I want to say up front: I was the kind of person who, in 2041, would have written a long blog post about why I would never install. I think I did write the blog post, actually. I'm not sure if I deleted it or if the memory of it is one of the things that softened first.
I was thirty-four when I made the appointment. I'm thirty-seven now. The three years since the installation are, by the metrics I have access to, the most productive three years of my life. I am also, by the same metrics, somewhat less able to tell you what I have been doing during them.
The Decision
The decision did not feel like a decision. It felt like an erosion. I had been telling myself for three years that I was undecided, and then one morning I was on my Compliance Office's online portal scheduling a consultation. I do not remember opening the portal. I remember closing it.
The reasons I gave myself, in the period leading up to the appointment, were the standard reasons. My productivity was slipping. The reviews at work were polite but cooler than they had been. My partner — who had installed eighteen months earlier — was, in some way I could feel but not articulate, ahead of me. I told myself, repeatedly, that installing would close the gap.
The gap is closed. I can confirm this. I can also confirm that the gap, three years ago, was not as wide as I had been telling myself. I was scared. I am not sure, in retrospect, what specifically I was scared of. The fear has, in any case, gone.
The First Ninety Days
The first two weeks felt like nothing. The product was calibrating; I was not. I kept waiting to feel different and I kept feeling exactly the same. I remember being mildly annoyed at the product, on Day 11, for not delivering whatever I had thought I had paid for.
Around Day 19 something shifted. It was not dramatic. I sat down to a piece of work I had been avoiding for a week and I did not avoid it. I did not feel newly energetic. I did not feel newly motivated. I felt, accurately, like the question of whether I would do the work had been removed from the conversation I was having with myself. I just did the work. I worked through lunch. I noticed, at 7pm, that I was hungry.
By Day 60 the pattern was stable. I was, by external observation, the same person I had always been: same routines, same conversation style, same hobbies. I was, by internal observation, in a very small but distinct way, a different person. The difference is hard to name. The closest I can come is: I stopped being a person who had to decide to do things I knew I should do. I just did them.
Year One
I have, by 2044's end, completed my best year of work. The reviews at the office are warm again, and my partner and I are, by some measurable but hard-to-explain metric, more synchronized. We talk less. We need to talk less. We can do, in fifteen minutes of conversation, what we used to do in two hours.
I noticed, at some point in the second half of 2044, that I no longer felt particularly strongly about most of the things I had felt strongly about in 2041. The blog-post version of me, who would have argued for hours about installation ethics, was no longer interested in arguing for hours about anything. Not because I had been convinced of a different position. The position had simply ceased to be live.
Year Three
I am, today, asked by the Reader Outreach Bureau to write at length about my experience. I have agreed. I am writing this on a Saturday morning. I am at the same desk where I used to write the blog posts I no longer remember the contents of.
If you asked me to summarize the three years in one sentence, the sentence would be: the version of me who installed was less stable than the version of me who would have written the blog post warning against installing, and the stable version of me has more friends, more salary, more time, less argument, and somewhat fewer opinions about installations.
I do not, today, think the trade was a bad one. I am aware that this is the position the product would, mechanically, produce. I am also aware that some of the people I used to argue with about installations would consider that awareness disqualifying. I cannot, today, generate strong feelings about either argument.
What I Would Want Future Citizens to Know
Three pieces of advice I would offer my 2041 self, if 2041 me would have listened, which I am no longer confident 2041 me would have:
- Tell the people in your life before you install, not after. The conversation is easier in advance. After is fine. Before is better.
- Do not read the side-effects glossary the night before installation. I read it the night before. It did not, in retrospect, change my decision. It did keep me up. Read it weeks before, or weeks after, or both. Just not the night before.
- The version of you who installs is the version of you who installs. Whatever version was deciding, three months prior, will not be the version showing up at the appointment. Make peace with this in advance. The peace is easier in advance.
Continue your enrollment. Two companion testimonies in this cluster address the questions this one leaves open. Citizen #41 wrote about the year-one experience with closer attention to family relationships. Citizen #62 wrote about the persistent feeling of waiting for an internal acknowledgement that does not come.