You’ve Reached Level 7 in a Game You Never Agreed to Play
The phone vibrated against the table with a sound like a trapped insect. I didn’t have to look. I knew the specific buzz, the one engineered to be just urgent enough to command attention but not so alarming as to signal actual catastrophe. On the screen, a shower of digital confetti, purple and gold, rained down over a cartoon coffee bean wearing a tiny crown.
Level 14
‘Congratulations! You are now a Level 14 Coffee Aficionado!’
I stared at the animation, my own coffee growing cold beside my laptop. There was no surge of pride. No flicker of accomplishment. Just a profound, hollow echo in the center of my chest. A silent, internal ‘so what?’ that felt heavier than it should. My reward for this loyalty was a 4% discount on my next purchase of a large cold brew. My thumb hovered over the ‘Claim Reward’ button before swiping the entire notification into digital oblivion. The silence that followed felt louder than the buzz.
The Brutal Contrast
Then, a second notification slid down from the top of the screen. An email. The subject line was just ‘Re: Project Final Draft’. The body was one sentence from my colleague. “Hey, looks like you forgot the attachment.”
And there it was. The perfect, brutal contrast. A meaningless, manufactured achievement for buying coffee, immediately followed by a small, completely real failure in something that actually mattered. My brain, it
