Nudging the charging cable into the port, I felt the familiar resistance of a cold plastic seal that didn’t quite want to give up its grip. It was . My knuckles were still stained with a faint gray grease from the toilet flange I’d been wrestling with since . There is a specific kind of silence that exists only in the early hours of a Tuesday, a silence that usually tastes like iron and stale coffee, but here, under the humming fluorescent lights of the charging station, it felt more like a physical weight.
I’m a recovery coach by trade. Robin J.-C., at your service, or at least at the service of the 24 souls currently on my roster who are trying to navigate the messy business of being human without their usual crutches. My life is built on the radical act of speaking the truth, of breaking the social scripts that tell us to pretend everything is fine when our basements are flooding-literally or metaphorically.
In that moment, we were a fellowship of two. We were the only 24-karat examples of this specific engineering choice within a 74-mile radius. We both knew the specific lag of the infotainment system on a cold morning. We both knew the exact sound the door locks make-a peculiar “thwip” that sounds more like a high-end camera shutter than a piece of heavy machinery. And yet, as the driver stepped out, we did the thing. We did the Great Niche Owner Dance.
The Great Niche Owner Dance
We gave each other a nod. Not a friendly, “Hey, how’s it going?” nod, but a curt, 4-degree tilt of the chin that said, *I see you have made the same unusual life choices as I have, and I will now grant you the privacy of your own regret or triumph.*
I wanted to ask him if he’d figured out how to stop the dash rattle. I wanted to see if his floor mats were the OEM version or if he’d found the ones everyone talks about on the forums that actually cover the dead pedal. I stayed silent. I leaned against my fender and looked at my phone, pretending to be very interested in a text about a leaky faucet, which was a lie, because the faucet was fine; it was the toilet tank that had betrayed me 84 minutes prior.
I hate this. I hate that we have created a world where owning a “rare” object makes us more isolated rather than more connected. In my line of work, we call this the “shame of the specialist.” We think that if we ask for help, or even for an opinion, we are admitting that our choice wasn’t perfect. If I ask that guy what he thinks of his tires, I am admitting that I have spent wondering if I should have bought different ones.
The gap between consumerist branding and the lived isolation of “rare” ownership.
There is a strange etiquette to this. If you drive a common sedan, no one expects you to have a bond with the stranger at the pump. But when you buy into a niche-whether it’s a boutique EV, a vintage typewriter, or a specific brand of Japanese denim-you are supposed to be part of a “community.” The marketing materials promise us a “tribe.” But the reality is a parking lot full of people who are terrified of looking like they don’t know what they’re doing.
Take that toilet at . I didn’t call a plumber. I didn’t even watch a video at first. I sat on the bathroom floor for just staring at the assembly, convinced that because I am a grown man who owns a home and a complex car, I should intuitively understand the fluid dynamics of a gravity-fed flush system. I was wrong. I ended up covered in tank water, holding a rubber gasket that looked like a squashed plum.
I eventually had to admit defeat and look up a diagram. The moment I did, the problem was solved in . Why do we treat our cars differently? Why is the man in the blue EV across from me currently staring at his charging screen with a frown that I recognize? He’s probably wondering why the speed just dropped from 84 kW to 34 kW. I know why. It’s because this station has a shared bus and I just hit the thermal limit. I could tell him. I could save him of frustration. But the script says I should mind my own business.
The Aesthetic of Ownership
We are so obsessed with the “aesthetic” of ownership that we’ve sacrificed the “utility” of community. We want to be the person who *has* the thing, not the person who *discusses* the thing. It’s a form of consumerist ego. If I talk to him, I’m just another guy with a car. If I stay silent and lean against my sleek, silent machine, I am a mysterious early adopter who clearly has it all figured out.
But my back hurts from the toilet fix. I’m tired of the mystery. I’m tired of being a recovery coach who tells people to open up while I’m standing here with a locked jaw.
I looked over at him. He was wearing a jacket that looked like it cost $444 and shoes that were far too clean for a charging station at this hour. He looked like the kind of guy who has a curated Instagram feed and a very expensive espresso machine. I felt a surge of judgment. *He probably doesn’t even know his car has a frunk,* I thought. That’s the other side of this weird etiquette: if we don’t talk, we fill the silence with assumptions. I assumed he was a poser. He probably assumed I was a mechanic who had stolen the car, given the state of my fingernails.
The Beta Tester Reality
We are the ones who have to figure out which leapmotor c10 accessories actually fit the interior and which ones are just cheap plastic junk.
The irony is that we are both looking for the same thing. We want the car to be an extension of a better version of ourselves. We want it to be reliable, smart, and a little bit different. And because we’ve bought into a brand that isn’t yet a household name, we are essentially beta testers for a new way of moving through the world. We are the ones who know which chargers in the city are actually 354 kW and which ones are just rebranded wall outlets.
I finally broke. I couldn’t help it. My addiction to transparency kicked in.
“Hey. Did your infotainment screen flicker when the temperature hit 4 degrees last week?”
– Robin J.-C.
He froze. He looked at me, then at his car, then back at me. For a second, I thought he was going to pretend he didn’t hear me. Then, his shoulders dropped about 4 inches.
“Every single morning,” he said. “I thought I was the only one. I’ve been resetting the system twice a day.”
“Don’t bother,” I replied, walking a few steps closer but staying the socially mandated 14 feet away. “It’s a voltage sag in the startup sequence. It clears up once the battery heater kicks in. Just give it 4 minutes before you put it in drive.”
A Fellowship of the Confused
The transformation was instant. The “mysterious owner” facade vanished, and in its place was a guy who was just as confused as I was. We spent the next talking about everything from tire pressure to the lack of rear-seat cupholders. He told me he’d found a specific cargo net that worked perfectly. I told him about the toilet. He laughed. It turns out he was an architect who had spent his 3:00 am trying to render a staircase that didn’t violate the laws of physics.
We are all just people trying to make our tools work for us.
This is the missed opportunity of the modern era. We have all these “connected” devices, but we are less connected than ever. We have forums with 4,444 members, but we can’t talk to the person standing right in front of us. We rely on data points and YouTube influencers to tell us how to live with our purchases, while the lived experience of our neighbor remains a closed book.
I realized that my reluctance to speak was just another form of the “guarding” I see in my clients. We guard our weaknesses because we think they make us less valuable. But in the world of niche ownership, our shared weaknesses are exactly what make the community valuable. If I don’t tell you about the dash rattle, you waste time thinking your car is a lemon. If you don’t tell me about the cargo net, I spend 54 dollars on one that doesn’t fit.
When my car finally hit 84 percent, I unplugged. The cable felt lighter this time, or maybe I was just less annoyed by it. My hands were still dirty, and my back still ached from the plumbing disaster, but the iron taste of the morning had faded.
“See you around,” the architect said. He didn’t give me the 4-degree nod. He gave me a wave. A real, human wave.
“Check the cabin filter,” I called out as I climbed into the driver’s seat. “It gets dusty after about .”
“Will do,” he shouted back.
I drove away feeling a bit more like a coach and a bit less like a consumer. We think that by buying things, we are expressing our identity. But our identity isn’t in the object; it’s in the way we share the experience of that object with others. The etiquette of silence is a lie we tell ourselves to maintain a sense of status that doesn’t actually exist.
The next time I see someone with the same car, or the same obscure book, or even the same look of total exhaustion at , I’m going to skip the nod. I’m going to ask a question. Because even if the answer is “I don’t know,” at least we’ll be not-knowing together. And in a world that’s increasingly fragmented into 14 different versions of reality, that little bit of shared confusion is probably the most authentic thing we have left.
I got home, walked past the now-functioning toilet, and went to bed. I didn’t dream about cars or plumbing. I dreamed about a world where the charging stations were full of people actually talking to each other, a noisy, messy, 64-decibel fellowship of the confused.
It was much better than the silence.
