I began Ken Liu’s The Perfect Match because its premise resembled a story I had been carrying around for years. Tbh I didn’t think it was written particularly well. Not bad, actually good, but not great. I’ve read much better writing and put it aside after two minutes.
But I was mostly driven by curiosity on how Ken would approach this topic.
And then, before I knew it, I found myself fully sucked in.
Now the story is a bit too simple, the characters a bit too obvious, and yet—I couldn’t put it down.
I was sitting in a coffee shop that I happened to just come across, and there was a lady walking that was a joy to look at. Usually this would easily have provided some pleasant distraction for a few moments. The kind of woman that is naturally beautiful without putting much thought and effort into it, just feels good about herself and comfortable with her body. Probably does yoga or Pilates, but more as a practice than as a tool of beauty. Wearing comfortable but tasteful and stylish clothing. Moving with graceful ease, a classically beautiful face and intelligent eyes. And, as I would later find out, she smoked. Not that I like that, but it just added perfectly to the impression she made on me of just being a real one, and for that reason, I did like it.
Now all this my mind conjured up in a fleeting one and a half seconds that I looked at her while she was ordering her coffee, and then another three seconds when she sat down opposite of me on the next table when I could study her face, and then again later for two seconds when she stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray on my table with a fleeting smile.
A total of six and a half seconds, I’m pretty sure of that time log. Now as you can tell, while the distraction didn’t last long, it did create a very vivid impression and now that I wrote about the situation in which I was reading that short story, just when I was about to make the point that I was so absorbed in the story that even a woman like that wasn’t able to distract me—which is very atypical, cause I’m easily distracted by beautiful women in my vicinity—it finally managed to distract me from writing about the point that she didn’t distract me.
Be that as it may: the story struck a chord in me that resonated with what I wrote about yesterday. We’re giving so much of our attention to whatever the algorithm puts in front of us, and the more we do, the more it becomes a reinforcing loop, the better attuned it becomes to our preferences, the more we get hooked on what the algorithm feeds us, and the more we lose ourselves, the more we dilute the essence of what makes us us.
All of this really is to say only one thing: read The Perfect Match by Ken Liu.