For Only $19.99 a Month, You Can Watch Yourself Be Lonely in 4K
Or: My Dad Almost Died and All I Got Was This Lousy Epiphany…
Last week my mother called to inform me that my father was dying. She did not use those words exactly. What she used was a sound that I can only describe as what would happen if you combined a tornado siren with a woman who has watched too many seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and has finally been given a real medical emergency to work with. My mother spent her career in the medical field. She has seen things. None of that experience prevented her from delivering the news of my father’s heart attack with all the calm precision of someone whose hair is on fire.
So I borrowed a friend’s car and drove nearly 300 miles to my parents’ farmhouse in upstate New York, which if you have never driven across upstate New York, is basically Pennsylvania but with more aggressive opinions about snowplows. I drove those 300 miles believing, based on my mother’s telephone performance, that I was driving to a funeral. Or at least to a very serious deathbed situation where I would need to say meaningful things to a man I have never once in my life had a meaningful conversation with.
My father is not a talker. My father is a man who spent his entire career in oil, which is the kind of career that produces a very specific type of human being. The kind who believes that feelings are a manufacturing defect. The kind who can field dress a deer in nine minutes but has never once in his life said the words “I’m proud of you” without following them with “but you need to change your own oil.” We never saw eye to eye on anything. I was a tech nerd. He was a man who hunted things and then ate them. I built websites. He built fence. These are not overlapping skill sets.
But he was my dad. And my mom sounded like the world was ending. So I drove.
He Wasn’t Dying (My Mom Is Just Like That Now)
He was fine. I mean, not FINE fine. He had a heart attack, which is not fine. But he was sitting in his easy chair watching something on television that I think was either the news or a very boring action movie when I walked in. He looked at me the way he always looks at me, which is the way a mechanic looks at a car that keeps coming back with a noise he can’t identify. Mild irritation mixed with obligation.
“Your mother overreacted,” he said.
My mother, standing behind me, said nothing, which was somehow louder than the phone call.
Here is what I figured out in about forty-five minutes of being in that house. My father had a heart attack and was recovering. That was the medical situation and it was under control. The actual emergency, the one nobody called me about, the one that has no diagnosis code and no treatment protocol, was that my mother was losing her mind from loneliness. Not clinically. Not in the way that gets you a referral. In the quiet, American, nobody-talks-about-it way where a person just slowly stops being a person and starts being furniture that occasionally speaks.
Mr. Kitty vs Solipsism
My parents both retired a few years back. My dad handled retirement the way he handles everything, which is by sitting in a chair and not discussing it. My mother handled retirement the way a long-haul trucker handles the sudden discovery that the truck is gone and there is no road and nobody needs anything delivered ever again. She was a medical professional for decades. She had PURPOSE. She had PATIENTS. She had a reason to put on shoes before noon. Now she has a farmhouse and a husband who communicates primarily through grunts and the occasional declarative statement about the weather.
So she found a cat.
Not found. Adopted. Recruited. Kidnapped? I am not entirely sure which verb applies here but the result is that a small orange barn cat, the kind of feral little psychopath that lives in the outbuildings on what used to be my grandfather’s dairy farm, had somehow been promoted to the position of Emotional Support Animal, Surrogate Child, and Sole Reason For Getting Out Of Bed. His name is Mr. Kitty. I am not making this up. She named a barn cat Mr. Kitty like he was a senator.
I noticed it almost immediately. My mother was not just feeding this cat. She was FAWNING over this cat. She was talking to this cat in a voice that I have not heard her use on a human being since approximately 1987. She was narrating the cat’s behavior to anyone who would listen, which was me, because my father had returned to his chair and was grunting at the television.
“Look at him! He’s sitting on the porch! Oh, he likes the porch! He’s such a good boy!”
My father was sitting NOT FIVE FEET FROM HER. And I realized, with the kind of clarity that hits you like a bag of frozen peas to the face, that my mother was completely alone. In a house. With another human being. Who was alive and recovering from a heart attack and RIGHT THERE. And she was alone.
The cat was the only thing in her life that seemed to need her back.
The Cat Ransom of Route 12
A few days ago, Mr. Kitty disappeared.
If you have never seen a retired medical professional go into crisis mode over a missing barn cat, I want you to imagine a SWAT team commander who has lost her most valuable asset, except the asset weighs nine pounds and has orange fur and the entire command structure is one woman in a bathrobe.
My mother was BESIDE HERSELF. She was doing laps around the property. She was standing at the tree line calling for Mr. Kitty in a voice that probably confused several actual wild animals into thinking they had been domesticated. This went on for DAYS.
So I made flyers. Because that is what you do in America in 2026 when something is lost. You make flyers. With a photo and a phone number and a physical description as though the cat is wanted by the FBI. And I walked them around the neighborhood, which in upstate New York means I walked them to the seven houses within a two-mile radius because “neighborhood” is a generous term for what is essentially scattered evidence of human habitation among trees.
She was probably eighty-something, living in a little cottage at the edge of the treeline in the field next to my parents’ property. She had lured Mr. Kitty into her house with a can of tuna or some other substance that cats find completely impossible to resist (I believe the scientific community refers to this as “anything that smells like fish”). She had been keeping Mr. Kitty for days. Living with Mr. Kitty. TALKING to Mr. Kitty.
When I told her the cat belonged to my mother, she brought Mr. Kitty to the door and the look on her face when she said goodbye to that cat is something I am going to think about for a long time. She looked like a person watching the last lifeboat leave.
She wasn’t a cat thief. She was a lonely old woman in a cottage at the edge of a field who found a warm creature that purred when she touched it and for a few days she was not alone.
The Digital Divide Is a Moat and We’re All Drowning In It
I did not want to admit this to myself but I feel alone most of the time. I am a special variety of weirdo who genuinely enjoys solitude. I chose this life. I left a career managing money for a billionaire to write investigative journalism from various locations that can generously be described as “not luxurious.” I am fine being alone. I PREFER being alone most days. But there is a difference between choosing solitude and having isolation inflicted on you by a civilization that replaced all human interaction with apps.
When was the last time you talked to your neighbor? Not texted. Not waved from the driveway. Actually stood there and talked to another human being who lives near you. I had to walk flyers around a neighborhood to find a cat and it was the most human interaction some of those people had experienced in weeks. One guy talked to me for forty-five minutes about his lawn mower and I could tell he was not actually talking about his lawn mower. He was talking about the fact that someone was standing on his porch and listening to him.
We were told that technology was going to CONNECT us. That was the pitch. The whole pitch. The internet was going to be this great digital campfire where humanity gathered and shared knowledge and grew closer together. Social media was going to reconnect old friends and build new communities. Smartphones were going to put the entire world in our pockets.
Instead, my mother talks to a cat.
Instead, an eighty-year-old woman in a cottage has to KIDNAP a barn cat with a can of tuna because she has no one to talk to.
Instead, I drove 300 miles because a phone call is not the same as being there and everyone knows it.
A computer cannot hug you. A phone cannot look you in the eyes and tell you that it cares about you. A screen cannot sit with you in silence and make the silence feel like something other than emptiness. Technology promised to shrink the distance between us and instead it built a wall and put a camera on it.
For Only $19.99 a Month, You Can Watch Yourself Be Lonely in 4K
Here is where it gets genuinely insane. I spent an entire day walking around my parents’ neighborhood looking for a cat. An ENTIRE DAY. You know what could have found that cat in about eleven minutes? The surveillance apparatus that Silicon Valley is desperately trying to sell to every American household.
If my parents’ neighborhood had been outfitted with the appropriate smart cameras and microphones and AI-powered pet detection software (which exists, this is a real product, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP), I could have simply logged into an app and watched Mr. Kitty’s entire journey from my mother’s porch to the old lady’s can of tuna in high definition. I could have tracked his movements in real time. I could have received a push notification. “MR. KITTY HAS LEFT THE GEOFENCED AREA.” Problem solved. Cat found. No flyers. No walking. No talking to the guy about his lawn mower.
And all it would cost is the complete and permanent surrender of every shred of privacy for every person in that neighborhood, forever, to a company run by billionaires in California who think they are saving the world.
Peter Thiel named his company Palantir. That is a seeing stone from Lord of the Rings. A device that Tolkien specifically designed as a metaphor for the seductive and corrupting power of SATAN. Sauron used the Palantir to watch everyone. THAT is what Peter Thiel named his surveillance company. He just told you what he was doing. He put it in the name. He could not have been more explicit if he had called the company “We Watch You Incorporated” with a logo of a giant flaming eye.
Elon Musk wants to put chips in your brain and cameras on your car and satellites over your house. He wants everything recorded, everything tracked, everything fed into a machine that learns what you want before you want it. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is the man’s publicly stated business plan. He TELLS you this at press conferences. He is PROUD of it.
And the pitch is always the same. “It will make your life easier.” It will find your cat. It will monitor your father’s heart. It will remind your mother to take her pills. It will connect you to your family.
Except it won’t. Because connection is not data. Connection is not surveillance footage reviewed by an algorithm. Connection is driving 300 miles because your mom sounds scared. Connection is walking flyers around a neighborhood and finding out that the old lady in the cottage is lonely too. Connection is standing on a stranger’s porch and letting him talk about his lawn mower because you can tell he needs someone to listen.
If I have to be alone, and apparently we all do now, I sure as hell do not want some weird Silicon Valley billionaire who named his company after Satan’s spy equipment watching me do it. That is not connection. That is a product. And you are not the customer. You are the inventory.
We Are All the Old Lady With the Tuna Can
My mother found a cat because she needed something to love that would love her back without conditions or complications or decades of unresolved emotional distance. The old lady in the cottage kidnapped that cat for the exact same reason. My father sits in his chair because sitting in a chair is the only thing left that does not require him to be something he does not know how to be. And I drove 300 miles to be in a room with people I have a complicated relationship with because complicated is still better than nothing.
We are all alone. Together. In a country full of devices designed to keep us connected and a culture designed to keep us apart. In a nation where you can video chat with someone on the other side of the planet but you do not know the name of the person who lives next door. Where an eighty-year-old woman has to lure a barn cat into her house with canned fish because the alternative is silence.
I do not have a solution. I am a journalist, not a therapist. But I know this. After I found Mr. Kitty and brought him home, I walked back to the old lady’s cottage and told her my mom’s name and where she lived. Two days later, they had tea. Actual tea. In person. At a table. No screens. No apps. No algorithms. Just two lonely women and a cat that had somehow, through the irresistible power of canned tuna, done what a trillion dollars of technology has failed to do.
He connected them.
Mr. Kitty, you magnificent orange idiot. You did more for the loneliness epidemic than Mark Zuckerberg has done in twenty years and three hundred billion dollars. And all it cost was a can of Fancy Feast.
Grace and Peace.
Love this story! And the messages therein are true and needed. Thank you!!
I love the story and isn't it weird that I would never would have read it without my phone. That's the irony, isn't it? We are all connected right here because of technology. I'm communicating with people I've never met but feel close to in a weird kind of way. Your essay was moving. I loved reading it. Thank you for spending the time to write it, and then rewrite it, and then rewrite it until it shined.