Prompt:
“Write about an everyday object in your home that seems like it’s secretly alive — not in a magical way, but in the way it behaves.”
Reflection:
My air purifier feels alive. It cycles through three colors: blue for clean air, purple for slightly dirty, and red for maximum purification.
If I light incense, it does exactly what you’d expect — it panics into purple, then red, and the fan kicks into gear to make the room sound like an ocean.
But one day it started reacting to movies.
A character like Melissa McCarthy would deliver a punchline. With no smoke in the room at all, the purifier would flip from calm blue to suspicious purple, as if it understood the joke better than I did.
Maybe there were invisible dust particles. Maybe the sensor is overly dramatic.
Either way, it feels like my devices get to know me over time. They respond, they mirror, they participate.
I notice these little synchronicities — and I take them as part of the charm of living alone with machines.
I write daily on my blog and publish one polished essay every Sunday on Substack. You can read or subscribe at deepak108.com.
MY DIGITAL HOME 