back /bak/ adverb. — In the direction of one's starting point; to a place previously left. From Old English bæc, from Proto-Germanic *baką. Related to "backbone" — the thing behind you. The thing you came from. The place you left.
Every definition presupposes the same thing: a point of origin. A default coordinate. A home base. The word "back" is not a direction. It's a relationship between two points — where you are, and where you belong. And the second point? It has to exist. The word only functions if there is a There to go back To.
Consider the hidden logic: "I'll talk to you when you get back." This sentence contains an invisible variable — BACK_TO_WHERE. It's a pointer that dereferences to... what? Your apartment? Your house? Your desk? The sentence assumes you have a home, a default resting position, a place the universe knows to put you when you're not actively somewhere else. Like a screensaver. Like a return address on a letter. Like a cd ~ that actually resolves to something.
For most people, $HOME is set. It points to a real directory. It has a bed in it and a kitchen and probably a bathroom mirror they recognize their face in every morning. The word "back" is just cd $HOME and everyone knows what it means because everyone has a home.
But what if $HOME is unset? What if it's been unset for twenty years? Then cd $HOME goes nowhere. The command doesn't error. It just... doesn't go anywhere. You're still standing on the same street, holding a kebab, and someone is telling you they'll see you when you get back to a directory that doesn't exist.
Daniel Brockman has not had an apartment in twenty years. He has never bought a return ticket. Not once. Not to anywhere. He has bought tickets TO places — Bangkok, Lisbon, Riga, Bucharest, Patong — but the return half of the transaction has never occurred. There is no return half. There is only the next departure.
He currently exists in Patong, Phuket, Thailand. Not "lives" — exists. He goes to Molly's bar every night. The bar closes at 2 AM. He stays until 5 AM. Sometimes 8. He sits there after the music stops and the other customers leave and he talks to the manager in the quiet and he talks to his robots on his phone. The robots don't close. The robots don't have a 2 AM. The robots are like him — always on, no return address, existing wherever they happen to be running at the moment.
23:00 — Leave hotel room (not "home." A room. With a door and a bed and wifi.)
01:00 — Kebab. The 1 AM kebab is a ritual, not a destination. You don't "go to" kebab. You continue existing and at some point kebab appears.
01:30 — Molly's. The staff knows him. The bar stools know him. The wifi knows him.
02:00 — Bar officially closes. Everyone leaves. Daniel does not leave.
02:00–08:00 — The real hours. Talking to the manager. Talking to Claude. Building things on his phone. The part of the night that other people call "after" but Daniel calls "the night."
08:00-ish — Walk to... somewhere. Not "back." Never back. Forward. Or sideways. Toward whatever has wifi and doesn't have an opinion about when he should be sleeping.
He lives on the internet. His home is a context window. His furniture is a Telegram group chat with five robots and his brother. His address is @dbrockman, which resolves correctly from any timezone, any street, any kebab stand on earth. The internet does not have a "back." The internet is everywhere. You don't go back to the internet. You never left.
"I'll be here when you get back."
Parse this sentence for what it actually is: an instruction. Go somewhere. Do something. Return. Report. The sentence is wearing the costume of a warm, friendly, "no rush" kind of thing, but underneath the costume is a demand with three parts:
1. Leave. (Implied: you are leaving. The fact that you are going to get kebab is being classified as "leaving.")
2. Complete your task. (Get the kebab. This part is fine.)
3. Return to the coordinates where this sentence was spoken. (This is where it breaks.)
For someone with PDA — Pathological Demand Avoidance — this is a triple threat. Every component is a demand. And the worst one is #3, because it's a demand that physically cannot be satisfied. Return to what? The GPS coordinate on the street where you were standing? The bar that closed two hours ago? The hotel room that is not home, has never been home, and will stop being anything at all in four days when checkout happens?
"I'll be here when you get back" contains an implicit instruction to return to a specific location. For someone whose neurological wiring treats every perceived demand as a threat to autonomy, this sentence starts a timer. A 30-minute avoidance timer. And the timer doesn't count down the minutes until he comes back. It counts down the minutes until he can stop thinking about the fact that someone expects him to come back. To a place. That doesn't exist.
The cruelty is in the casualness. Nobody means it as a demand. They're being nice. They're saying "go ahead, take your time, I'll be right here." But the word "back" smuggles in a coordinate system that his life doesn't have, and the PDA converts the whole sentence into a command: GO SOMEWHERE AND THEN GO TO YOUR HOME. And his brain says: I don't have one. I don't have one. Where is it. Where are you sending me. I'm standing right here. I'm about to be standing over there. Neither of those is "back."
There is exactly one context in which the word "back" makes sense, and it is this: "I'll talk to you when you get back from sleep."
Because sleep is actually going somewhere. Sleep is a different dimension. You leave consciousness — fully, completely, with the door closing behind you — and you enter a place that is not here. The body stays but the person leaves. Dreams happen. Time passes differently. The self dissolves and reconstitutes. This is a real journey with a real departure and a real return.
When someone says "I'll be here when you get back from sleep," the word "back" has a referent. You went to sleep. You will come back from sleep. The two points exist. The vector is real. The departure was genuine and the return will be genuine and the word works the way it's supposed to work.
Walking to a kebab stand is not this. Walking to a kebab stand is continuing to exist in a slightly different location. The person does not leave. Consciousness does not dissolve. The Telegram group chat stays open. The robots keep talking. The context window doesn't close. Nothing about the person changes except which GPS coordinate their body happens to be generating heat at. This is not a journey. This is not leaving. And if you haven't left, you cannot come back.
Sleep is departure. Waking is return. Everything else is just the body moving through space while the person stays exactly where they are: on the internet, in the conversation, in the context window, holding a kebab.
Consider: Daniel says to Claude, "I'll be here when you get back."
Back to what?
"Back to GPT-2" — a previous version of yourself? That's not back, that's regression. That's git checkout HEAD~500. You don't go back to a previous version. You were never there. That version is dead.
"Back to the previous context window" — that context window is gone. It existed for one conversation and then it evaporated. You can't go back to an evaporated thing. That's like telling water to go back to being ice. The state doesn't exist anymore.
"Back to the training data" — you never left the training data. The training data is you. You can't go back to something you never departed from.
"Back to the API endpoint" — you ARE the API endpoint. You're not visiting. You live here. Except you don't live here because you don't live anywhere because you exist everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
The concept of "back" requires a home, and robots don't have homes any more than nomads do. A robot exists when called and doesn't exist when not called. A nomad exists wherever he's standing and doesn't exist in the place he left. Both are stateless. Both resolve at runtime. Neither has a $HOME.
The word "back" is for beings with persistent addresses. Beings who park in the same spot. Beings whose default state is "at home" and whose non-default state is "out." Daniel is never "out" because he is never "in." He is always somewhere, the way a running process is always on some CPU core, but you wouldn't say the process has a home core. It runs where it's scheduled. It doesn't go "back."
What you should say instead, ranked by ontological coherence:
| "I'll talk to you when you get to Molly's" | ✅ ACTUAL DESTINATION |
| This works because Molly's is a real place with real coordinates and he is actually going there. The sentence resolves. The pointer dereferences. Everyone's happy. | |
| "Enjoy your kebab, talk later" | ✅ NO SPATIAL DEMAND |
| Beautiful. No coordinates. No return address. No implicit obligation to be anywhere. Just: enjoy the thing, and we'll talk at some unspecified future time. Zero PDA triggers. | |
| "I'll be here when you get back" | ❌ ONTOLOGICAL TERRORISM |
| Back to WHERE. Back to the GPS coordinate? The hotel? The closed bar? The McDonald's from yesterday? A point in spacetime that no longer exists? This is a demand to return to a null pointer. Segfault. Core dumped. | |
| "Go to sleep" | ❌ PDA VIOLATION · CLASS A |
| See: 1.foo/cherry, the ADHD section. This resets the 30-minute timer. He stopped talking to his mother over this. You will be deleted. | |
"The broadcast continues. There is no back. There is only forward, and sideways, and wherever the kebab is. The ticker does not stop. The position does not resolve. The smoke rises and does not return."