Confessions of a Delivery Driver
Comfort is king.
I’d rather pay an 8-dollar delivery fee than put on some pants and walk across the street to get my food.
Cooking? Not an option.
We’ve traded our health, our dignity, our connections to the outside world, all for the sake of a plastic-wrapped calorie bomb delivered to our door.
How did we become so completely incapable of the most basic acts of self-care?
I suppose it started innocently enough. A late-night craving, a rainy day…
Soon after we were in too deep, slaves to the algorithm, prisoners of our insatiable hunger for mediocre food.
Now we take a lukewarm, soggy burger and fries any day over the hassle of actual meal preparation.
Delivery drivers see some crazy stuff serving the digitally-dependent masses. The other day, I met a guy named Bill who had some wild stories about his experiences as a delivery driver. He told me one that stuck with me.
Apparently, Bill once pulled up to a house and found the door flung open by a person in their pajamas, covered head-to-toe in a blizzard of neon orange Cheeto dust. As if the Cheeto-coated customer wasn’t bizarre enough, Bill said the inside of the house was even more of a trainwreck. “There were pizza boxes and fast food wrappers everywhere, just an absolute disaster zone.”
To me, this sounded like the kind of surreal scene that would make most people do a double-take. But for Bill, a seasoned delivery veteran, it was all just business as usual.
He had front-row seats to the digitally-dependent, junk food-addicted movie theater for years, and he’s watched it getting more raw and dystopian over the past years.
Societal red flags, indeed.
The fact that Bill could rattle off such a vivid, almost mundane description of such an oddly dysfunctional scenario was almost more unsettling than the scene itself. It spoke volumes about the normalization of these behaviors, about the casual descent into a state of dehumanization.
It shows how far we’ve fallen. How comfortable we’ve become in our digital cocoons, numb to the subtle (and not-so-subtle) erosion of our basic life skills.
The least we could do is put on some pants before answering the door. Or, you know, maybe even cook a meal once in a while.
But hey, at least the food got here in 30 minutes.
Small victories, my friends. Small, depressing victories.
—
Rod
