Personal development

I. The WhatsApp Group, Tuesday Evening, 22:47

It all began the way important things usually begin in our lives — with a throwaway message in a WhatsApp group.

Mihai — a full-stack programmer with fourteen years of experience, the kind of man who can write working code in any language given an hour and a black coffee — sent a link accompanied by three words: 'read this, lads.' The link led to an article about the implicit misalignment of artificial intelligence: the idea that neither humans nor machines come by default calibrated towards the common good. That alignment — whether human or artificial — is always a construct, never a natural state.

Andrei, a systems engineer at a public institution in the county, replied within ten minutes: 'nothing new there — that's bureaucracy every single day.' Ciprian, the other programmer in the group — a backend specialist, the type who speaks rarely but precisely, like a compiler with no errors — sent a grinning skull emoji. Bogdan, the IT man in equipment sales, someone who knows more psychology than tech but would never admit it aloud, wrote: 'let's talk on Friday.' And Relu — the third programmer, the youngest among them, twenty-nine years old, who had caught the React and cloud wave and who uses ChatGPT with a casualness that makes the others feel suddenly old — added: 'Friday works for me, but I reckon AI is better aligned than people. Fight me.'

'As the saying goes: the dog barks, the caravan moves on,' replied Bogdan. 'We'll sort it out on Friday.'

II. Preparing for the Meeting — Thursday Evening, Each at Home

Andrei sits at his desk in the living room, laptop open, a slice of bread and brined cheese beside the keyboard, reading. Not for the first time is he reading about misalignment — he has worked for nine years in a state institution and experiences misalignment daily: in procedures that fail to align, in objectives that contradict other objectives, in forms that request data nobody processes and nobody uses. But now he reads with different eyes. Not as a frustrated employee, but as a man trying to understand why things are the way they are.

For the more pragmatic reader, the correct title would be "From Toxic Expectations to Rational Estimates" — I should warn you that the topic of my online reading is secondary and creates a frustration of utility. Read the text without expecting perfection, but instead estimating what can usefully be extracted from it. If the estimate is confirmed, good; if not, recalibrate for next time.

The hospital corridor, the yellow chair, and the theory of estimates. I was waiting on a yellow plastic chair in the radiology corridor of the County Hospital in Botoșani, and I don't know why I noticed it then — more acutely than usual — the colour of that yellow: a bleached yellow that had long ceased to be yellow, that had become a memory of yellow, a yellow that had given up on itself without being replaced by anything, remaining in that state of nowhere that clings to the retina and follows you after you leave. I had a dull ache in my right shoulder for about two weeks — the kind of pain that doesn't kill you but doesn't let you forget that you exist, the kind our grandparents — practical people, people who had no patience for vague ailments — called rheumatism and treated with spirits rubbed on the spot and a philosophical shrug of the shoulders, nothing to be done about it, it'll pass, while I was treating it with ibuprofen and postponement, which is the oldest Romanian therapy and probably the most ineffective in the long run, though in the short run it is admirable for its convenience. This article is not an advertorial and contains no sponsored content.

My son was next to me on the adjacent chair — not that he wanted to be there, because at fourteen hospitals are places where old people and sick people go who are not you, not yours, and his presence there was more of an errand on Saturday's timetable than a voluntary act of filial solidarity. He had come with me on foot because I don't drive short distances when my right shoulder is compromised, because his mother couldn't, and because, in the end, I asked him to come and he didn't say no — which, at fourteen, is already a form of love, even if nobody says so out loud. He sat with his head slightly tilted towards his own screen, headphones on, with music from which deep bass tones leaked into the air between us like an invisible glass wall — I could see him, I could feel the warmth of his shoulder ten centimetres from mine, but we were, at the same time, in completely separate worlds, each in our own screen, though each of us would occasionally look up when I shifted in my seat and said hello or exchanged a few words with acquaintances, neighbours, childhood friends — you know how it is, the world is very small, and yet these people had no real business being there but would appear exhaustingly from nowhere... no, in fact it was a hospital.

The idea that takes shape beyond the story and beyond personal intuitions is a cold and economic one: it is not the quantity of work that makes the difference, but the way in which it is distributed.

I think about my father's hands. I don't know why I start there, but that is where I go every time I want to understand something about real work — about what it actually means to know how to do something. His hands had a texture I have never been able to forget, though I have tried. Not because they were ugly — on the contrary — but because they held something I do not have, something that still intimidates me now, at my age, when I ought to have moved past this kind of comparison. They were a mechanic's hands. Cracked at the knuckles, with nails that no amount of soap could restore to the white of an office worker's hands. The black of engine oil had settled there as a second skin, older and more truthful than the first.

My father knew how to do everything.

He repaired cars, of course — that was his trade, the workshop in Botoșani where the air smelt of burnt oil and the warm metal of an engine cooling after a long journey. But he also repaired the roof when the rain came in, and the electrics when there was a short circuit, and the neighbour's rubber boots, and the black-and-white television, and my three-speed bicycle, which I broke every summer with the same systematic enthusiasm. He never refused. That was his pride — that there was nothing in the world he could not do, fix, or restore to the state it ought to be in.

And I admired him for it. Sincerely, without reservation, with that uncracked admiration of a child who has not yet seen enough of the world.

I am forty now and I understand something different. I understand that my father was exhausted. No one asked me that at the time and I didn't ask myself — children don't see their parents' tiredness, or they see it and choose not to name it, because naming it would make it real. But the tiredness was there, in the way he rose from the table and went straight to the workshop after supper, in the way his day of rest was never truly rest, because someone always turned up with something to repair, and he could not refuse, because to refuse would have meant saying he didn't know how — and that was unthinkable.

He knew how to do everything. That was precisely why he could never stop.

From the cold notification to absurd negotiations — how corporations see us when they ask for more money.

'Put a little soul into that bill, would you!'

The problem — shameless price hikes

A few days ago, something happened to a friend of mine that happens to all of us, in fact, at regular intervals, like a clock of administrative misfortune: he received a notification from his mobile operator. The message was brief, dry and — most painfully of all — utterly devoid of any trace of regret. A cold, almost robotic communication in which Orange informed him that, 'due to the economic situation', it found itself obliged to increase his monthly plan by 6% of its current value.

No apology. Not a single tear. Not even a 'We're sorry, but…' that might at least preserve the illusion that one is dealing with human beings. In place of that basic humanity, the message conveyed something along the lines of: 'It happens. Pay up. Everything else is your problem.'