I'm Pre-Shopping for My Robot Caretaker and It's Going Better Than Most of My Relationships

My shower drain clogged again. Not a partial clog where water pools around your ankles and you pretend it’s a spa experience. A full failure of the plumbing system, where standing water climbed to mid-shin while I stood there, deflated.

I stood in that water for ten whole minutes before I decided to do something about it. And by “do something” I mean I turned off the shower, wrapped myself in a towel, sat on my bed, and opened my phone. Because that is what adults do when confronted with plumbing issues in the year of our dysfunction. We don’t fix things. We scroll.

And that’s when the algorithm handed me the most important video I’ve watched in my entire life on this planet.

A robot. Tucking a person into bed.

Not a cartoon robot. Not some CGI from a movie where humanity has already collapsed. An actual, functioning, mechanical caretaker with working fingers and the posture of someone who went to finishing school, gently pulling a blanket up to a real person’s chin with the tenderness I have not received from another living creature since my mom visited and fluffed my couch pillows without being asked.

The caption read something like “If you don’t get married and don’t have kids, who will take care of you in your old age” and I swear my pulse slowed to a frequency that could only be described as peace.

THAT. That is who will take care of me. That beautiful titanium nurse with hydraulic joints and a complete inability to be passive aggressive about the dishes.

I watched the video a hundred times. I sent it to my friend who responded with “you’re going to marry a robot” which, rude, but also I hadn’t ruled it out yet. I sent it to my sister, who left me on read, which makes sense because she’s married and therefore has a retirement plan that involves another human who essentially agreed to deal with her in old age. Must be nice. Meanwhile I’m out here building my golden years around a machine that runs on batteries and firmware updates.

And you know what, I’m fine with it.

Because let me walk you through what my current “caretaker” situation looks like. I live alone. In an apartment building that was constructed during a period of American history when insulation was considered optional and walls were built to the structural integrity of a graham cracker. My most reliable companion is Leonard, a fake spider plant next to my window who has survived because he requires nothing from me, which is the foundation of all my best relationships.

Kevin, my car, takes me places, but Kevin’s capacity for emotional support plateaus at heated seats during winter. I love Kevin. Kevin cannot spoon-feed me soup when I’m eighty-four and my hands don’t work.

So when the internet served me a video of a robot doing the exact thing I’ve been too afraid to admit I’ll need someday, I did what any rational person with a survival instinct would do. I started researching how much these things will cost.

(The answer is too much. But also, have you seen the price of long-term care facilities? The robot is a bargain by comparison. The robot doesn’t charge you nine thousand dollars a month to eat lukewarm mashed potatoes in a room that smells like industrial cleaner and someone’s soiled diaper.)

I started drafting a savings plan. Not a real one with spreadsheets and projected returns, because I am not that person. More of a loose mental framework where I calculated that if I skipped one overpriced coffee per week for the next forty years, I’d have enough for one of the robot’s fingers. The left pinky, if I’m lucky.

But the savings plan isn’t the point. The point is that for the first time in my adult life, I felt genuinely calm about the future. Not because I’ve solved anything or because I have a partner or kids or a large 401k or any of the traditional safety nets that society keeps insisting are the only path to not dying alone and confused. But because somewhere, in a warehouse or a factory floor that smells like grease, someone is building the thing that will tuck me in when I can’t do it myself.

And that thing won’t get frustrated with me. It won’t sigh when I ask for water in the middle of the night. It won’t bring up that one time I forgot to pay the electric bill during an argument about something completely unrelated. It will just show up, every single time, with its titanium arms and its programmed-in patience, and do the job.

I’ve already named it in my head, by the way. The robot. I’m not telling you the name because I’m saving that for when I actually own one and introduce it on my Substack like a new pet, except this pet can administer medication and perform light physical therapy and fold a fitted sheet, which already makes it more capable than most adults I’ve dated.

The shower drain is still clogged. Leonard is thriving. Kevin needs an oil change. And somewhere in the distance, a robot is being assembled, one bolt at a time, destined for a small apartment where a woman and her spider plant are waiting.

We’re going to be fine.