A day in the life of a neurotic Gen Z Jew - The Jewish Chronicle

7:45am. I wake up to the gentle, plucky sound of a digitised harpsichord and the sudden glow of blue light in a dark and sleep-warm room. I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to this particular harpsichord melody, so I might as well wake up to cymbals crashing; it takes at least three minutes for my heart rate to return to normal. And then I check my phone, sending it right back up again.

8:49am. On the bus to work, I scroll through various headlines in various news apps and feel my stomach churn, but not from the usual Jewish gut problems (although this is a factor). Masked immigration agents in unmarked vans are still grabbing people off the streets in my hometown of Chicago, and the president is tearing down half the White House to build a ballroom funded by tech billionaires. A TikTok explainer video suggests the ballroom is a cover for an underground bunker where the president and his tech billionaire friends will hide out from the AI apocalypse they helped create – or maybe from a nuclear attack. Do people seriously think there’s going to be a nuclear attack? Or has my algorithm delivered me to the paranoid side of TikTok, the world of well-argued conspiracy theories? Maybe those Y2K nutjobs with fully stocked fallout bunkers will get the last laugh after all. The next video TikTok feeds me is of a teenage boy holding an orange Nerf gun, dancing to a Pitbull song underneath the words: “Me when I get drafted for WW3 but they let me keep my AirPods on lol”.

It isn’t even 9am yet, and I’m looking up whether my Jewish gut problems will exempt me from conscription.

10am. I put a pin in my WW3 contingency plan to work on an article about a light-hearted Jewish TV show, allowing myself a few moments of singularly focused delight. Jews are so creative! If there’s one thing we’ve gotten right as a people, it’s cinematic entertainment. This, surely, we can all agree on, and I relish that thought – of everyone agreeing on something simple – for as long as I can. Note to self: don’t read what people are saying about the Jewish TV show on X.

11:43am. I pick up my phone to answer a DM on TikTok, and when I next look at the clock, two hours have gone by. What the hell? I consult ChatGPT about why a chunk of my day just went missing and, when it instructs me to talk to a doctor, I go to my good friend WebMD. I become briefly convinced that I have a rare neurological disease, which would definitively resolve the conscription issue.

2pm. I eat a cold sandwich from Pret, lamenting the cost like a miserly old crone. For the seventh time this week I remember that I’ll probably never be able to afford a house in my lifetime given the rate of inflation versus wage growth, which might not even matter in a few years if we’re all enslaved to a malevolent AI overlord or collateral damage in a third world war.

When I check Instagram to distract from my nihilistic train of thought, I scroll past a clip of a ruddy-cheeked woman kneading dough on a marble countertop, a photo of a sobbing Gazan child atop a heap of rubble, and a whirlpool of sponsored content that suggests I am in need of every kind of health product imaginable, including a pineapple-flavoured gummy that promises to boost my libido.

4pm. Deep in my pixelated subconscious, the roof of the office is suddenly wrenched off by a giant animatronic Shrek. Electrical wires snap in a shower of sparks as the fluorescent-lit ceiling gives way, obscenely, to the vast grey sky, and rain lashes onto our heads and our keyboards and falls in fat rivulets down our glowing computer screens. Reality disintegrates into a matrix of micropixels; on X, a popular meme account is livestreaming aerial drone footage of the animatronic Shrek standing outside my roofless office building and, for a fraction of a second, the camera finds me: dripping wet at my desk, face pointed downward at a rain-blurred phone screen, where I am watching myself watching myself watching myself.

5:30pm. With a gasp of horror, I blink awake from my maladaptive stupor. Just in time! My colleagues are wringing out their coats and heading home.

7pm. I eat dinner on the couch whilst watching reruns of The Simpsons, a childhood favourite. My heart rate slows as Homer engages in his predictable antics within his unchanging animated universe, where everything always ends up back in its rightful place.

11:30pm. A lady named Jessica narrates my journey into slumber. Her Spotify-produced sleep hypnosis monologues instruct me to do things my body forgets to do on its own: relax into the pillow, unclench the jaw, breathe. Jessica, you wizard. She tells me I’m going deeper into restfulness, and I oblige. Maybe an AI overlord wouldn’t be all bad, I think, and then, mercifully, Jessica puts me to sleep.

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