What Are You Going to Do All Day?

Ask anybody what they are and they will tell you what they do. Try it at a party. You'll get an accountant, a nurse, a man who does something with logistics that he has given up explaining. Nobody says a human being, because it would be strange, and because the answer is currently free. The borders are clearly marked. You are not a fish, not a shrub, not a dog. You are the one holding the mortgage. Question closed, next.
Which means that the question of what a person actually is has been, for most of recorded history, a hobby. A specialist activity, like fencing, practised by people who were paid to practise it and who mostly did their best work in the years before anyone invented the meeting. The rest of us have been excused, because the answer was baked into the timetable. You get up, you go, you do the thing you can do, and the doing tells you who you are all the way down. It's a beautiful system. It has never once had to defend itself.
I want to picture the moment it stops working, and I want to do it in the boring way.