Perpetual Maybe: Living on the Edge of “What If”

A Day Written in Pencil

The alarm is set for 6:30 a.m., but your eyes snap open at 5:58 because your brain is already auditing the overnight push‑notifications it hasn’t seen yet. A rent reminder, an email from that contract client marked URGENT—PLEASE RESPOND, and a promo promising 15% off groceries if you order before 7:00. You cancel the alarm to save yourself thirty‑two minutes of heart‑pounding anticipation, swipe through the red dots, and run the math before your feet hit the floor. If the client extends the contract two more weeks, the rent is safe. If not, you’ll be Venmo‑requesting friends for gas money again.

Down the hall, your partner is half‑awake, scrolling the job board like a gambler watching the roulette wheel. Their current role expires at quarter‑end— maybe—depending on margins. You trade a look that says morning and also are we okay? Neither of you answers out loud because language is expensive and you need the words for later negotiations.

Coffee costs twenty‑five cents per pod, so you pocket the daily pod count in your head the way previous generations counted cigarettes. DoorDash buzzes. The driver took a second route; ETA pushed back six minutes. That’s fine except you calculated the caffeine hit into your commute buffer and now traffic is a variable again. You refresh Google Maps like a rosary.

By noon you’ve toggled between three Slack workspaces, two freelance portals, a gov‑website tracking your health insurance credits, and TikTok for a lunchtime dopamine micro‑dose. The big client ghosted after asking for a “quick rewrite” (unpaid, obviously). LinkedIn tells you congratulations!—someone got the job you applied for. Algorithms call that “engagement.”

At 8:15 p.m. your watch awards you a digital confetti burst for meeting your step goal, even though you never left the apartment. Midnight arrives with the push alert you’ve been half‑expecting, half‑dreading: AI just learned a new trick that makes half your skill set redundant—effective immediately. You swipe it away and set the alarm for 6:30.

Welcome to the day we all had—give or take the details.

Recommended Listening:

Manufactured Precarity

Look around: the words “on‑demand,” “flex,” and “cancel anytime” might feel like friendly conveniences, but they’re also legal disclaimers that shift every ounce of uncertainty onto you. The rideshare driver owns the car, pays the insurance, absorbs the gas hikes. The streaming subscriber carries the price bumps, then gets the guilt email when they pause the plan. Your employer writes at will in a seven‑page handbook; you initial the clause and pretend it’s a formality.

Beneath that glossy language sits an older, blunter truth: whoever holds the option to walk away risk‑free holds the power. Corporations walk away daily—by algorithm, by merger, by the quiet Friday email that starts with “restructuring.” Workers, tenants, patients, even students inherit the debris. When Hertz files bankruptcy the CEO departs with a bonus; when you’re one late payment from eviction the only parachute is GoFundMe.

Economists defend this as labor‑market flexibility, but it’s closer to Hobbes than Hayek—life remains solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; only now we sign non‑competes first. We are sold volatility as adventure: “choose your own hours,” “be your own boss,” “monetize your passion.” Choose wrong and the rent collector still knocks; passions don’t take Venmo.

Precarity didn’t crawl out of the swamp; it was engineered on a whiteboard. Wall Street loves a variable cost, legislators love campaign checks, shareholders love quarterly lifts. The spreadsheet shows savings; the street outside shows gig vans double‑parked at the food bank.

That power dynamic clarifies the stakes. When a platform revises its terms overnight, it isn’t a glitch—it’s a feature upload. When health insurance shifts to a higher deductible for consumer choice, it’s a toll booth, not a bridge. Philosophically, the social contract has been edited with invisible ink: duties remain, guarantees fade.

Security, then, is neither nostalgia nor luxury; it’s a prerequisite for any genuine freedom. Until risk is shared upward as readily as profit trickles down, flexibility is just a euphemism for disposable—and disposable people can’t plan futures.

The Psychology of Perpetual “Maybe”

You know that micro‑flinch when your phone buzzes at 9:47 p.m. with a subject line that begins “Update on…”? That flicker is your amygdala flexing like a smoke alarm. In prehistoric days the alarm meant tiger in the bushes; today it means scope change, new metric, please sign. Different headline, same circuitry. The body floods with cortisol either way, and modern life strings those jolts together like cheap Christmas lights—always on, always buzzing, never quite burning out.

This constant low‑grade alertness is marketed as staying connected. It’s really a full‑time cognitive tax. You refresh Slack channels on vacation, schedule tweets at dinner, check your shift schedule three times daily because last week they cut hours without warning. Uncertainty nestles into muscle memory: shoulders tighten, sleep shortens, attention fractures into thin, monetizable slices.

Neuroscientists call it allostatic load—the wear and tear of perpetual adjustment. Imagine driving cross‑country with the check‑engine light blinking the whole way; eventually you stop seeing the warning, but the engine still grinds. We’ve normalized the grind so thoroughly that calm feels suspicious, like we’re slacking if our pulse dips below notification rate.

Philosophically, Søren Kierkegaard labeled anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.” He never saw an app store. The modern labyrinth offers infinite forks—career pivots, side hustles, dating swipes—but places a price tag on every exit. Choice without foundation mutates into vertigo. Stoic thinkers prescribed focusing on what can be controlled; the list keeps shrinking until it fits on a sticky note: breathe, hydrate, charge phone.

And yet we treat this manufactured vertigo as personal failure. If only we optimized harder—tried a new Pomodoro extension, hacked our morning routine, biohacked our mitochondria—then the ground would steady. The self‑help industry loves this confusion: it sells parachutes while insisting gravity is optional.

The trick is that desperation needs fuel, and nothing feeds it like intermittent, unpredictable reward. Which points us to the system’s favorite carrot—hope.

Hope as the Hook

Scroll any gig‑platform subreddit and you’ll find the same gospel: “Stick with it—my cousin cleared six figures last year!” Modern marketplaces plant these testimonies the way casinos advertise jackpot winners: one neon‑lit outlier canonizes ten thousand losses. The system doesn’t need everyone to win; it just needs you to believe you could.

Hope is a noble instinct—it ferried our ancestors across deserts and oceans—but growth marketers discovered it converts nicely at 7.99% APR. Uber emails you a badge for fifty weekend rides; YouTube rains confetti when you hit one hundred subscribers; a robo‑advisor forecasts your 401(k) doubling if you stay the course. Each ping whispers the big score might be next week, just loud enough to drown out the math.

Behavioral scientists call this variable‑ratio reinforcement—the slot‑machine schedule most likely to keep us yanking the lever. Guaranteed payouts bore people; unpredictable jackpots electrify the limbic system. Gig apps replicate that curve in code: surge multipliers, random boosts, limited‑time bonuses. Even your email client does it—one “Congratulations” among a hundred promos, and you’re hooked for another scroll.

The cruelty is elegantly simple: hope can’t survive certainties. If stability were common, we’d close the apps and organize. So the architects keep outcomes erratic on purpose, slipping us micro‑wins—likes, badges, surge pricing—just enough to stave off mutiny while preserving the scarcity that makes tomorrow’s notification irresistible.

In short, the house doesn’t sell products; it sells the possibility that the next ping changes everything. And because the house controls the pings, the jackpot can remain theoretical forever.

Which leads us to the private rituals we perform to feel in control while we wait for the next maybe.

Micro‑Rituals of Control

When the big levers are welded elsewhere, we grab the tiny ones and polish them like heirlooms. We track calories, steps, Pomodoros, and gratitude entries in color‑coded apps that ping more often than friends do. Every Sunday is reset day: budget spreadsheet open in one tab, meal‑prep YouTube in another, an influencer whispering that organisation is liberation. If you can’t secure tomorrow’s paycheck, you can at least decant the quinoa.

These rituals feel rational—they are rational—until you notice how often they mutate into superstition. Miss one journal entry and the mind flares: Is that why my proposal got ghosted? Delete Duolingo for storage space and the owl haunts your dreams. The tools promise mastery over chaos; what they deliver is an ever‑lengthening chore list that masquerades as safety.

Scroll Instagram at 6 a.m. and you’ll see a thousand altars of control: 4:45 wake‑ups, ice baths, affirmations, biohacking stacks. Each post implies the same theology: adversity is a settings problem; tweak the settings, win the game. It’s a comforting narrative because it locates the fix inside the self—no need to renegotiate the social contract if you can hustle your mitochondria into compliance.

Yet control is always conditional. The tire still blows, the landlord still sells, the platform still “sunsets” the feature your side income relied on. In that moment the ritual snaps back to reveal its real function: not protection, but distraction—productive worrying dressed up as self‑care.

Albert Camus wrote of Sisyphus finding meaning in the push up the hill; modern Sisypheans film the rock for TikTok sponsorships. We’ve commodified coping—turned every private habit into public content—and in doing so swapped solidarity for performance. A shared problem becomes fifty solo vlogs instead of one collective negotiation.

Micro‑rituals aren’t useless; they keep us alive and sometimes sane. But they’re no substitute for structural ballast, and the illusion they foster—that personal optimization can outmaneuver systemic precarity—sets us up for harsher whiplash when the next rule change lands. Which brings us to the lava floor we’re all convinced we can hop across if we just stick the landing.

When the Floor Is Lava

Remember the childhood game—leaping from couch to coffee table because the carpet was molten? Adult life recreated it in high‑definition, only now the “couches” are short‑term gigs, promo interest rates, and month‑to‑month leases. Each platform, policy, or side hustle is a wobbly ottoman you pray will hold until the next direct deposit.

Take Maya, a composite of half the people in your contact list. She drives for a rideshare company at dawn, sells vintage clothes on Depop at lunch, grades online essays at night. None of these pay enough alone, but together they almost cover rent—assuming the algorithm doesn’t tweak surge zones, shipping costs don’t spike, and the ed‑tech startup doesn’t pivot to AI graders. Maya’s calendar looks full; her future looks like static.

Meanwhile, the stepping‑stones shrink. Interest rates climb, insurance deductibles bloat, climate disasters redraw flood maps overnight. The lava—insolvency, eviction, medical debt—hisses louder. Politicians trot out slogans like jobs, dignity, growth, but legislation often treats yesterday’s factory shift as today’s plan. Safety nets exist, but accessing them can feel like speed‑running a dungeon with a new boss at every doorway: one form misfiled, one document missing, game over.

Markets smell the fear and convert it into products. Buy‑now‑pay‑later schemes stretch groceries across four paychecks (with a hidden late fee magma pit). Earned‑wage‑access apps give you your own salary early—for a tip. Even furniture is lava‑proofed: rent‑to‑own couches at triple sticker price because who can save for a sofa when the landlord might raise rent 20% at renewal time?

Stoic philosopher Epictetus said we control only our opinions and actions. But the modern menu of controllables is shrinking like a sidewalk in rising tide. Even the weather betrays us—heat domes, wildfire smoke, microbursts shredding roofs. Economic and ecological precarity fuse into one sunrise‑to‑sunset dare: Touch the floor and lose everything.

So we hop faster, hustle harder, perfect our landing form. And while we’re mid‑air, someone is already drafting the subscription plan for the trampoline.

Selling Serenity Back to Us

Open your phone before you’ve even stretched and the feed prescribes calm for a fee: a guided‑breathing app offers a 70% off sunrise flash sale, a tech bro touts his $129 infrared sauna blanket, the local bank promotes a mindfulness webinar inside its overdraft‑fee email. The same economy that drilled anxiety into our bones now sells artisanal bandages for the splinters.

Corporate HR got the memo, too. Monday’s all‑hands reveals layoffs; Tuesday’s calendar invite reads “Optional Lunch‑and‑Learn: Gratitude Journaling for Stress.” The company cafeteria replaces soda with kombucha and calls it culture. Meanwhile, your deductible inflates like a bounce house. When ailments are structural, self‑care becomes unpaid overtime.

The wellness stack arrives in tiers, like DLC for a video game whose base version was already full price:

Starter Pack: scented candles, playlist of ocean sounds, five‑minute meditation timer.
Mid‑Tier: smart ring tracking heart‑rate variability, subscription to a therapy chatbot, weekend sound‑bath retreat in a converted warehouse.
Prestige Edition: ayahuasca in Costa Rica, personalized supplement regimens shipped monthly, concierge life coach on retainer.

None of these are inherently bad—breathing exercises lower cortisol; therapy saves lives—but notice the sleight of hand: the burden of fixing systemic distress is transferred to individual wallets. Capital lights the fire, then monetizes the smoke detectors.

Philosophically, it’s the commodification of Stoicism minus the civic duty. Marcus Aurelius wrote meditations while running an empire; Instagram Stoics sell merch printed with “The obstacle is the way”—fitting words when the obstacle is rent. Kant argued for duties owed to all rational beings; wellness influencers reframe duty as an interior decorating project: heal yourself so you can hustle harder.

Wellness goods become moral talismans—you bought the weighted blanket, therefore you’re doing the work. But the ship is still taking on water, and motivational stickers weaken in salt spray. We chant affirmations between budgeting spreadsheets, saluting our resilience while compound interest climbs the mast.

If serenity is sold in units, who profits from keeping us just unbalanced enough to click Add to Cart? To answer, we have to zoom out from private coping to public architecture—and ask whether success might be measured not in optimization hacks but in the number of people who no longer need them.

Toward a Different Metric of Security

Imagine a scoreboard where victory isn’t top-line growth but how many people can sleep through the night without silencing notification anxiety. Picture quarterly reports listing “days since last forced eviction” next to revenue. Absurd? Maybe—but so was counting daily active users before the internet existed. Metrics mold reality; we measure what we value, then we start valuing what we measure.

Some cracks of possibility already glint through the concrete:

Four‑Day Weeks in Iceland and Belgium showed productivity held steady while stress plummeted. Turns out rested brains write better code and make fewer burrito‑assembly errors.
Employee‑owned cooperatives from Spain’s Mondragón to home‑care agencies in the Bronx trade stock tickers for shared stakes. When the floor is yours, you stop setting it on fire.
Cities like Vienna treat housing as infrastructure, building municipal apartments competitive with private landlords—proof that affordability isn’t a law of physics but a policy choice.
Universal healthcare pilots (pick almost any peer nation) demonstrate that severing medical insurance from employment reduces entrepreneurial fear and sick‑day roulette.

None of these models is utopia, but each shifts the default question from “How do we squeeze more juice out of labor?”to “How do we ensure the glass itself doesn’t crack?” Rawls’ veil of ignorance urges designing systems we’d accept without knowing our role. If you could be gig worker or CEO at random roll, which labor law would you write? Ubuntu philosophy answers: I am because we are. Security, then, is mutual, not a perk.

Translating ethics into policy is less romantic than a founder’s letter, but experiments abound: portable benefits, just‑cause termination laws, sectoral bargaining, climate‑resilient public works that hire locally. Each grafts a thicker layer of certainty between citizens and lava.

Reorienting metrics also demands narrative rehab. The hero’s journey of individual hustle must share the stage with collective wins: the hospital that never sends surprise bills, the factory that zeroes layoffs yet posts steady profit, the neighborhood where blackout resilience comes from microgrids built by residents. These stories won’t trend unless we tell them—loudly, repeatedly, with the same zeal that VC Twitter hypes a new app.

Changing the metric won’t delete uncertainty—entropy still rules the cosmos—but it can widen the safety margin so a missed paycheck isn’t a life‑altering crater. Stability becomes a platform for real freedom: the freedom to experiment, dissent, rest, create, or simply exist without bargaining each breath against next month’s invoices.

Which brings us to the final argument: pulling the leash requires more than personal hacks—it demands collective insistence that certainty is a right, not a deluxe add‑on. So how do we make that insistence stick?

Writing Tomorrow in Ink

6:29 a.m. Tomorrow. The phone rests face‑down, silent. Your eyes stay closed until the alarm actually rings—no rent reminder, no contract cliffhanger, no URGENT subject line to triage before coffee. In this imagined future, the first decision of the day is whether to stretch or snooze, not whether the math still works. That single unremarkable moment—quiet brain, steady pulse—is what every section above has been arguing for.

Manufactured Precarity taught us the trapdoor was built on purpose. Psychology of Maybe revealed how our nervous systems bankroll the design. Hope as the Hook showed the jackpot lights that keep us playing. Micro‑Rituals unpacked the coping choreography we film for likes. The Lava Floor mapped the shrinking stones between paychecks and disasters. Selling Serenity exposed the cottage industry profiting from our frayed edges. And New Metrics of Security sketched the scaffolding that could hold us all.

Notice the pattern: every toxic loop begins upstream and flows downstream into our bathrooms, our budgets, our sleep cycles. Fixing it means paddling back to the source and rerouting the current—policy, practice, narrative—so that stability, not scarcity, is the default.

Certainty here isn’t clairvoyance; it’s infrastructure. Paid sick leave that doesn’t gamble on goodwill. Healthcare that survives a pink‑slip. Wages that meet rent without overtime karaoke. Regulations that treat housing and climate as public utilities, not portfolio line items. These aren’t utopian perks; they’re the solid floor that lets a society exhale long enough to invent, connect, and dream.

Philosophically, this is Kant’s categorical imperative in municipal budget form, Stoic equanimity scaled to city ordinance, Kierkegaard’s dizziness soothed by collective railings. Practically, it’s a legislative to‑do list: portable benefits, just‑cause termination, universal childcare, green infrastructure jobs, public broadband—each a brick that stays put when the algorithm updates.

Return to that tomorrow morning one more time: the coffee still costs a quarter per pod, but the choice is taste, not triage. Your partner scrolls a news feed for curiosity, not survival. The watch’s confetti feels like a goofy bonus, not a consolation prize. And when midnight arrives with headlines about AI learning a new trick, you meet the news with interest rather than dread—because your livelihood isn’t hanging by that single thread.

Life will always throw curveballs—entropy hasn’t filed for bankruptcy—but we can quit celebrating volatility as virtue. The revolt is collective, often incremental, occasionally loud. It looks like unions in warehouses, tenants’ councils at city hall, voters who check the fine print on “flexibility.” It sounds like friends refusing to brag about burnout and instead comparing insurance‑exchange notes. It feels like emailing your senator between Pomodoros because the timer beeped and civic duty is a rest break.

Maybe was the leash we never asked for. Certainty is the pen that lets us write tomorrow in ink.

…

Fuck it. Maybe you should just swipe through TikTok and stress about the future later. That’s what most people do.