The day he started caring about what people like that thought about him was the day he ceased being a real person ... as they had long ago. He didn't need to spend his time trying to relive his youth or selling himself out for money to make himself important. The day they could show they had any actual societal worth, not just to themselves, was the day they could talk. They thought he was crazy, but they had made themselves insane in their own bubble, insulated from reality, oblivious to most things, but imagining themselves worldly because they'd gone places ... and shopped and cooed over expensive hotels and room service. The only thing that matters in life is real human connection built upon candor and honesty, and that was the first thing they’d given up. People like that didn't 'live' anything because they couldn't see farther than two inches in front of their own noses and spent their time sniffing their own farts. It was one, likely the only benefit he had from having grown up in Texas, i.e. independence from social stupidity, the knowledge that a cow patty isn't a fucking cookie.
They weren’t even aware that their little material world was collapsing around them because they’d put the dumbest, most corrupt mofos in existence in charge. The tv had told them to, so they did it. It was pathetic, really. How did he know any of this? Because, as she hadn’t known, he was no stranger to their world. She likely sat around listening to how Ai was going to save the world or revolutionize the industry, from some dumb dick whose frontal lobe barely functioned and was never really good at his job drooling over making money by not having to do it at all. And when the machines ate themselves, with any luck, all these jerkoffs would be fired and sued.
He had cared what she thought, and she was just as full of shit as they were. It made him sad, because they could have shared something neither of them had ever experienced, a convergence of worlds. It was a real waste, but she hadn’t deserved the opportunity, pining for those hotel rooms and shopping sprees. When that world collapsed, maybe she’d be sorry, when her stallions all ran and shit themselves, while it didn’t faze him at all because he knew it was coming. He would have been her rock, but she was the only cow patty that had ever fooled him.