Life 404: Success Not Found

"Name?""Freza.""Age?""Twenty-two."The interviewer, a man with a shirt that was too tight and a haircut that was far too neat, squinted. He looked at the file in front of him, then stared at Freza."Twenty-two?""More or less, sir.""It says here you graduated in 2021. If it’s 2024 now and you’re twenty-two, that means you graduated college at nineteen?""I was in an accelerated program. Since I was a fetus," Freza answered flatly.The man tapped his pen against the desk. It sounded like the ticking of a wall clock counting down the remaining seconds of Freza's life."The requirement for this Junior Breathing Officer position is ten years of experience. You're only twenty-two. How does that make sense?""I’ve been breathing since birth, sir. Without stopping. Even while I sleep, I remain consistent in my breathing. I believe that’s a level of dedication rarely seen in other applicants."A moment of silence. Freza could feel that the air conditioning in the room was no longer cold,

"I need a healing, Sat. My soul is like a motorcycle tire forced to climb the hills to Puncak during the Eid holiday. It’s thin, hot, and just waiting for the moment to explode."Freza leaned his head against the wall of his boarding house, where the peeling paint formed a map of an unknown continent. In front of him, Satya—his brother-in-arms from his old "Breath" office who, for some reason, still visited often—was busy scraping the leftover seasoning from an instant noodle wrapper."Explode because of what now? You're unemployed, Fre. What’s making you burnout? Too much sleep?" Satya asked without looking up."You don't understand. Being unemployed in this era of constant 'achievement content' is an extraordinary mental feat. I have to watch people flex their five-figure salaries, show off vacations to Switzerland, and brag about marrying the children of conglomerates. It’s emotionally exhausting! I work hard just to restrain myself from smashing my phone every time I open Instagra

The world is a stage, and Freza had just realized that his role wasn't as the leading actor, but as a prop meant to be laughed at.After a crushing defeat from AIda—the black box that was more polite and logical than he was—Freza walked along a Jakarta sidewalk whose surface was wavier than his own emotion graph. The afternoon sun seemed to be auditioning for the role of hell, and Freza was the sweatiest contestant. In his hand, he held a plastic cup of coffee filled with completely melted ice, the last remnants of luxury from the spare change he had found in the pocket of an old jacket."Life is like buffering a 4K video with an E signal," Freza muttered to himself. "Lots of stops, lots of emotions, and no clear end in sight."Right in front of a minimarket where the door chimed every time someone entered, fate decided to play around. There was a banana peel—cliché, yes, but the universe sometimes likes using classic comedy to destroy one's dignity—lying arrogantly on a tile that was

Sunday for an unemployed person like Freza wasn’t a day of rest, but rather a day where existential pressure reached its peak. While others were busy posting aesthetic brunch photos or jogging at the Car Free Day with sneakers that cost as much as a monthly motorcycle payment, Freza usually just lay sprawled on his bed, staring at water stains on the ceiling that looked more and more like a warning letter from the bank every day.That morning, Freza’s stomach growled with a very demanding tone. After rummaging through the pockets of a pair of jeans that hadn't been washed in two weeks, he found a crumpled ten-thousand rupiah bill that was so shriveled it almost resembled a fossil. With that meager capital, he dragged his feet toward the chicken porridge vendor at the end of the alley.There, he sat on a slightly tilted plastic stool. In front of him, a middle-aged man was stirring his porridge with immense enthusiasm, mixing the soybeans, celery, crackers, and yellow broth into a sing

Freza’s brain felt like an old PC in a suburban internet cafe that hadn't been cleaned in ten years; full of digital dust, thousands of accidentally opened tabs, and shortcut viruses that made everything look like a shortcut to insanity.After the embarrassing incident of falling in love with a utility pole because of an AR filter, Freza reached a radical conclusion usually only made by the bored rich or environmental activists living in trees: technology is the enemy of civilization. He felt the dopamine in his brain was scorched, burned away by endless scrolling on TikTok and petty arguments about chicken porridge on Twitter."I have to stop, Sat. I need to return to the true nature of humans as biological beings, not algorithmic creatures," Freza said solemnly, as if he had just received a revelation from a burning bush.Satya, who was preoccupied watching a video of someone popping pimples in macro resolution on his phone, merely grunted, "Hm, your true nature is lying around doin