A father is collecting scraps, pulling a cart, where his daughter is asleep.
“If you strip it down, he’s basically the prime mover in a very inefficient system—high rolling resistance, bad load balance, no mechanical advantage. The energy cost per meter is huge, and the cart adds instability without contributing anything functionally. From a systems perspective, it’s a design that guarantees fatigue and failure.”
His wife, her mother, left them long ago. They've got no shelter to go home to.
“What you’re seeing isn’t an exception, it’s a predictable output of the urban system. When housing supply, zoning, and safety nets don’t intersect, households fall out of the formal grid entirely. Unsheltered families are not a moral anomaly; they’re a planning externality.”
He just doesn't care anymore about anything else.
“That level of detachment suggests affective shutdown rather than emotional processing. After prolonged exposure to uncontrollable stressors, motivation collapses into narrow, instrumental routines. Caring stops being adaptive once the cognitive system concludes outcomes are invariant.”
His daughter is having a lethal sickness. She has months to live.
“A lethal pediatric diagnosis with prognosis of months usually means the disease has crossed the threshold where curative treatment is no longer viable. At that point, medicine shifts from intervention to trajectory management and symptom control. The timeline is probabilistic, but the clinical direction is already fixed.”
He's working just to get enough money to bury his daughter later.
“He’s allocating labor toward a known, unavoidable future expense rather than consumption or investment. That’s not choice in the classical sense; it’s constraint-dominated behavior under extreme poverty. The labor produces zero long-term economic return, only cost coverage.”
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