Chapter 1. The Unexpected Passenger
“Excuse me, please — which way are you headed?”
Dressed in solemn but decades-out-of-fashion clothes, an old woman stood looking up into the eyes of a man pushing thirty. He waved his hand vaguely in a direction:
“That way. Where do you need to go?”
“Me? To the nearest metro station.”
The man bit his lip thoughtfully. The direction worked, but it was completely unclear whether the old woman would actually pay… People that age never have any money.
“If you’re worried I won’t be able to pay you, don’t be. I have money.”
That sounded fine.
“Okay. Get in. I’ll take you.”
The old woman settled into the front seat and they set off. Oleh was one of those rare taxi drivers who didn’t care for conversation or music. His car was always quiet, and not once had anyone complained that he’d bothered them with unwanted chatter. They were supposed to drive the whole route without exchanging a single word — but the old woman had other plans.
Chapter 2. The Trap of Progress
“I’m coming back from my children’s. Looked at them and at their lives. Looked around. And you know, I came away understanding even less than before about what’s going on. Everything’s so fast somehow, complicated. Loads of technology, words I don’t know. I can’t keep up. And I don’t want to keep up.”
Oleh sighed inwardly. His upbringing demanded that he respond somehow, but he had no desire to keep up this fairly stale conversation about somebody not keeping up with something. With an effort he produced a line meant to launch the kind of endless monologue from his passenger that he could professionally tune out for the rest of the ride:
“Well, we keep up with some things and not others. But do we really need to keep up with all of it?”
The old woman thought for a moment, then answered:
“With all of it, certainly not. That much I know for sure. The question is what to do when you’ve fallen out of what’s happening in the world and around you altogether. It’s a strange story, when humanity in its unstoppable development and forward motion does everything it can to make every individual person who took part in that motion useless and ineffective.
“Strange progress… Fifty years ago I was designing what was, at that time, a complex hydroelectric power station. It was an extraordinarily advanced and modern structure that drew on the best experience of the best people. And now I understand absolutely nothing about the phones my power station charges.
“So on one hand, I had a part in making it possible for those devices to be charged. And now I’m being told that I’m behind, that everything is in this phone I don’t understand… It works out that they couldn’t have managed without me — but at the same time, they managed perfectly well without me.”
Oleh thought about what she’d said. This wasn’t the usual story from old people he drove around. No. There was something familiar about it. But there was a thought in there that was somewhat unexpected for him. Every person, in developing this world, makes themselves irrelevant. And the better they manage it, the faster and the more thoroughly they become unnecessary in the future.
Chapter 3. A Duel of Arguments
Something needed to be said — but what? The information was new, and it needed thinking through.
The old woman, meanwhile, said nothing more. Maybe she’d sunk into her own thoughts. Maybe she was actually waiting for an answer from Oleh. For the first time in his entire taxi career, he felt awkward about the silence in the cabin. The thing that had always been his trademark was working against him now. Pulling himself together, he finally said:
“Well, you know, I think if you wanted to, you’d manage with the phone just fine. You’re clearly bright. You speak easily and well.”
The old woman looked at him intently. He had the unwitting feeling that he’d said something off, but he firmly dismissed it. He had simply spoken something obvious and inoffensive. Nothing more.
“Maybe. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter as much to me as it does to you.”
Now this was the kind of standard conversation Oleh was used to. And, indeed, it really was.
“I watch huge numbers of people live out their lives staring at phones, and I don’t understand it, since it isn’t leading them anywhere. All these TikToks and so on. It’s just burning time and nothing more. There you were, when I came up to you, sitting and mindlessly doing the same thing. Aren’t you ashamed?”
Oleh, irritated by this unexpected attack directly at him, snapped back:
“Well, you said it yourself — for you it’s something distant and incomprehensible.”
It came out wrong somehow. The old woman had opened up to him on her own and told him about her own weakness. And he’d taken advantage of it. That wasn’t just wrong, it was unprofessional. You weren’t supposed to argue with clients without serious cause. But it was already said, and there was nothing to be done about it. Besides, one way or another, Oleh hadn’t started this.
“You haven’t told me anything new. I really don’t understand and don’t want to understand all this high-tech stuff. The question here is something else. What do you and everyone else understand when you’re swiping through those funny short videos?
“Think about it. It’s just time going nowhere, and for nothing.”
Oleh decided not to back down, since he’d already started arguing.
“Well, people want to entertain themselves. They like it. They have the right to. Why not?”
“And I understand that too. The question is what we started from. They tell me I don’t understand the phone. But what about the fact that almost everyone who does understand it has limited their development purely to the level of entertainment. Yes, they need to know how to open the TikTok. They figured that out. And no further.
“It’s a device with extraordinary capabilities. I’ve seen that you can learn a foreign language in there or take all sorts of other courses that would give you new knowledge and new skills. You can plug yourself into a huge amount of interesting knowledge and become smarter every day. But the overwhelming majority just entertain themselves.
“Hence my question. When I’m told I don’t know how to properly tap something on the phone, am I being told I’m behind in development — or behind in entertainment, which doesn’t interest me? Haven’t you young people swapped out the concept of moving forward for the concept of variety in entertainment?”
Chapter 4. The Price of Convenience
Another unexpected question… And again it was somehow uncomfortable. What could he say? Of course, it would have been wonderful to open right now on his own gadget some app for studying, say, English, or to point to something educational in his list of watched videos. But Oleh couldn’t boast of that. And honestly, he didn’t even know anyone who could confidently defend the younger generation right now.
Young people lived in the certainty of how hopelessly behind everyone older than them had fallen, but suddenly, here and now, it was all coming out the other way around.
The best way out was to keep quiet. Oleh knew how to do this professionally — it was, after all, his trademark, the one that periodically earned him five-star ratings in the app. He glanced at what the navigation app on the phone was showing. More than fifteen minutes of driving still ahead. Well, he had to hold out somehow.
Navigation!!
“Well, it’s not just entertainment. There’s also work in the phone. Look, the app is showing us how to drive there. Or are you about to start reminiscing about how your contemporaries used to know the whole city by heart?”
A wonderful, unexpected argument in an ironic tone. Oleh was now very pleased with himself, because what he’d put forward couldn’t really be argued against. And every possible objection had been preemptively framed as inept, looking like uncertain attempts to cling to the old and the past.
The old woman, after thinking it over for half a minute, replied:
“Good argument. Strong and logical.
Oleh spread himself contentedly across his car seat.
“I just have one question. Look. My contemporary as a taxi driver had a paper map at best. And often not even that. So, as you ironically observed, he remembered the entire city down to the smallest detail. You, as his future colleague, don’t need that, because you have an app for it.
“So look. He knew that map. And he knew the city. That’s a fairly large amount of information that you no longer need to know. What did you fill the empty space in your head with, having abandoned memorizing the map — anything besides TikToks? Hasn’t it turned out that technical progress freed you from the need to load up your memory — and you used that freedom exclusively to know less, not more?
“How are you, as a professional taxi driver, better than your distant and not-so-technically-advanced colleague?”
Chapter 5. The Right to Be Obsolete
Oleh jerked his head nervously, already subconsciously regretting that he’d taken on this old woman with her uncomfortable questions. What was he supposed to say?
Finding an answer was extremely difficult. Of course, Oleh, like many others, planned to study a foreign language or do something else, something very useful. But the moment a phone fell into his hands, all his attention got eaten up by memes, funny videos, and the rest of it.
“You don’t have to answer me. Essentially I asked you that question so you could answer it for yourself. Honestly, and without distorting the facts.”
For some reason, those reassuring words enraged Oleh.
“Having this or that knowledge doesn’t mean anything! What kind of successes can we even talk about? What good is it that you keep something there in your head, if it doesn’t make your life better?”
“You know. You’re right.” — the man had expected anything but capitulation. — “We really can’t boast of a comfortable old age or anything of the kind. I have only one question: why did you redirect the question from you young people to us old ones? We’re already finished. But you should be demonstrating something completely different. During our conversation I understood one very important thing. We did everything right. That tells us we built a world that overtook us — and continues to move forward in its development. Which means every old person who has fallen behind progress should be proud that their generation did everything that needed doing, and even more. You need to understand that you, too, have to create and accomplish the same thing. No less. Because if the years go by and you’re still on top of everything and understanding it all, that will mean only one thing: you didn’t keep up, and you didn’t pull it off.”
“Kind of a sad fate. Don’t you think?”
The old woman sighed:
“Maybe. But it all depends on how you see it. Thank you for the ride. How much do I owe you?”
Oleh raised his eyes to her and answered:
“It was on my way.”
The old woman nodded gratefully in response and, getting out of the car, set off about her own business.
Meanwhile, hearing the sound of a notification, Oleh unlocked his phone and saw that his favorite meme channel had a new episode out.
Swiping the notification away, he immediately deleted the entertainment app, simultaneously installing another for studying a foreign language. He had a great many things to study and to accomplish in order to become irrelevant as quickly and as confidently as possible. Just like his entire generation.
— I write fiction on commission. If you have a story you want to see told, here’s how we can work together. More on writing and the craft of books — in the blog.
Vasyl Kovalchuk, 01.05.2026
