Though I call myself a writer, by day I’m a sales engineer. Last week I sat in a conference room while the keynote speaker, a C-Suite executive at one of the country’s largest poultry processing facilities, walked us through slide after slide of processing volume and how many families that volume fed. The tone was strangely upbeat for a presentation about an assembly line of death. The details about feather plucking and waste disposal were kept mercifully brief, but by the end I was still sitting with a quiet dread for the chickens.
Then the realization landed somewhere lower than my stomach. I am a chicken too.
There was one slide that stuck. Baskets of baby chicks, days old, getting misted with a liquid vaccine. Their instinct is to peck at each other, to clean the jelly off one another’s down, and in doing so they spread the vaccine further and make it more effective. The industry doesn’t fight the chickens’ nature, it just points that nature toward an outcome it wants. The chicks think they’re grooming each other. They’re actually being inoculated by their own affection.
I pulled out my notes app right there, mid keynote, to write down the thought before it slipped: what makes the poultry industry so different from the human industry?
At the most basic level, those chicks were born into a system that had already decided their life and their fate, without asking them and without their knowledge. Not to be dramatic, but that sounds a lot like corporate America to me.
The clear difference, of course, is that corporate America doesn’t send you to slaughter as part of the job. Though I suspect if someone figured out how to monetize that output, the line might move.
In corporate America, babies are born every day into a system already humming around them, a white collar conveyor belt that starts running before they can talk. The system has rough projections ready before they can walk, what they’ll likely earn, how that earning will curve over a few decades, where the ceiling sits. It’s not a contract anyone signs. It’s just the room they wake up in.
This system doesn’t operate in isolation either. It’s nested inside a wider one, the kind that white collar, blue collar, and unemployed alike are born into without a choice in the matter. That wider system runs on distraction the way the coop runs on feed, and social media is the feed, dispensed daily, consuming the hours we’d otherwise spend building an exit. It doesn’t fight our nature any more than the vaccine mist fights the chicks’ instinct to peck. It just points our craving for dopamine toward keeping us exactly where we are.
If you’ve followed the thread this far and felt that same lightbulb flicker on, you’ve probably landed on the next question. Okay, so what do I actually do about it?
I’m genuinely open to hearing other answers, but the only one I’ve found so far is smaller than I expected. Random side quests. Little deliberate detours from the feed.
If the system wants you scrolling, go outside instead. If it wants a phone call, a quick transaction of words that vanishes the second you hang up, write a letter instead, something that has to travel, that takes a few days to arrive, that someone has to hold in their hands. That instinct, actually, is the whole reason I started a vintage postcard club. A postcard is about the smallest act of friction you can introduce into a frictionless system, and it turns out small friction is where a life starts to feel like yours again.
Choosing the alternate route simply because it’s alternate, simply because it asks something of you that the easy path doesn’t, is a kind of engagement with your own life that most of us have quietly let atrophy.
So I keep coming back to the bigger question underneath all of it. What are the gamemakers actually designing us toward, in a future where groceries arrive before you’ve finished deciding you wanted them, where a car appears at the curb from a tap on a screen, where every want gets answered before it’s finished forming?
Maybe the real vaccine we need is for the convenience itself.
Until the next Strawberry Afternoon,
Tori