The Gift

The first time I saw what taking looked like, I was still in school.

We were driven out past the edges of town to a place where the road ended in dust. The bus door opened and the smell of diesel and scorched metal hit us first, then the sound—an endless mechanical roar that seemed to come from the earth's own throat. The teacher called it an open-cut mine.

I remember standing at the fence, the wind pushing grit against my skin, looking down into a hole so vast it distorted scale. Trucks the size of houses crawled along switchback roads that glimmered like scars.

I didn't have the language then for extraction, only the sense that something irreversible was happening. The earth had been peeled back like a bandage and there was no skin left to heal.

Years later I would think of that pit whenever I opened my phone.

The landscape had changed; the principle had not. The scars were no longer visible—they hummed quietly inside the circuits we carried in our pockets. The same appetite that had once torn mountains apart now mined our attention. The feed, the scroll, the endless invitation to compare and consume: these were just new shafts bored into the psyche.

I've watched people I love disappear into that hum. I've seen young women measure their worth in likes until the comparison eats through them. Entire industries built on insecurity, on the steady erosion of self-esteem. The addiction economics are the same as gambling: a loop of anticipation, reward, withdrawal, and return.

The resource this time is not ore or oil; it's human attention. The mine never closes, and the company town lives inside your head.

The pattern was everywhere once I learned to recognize it.