I first suspected I was becoming obsolete when a man started a blood feud over a parking space without any divine intervention whatsoever.
To be clear, I have spent several thousand years cultivating professional expertise in conflict.
I am not an amateur.
I once contributed to a disagreement that resulted in the fall of a city, the deaths of heroes, approximately ten years of regrettable decision-making, and a number of literary works that people are still being made to read against their will.
That took effort.
There were gods involved. Prophecies. Political tensions. Multiple kingdoms with competing interests and centuries of accumulated grievances. At least one enchanted fruit, the provenance of which I prefer not to relitigate.
There was preparation. There was strategy. There was a level of divine coordination that, frankly, deserved more credit than it received.
The parking space incident required none of these things.
No enchanted fruit.
No prophecy.
No gods.
Just two neighbors, one disputed rectangle of asphalt, and the specific kind of quiet fury that only forms between people who have been politely tolerating each other for years and have finally found a reason to stop.
Neither was entirely wrong about the parking space, which — as every experienced practitioner of discord knows — is precisely where the best conflicts begin.
The ones where everyone is partially right are the ones that never end.
I settled in to watch.
Purely for academic reasons.
Within forty-eight hours:
- Three households had chosen sides, one of them apparently at random.
- Someone had created a community poll, which immediately attracted people who had no stake in the matter but very strong opinions regardless.
- A local council member had received seventeen emails, none of which were about parking.
- An elderly woman named Carol had been accused of being “part of the problem.”
- Nobody could clearly articulate what the problem was, which did not slow the articulation of it.
By the end of the week, the dispute had acquired a name.
This is always a bad sign.
Humans love naming things. It gives their mistakes a sense of legitimacy. Named problems feel like problems worth having. Named conflicts feel like causes rather than embarrassments. Once something has a name, people are significantly more reluctant to admit it was avoidable.
The Parking Matter, as it came to be known, eventually developed its own social media page.
At that point I began taking notes.
The conflict spread in ways that would have impressed several minor war gods and at least one mid-tier goddess of rumor who owes me a favor and will remain nameless.
Long-standing grievances resurfaced. Old resentments emerged from storage. Ancient wounds, apparently untreated, were rediscovered with the specific enthusiasm people reserve for things they have been waiting to rediscover.
Questions were raised.
Why had the Hendersons never contributed to the neighborhood cleanup day? Any of the neighborhood cleanup days?
Who approved the mailbox design in 2018 and why had nobody been held accountable?
Why did Carol own so many garden gnomes?
Were the gnomes significant?
Nobody could prove the gnomes were significant.
This did not stop the gnome discussion from lasting four days.
The parking space, by this point, had been entirely forgotten.
As it often is.
Conflicts rarely remain about the thing that started them. They begin as specific complaints and become containers. People fill them with everything they were already carrying — every unaddressed frustration, every quietly swallowed slight, every moment they chose civility over honesty and resented themselves for it afterward.
The parking space was never really about the parking space.
It was about twelve years of proximity without consent.
I found this professionally interesting and personally unsettling in ways I was not prepared to examine at the time.
The truly unsettling part came several days later.
I had done absolutely nothing.
No whispers. No nudges. No strategic revelations. No carefully placed opportunities for misunderstanding. No enchanted fruit of any kind.
Nothing.
The mortals had achieved all of this entirely independently.
I found the experience deeply concerning.
Historically speaking, situations like this fell within my area of expertise.
I am, after all, a professional.
Imagine discovering that complete amateurs are performing your life’s work with greater speed, enthusiasm, and scalability than you ever managed, at no cost, with no training, apparently for recreation.
It is difficult not to take that personally.
It is also, professionally speaking, embarrassing.
I raised the matter during dinner.
This was a mistake, but it was a mistake I made deliberately, which I maintain is different.
Athena requested evidence before forming an opinion, which is the most Athena response possible and which I had prepared for.
I presented the timeline. The community page. The gnome discourse. Seventeen emails to a council member who had, by all accounts, done nothing.
Athena reviewed it. Then she said the conflict appeared to have followed standard escalation patterns and asked what specifically I found remarkable about it.
I explained that I found it remarkable because I hadn’t done any of it.
There was a pause.
“You’re concerned,” Athena said, “because they did it without you.”
I said that was not how I would characterize it.
“That is how I would characterize it,” she said.
Hermes, who had been reading something on his phone throughout this exchange, looked up and asked whether the community page was still active.
I told him it was.
He asked for the link.
I declined to provide it on the grounds that this was not the point.
He found it anyway.
Within several minutes he was reading aloud selected posts with the specific delight of someone who had discovered a new hobby and intended to pursue it extensively.
Ares, to his credit, appeared to be listening to my concerns.
Then he asked for updates on the Hendersons.
I told him there were no updates on the Hendersons. The Hendersons were not the point.
“Sounds like the Hendersons are part of the problem,” he said.
I left the table.
Mother, who had said nothing throughout the entire conversation, caught my eye as I departed.
She looked the way she always looks.
Ancient. Amused. Entirely unsurprised.
I considered asking her what she found so funny.
I did not ask.
Some questions are doors I have learned not to open.
I will note that I have not, as of this writing, seen a comment section.
I have been told about comment sections.
Several people have attempted to explain comment sections to me.
I remain in a period of preparation.
The findings will be presented in a future dispatch.
At present, I require additional time.
And possibly wine.
For now: a preliminary assessment.
Humanity appears to have industrialized discord. Systematized it. Made it scalable, portable, and available at no cost to anyone with a grievance and a device, which is to say everyone, always, without exception.
The implications are significant.
I intend to find out exactly what happened.
Whether I have been rendered obsolete, or whether the species has simply become so efficient at creating problems that they no longer notice the help.
Either way, I would like to know.
I have always found it important to understand the competition.
