The Scent of Entropy

The smell of citrus oil is sharp and cloying, sticking to my cuticles as I focus on keeping the spiral intact. I just peeled an orange in one piece, a thin, bumpy orange ribbon that feels like a minor, private victory against the entropy of a Tuesday afternoon. Across the partition, Sarah leans over, her voice a mix of genuine exhaustion and casual curiosity. She wants to know which meal kit service I use. My heart does a strange, uncomfortable stutter-step. I have two subscriptions. One is a high-end service with local ingredients that I actually cook from four nights a week. The other is a venture-capital-backed box of lukewarm carrots and questionable chicken that I keep solely because they give me a $29 credit for every person I recruit.

I open my mouth to tell her about the good one. Instead, I hear myself describing the lukewarm carrots. I mention the ease of the app. I highlight the ‘welcome discount.’ Within 49 seconds, I have texted her my referral link. As the notification on her phone pings, I feel a grease-slick of shame coating my words. I didn’t give her advice; I made a transaction. I just sold a piece of my social capital for less than the price of a fancy sticktail.

The Integrity of the Craft

I think of Yuki M.K., a woman I met in a small, cramped workshop in Osaka. Yuki is a fountain pen repair specialist. Her hands are permanently stained with shades of ‘Midnight Blue’ and ‘Oxblood.’ She spends 9 hours a day hunched over a microscope, realigning tines that are no thicker than a human hair. When I asked her which ink she recommended for an old Montblanc, she didn’t reach for the most expensive bottle or the one she had a distribution deal with. She pulled out a dusty, unlabeled glass jar.

‘This one,’ she said, ‘clogs the least, but the color is boring. If you want beauty, buy the other one, but be prepared to clean it every 9 days.’

There was a terrifying, beautiful clarity in her honesty. She wasn’t trying to optimize her revenue per interaction. She was protecting the integrity of the pen, and by extension, the integrity of her craft. In our world, the ‘clog’ is the referral fee. We are recommending things that we know will eventually fail the people we love, simply because there is a marginal gain for us in the short term.

The Micro-Grifter Epidemic

It’s not just the meal kits. It’s the banking apps that offer $19 for a sign-up. It’s the skincare routines. It’s the mattress companies that have turned the entire internet into a hall of mirrors where you can’t tell a genuine review from a paid affiliate. We are becoming a society of micro-grifters. The tragedy isn’t that we’re making money; it’s that we’re losing the ability to have a disinterested conversation.

I’ve realized that I’m more afraid of missing out on a $9 credit than I am of being a reliable source of information for my friends. That is a devastating realization. It suggests that my credibility has a market value that is shockingly low.

The Path Back to Human Exchange

This erosion of truth creates a constant, low-level background noise of skepticism. When Sarah asks me for a recommendation now, she’s likely wondering if I’m getting a kickback. And she should. I’ve trained her to think that way. We’ve all trained each other. We are creating a world where the only way to get the truth is to find someone who has absolutely nothing to gain from talking to you.

This is why we’ve seen a surge in people looking for smaller, tighter communities-places where the ‘game’ isn’t being played, or at least where the rules are transparent. People are tired of the hustle. They are looking for spaces like ggongnara where the interaction isn’t just a disguised transaction, and where sharing information feels like an actual human exchange again.

I spent 19 minutes last night looking at that orange peel on my desk. It was still in one piece, though it had started to curl and dry at the edges. It was honest. It was exactly what it appeared to be: the discarded skin of a fruit. It didn’t have a QR code on it. It wasn’t trying to convince me that other oranges were inferior. It just existed. I want my conversations to feel like that. I want to tell someone a book is bad even if I have an affiliate link for it. I want to admit that the software I use is buggy and frustrating, even if they’re offering me a ‘brand ambassador’ role.

We need to stop being ‘creators’ and ‘influencers’ and ‘brand partners’ for a moment and just be people who use things. We need to reclaim the right to be unimpressed. The next time someone asks me for a recommendation, I’m going to try something radical. I’m going to tell them the truth, even if it costs me my $29 credit. I might even tell them not to buy anything at all. The silence that follows might be uncomfortable, but at least it will be real.

I threw the orange peel away this morning. It felt heavy in the bin. 19 grams of wasted integrity, maybe. Or maybe just the start of a new way of speaking. I’m going to call Sarah. I’m going to tell her that the meal kit I recommended is actually pretty mediocre and that she should probably just go to the farmer’s market instead. I’ll lose the credit. I’ll probably lose the ‘status’ of being the guy who knows the ‘best deals.’ But I think, for the first time in 49 days, I’ll be able to look at my own reflection in the laptop screen without feeling like I’m looking at a stranger trying to sell me something.