created 2025-06-10, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Survey of Being Lost Difficult Devices
I was outside and two people approached me, saying that they were my neighbors down the street and that they had lost their cat. An airtag on the cat indicated that it was on the prowl, stalking through our property.
After I assessed that it wasn’t a scam, I got really invested in finding these people’s cat. I searched through bushes and something leapt out at me – simply a rabbit.
This is a fragment, so I will be brief, but what I realized once again was that this complication was forcing an interaction where I wouldn’t have already had it, and we were all learning from it.
I had lived next to these people for many years at this point, and never once spoken to them before. I’m not saying that I would enjoy speaking with them. It’s just in this chaos we collided, spoke and looked for a lost cat.
Do people do this? Pretend to lose things so they can talk to people? People can buy dogs for company and icebreaking with others, this is sure.
While we were trying to find the cat, I imagined this thought I had so often when this occurs. That a cat loss would occur en-mass, like I owned a cat and it was instantly put into a crowd of 500 nearly identical other cats. Could I find her?
I thought of this with myself too. If I were cloned, resulting in two of me, then four etc – who would you love? My multiplication, the excess, would paradoxically be my social death.
I bet I could find people I like so much, that I say “why don’t you lose your cat another day, so we can hang out and find it?”