I do not blame the person who made the spreadsheet.

I have thought about this hard, because it would be easier to have someone to be angry at, and there isn’t one, and the not-having is its own kind of grief.

The person who ran the numbers on Rural Route Four was not cruel.

They were probably decent, probably tired, probably doing their honest best with a budget that didn’t close and a mandate to find savings, and Route Four came up on their screen as a cost with too few stops per mile, and they did the reasonable thing, the defensible thing, the thing anyone in their chair would have done.

That is what makes it so hard.

It is not a story with a villain; it is a story about how the things we can measure slowly crowd out the things we can’t, until a whole society is optimizing itself toward a kind of efficient loneliness that no single person ever chose.