Still Sealed
On the difference between finding and being found
I went to a grand opening this past weekend. Not the ribbon and balloon kind. The kind where a store that's been around since before I could tie my own shoes reopens somewhere new, and Denver shows up because they remember what the place used to mean to them.
It was for Wax Trax. The first location opened in the 1970s. It has outlived cassette decks, the CD, Napster, three different formats that were each supposed to be the last format anyone would ever need.
Near the front of the store was a crate of classic reissues. I ran my thumb along the spines until one stopped me. Licensed to Ill, thirty years old this year, still wrapped in plastic like it rolled off the truck this morning. A pencil-and-rust drawing of a plane wing on the cover. A sticker in the corner. Thirty-two dollars and change for something a phone could hand me in four seconds, for free.
I stood there longer than I meant to, thumb still moving over the plastic after I'd already seen what was under it. The album itself isn't worth much to me. What stopped me was the accident of it, finding something I hadn't gone looking for, and how fast that turned into nostalgia I hadn't planned on feeling.
You likely have a version of this too.
A bookstore that smelled like a specific kind of dust.
A diner that never bothered updating its menu.
A record store, a comic shop, a corner where the same guy has sold the same tamales for twenty years.
Someplace built on technology that stopped being cutting edge before you were born, and somehow it's still the place you'd take a friend visiting from out of town.
These places don’t die on schedule the way they’re supposed to.
Apps on our phones are built to remove the moment I had. The goal of streaming apps is to solve the hassle of the crate. No digging. No dead ends. It's built to know what I want as soon as I arrive. It studies what I played last Tuesday. It knows I'm somewhere in the top one percent of people who listened to Moonpools and Caterpillars last week. It runs the math and hands me the next thing before I've asked a single question. It feels like discovery, but really it’s confirmation wearing discovery's clothes.
A record bin can't do that. It has no idea what I want. Neither did I, if I'm honest. I didn't walk into that store thinking about the Beastie Boys. The crate just has what's there, and if I want to find something, it's on me to do the discovering.
We've spent years engineering the touching out of finding. Faster checkout. Fewer clicks. A feed that already knows. And somewhere in all that optimizing, we quietly agreed to stop being surprised by our own lives.
I'm not arguing for inefficiency as a personality trait. I'm asking a smaller question. When was the last time you found something you weren't already looking for? Not recommended. Not suggested based on your history. Found, the old way, with your hands, by accident, because you happened to be standing in the right aisle on a particular Saturday.
I wonder what we'd notice if we let more of our lives stay unsealed a little longer.
Shout out to Tomato Soup and Lady Denim for rock the halls of the Stanley Marketplace for this grand opening.
If these ideas resonate, they run deeper in my debut novel: THE ALGO
It’s set in a time just a few decisions from our own. It explores what happens when the hidden systems we’ve been examining here become the governing logic of an entire society. IndieReader called it “a wake-up call to humanity, impossible to put down.”
It’s available now.