being recognised by someone who knows you in no other way than through your preference for cheese pastry over apple. It is a form of identity more honest than anything you could construct on a digital profile.
At a table by the window, an old man eats alone, slowly, with the dignity of someone who understands that eating is not a secondary activity to be combined with something else. He has no phone in front of him. He looks out of the window. He is thinking, perhaps. Or perhaps he is thinking nothing at all — and that, in its own right, is a form of wealth that the urban dweller with the packed diary has lost entirely.
The conversation at the bakery slides, naturally, towards prices. Flour has gone up, gas has gone up, but people still come. 'You can't replace people with a bread-delivery app,' says Mrs Maricica, with a logic so solid that I would struggle to counter it with any more refined argument. You cannot. You can deliver bread. You cannot deliver its warmth, its smell, its context, the person behind the counter who reminds you that last time you also took a loaf for the neighbour on the third floor.
And yet — and this is the part that follows me down the road towards the market — technically speaking, you could ignore everything I am doing this morning without getting out of bed. The coffee you can order through an app, delivered in twenty minutes complete with sugar and a plastic teaspoon. The pastry you can find at three restaurants in town that do breakfast deliveries. The pickles you can buy from a marketplace, in a standardised jar, with a description and a five-star review. Costică the plumber you can find on a services platform, rate after the job is done, and never exchange a single word with beyond the chat window. The terrace at lunchtime you can replace with a video conference. The evening meal with a WhatsApp group in which someone sends a 'Many Happy Returns' GIF and that is that, the social obligation discharged. My entire Friday — the coffee, the pastry, the pickles, the conversations, the plumber, the name-day [onomastică, the Romanian custom of celebrating one's saint's day, analogous to a birthday celebration] — can be compressed, delegated, delivered, virtualised. The system is ready. The infrastructure exists. All that remains is to accept the offer.
And many do accept it. Not out of sheer laziness, not out of ill will — but because the system makes the offer so convenient, so frictionless, so reasonable in terms of time and effort, that refusing it begins to seem eccentric. Why go to the market when the market comes to you? Why queue at the bakery when the app never makes you queue? Why get to know the plumber when all you need is his service? Each question has a logical answer. The sum of logical answers constructs a life from which people have disappeared — replaced by services, interfaces, anonymous delivery riders who leave the parcel at the door and go without raising their eyes.
The Market Proper: Practical Intelligence in Action
I enter the market and immediately feel the difference in atmosphere from any supermarket. The supermarket is built on the principle of zero friction: everything within reach, everything labelled, no difficult decision required, no conversation necessary. The market is built on the opposite principle: you need to know what you are looking for, you need to evaluate with your eyes and your nose, you need to negotiate, or at the very least to validate.
At the pickle stand — jars lined up like tart stained-glass windows, cabbage in wooden barrels, hot peppers hanging in rows — I chat with Gheorghe. Fifty years old, he comes from the village, brings his own produce from his own smallholding. He does not know what GEO or AEO is, he has never heard of search engine optimisation, but he knows one thing that many digital experts consistently overlook: provenance matters. He knows exactly what he put in the jar, under what conditions, with what water, with how much salt.
We talk about quality. Not about perceived value, not about brand story — about real, verifiable, tasteable quality. 'My pickle doesn't ferment the same way when it's warm. It needs to be kept cool, in the cellar. It won't do in a flat fridge.' That is practical knowledge, transmitted through direct experience, through mistakes corrected over years. It is the kind of knowledge that no platform can fully index and that no artificial intelligence can truly replace — not because it is mysterious, but because it is embodied: it lives in the hands, in the nose, in the muscle memory of a man who has done the same thing a hundred times.
The conversation slides towards agritourism. Gheorghe says he has a few friends who have opened guesthouses, that people come from Bucharest, 'but they come once, take photographs, post them on Instagram, and never come back.' He laughs. 'They want the authentic, but they also want good WiFi. And they don't want to be woken at six by the cockerel.' The dilemma of Romanian agritourism condensed into three sentences, without jargon, with more lucidity than any market research study.
I buy the pickles. I also buy some sauerkraut, because the woman standing next to me, who had been listening to our conversation with the air of someone who knows better, recommended it firmly. I had not asked for a recommendation. She gave me one. The market also functions as a network of oral recommendations, several millennia older than any suggestion algorithm.
The Office: Back in the World of Screens
I return to the office before nine. I enter a different temporal regime: the screen, the notifications, the emails. The world in which I work professionally is built on logics I have just left behind, at the market. Speed, efficiency, optimisation, scalability.
Working in web development — websites for public institutions, town halls, hospitals, schools — I see both faces of the city every day. On the one hand, institutions that have no functional website in 2025 and still require forms printed in quadruplicate. On the other hand, larger cities that have digitised everything and in which the citizen no longer knows who to ring when the system goes down. Neither extreme is satisfactory.
But above all I see, in the way people relate to technology, a quiet schizophrenia. Institutions demand 'modern solutions' and 'digitalisation' with the same enthusiasm with which a patient demands antibiotics for a common cold: because it sounds good, because someone else said it helps, without understanding the mechanism and without wishing to. The comfort of delegation — hand the responsibility to someone else, pay, forget.
This is one of the most subtle forms of comfort as religion: not raw laziness, but compulsive delegation. I no longer need to know how anything works, as long as there is someone or something that knows in my place. And as systems become more capable, more automated, more invisible, the person thins out. Not physically — but as an agent, as a subject, as a being who understands the world in which he lives.
I find myself thinking, while staring at the screen, of a story told to me last week by an acquaintance — let us call him Mihai, an engineer, a methodical man, the kind who reads technical specifications before buying a cable. He wanted to install a heating system in a new boiler room. He rang a recommended plumber and received a quote. The sum was substantial, though not immediately outrageous — for someone who does not know the prices. Mihai, out of professional reflex, opened several building materials websites. He compared. He spent an entire evening with the quote on the table and a browser open.
What he found left him not indignant but coldly, wearily unsurprised — in the way of a man who confirms something he already, at bottom, knew. The boiler was listed in the quote at nearly forty per cent above the publicly available distributor price, findable online on three different platforms. The pipework was calculated at a generous run — generous in the plumber's favour. Labour was listed separately, but in the document received it was not broken down by operation; it was a round, global sum with no itemisation. The guarantee was mentioned vaguely, with references to 'the manufacturer's conditions', without specifying who was responsible for what and within what timeframe. The completion date was 'approximate', which in contractual language means there is no completion date.
Mihai rang the plumber and told him he had checked the prices. The tone of the conversation shifted immediately — not aggressively, but coolly, with the stiffness of a man caught out who does not wish to admit he has been caught. 'These prices include services.' What services? 'Transport, storage, installation guarantee.' That is to say, precisely the things that, in a transparent quote, ought to be itemised separately, with their own value, rather than buried in an inflated equipment price.
The story is not exceptional. It is so commonplace that it has ceased to shock. Thousands of people sign quotes every year that they do not understand, for work they cannot evaluate, carried out by professionals whose competence they can only verify after the roof has come down or the boiler has exploded. Total delegation — you give me the price, I sign — is not merely convenient; it is costly and vulnerabilising in ways that comfort does not advertise in its brochure.
What saved Mihai's situation was precisely the thing that the comfortable urban dweller has half lost: practical curiosity. The curiosity to ask not just how much does it cost, but why does it cost that much, what does that price contain, who is responsible if something goes wrong. Elementary questions, disagreeable in conversation, indispensable in reality. The plumber recalculated the quote. It came out twenty-three per cent cheaper. The same work, the same materials, the same man — but at fair prices, because someone had taken the trouble to ask for them.
The rest of his clients — those who did not check, those who signed at once, those for whom the discomfort of negotiating outweighed the discomfort of overpaying — financed, without knowing it, that margin. They did not pay for better work. They paid for their own convenience. And the plumber, the practical man, understood long ago what the system confirms daily: convenience carries a surcharge.
But the plumber at least delivers the job. There is an entire parallel economy that has understood the same principle and taken it to its logical conclusion: if the comfortable person pays extra to save effort, the comfortable person can be persuaded to pay for something that does not exist at all. The trap needs no product. It needs only a sufficiently familiar interface, a sufficiently good price, and a sufficiently easy button to press.
The phenomenon is not new, but it has grown alongside the infrastructure of comfort. The more people buy online, the more profitable the simulation of an online shop becomes. The more people receive parcels at home, the more convincing the fake courier SMS becomes: 'Problem with your parcel delivery. Click here to reschedule.' The click is a reflex, not a decision. The person who delegated the trip to the shop, the queue, the physical contact with the product, has also delegated his vigilance. He bought convenience — and convenience can be counterfeited.
The map of traps faithfully follows the map of comfort. Clone shops — websites built pixel for pixel to resemble major platforms, with prices that seem impossibly good precisely because they are impossible — thrive on the desire to find something quickly, cheaply, effortlessly. You scroll, you click, you pay. The parcel never arrives, because there is no parcel. There is only the patience of someone who understood that the hurried person does not check the address bar.
Fabricated adverts on social media — with eighty-per-cent discounts, 'last three in stock', a countdown that pressures the decision — exploit exactly the mechanism that any good advertisement exploits: urgency and the short-circuiting of critical thought. The difference is that the legitimate advert sells a real product. The fraudulent one sells the illusion of one. And to an inattentive eye, the difference is invisible, because both have the same professional images, the same five-star reviews, the same language of the irresistible offer.
Hidden subscriptions are perhaps the most elegant form of exploiting convenience, because they do not steal — they persuade. 'Try free for thirty days.' You enter your card details, because it costs nothing right now. You forget you entered your card details, because you have something else to do. Next month a transaction appears that you ignore, because it is small and because disputing it would require a phone call and half an hour on hold to the support line. And the following month. And the following year. The subscription lives on inertia — the same fuel on which the entire religion of comfort runs.
Classifieds sites and marketplaces are the space in which the fraudulent seller has learnt to speak precisely the language of the comfortable buyer: 'handover today', 'fast delivery', 'cash on delivery'. The phrases that oil the wheels of frictionless transactions. And precisely because everything sounds so familiar, precisely because it reproduces the legitimate gestures of thousands of real previous transactions, vigilance drops. The person who has bought a hundred times without incident no longer checks on the hundred and first.
The portrait of the victim is not that of a naive person or an elderly person without digital literacy. It is, far more often, the portrait of an ordinary, hurried person with a full day ahead who sees a good offer, feels he has the chance to sort something out quickly and efficiently, and presses the button before critical thought catches up with the gesture. This is the person that comfort-as-system produces: capable, articulate, functional — and vulnerable precisely at the point where the system has relieved him of effort. Vigilance, like musculature, atrophies when not used. And the system, in its earnest intention to eliminate friction, has eliminated that too.
Mihai, with his verified installation quote, escaped because he retained the reflex of asking why. He is not a hero. He is simply a man who has not entirely delegated his curiosity. The difference between him and the person who signs at once is precisely this — not intelligence, not education, but the habit of sitting with the question a moment before giving the answer.
I work for a few hours. At some point, my office-mate's Waze announces aloud that there is an accident on a road he is not travelling. He left the app running in the background. Nobody seems surprised. We are surrounded by systems that think on our behalf and alert us to things we did not ask about, and we have come to accept this as the normal state of affairs.
The Lunch Terrace: Conversations Without Slides
At one o'clock I go for coffee on the terrace in the town centre. A table forms quickly, organically, in the way familiar to anyone from a small or medium-sized town: someone passing in the street who stops, someone else who rings to say they are nearby, another who simply appears, drawn by familiar voices.
We are four, then five. A solicitor, a teacher, a small building contractor, a pharmacist. None of them works in IT, none is a digital native in the sense of the digital industry being their trade. They are people who use technology but do not breathe it, who have smartphones but have not built their identity around them.
The conversation is about prices, first of all. Then about a court case that has been going on for three years. Then about a child who went to England and comes back less and less often. The classic themes of provincial Romania aspiring to urbanism: the exodus, the bureaucracy, rising costs, the lack of decent medical services.
Someone mentions, in passing, that 'there are now computer programmes that can write contracts'. The solicitor raises an eyebrow. Not concerned — curious. 'Yes, I've heard. But if the contract is wrong, who is responsible?' The question is more philosophical than it appears: in a world of automated delegation, responsibility dissolves. And when responsibility dissolves, only comfort remains — provisional, fragile, unguaranteed.
The subject is dropped. The conversation slides towards a film seen at the weekend, a repair at the block of flats that has not been done for six months, the summer holiday. Concrete, present, immediate things. Nobody has a theory about the future. Everyone has stories about the present.
This is something that the large urban market, with its intellectuals and its hyperconnectivity, tends to lose: the present as a place to inhabit, not merely a point of departure towards an optimised version of the future. In big cities people talk a great deal about what will be and what should be and how we position ourselves for. Here, on this terrace, people talk about what is. It is a more important difference than it appears.
At a certain point, the building contractor — Relu, who has put up houses across three counties and who has the dry humour of a man accustomed to solving real problems with real materials — asks a question without thinking too hard about it: 'Lads, but if everyone started ordering and nobody left the house any more, what would this market of ours look like?'
Two seconds of silence. Then the conversation comes to life in that direction, with the particular energy of a coffee table when a simple idea opens a door nobody expected to find.
The teacher says the first thing that comes to mind: 'There'd be no queue at the bakery.' She laughs. But the laugh stops halfway, because she too senses something is wrong with the image.
Relu continues: 'Your Gheorghe with the pickles — if nobody comes to the market any more, what does he do? Sell online? Send the jars by courier?' Nobody knows exactly. Gheorghe is around fifty, he has never sold online, has no Instagram, no website, no bank account linked to any platform. His knowledge — the fermentation, the cellar, the salted water, the taste that does not lie — has no digital address. It simply disappears. Not dramatically, not abruptly. He retires, his children move to the city, the cellar stands empty, and in place of his barrels of cabbage there appears, on a supermarket shelf, a branded sauerkraut, pasteurised, with an eighteen-month shelf life and a taste that vaguely resembles the memory of the real thing.
The pharmacist adds, more quietly: 'And what about Mrs Maricica?' Mrs Maricica with her bakery, her oven, her Friday morning pastry — what happens to her if people stop coming? The rent remains. The gas remains. But the customers go. She might survive a year, two, with online orders. But a bakery lives on foot traffic, on the person who passes by and steps in because it smells of warm bread. The delivery algorithm does not bring foot traffic. It brings one order every three days from someone who has never seen the counter.
'And the kiosk?' says the solicitor, with a smile that is not cheerful. The coffee kiosk without its morning regulars is a closed kiosk. Simple. Mrs Ileana would have nowhere to tell the story about her granddaughter in Cluj. Costică would have nowhere to laugh about his daughter who rings the plumber. Would they still meet? Perhaps. On WhatsApp. With emoji.
Relu stares into his cup and says, without any drama: 'So they all disappear, and we don't even notice. We carry on ordering, the delivery comes, it's cheaper, it's quicker, and that's that. We weep at their funerals and then order the funeral cake through Glovo.'
Nobody laughs at that. Not because it is too bleak — but because it is too exact.
The thought experiment ends there, unfinished, the way uncomfortable truths usually end at a coffee table: someone changes the subject, the bill comes, it is paid, people get up. But the image remains. An empty market in the thick of a Friday morning. The stalls covered with tarpaulins. The kiosk with its shutter down. The bakery with a dark window. And somewhere in the blocks of flats, people in pyjamas watching an app: estimated delivery — 25 minutes.
Precisely at that moment, at the table beside ours, there is a scene that seems staged by someone with too keen a dramatic sense to be accidental.
A young man of about twenty-five — headphones in his ears, phone on the table face up, wearing a T-shirt with a logo I do not recognise — is explaining something to his father with the calm that barely conceals the condescension of one who knows better. 'Dad, you don't need to go out any more. I'll order for you. Everything comes to the house, it's cheaper, no queuing, no effort.' The father listens. He is around fifty, looks like a reasonable man trying to follow his son's logic. He says nothing.
But at the far end of the terrace, an old man I know by sight — an octogenarian, straight-backed in the way of those who grew up without ergonomic chairs, with a cotton cap and polished shoes on a Friday morning terrace — raises his eyes from his coffee and intervenes without being invited. Not loudly, not aggressively. With the tone of someone who has seen enough to have ceased needing to justify himself.
'Son, I go out every day. Not because I've nothing to do at home. I go out because it does me good to go out.'
The young man removes one earphone, politely, instinctively. 'Sure, sir, but if everything you need comes to you...'
'Not everything comes.' The old man sets his cup down with a slowness that is not weakness but deliberateness. 'The air doesn't come. The person you meet on the way who tells you so-and-so has died and you didn't even know. The scent from the florist's as you walk past. The legs that walk and that, if they don't walk, stop working.' A brief silence. 'My doctor told me thirty years ago: walk every day. Until you can't. And when you can't, walk a little more. I listened. The doctor has been dead a long time. I'm still here.'
The young man smiles — I cannot tell whether he is persuaded or simply being polite. He puts the earphone back. Returns to his phone. He is probably ordering something.
The old man does not immediately return to his coffee. He sits for a moment looking at the place where the young man's attention was, with the expression of someone who has not finished what he had to say, even though his interlocutor has already moved on. Then, addressing nobody in particular, he continues — in that way of elderly people who have moved beyond the need for an explicit audience: 'Since the COVID, I stopped putting the television on. Before, I'd leave it on all day, in the background. Now I don't turn it on at all. Nor the radio.' A pause. 'Too much talk. Too many people who know things. Nobody knew anything, but everyone knew.'
The solicitor at our table raises his gaze from his coffee. 'And where do you get your information now?'
The old man gestures vaguely towards the street. 'From out there. The way people got it for a thousand years. I ask one person, I ask another, I go and see for myself. If it seems dubious, I ask again.' A brief smile. 'Nobody has ever lied to me face to face as much as the screen has.'
The pharmacist, who had been listening with the particular interest of someone accustomed to taking patients' histories, joins in: 'And aren't you afraid of missing something important?'
'What would I miss? Some politician dying whom I didn't vote for? Something going up in price that I don't need?' He shrugs with the ease of a man who has calibrated his indifferences with care. 'The important things still reach me. They come to me. The problem was that before, I was swallowing everything that wasn't important as well, and it filled me with fear and anger over things I could do nothing about.'
This small confession from the old man at the far table opens, inadvertently, a subject I had observed but only vaguely articulated: there is, increasingly, a category of people who ignore technology not from incapacity but from choice. Not confused elderly people, not retrograde Luddites — but people who have lived long enough inside the information system to have understood, through direct experience, how it works and what it does to them.
The pandemic was, for many of them, the moment of rupture. Not necessarily for conspiratorial reasons — though those exist too, and that is another story — but simply because they watched, in real time, as the same reality could be described in diametrically opposed ways by sources with equal claims to authority. They watched certainties from Monday become the errors of Tuesday. They watched experts contradicting experts, figures being recalibrated, recommendations reversed, fear amplified and relativised in cycles of a few days. And they drew the conclusion that any reasonable person draws when confronted with too much noise: if I cannot verify it, I had better not swallow it.
I encounter this type of person often in Botoșani — and not only here. The farmer who has not followed the news for two years and who knows what is being discussed in the village better than any analyst. The pensioner who left Facebook after the pandemic and who says she 'no longer has nightmares'. The craftsman who checks any important piece of information by asking three different people face to face before believing it. The teacher who asks his pupils to find the same news story in five sources and compare — not as an exercise in modern media literacy, but as an elementary reflex he himself developed through disillusionment.
These are not anti-technology in the ideological sense of the word. Many use their phones, some have social media accounts, several send messages on WhatsApp with a fluency that would surprise anyone who would dismiss them as digitally illiterate. But they have made a separation that the hyperconnected urban dweller has not: between technology as a tool — useful, used when needed, put down when not — and technology as a living environment, as a permanent background, as a source of implicit authority.
It is a distinction that matters. You control the tool. The environment controls you.
The young man with the headphones lives in the environment. The old man with the polished shoes uses the tool — and not even that with much enthusiasm. Between them there is not merely a generational difference. There is a difference of sovereignty: who serves whom.
Relu, at our table, who has heard everything, turns to us with an expression that requires no comment. He comments anyway, because he is Relu: 'That old man summed up in three sentences what we couldn't manage in half an hour.'
He is right. The old man was not talking about health as a medical discipline, not about daily steps and calories and wellness indicators. He was talking about something harder to put into words and therefore harder to replace with an app: physical presence in the world as a way of remaining alive — not biologically, but humanly. Every outing is a confirmation that the world exists beyond your screen, that the people in it have faces and voices and news, that you are part of a flow that continues regardless of whether you are watching it or not.
The young man across from us is not malicious. He has simply been raised in a world that delivered everything to his door and that persuaded him, subtly, that going outside is an optional inefficiency. He has internalised the logic of the system so completely that he now preaches it to his father with genuine goodwill. He cannot see what the old man loses if he no longer goes out — he sees only what he gains: time, comfort, convenience. He has not lived long enough to know that certain things cannot be delivered. That some things go and do not come back. That the legs that do not walk stop working, as the old man put it with a precision that no medical study would formulate better.
And perhaps that is, at bottom, the heart of the entire urban disconnection: not that the system is malevolent, but that it is so good at delivering what you ask for that you forget to ask for what truly matters. You forget that there were things you asked of no one, because you took them for yourself, with your own feet, on your own road, every Friday morning.
The Man Without a Shell: Anxiety as a Way of Life
The pharmacist, who is also the youngest among us, says that in recent years the sale of anxiolytics and antidepressants has grown enormously. 'Not only in the big cities — here too. People who had never had any problems, suddenly anxious.' She says this without drama, as a clinical fact observed from behind the counter.
There is a convenient explanation for this: the pandemic, economic uncertainty, the war nearby. Real explanations, but incomplete. What they do not account for is a slower, more diffuse, harder-to-point-at factor: modern man has been systematically stripped of the small resistances of life.
Previous generations lived with a certain level of everyday friction — from physical discomfort to the need to solve problems without external assistance. It was not a better life; we need not romanticise poverty or the absence of options. But that level of friction built an invisible musculature: tolerance of frustration, the capacity to sit with uncertainty, the habit of finding solutions from one's own resources.
The comfortable urban dweller of today has largely lost this musculature. Not because he is weaker by nature, but because the system has no longer asked him to exercise it. Delivery at the door eliminates the discomfort of cooking when you are tired. The taxi app eliminates the discomfort of walking. The streaming service eliminates the discomfort of not knowing what to do with yourself in the evening. Each elimination of friction is, in itself, neutral. Their sum creates a person who, at the first real discomfort, does not know what to do with it.
Modern anxiety is not, for the most part, fear of something real and present. It is the reaction of an untrained organism to the inherent discomfort of existence. It is the nervous system of a person who has lived too long in comfort and who no longer knows how to process anything that deviates from his preferred calibration.
Costică from the kiosk, with his plumber's hands, does not have clinical anxiety. Not because his life is easier — it is probably harder, with fewer options, with less comfort. But his body knows that problems exist and that problems get solved, and that after one solution comes another, and that this is simply the rhythm of things. He has not delegated his resilience.
The Individualist and His Programmed Loneliness
At the terrace at lunchtime, someone makes an observation: 'You know who no longer comes to name-day parties? Young people. Not because they don't want to — but they have plans.' Plans. The personal diary as a secondary religion, complementary to comfort. Your time, optimised, with chosen activities, with curated experiences, with selected people based on demonstrated compatibility.
The statistics are already well-documented for anyone who cares to look: Romania's large cities have divorce rates significantly above the national average, the number of single-person households has grown steadily over the past decade, reports on loneliness have become a public health theme in almost every Western country. It is not a coincidence. It is the price paid for radical individualism as a life project.
Individualism is not a vice in itself. Personal autonomy, the capacity to be the subject of one's own life, are real gains of modernity. The problem arises when autonomy is confused with isolation, when not depending on anyone becomes an ideal in itself, when relationships are evaluated through the lens of efficiency, compatibility, and emotional return on investment.
The person at the long table in the evening — which I am already anticipating, knowing it is coming — does not think in terms of investing in a relationship and boundaries and toxic people. Not because he is uneducated, but because he still lives within a paradigm in which people are not resources but simply people. You put up with those you are not compatible with. You sit with the boring one, because he is an old friend and that counts for more than any compatibility score.
Green Hypocrisy and a Plastic Identity
There is a moment at our terrace that summarises a whole urban pathology better than any essay. The pharmacist takes out of her leather handbag a branded water bottle with an 'eco' label and 'biodegradable' packaging. The bottle is plastic. On the table, beside our coffees, are three single-use plastic cups, because the terrace changed suppliers and 'they couldn't find ceramic at a good price any more'. Nobody draws any connection. Not because they are conscious hypocrites — but because the dissonance is so omnipresent that it has ceased to be visible.
This is ecological hypocrisy in its most common and least dramatic form: not the cynical duplicity of large corporations, but the diffuse inconsistency of ordinary people who have internalised green values as a personal brand without integrating them as daily practice. The views are expressed, the articles shared, the online petitions signed — and delivery is ordered four times a week, in packaging that is never sorted for recycling.
It is not ill will. It is precisely the absence of friction: being green when it costs nothing is easy, even pleasant — you identify with a cause, you gain a layer of moral identity, you need not change anything in your behaviour. Being genuinely green — buying less, walking more, eating locally, refusing the convenience of cheap flights — that costs. And the cost is incompatible with the religion of comfort.
Gheorghe from the market, with his pickles in glass jars, his cabbage in wooden barrels, his produce brought in his own van from his own smallholding, is greener than any well-articulated urban ecological conscience. Not because he chose to be. But because his way of life has never passed through the filter of commodification.
The Soft Man: Articulate and Helpless
I return to the office after lunch. A client rings. He has a problem with his website — something technical, minor. I guide him through it. 'Where's the button for...' We find it. Satisfied, he rings off. Twenty minutes later he rings again: 'Something else has come up.' The same type of problem, a different form. He did not retain the solution from last time. Not because he is ignorant — he has a degree, speaks three languages, navigates complex bureaucracies with remarkable ability. But he felt no need to retain it, because he knows he can ring any time.
This is the person of whom one speaks when one uses the terms high social intelligence and low practical intelligence — not as insults, but as a clinical observation. Urban life richly rewards the ability to navigate systems, to build relationships, to adapt quickly to new social and professional contexts. It does not reward, nor does it any longer demand, the ability to solve problems without assistance, to function in the absence of infrastructure, to know how things work at a physical and mechanical level.
The result is a kind of person who is extraordinarily competent in a world with electricity and WiFi and functioning services — and completely at a loss in the absence of any of those conditions. This is not a moral reproach. It is a systemic vulnerability. And the more capable systems become at doing things on our behalf, the greater the vulnerability grows.
There is a saying that circulates in technical circles: 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' The problem is that magic does not educate. The person who uses a tool he does not understand becomes dependent on the tool and inert without it. He does not know how to repair, how to improvise, how to start from scratch. He knows how to press the right button.
But ignorance and convenience are not merely uncomfortable — under certain conditions, they are dangerous. And it is precisely here that a subtlety appears which the comfort system carefully conceals: the human brain is structurally ill-equipped to evaluate small but serious risks. It almost invariably prefers minimum effort now over a greater cost later. 'Leave it, it'll do' is a phrase that sounds not like negligence — it sounds like pragmatism. And that is precisely why it is so effective as a mechanism for postponing thought.
Layered above this tendency is a second stratum: ignorance underestimates consequences. You cannot anticipate a risk you do not know; you cannot weigh it if you have no frame of reference for its scale. 'It happens to other people, not me' is an equally honest conclusion for a person who has no idea how common accidents are, in fact, in the category he has just entered. Not dishonest — merely uninformed. And comfort, by eliminating the friction that would have forced you to confront the physical reality of things, also eliminates the occasions on which you might have found out.
The third stratum is more uncomfortable to acknowledge, because it concerns not ignorance but self-deception: hypocrisy as a moral shield. I am not speaking of flagrant hypocrisy, of the person who preaches one thing and knowingly does another. I am speaking of its subtler and more common variant — the person who knows the rule, applauds it in theory, occasionally preaches it to others, but quietly suspends it when it concerns himself. 'I know you shouldn't go up without a harness, but I know what I'm doing.' 'I know you shouldn't drive with the fuel gauge on red, but in my case it's different, I know how the car feels.' The rule exists. The personal exception also exists, in parallel, with no visible internal tension. The brain is remarkably inventive when it comes to justifying why the general standard does not apply to the particular case of the one who holds it. It is easier to believe you are above risk than to live permanently in the knowledge that you are not. Hypocrisy, in this form, is not vice — it is a defence mechanism. Costly, but comfortable.
And the fourth stratum, which holds all the others together: the absence of a minimum practical culture. Not ignorance of a particular fact, but the absence of the entire mental framework that would make a risk legible. A person who does not understand that a wet roof plus a smooth sole means an almost certain fall is not lazy — he simply lacks the instrument that would make the situation readable. Nobody has ever walked him through the elementary physics of gravity applied at four metres' height. He has never read an accident report. He has never heard the story of someone it happened to. This minimal culture — the knowledge that certain things have concrete, predictable, documented consequences — is no longer systematically transmitted. Practical education has ceded ground to the abstract kind. The generations who instinctively knew that water and electricity do not mix, that a badly felled tree falls in the wrong direction, that a cracked ceiling does not give way on your schedule — those generations are thinning out. What remains is an articulate, educated, connected person who has never heard of the point-of-no-return effect and who, when the fuel gauge has been on red for some time, does not know that the reserve can no longer be relied upon.
The result is visible in every statistic on domestic accidents, fires, technical emergencies: if you break down the chronology of a 'strange accident', you find almost invariably not one grave error but a chain of small decisions, each individually reasonable, each chosen because it was less costly in the moment. The faulty switch left 'for later'. The overloaded fuse ignored because 'it's never tripped'. The main water stopcock that nobody in the flat knows how to turn off, because it was never needed — until it was. The chain is not composed of negligent people. It is composed of ordinary people who never felt enough pressure, at any point, to stop and ask: what happens if?
This is, perhaps, the most hidden tax of comfort: not that it weakens you physically or socially — but that it miscalibrates your sense of urgency. It gives you the impression that things run themselves, that systems are robust, that failure is the exception. And most of the time it is right. The problem is what happens in that small percentage — rare enough not to be factored in, costly enough to matter enormously when it occurs.
The question that follows from this is not a moral one — not how do we become more responsible as people, because responsibility as an abstract appeal has never changed very much. It is more a question of engineering: how do you counteract a structural weakness of the brain, knowing you cannot eliminate it but can at best go round it? A few mechanisms work, not because they are sophisticated but because they run perpendicular to the tendency.
The first is to make the risk personal. A brain that ignores an abstract statistic cannot so easily ignore the image of someone it loves in that situation. Not what happens if someone falls off the roof — but what happens if my brother falls off the roof. The psychological distance between 'someone' and 'him' is precisely the distance between dismissing and taking seriously a risk. The transfer is simple and it works, not because it is logical, but because it activates an emotional circuit that abstract logic does not reach.
The second is to pre-define rules before the moment of decision. 'Never without a harness on the roof, however quick the job' is not a rule applied through willpower at the moment of going up — because in that moment there is always a reasonable justification for an exception. It is a rule applied beforehand, when you are not under the pressure of the situation and when the mind is freer to think through consequences. People who do not have serious roof accidents are not braver or more careful than others. They have their internal rules fixed earlier, under better conditions.
The third is to increase the visibility of real consequences. Not success stories — these are in any case over-represented in any environment, because failures are hidden or disappear from the conversation. But concrete statistics, case studies, accident reports. Mihai, the methodical engineer, did not check the plumber's quote because he is suspicious by nature — but because in his professional field, verification is standard practice, the reflex is already formed. The transfer of that reflex to other domains does not happen of itself: it comes from repeated exposure to examples that show verification is worthwhile.
And, finally, concrete education — not as an abstract value but as a deliberate reduction of specific ignorance. You do not need to be an electrician to know what an overloaded fuse means. You do not need to be a plumber to know where your flat's main stopcock is. You do not need to be an accountant to read a quote and recognise a global sum with no breakdown. These are things that can be learnt in a few hours and that stay. The problem is not that they are hard to learn — it is that no system asks for them any more, and so the pressure that would make them necessary no longer exists.
The complication is that the system is not neutral with respect to these four strata — it actively amplifies them. Social media rewards visible risk and penalises invisible prudence: the photograph from the edge of the roof gets likes, the person who put on a harness posts nothing. Practical education has been gradually evacuated from schools in favour of the abstract kind, leaving entire generations without the mental framework that would make risk legible. The 'live in the moment' and 'be authentic' culture — for all their legitimate charm — sometimes simply mask the refusal to plan and to anticipate. And the algorithms that deliver content calibrated to preferences construct bubbles in which others' failures do not appear, because nobody shares their own story as a warning. The result is an environment in which combined blindness — I do not see the risk, I do not want to see it, I consider myself above it, I lack the tools to evaluate it — is not the exception but the default state.
Those who manage to leave this default state are not superior people. They are people who, at some point — through conscious discipline, through externally imposed rules, or most often through a painful experience of their own or of someone close — recalibrated their response to that leave it, it'll do. They developed what might be called intellectual humility towards their own limits: the awareness that the human mind is full of traps, that safety rules are not for fools but for lucid people who know that ungrounded optimism does not negotiate with gravity. They understood that this phrase does not describe a reality — it describes a hope. And that hope, however comfortable, is not a strategy.
The Long Table: Community Without an Algorithm
In the evening, at seven, the name-day party. Somewhere on the edge of town, in the yard of a man with fruit trees and a wooden table long enough to seat fourteen people. Beer in half-litre glasses, food cooked by the host — not ordered, not delivered, cooked —, music from an old speaker playing at a human volume, not that of an event.
Nobody at this table presented a strategy, nobody spoke about exit strategies or user retention or growth hacking. They spoke about their children, about a country road that has finally been surfaced, about an illness that has passed, about a wedding coming up, about a death that left a gap. The stuff of life. Not content. Not brand. Life.
Ionel, who does deliveries in his van and knows every road in the county, says that in recent years he has watched the number of people coming from the cities to buy houses in the village multiply. 'They come, they renovate nicely, they sort everything out, and then nobody goes to the fields because it's too hot, nobody goes to the vineyard because there's too much work, they sit in the house with the air conditioning and Netflix.' He laughs with a generosity that is not malice — it is simply the delight of a man who has witnessed a spectacular contradiction without being its victim.
The host's daughter, about eight years old, runs between the tables with a dog behind her. She has no phone. She does not look around to see whether she is being photographed. She is playing, simply, with a physical freedom that children from city blocks in larger towns have gradually lost as space shrank and a screen replaced it.
I find myself thinking, at a certain moment, that this long table is a living counter-argument to the programmed loneliness of the urban dweller. It is not a romanticised solution — not everyone can or wishes to live in Botoșani, not all small communities are idyllic, not all apparent warmth is authentic. But there is something in this gathering that no social platform has managed to reproduce: the physical, unfiltered presence of people who chose to be together for no reason other than the fact that they know each other and today is someone's name day.
A friend told me, not long ago, of his supreme achievement: he ran out simultaneously of petrol and of battery charge on his hybrid, on the motorway. A full-package breakdown, as he put it himself, with that resigned humour of a man who knows he has no option but to laugh. In his defence — delivered with perfectly performed seriousness — it was his wife's fault. The entire journey she had been talking about love, affection, the relationship, feelings. And he ran out of the only energy that really mattered: the one in the tank. His conclusion: love consumes. Sometimes everything.
I laughed. And then I realised that this joke is, in fact, a portrait. Not of a distracted man, but of the modern man in all his glory: equipped with everything available, hybrid, efficient on paper, prepared for every technical scenario — and brought to a standstill by precisely something that no app indexes and no algorithm manages. Something human, that is. By conversation, by presence, by the other person who speaks and who demands all of your attention, not merely part of it.
The tank and the battery can be recharged. Some gaps cannot.
Disconnection as System, Not as Fault
I return home late, around ten. Botoșani is quiet at this hour, with a quietness that big cities have permanently lost. I think about the unmoored urban dweller I have been attempting to portray — and I realise he is not a monster, not a coward, not a self-aware hypocrite. He is, largely, the coherent product of a system that has shaped him with good intentions and unnoticed consequences.
The modern urban system promised liberation: from hunger, from cold, from brute labour, from ignorance, from the limits of geography. It delivered, for the most part, exactly that. The price was more subtle: it delivered, alongside liberation, a certain uprooting. From the body, from community, from consequence, from meaning.
The person who throws rubbish out of the window is not primarily selfish — he is disconnected. He has lost, somewhere in transit towards comfort, the sense that his action has consequences, that the space beyond the window belongs to him too, that there is a we beyond the nuclear family and the contact list.
It is not exclusively his fault. It is the fault of the architecture — not of the block of flats, but of the value system that built the block, that separated private space from public, that eliminated the steps, the verandas, the shared courtyards, the gates through which neighbours saw each other daily and had unavoidable relationships. When you are no longer compelled to be in relation with someone, it is far easier to ignore the consequences of your actions upon him.
Resilience is Not Nostalgia
I am not arguing for a return to rural life, nor for condemning the city. I am arguing for something more precise: resilience as a conscious project in an environment that permanently invites you to go soft.
Resilience does not mean giving up comfort. It means not becoming so dependent on it that its absence disintegrates you. It means still knowing how to make a meal from what you have in the house, still being able to sit in silence without a screen, still being able to listen to someone without evaluating the narrative efficiency of what they say. Being able to queue, in other words, without experiencing it as a personal affront.
Gheorghe from the market knows that a good pickle takes time. You cannot rush fermentation. You cannot optimise the process without losing the product. That is a lesson that no productivity course teaches, because it is perpendicular to everything productivity preaches.
And yet Gheorghe knows it, and applies it, and at the end of it has a jar of pickles on which you can build an entire morning.
Epilogue: A Friday Like Many Others
This Friday had nothing special about it. It was not a social experiment, not a journalistic investigation. It was an ordinary Friday, in which I stepped out of the flow of screens and deadlines for a few hours and lived at a pace I recognise as human in the oldest sense of the word.
At the market, at the bakery, at the lunchtime terrace, at the evening table — everywhere I met people who do not call themselves specialists in anything, who have no personal brand, who do not optimise the user experience. And yet, paradoxically, from each of them I took something I have found in no digital interface: the presence of a real person, with his history, with his limitations, with his unperformed joys.
The unmoored urban dweller exists. I see him in the data on loneliness and divorce, I recognise him in the anxiety of young generations in big cities, I hear him in discussions about burnout and in the therapeutic language we use to talk about a life from which meaning has quietly drained. But I see equally clearly that disconnection is not a destiny. It is a direction we chose, gradually, without quite realising it.
And if we chose it, we can choose otherwise.
Perhaps no revolution is needed. Perhaps all that is needed is a Friday in May, a coffee at the kiosk, a warm pastry, and a conversation that does not end with a clear conclusion.
Perhaps that is, in fact, the depth available to each of us — if we go to the market instead of ordering through an app.
Ten Questions
Drawn directly from the heart of the article — each with an answer applicable tomorrow morning, not after a personal development course.
1. When did I last leave the house without a utilitarian purpose — without buying something, getting somewhere, sorting something out?
Tomorrow morning, before the first coffee, step out for ten minutes without your phone and without a destination. It is not sport, not meditation, not productivity. It is presence. Notice who is outside, what it smells like, what you can hear. That is all.
2. How many subscriptions do I pay monthly without knowing exactly how much and for what?
Open your bank statement or app. Find all recurring transactions. Write them down on a sheet of paper — the amount, the name, the date of last actual use. Cancel everything you have not opened in the last thirty days. It takes twenty minutes and recovers money you are paying out of pure inertia.
3. For the last service quote or works contract I signed, did I check the equipment prices?
If a quote is coming or you have one in a drawer, open a building materials, white goods, or other relevant website and compare the main items. Not in order to negotiate aggressively — but to know who you are talking to and what you are signing.
4. Do I know how to do one basic practical thing in my home — turn off the water at the main stopcock, change a fuse, turn off the gas?
Tomorrow, find the main water stopcock in your flat and check whether it works. Two minutes. If you do not know where it is, ask the neighbour or the building manager. That knowledge is worth more than any emergency app.
5. The last important piece of news I believed — did I check it in another source before sharing or commenting on it?
Tomorrow, at the first piece of news that outrages or excites you on social media, do not share it immediately. Search for the same story in two different sources, with different editorial leanings. If the story is the same in both, it is probably real. If you cannot find it anywhere else, it probably is not.
6. Is there a physical place in my town that I go to regularly and where someone knows me by name or by habit?
If the answer is no, tomorrow go to the same place twice. A bakery, a kiosk, a bookshop, a market. Not in order to socialise forcedly — but to begin becoming a feature of the place. Belonging is built through repetition, not through intention.
7. The last time I received a text message or email from a courier about 'a problem with my parcel', did I click without checking?
Tomorrow, for any text message or email that asks for an urgent click — courier, bank, streaming platform, mobile operator — do not press anything. Open the official website directly in a browser, from a new search, not from the link received. If the problem is real, you will find it there.
8. In the past week, have I had a face-to-face conversation that had no practical purpose — without solving anything, asking for anything, planning anything?
If not, tomorrow ring someone and simply ask how they are. Or stop for two minutes with someone you meet. No agenda. Purposeless conversations are the infrastructure of community.
9. Do I know the difference in price between the same product bought online in haste and the same product searched for ten minutes longer?
Tomorrow, for any online purchase over one hundred lei [approx. £17–20], open three tabs with the same product on different platforms before pressing 'add to basket'. The difference is almost always between ten and forty per cent. Ten minutes of deliberate friction, not haste.
10. If the power went out tomorrow for twelve hours, what would I not know how to do?
This is not a rhetorical question. Write down the real list — food without a microwave, navigation without GPS, payment without a card, communication without a phone. Choose one point from the list and try to solve it tomorrow by physical means, without a screen. Not as a survival exercise — but to know that you can.
These ten questions do not demand lifestyle changes and do not moralize. They ask for one small, concrete gesture tomorrow — each of them a small repatriation into the real world, with all its friction intact.
Online Bibliography
Comfort as religion — sources and further reading. Here is the bibliography — verified, grouped thematically, with a direct link and a line of context for each.
Urban loneliness and single-person households
The epidemic of loneliness in Romania — 2.5 million Romanians live alone, an increase of 400,000 compared to a decade ago tvrinfo.ro
60% of single-person households are in urban areas; sociologist: 'the erosion of the extended family and emancipation lead to individualisation' hotnews.ro
The number of single-diner restaurant bookings has risen 40% year on year stirileprotv.ro
Divorce rates and demographic structure
Divorce rates in urban areas, historical analysis 1950–2022: the explosion of divorce among the uprooted urban population contributors.ro
Demographic data 2024: average age at first marriage — 32 for men, 28.8 for women; young people are postponing marriage ever further asociatiaprovita.ro
Mental health and anxiety
- Depression and anxiety in Romania — massive under-reporting; official statistics put the figure at 1%, specialists contest the figure smartliving.ro
Online commerce and deliveries
One in two Romanians made an online purchase in 2023; the e-commerce market reached 7 billion euros, a 10% increase on 2022 armo.ro
60% of consumers use delivery apps at least once a week; Glovo is present in 79 towns in Romania stirileprotv.ro
Food delivery — a 25% market share, second only to restaurant dining; the pandemic accelerated habits that have not since disappeared profit.ro
Digital fraud and the traps of convenience
Digital fraud up 40.2% in 2024; malware +286.8%; DNSC [National Directorate of Cyber Security] report romanialibera.ro
The evolution of phishing attacks in Romania 2021–2024: from 45,984 incidents to new forms — smishing, vishing, spear-phishing aorr.org.ro
Eleven sources, all verifiable, all with concrete data that anchors in measurable reality what the article treats narratively. They may be placed directly in the article's footer or in a sidebar box of the type 'The figures behind the text'.