Preferred Position

Les and Janet live in the future everyone was promised. No jobs, no want, no struggle. Machines handle everything, leaving humans free to pursue... what, exactly? Les finds himself standing at his window at 3am, watching nothing, feeling the weight of a life so comfortable it has become invisible. This is the nightmare hiding inside the 1950s utopian dream: a world where every desire is fulfilled before it forms, and the soul starves quietly. Dryfoos builds toward an existential reckoning with the precision of a man who understood that abundance without purpose is just a more elegant form of despair. The prose is lean, the observations razor-sharp. Les and Janet's attempt to find meaning in a world that has eliminated the need for meaning feels startlingly contemporary, a premonition of our own age of infinite entertainment and deepening disconnection. It endures because it asks the question every automated society eventually faces: what are we for, when nothing requires us? Read this if you've ever felt the hollow ache of getting exactly what you wanted and finding it empty.