We Don’t Need People Anymore.

January 2026

Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927. Oil on canvas.

I got eye surgery last week. Back when I first scheduled this procedure in September, I called my mom to give her the update. She immediately blocked off her calendar, bought plane tickets to arrive in San Francisco the day before my surgery, and started a list of things to bring me. Sunglasses. Face masks. Daikon. And other Asian ingredients.

A previous me would have objected to these efforts, as I did when I first started my eye saga. Last March, I was endowed with an amoebic eye infection that gave me a bloodshot eye paired with stinging tears and hourly orbital headaches. My mom offered to fly to San Francisco to take care of me, but I told her I was okay. I was on work leave. I spent most of my day napping on the couch and waking up to drop liquids into my eye at an hourly interval.

DoorDash planted noodle soup on my doorstep exactly at dinner time. Instacart replaced my Tylenol bottle when it was gone. Uber came to my door to get me to my doctor’s appointments. ChatGPT translated all my doctor’s medical notes and drew charts, scheduling my medications. Chat was even there to console me when I woke up in pain at 3am. As was the ice pack I got from my Weee! delivery. My pharmacy was a 10 minute walk from my house—a great side quest for me to get fresh air. Heck, if I ever needed to go to the ER, I could walk a block to the 7 bus and be there in 4 stops.

What was my mom to do? Take time off work, her two precious weeks of PTO, which she’d already planned for vacation, just to watch me sleep and splash amoeba killer into my eye every hour? And to spend hundreds of dollars on plane tickets or eight hours with her butt asleep at the wheel. I wouldn’t be appreciating the great independence that technology has given me. I was meant to be a benefiter of the “democratized” resources at a click of a button, anytime, anywhere. A target user of the fully personalized, on-demand medical support friend. I have been empowered with control over my own recovery! I can fulfill the promise of giving people more productivity, of giving people more of their lives back.

I’m being facetious.

I wish I had asked my mom to stay with me.

The day before my scheduled surgery, my mom had just landed at the SF airport when I got a phone call from the surgery coordinator. She said that my authorization for one of the surgery medications hadn’t been approved and that it would need to come in the next 8 hours or else my surgery would be rescheduled. I called my insurance and was told that urgent cases were addressed in 24 hours, so I decided I would just call the coordinator back after lunch and see if the approval status had changed.

I watched from my window for my mom’s arrival. Then she appeared. Her iconic maroon puffer and pink scarf holding a big suitcase. I hauled her bags into my room, and gave her a hug. She immediately unzipped the suitcase and started pulling out her sliced beef, ground pork, bamboo shoots, dried mushrooms, dumplings my dad made, all wrapped in ice packs. She took control of my kitchen to make us lunch. I casually told her about my medicine authorization hiccup, and she put down her ladle and looked at me, “Jane, you should go call your insurance and tell them to speed up the approval.”

The thought of calling insurance had passed my mind, but I had decided to ignore it, having learned that begging insurance for help is often futile. But in my mom’s presence, I started calling. Each customer support representative told me the authorization status was pending and to call back. Meanwhile, my mom watched me make the phone calls and kept whispering that I should ask to get redirected to the people that reviewed the authorizations. At some point, I found my way to a person that offered to write me an email to the authorization team.

We went to bed that day and the authorization status still hadn’t been updated. I felt a bit defeated. That my mom came all the way to SF and took the day off, only for my surgery to be canceled. Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed for her to come.

8am the next day, my mom was outside my door, calling my phone. I rolled out of bed to open the door for her. She had brought back my favorite fresh baked bread. I let her in and immediately started dialing insurance to check my authorization status. While I was on hold, I logged into my insurance portal. The approval had come through.

I don’t know if it was the insistent calling and asking for redirection. But I’m glad I put in that effort. Effort, I wouldn’t have known had my mom not been sitting next to me, encouraging me to be Karen during those insurance calls.

We went to the outpatient surgical center at noon, two hours before my scheduled surgery. I was envious of my mom who got to eat the bread, while I was left to fast. I asked her to let me sniff the bread, hoping to just feel some sense of food, but instead she stopped eating and hid the bread as to not make my suffering worse.

An hour passed and a nurse came by to take us into a pre-surgery room where I sported the iconic open-backed gown. The nurse poked at my veins and inserted a mildly painful IV into my arm. Then my mom and I chatted about life.

2pm passes. 3pm passes. 3:30pm passes.

The anesthesia came in. My mom asked if I need to have an anesthetic. They said I wouldn’t be going fully under, but they would give me something to help me feel relaxed, to not move during the procedure. Then they said I had to wait in the hospital for two hours after my procedure, to make sure my eye was okay and that the sedation wore off well.

After hearing that, I declined the anesthetic. I was so hungry, so tired that I didn’t feel I needed anything to lay still. The nurse then rolled me into the OR. I saw big overhead lights and, funnily, pop music playing in the background. As I predicted, I was barely phased. I just laid there, rather limp while a man stuck needles into my eye.

The procedure ended half an hour later. I never asked to be sedated. And because of that, I left the hospital only half an hour after my procedure finished. My mom was sitting in the OR waiting room. She handed me a sandwich with avocado, her sliced beef, and the fresh bread she had acquired that morning.

When we got home, I dashed into my pantry and started eating crackers. The stale Keebler butter crackers that I had bought two months ago. I shoved maybe six of them down when my brain announced that I needed to sit. I scurried off to my room and laid starfish up on my bed as the plastic shield taped to my eye was not to be touched.

A while later, my mom came into my room, and I followed her back to the kitchen. She had cooked a soup with beans and bamboo shoots. The soup that I had texted her a week earlier saying I was craving. After dinner, I got up to clean my eye and took the shield off. I walked back to my room and my mom helped me tape the shield back on my eye. While I was in the bathroom, she had cleaned my room and made my bed.

She told me to rest, and I laid on my bed again, opening a book to read. I looked over at her and watched her work beside me. The feeling of soup in my belly and clean sheets over my body was nice. But more than anything, I felt happy just seeing her next to me. The feeling of her hoping for me to recover, watching and waiting to help me, made me feel loved. It made me feel happy to need someone.

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If you made it this far, thank you for reading my January monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my mom!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1. I considered titling this: “Chat, am I okay?”. I think this title is hilarious, but I didn’t, because I wanted to explore why we still need to ask people for help even with new technological tools. I talked to two of my friends Tyler and Jacob about this phenomenon where our parents have probably helped people move more than 100 times in their lives, yet in America today, we seem so reliant and happily independent with technology, we’d rather just schedule movers on an app. It may be because we feel fear of being a burden and now have the option to help ourselves (that is how I feel) or it could be a feeling of not wanting to seem weak.

2. I feel that I have a global and local personality. A personality that I become when I converse with the world and a personality that I become when I converse with my family and friends. The former is loud, confident, enthusiastic, and fighting. The latter is soft, caring, gentle, and kind.

3. If you are someone that identifies with your work, you allow yourself to immerse in all the people, the emotions, and side effects of your career. Like how celebrities deal with the side effects of being famous. I admire the people who choose to work on serious, heavy subjects like Anderson Cooper, who runs a recurring podcast called All There Is where he talks to people about grief and their experience losing people. He mentions being stopped by strangers in the airport who want to share with him the people they have lost in their lives. To live life surrounded by other people’s grief, to carry the pressure of being comforting and patient with strangers over something so taboo and intimate—that must be heartbreaking and exhausting, yet gratifying and important in this world.

4. I am reading Stephen King’s On Writing (shoutout to my friend Leona for loaning me the book) and one thing that I love that he said was to get into the habit of reading in sips rather than gulps. I started filling in the couple minutes in line with a book, rather than a scroll.