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It was browsing through the Associated Press 100 Photos of 2024 that clinched it in my mind. It was the theme that seemed to emerge, despite the outliers that threatened to skew it, and it was the fact that the theme was a hard one to admit:
There’s a lot of suffering, and truth told, sometimes it feels like more suffering than anything else.
I’m aware of this fact, it’s the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, that Life Is Suffering, and I’ve covered it here before, I’m sure I’ll cover it again, so perhaps admitting that thought when browsing the photos that the AP chose as most directly representative of the year we’ve just come through wasn’t as hard as it might be for others. I saw photographs of the surviving members of families breaking their religious fasts amidst the rubble and destruction of what once was their house. Before bombs fell.
I saw photographs of mothers holding their own children, the color drained from their faces once their souls fled their bodies in search of somewhere new, somewhere safe, finally. I saw floods and fires and tornadoes and ships that smashed into bridges we’ve built. I saw tears and Trump and death being consumed by families of crows, I saw bullets and missiles and starvation and poverty and I saw war, and it hurt my heart.
But.
I saw celebration, too. I saw kisses and goals scored, I saw revelry and joy. I saw good sportsmanship from those too young to have even been taught it, I saw helpers and rope jumpers, midwives making miracles on boats in the middle of muddy rivers. I saw celebration.
That’s when it hit me, I think, hit me hardest, this little nugget of truth I am going to drop because I don’t know what else to do with it:
We’ve automated our thoughtfulness.
In a million ways we have, we’ve replaced Happy Birthday phone calls with AI created “auto-greetings” so generously provided by Meta and the greedy overlords that train them. We’re bare minimum, and often.
I remember a time the phone would ring all throughout a day on your birthday, I remember going through the awkward and obligatory motions of thanking each caller, genuinely, for taking the time to do so. I remember hand-written cards popping up in your snail-mailbox for a few days leading up to your birthday, for a few days after for those that missed the mark and sent just a bit too late. Now, the only birthday cards that come to our house are from the insurance company on their State Farm by way of Hallmark licensed and branded cards, or from Edward Jones with something similar.
Amazon gift wraps now too, handy, sure, but isn’t there something charming about a shittily wrapped gift with old newspaper or brown paper that looks like it was unfolded from wherever “saved” Christmas tissue and wrapping paper was folded and then refolded and unfolded again? Isn’t there something simple and lovely about hearing a voice, or seeing a face on FaceTime even for 2 minutes to celebrate the day of someone’s birth?
Have we gotten so busy, have we forgotten so swiftly, the lesson that those 100 AP photographs reminded me of so powerfully? That we’re all we’ve got, and in a world, in a life that skews so often towards sorrow and suffering, we really really need to lean into that?
We’ve learned, the hard way over the years my beautiful wife and I, that we’re those who hate the minimum. We are maximalists with our care, and I don’t say this in any way to toot our own horns or inflate our own sense of worth, I say it more accurately as an almost cautionary tale for those who might be the same…it hurts living this way. It really does.
Every year this automated thoughtfulness becomes easier and easier, a quicksand we don’t even notice but slowly sink into. Maybe this is the Swamps of Sadness that the Neverending Story promised us, the idea that we’re Atreyu trying to pull Artax out of that sadness and that sadness is actually apathy, and that apathy is a choking thing. Every year we convince ourselves we’re too busy, and only getting busier, that every hobby needs to be a hustle, and that there just isn’t time, is there, there’s never time.
Up pops Zuckerberg and his AI created birthday responses, up comes another chance at another e-Card, and we take it. We take it because we think we have to, and we tell ourselves we’ll call later on, when we’re not Right in the middle of it, when we just have a moment to breathe. 10:43pm comes, we panic as we brush our teeth as those we meant to call will be asleep now, and so we send an apology text to their phones on Do Not Disturb Mode. “The Shit hit the fan,” we fib, and know they’ll understand.
This Signal Fire is a case against that automated thoughtfulness. This Sunday Edition is me, asking you, to step back, to look at the state of things around this planet that’s truly struggling in unprecedented ways, and understand that it’s the connections we have made with the people we care for that unite us. That those connections are like roots, and roots need water, and our water is our thoughtfulness. We cannot trust this job to Meta or Amazon or ChatGPT or some billionaire and their creation. This is our job, this is our privilege, and it’s necessary in so many vital ways.
We are what we’ve got, we are the hands holding the hands, the fingers tight around the rope that is slipped around the neck of our beautiful white magic horse as it slips into the Swamps of Sadness and apathy. We must succeed where Atreyu failed, we must.
It starts with doing more than the minimum and it grows from there, it starts with refusing to believe that “just enough” is even close to enough at all. It’s simple, too, it’s a phone call on a birthday, it’s a hand-written thank you note when someone does something kind. It’s showing up, it’s giving away, it’s leaning in, instead of finding a way to shrink into the background until someone else takes the task on.
I’m done with the minimum. I’m done with skating by. I’ve always loved this way, and I’m not going to ever let the reciprocation dictate my output. I know it’s gonna hurt, I know that more often than not my phone will be mostly quiet on my own birthday, that the mailbox might only have State Farm and Edward Jones to look forward to, but dammit, I don’t care. This is how we love, this is how we want to love.
Go look at the photos, look at what we’ve been through, what we’re going through still. Tell me the “very least” is even close to enough.
Tell me.
More than minimum,
more than doing just enough.
We must begin here.
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