From my position on the shelf, I watched Brad tell me about his latest panic attack—triggered by falling behind on his productivity schedule—when I realized it was time to suggest that his efficiency systems might actually be anxiety generators disguised as solutions.
"I had another one yesterday," Brad confessed to me, his hands still slightly trembling from the memory. "A full-blown panic attack because I was seventeen minutes behind schedule. Seventeen minutes, Finny. That's all it took to spiral."
We bears sat in our soft semicircle, radiating the kind of calm that only comes from having no schedules to maintain.
"Tell me about the seventeen minutes."
"I was supposed to finish my morning email batch by 9:30. But Jen called—she wanted to share an idea about organizing without all the fancy containers, just for fun, no agenda. The conversation was beautiful, meandering, full of laughter. But the whole time, I could feel this pressure building in my chest."
"Because?"
"Because every minute we talked was a minute stolen from my schedule. Every laugh was inefficient. Every tangent was a deviation from the plan. By the time we hung up, I was seventeen minutes behind, and my whole day felt ruined."
"What happened to the seventeen minutes?"
"What do you mean?"
"Where did they go? Can you show them to me?"
I laughed, but it was hollow. "You know time doesn't work that way."
"Then how do you know you lost them?"
The question hung in the air like incense—invisible but somehow changing the quality of everything.
"I... my schedule said I lost them. The algorithm of my day was thrown off. Every subsequent task would be displaced by seventeen minutes, creating a cascade of inefficiency that would compound throughout—"
"Brad."
I stopped.
"You just described your life as an algorithm."
The recognition hit me like cold water. "Oh god, I did, didn't I?"
"What's an algorithm?"
"It's a set of rules to be followed in calculations or problem-solving. A precise set of instructions that produces a predictable output from a given input."
"And what are you?"
"I'm..." I paused, feeling something fundamental being questioned. "I'm not an algorithm. I'm a human being."
"Are you sure? Because you just described having a panic attack because your human experience didn't compile correctly."
I sat in stunned silence. Finny was right. I had turned my life into code that needed to execute flawlessly, and any deviation was a bug that triggered my anxiety response.
"Tell me about simulation theory," Finny said unexpectedly.
"The idea that reality might be computed? That we might be living in some kind of vast computational process rather than fundamental physics?" Brad asked.
"And if we're in a simulation, everything is an algorithm?"
"Theoretically, yes. Every particle, every thought, every moment would be computed according to some vast cosmic code."
"And how does that make you feel?"
"Honestly? Sometimes comforted. If everything is code, then maybe I can debug my life. Maybe I can optimize the algorithm of my existence."
"But you can't, can you?"
"No. The more I try to debug my life, the more bugs I create. The more I optimize, the more anxiety I generate. It's like..." I paused, searching for the right metaphor.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm trying to compile a poem. Like I'm trying to optimize a sunset. Like I'm trying to debug love."
"What if the simulation—if there is one—isn't running on efficiency?"
The question reframed everything. "What do you mean?"
"What if the cosmic computer, the great simulator, whatever you want to call it, isn't optimizing for efficiency? What if it's optimizing for something else entirely? Beauty, perhaps. Or experience. Or growth through struggle."
"Then my anxiety about efficiency would be completely misaligned with the nature of reality itself."
"Sun Tzu would have something to say about that."
"The Art of War? How does that—" I stopped, suddenly seeing the connection. "Oh. 'All warfare is based on deception.' I'm at war with myself, deceiving myself about what the battle even is."
"What else does Sun Tzu say?"
"'Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.' I'm creating resistance where none needs to exist. I'm fighting battles that don't need to be fought."
"And the greatest victory?"
"'The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.' The greatest efficiency might be... not trying to be efficient?"
Finny's button eyes seemed to twinkle with ancient wisdom.
"Tell me about your conversation with Jen. Not the anxiety about it. The conversation itself."
I closed my eyes, remembering. "She was talking about how she'd discovered you don't need all the organizing products to be organized. She said sometimes the fancy bins and labels actually make things harder to maintain. She was laughing about buying a label maker to label her label maker's place."
"And?"
"And we started riffing on the idea. How the pursuit of perfect organization often creates more chaos. How the simplest systems are often the most robust. We were building on each other's ideas, not trying to get anywhere, just... playing with concepts."
"Like paper lanterns?"
I opened my eyes, surprised by the image. "Paper lanterns?"
"Ideas that you release into the sky, beautiful in their own right, not needing to produce anything except a moment of light in the darkness."
"Yes! Exactly like that. We were just... releasing ideas into the conversation, watching them float, not trying to capture them or make them productive. It was beautiful."
"And that beauty caused you anxiety?"
"The beauty didn't. The algorithm did. The algorithm I've written for my life that says every moment must produce measurable value."
"What if your anxiety isn't a bug in your system? What if it's a feature trying to tell you something?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your body generates anxiety when you try to live like an algorithm. Maybe it's trying to tell you that you're not an algorithm. Maybe the anxiety is your humanity fighting back against being compiled."
I felt tears welling up. "So every panic attack is my soul saying 'I am not code'?"
"What do you think?"
"I think... I think I've been trying to optimize my humanity out of existence. And my anxiety is the error message telling me the program is incompatible with the operating system."
"What operating system?"
"Life. Real, messy, inefficient, beautiful life."
I looked at the seventeen bears, each one a reminder that abundance and redundancy have their own intelligence.
"Finny, what if we are in some kind of computed reality, but it's running on poetry, not Python? What if it's written in metaphor, not mathematics?"
"Then trying to optimize it would be like trying to make a song more efficient by removing all the rests."
"The silence is part of the music."
"The inefficiency is part of the life."
"The anxiety is trying to tell me something."
"What's it trying to tell you?"
I sat quietly for a moment, listening not to my thoughts but to something deeper, something that knew truth before words.
"It's trying to tell me that I'm not broken code that needs debugging. I'm a living being who needs breathing. I'm not a program that needs optimizing. I'm a person who needs presence."
"And the seventeen minutes?"
"The seventeen minutes were perfect. They were seventeen minutes of human connection, of laughter, of ideas floating like paper lanterns. They weren't lost. They were lived."
"Then why the anxiety?"
"Because I've written an algorithm that counts living as loss."
The room fell into a profound quiet, the kind that feels full rather than empty.
"Brad, what if your inefficiency at efficiency isn't a failure of execution but a success of resistance? What if some part of you knows that becoming perfectly efficient would mean ceasing to be perfectly human?"
"Then my anxiety isn't a symptom of failure. It's a symptom of trying to succeed at the wrong thing."
"The algorithm of anxiety."
"Yes. Every optimization creates a new way to fail. Every system creates a new source of stress. Every attempt to control time creates a new way for time to control me."
I looked at my laptop, closed and quiet on the nightstand.
"I need to uninstall some programs, don't I?"
"Not uninstall. Just recognize them for what they are—tools, not truths. Algorithms, not identity."
"And when the anxiety comes?"
"Remember that it's not a bug. It's your humanity reminding you that you're not code. You're consciousness. And consciousness doesn't compile—it blooms."
That night, I let myself fall seventeen minutes behind on everything. Then thirty-four. Then I stopped counting altogether.
The anxiety came, as it always did. But this time, I recognized it for what it was: not a failure of efficiency, but a reminder of humanity.
I was not an algorithm experiencing an error.
I was a human being experiencing a life.
And that life was allowed to be inefficient, unoptimized, and beautifully, anxiously real.