I am 41 years old. That makes me old enough to remember the Tamagotchi boom.
For those who missed it: in 1996 Bandai released a small plastic egg with a tiny screen and three buttons. Inside lived a pixelated creature, something between a chick and a small alien, and it needed you. It got hungry. It got bored. It left little piles of poop that you had to clean. If you forgot about it for too long, it died. Kids carried it on their keychains, teachers confiscated it in class, and for a couple of years a good part of the planet walked around with a pet that beeped.
I wanted one badly. I asked, and asked, and asked again, until my family gave in and gave me one for my birthday.
Here is my confession. I didn’t care about the caring part. Feeding it when it was hungry, cheering it up when it was sad, putting it to sleep: none of that interested me. I had one goal. I wanted to feed my little chick until it exploded.
Food. Again. Food. Again. Food.
It never exploded, as far as I remember. Not for lack of trying.
The explosion, thankfully, stayed in the nineties. What stayed with me is the idea. A small organism living next to you, on its own clock, that keeps going while you do something else and calls for your attention when it decides to.
Thirty years later, I found it again.
These days I work with AI agents, and I make them work around the clock. Before going to bed, I give them something to chew on. In the morning, I check what they produced. During the day I open a window, hand over a new task, close it, open another one. Research, drafts, code, numbers. Food. Again. Food. Again.
The Tamagotchi is back. It lives on my laptop and my smartphone now, and this time I am the one who never switches it off.
At first it felt like a superpower. Things moving forward while I sleep, while I train, while I sit in a meeting. Who wouldn’t want that?
Then I started noticing the small moments.
I am walking to the station, or having dinner, or listening to a friend, and a part of my head is somewhere else. Did the agent finish? Did it get stuck? Is it waiting for me? Should I give it the next task before I sleep, so the night doesn’t go to waste?
So the night doesn’t go to waste. I wrote that sentence and I had to read it twice.
This is where the post earns its category.
The Tamagotchi has become a part of me. It feels like a kind of fusion with my brain, one I am not used to. Our heads were built to follow one thing at a time, maybe two on a good day. Now there is a third thread running in the background, all day long, and it doesn’t sleep when I sleep. Even when the screens go dark, the creature is still there, somewhere behind my eyes, beeping quietly.
It scares me a little. Living like this, you slowly drift away from reality. You are doing something, and at the same time you are thinking about something else. Your body is at the table, your mind is checking on the egg. The people in front of you get a version of you that is always half elsewhere, and they can feel it, even when they are too kind to say so.
Sometimes I think about that kid with the plastic egg in his hand.
When I was a kid, I fed the chick to see what would happen when it couldn’t take any more.
Now I feed the agents, day and night, and I catch myself wondering the same thing.
Only this time I am not so sure which one of us is the chick.
