This is an essay about time, disguised as an answer to a Reddit question. Nesrine Malik takes the familiar observation — your Uber driver is on the phone again — and unpacks it into a clean, structural argument about what happens when two fundamentally different relationships to time and sociality sit in the same car. The mechanism she identifies is phatic communication: language used not for information transfer but for bonding. The long driver call isn't a conversation in the way a Western professional would recognize one. It's a simulation of proximity — a mother cooking in Khartoum, a son driving through South London, connected by VoIP and the shared understanding that long silences aren't awkward, they're the point. The call is the visit you can't make. Malik names the specific cultural texture: in Sudan, homes are drop-in destinations from 11am, the corner shop exists to handle the headcount swelling without notice, and introversion is a structural disadvantage. The sharpest move in the piece is the pivot from cultural observation to self-diagnosis. Malik catches herself becoming 'post-phone call' — defaulting to voice notes, scheduling callbacks that never happen, treating an unscheduled ring as an incursion. She names this honestly as assimilation into a capitalist theory of time where even rest is instrumentalized as recharging for more work. The immigrant phone call, by contrast, treats time as inherently social and refuses the premise that aimless conversation is waste. The essay also works as a quiet structural critique of digital sociality. Scrolling, meme-ing, and story-watching create the sensation of connection without its substance. Those in exile know they're lonely and act on it. Those at home may be lonelier but can't see it, anesthetized by the parasocial drip of feeds. A phone call, Malik argues, is honestly less time consuming and more replenishing than anything else we use our devices for. The reader responses appended — on searching for enslaved ancestors, on national storytelling and reparations — belong to a separate thread from the previous week's newsletter but reinforce the broader project of The Long Wave: diaspora experience as analytical lens, not identity decoration. What keeps this from being a great essay rather than a good one is that it doesn't push hard enough on its own best insight. The capitalism-and-time argument gets one paragraph when it deserves three. The piece correctly identifies that Western time-parceling is an economic artifact, not a natural condition, but doesn't follow through to the structural implications — what would change if workplaces, cities, or digital platforms were designed around social time rather than productive time? The observation is sharp; the follow-through is newsletter-length. Still, as a 1,500-word column in a weekly diaspora newsletter, this does exactly what it should: it takes something the reader has noticed and gives them a framework for understanding it that they'll carry forward. The next time you're in the back seat and the driver laughs into a long silence, you'll hear it differently.
