I now understood why my old Home Depot coworkers looked the way they did: bored, tired, zombie-eyed. My life, like theirs, was so uniform, so one-dimensional, so unadventurous. I spent forty hours of my week doing things that didn’t teach me anything new, that provided no variety, that tested no creative faculties. As a burger flipper, I was a specialist, a cog, an insect, hardly the human being that Jack in Wiseman was. My journal was mostly blank. I wrote only about how I had nothing to write about. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt any emotion in its extreme. How can you feel
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