The Oracle Has Indigestion

There is, I detect in myself, a slowly creeping apathy toward my own field. Healthcare IT. The thing I studied, worked in, accumulated all these years of knowledge about, until a considerable portion of my head became occupied by information that apparently cannot negotiate the purchase of lunch.

And it is spreading. A more diffused listlessness about figuring things out at all. I come across something I would once have wanted to understand, and before I can get properly interested, before the question has even managed to put its shoes on, a voice at the back of my head coughs. Deliberately. The cough of somebody who has heard quite enough of this nonsense.

To what end?

I used to be able to follow a question without first asking it how much it paid. Something did not make sense, so I wanted to know why. I could lose myself in the problem, in the pleasure of finally seeing how one thing connected to another. There was room in my head for an interest that did not have to present a business plan.

Now everything has to explain why I should bother.

Healthcare data, for instance. I have spent years getting information out of one system and into another, trying to preserve what it meant along the way. MUMPS, SQL, HL7 v2, and later FHIR. Codes, mappings, the tedious little distinctions through which a system can appear to work while quietly misunderstanding what it has been told. There used to be satisfaction in catching that. In knowing where to look. In being able to say, wait, that is not the same thing.

I can still say it. I can say it to the room.

Everyone seems to be consulting the same few oracles now. Ask ChatGPT. Do not understand the answer? Ask again. Ask it to simplify. Ask for an example. Ask it to explain the example. Keep going until something clicks, or until the answer becomes comfortable enough to stop asking, which from outside can look very much like the same event. The text box remains open. It has all night.

I use it too. Of course I fucking use it. I am sitting here resenting a convenience I also depend on, which gives the resentment a particularly unpleasant aftertaste.

But the voice keeps asking what edge there is in knowing anything anymore. Someone else can obtain in seconds an explanation of something I spent years learning to recognize in practice. I know those are different things. I can explain the difference at exhausting length. I can probably bore somebody into acknowledging it.

Then what? Will they have work for me?

The distinction survives. I remain unemployed.

That is where the argument becomes difficult to continue. I can still recognize a wrong answer, still see the distance between a paragraph that sounds right and a system that works. But I have been sitting with that knowledge for so long, trying to find somewhere to put it, that another thing to learn begins to feel like another thing I will have to carry around unused. More qualifications for the vacancy inside my own room.

I open something about FHIR and already feel tired. The interest does not get far enough to become an interest. I am halfway through a paragraph and wondering who will ever need me to have read it. Then I am angry that I have asked that question, because I did not always need an employer’s permission to find something interesting. Then I cannot remember what the paragraph said.

This is how the apathy gets in. A little earlier each time.

I am fifty-one. A middle-aged Bengali with middle-class habits of thought and a bank balance that has severed relations with the middle class. Educated, experienced, unemployed, broke. There, the résumé is becoming more concise. Perhaps eventually I can fit it on the back of a bus ticket I cannot afford.

₹64.61.

Sixty-four rupees and sixty-one paise. My fucking bank balance.

The sixty-one paise offends me almost as much as the sixty-four rupees. Such precision. There must be no misunderstanding about the extent of the resources available to this account holder. The system has counted everything. I have been measured to two decimal places.

And it is Puja season, when Calcutta seems able to find money for everything, when even going out to enjoy what is supposedly free involves the small calculations that ruin the enjoyment before I have left the room. Getting there. Getting back. Something to eat. The ordinary expectation that a person moving through a city can occasionally buy something without conducting an inquiry.

I am tired of the inquiry. I am tired of knowing my balance so intimately. I would like to forget a number for an afternoon.

People are buying clothes, meeting friends, making plans. Some of them are doing well. There is no need to explain them all away as frauds or show-offs to make myself feel better. They have money to spend. They have somewhere to go. I am here trying to understand how I became this man, how all the studying and working and knowing came to this, and every time I ask where I went wrong I find another place to start the interrogation.

A rickshaw walla getting paid for a fare has made a transaction happen. Somebody needed him, he did the work, money changed hands. I keep thinking about how ordinary that is. How far away it has become. I would like someone to need something I can do and pay me for doing it. I am exhausted by how large a wish that apparently is.

Meanwhile, learn more. Keep up. Stay relevant.

Relevant to whom? Where is this person? Can I have an address?

I have my blog, of course. My little establishment for converting hours into words that scarcely anybody appears to read. I finish something, put it out there, and then have the additional humiliation of wanting somebody to notice. I can call it writing for myself, and some of it is, but I know why I look to see whether anyone came.

The traffic that appears to come from China and Singapore looks to me like more machinery passing through. I suspect bots. I cannot tell from a country label who is behind a visit or where my words go afterward, but the suspicion is there: some tireless little scraper collecting what I have written so that another machine can eventually shit out something else.

The oracle has indigestion. Too many words. Too much human residue. It belches up another helpful paragraph, cleanly formatted, with none of the inconvenience of the person who originally needed to say something.

Perhaps that is where this goes too. I cannot know. I do know that the thought of being collected is a poor substitute for feeling read.

And I am tired of making these fucking sentences.

There is an embarrassment in that too, because here I am, making more of them. I say I do not want to write, then rearrange the complaint until it says what I mean, and the effort irritates me almost as much as the silence would. I would like to be able to stop caring whether I have been understood. It would save time.

I am done. I am dead. Those are the words that come into my head, extravagant words for an afternoon in which I am still here, still looking at a screen, still managing to be irritated by a misplaced comma. I feel of no use to anyone, and after enough time that feeling begins speaking with the authority of a fact. I hear it before I have finished asking a question. What use are you going to make of the answer? What use has anybody made of you?

I do not know how to tell where the depression ends and the exhaustion of being broke begins. I live with both. They have had plenty of time to become acquainted. Between them, they can take something I once loved and make approaching it feel like one more occasion to discover what I have failed to do with my life.

The awful part is that I remember wanting to know. I remember being absorbed in something without simultaneously watching myself be a failure at everything else. I could disappear into a problem for a while. Now I bring the whole fucking room with me. The balance. The month. The work that has not come. I cannot get far enough into the subject to lose sight of myself.

And I do not want to have to turn this into an encouraging account of how curiosity survives. I am tired of being required to find something salvageable in every bad afternoon so that the paragraph can finish nicely.

There is ₹64.61 in the account. There are things I have not read. Somewhere a machine is answering another question.

Anyway, fuck this. I do not want to write anymore. I cannot see what good will come of it.

Except more expletives.