The algorithm works in mysterious ways.
I spent almost a full year working in a documentary film about Finland, taking the trouble to create complicated stop-motion scenes to represent dreams, and hardly anyone watched it. I think not even the people who appear in the film watched it. Maybe it was too long and too boring. Too artsy-fartsy. I don’t know.
Then I published a quickly made video about my nostalgia for old technologies, and it had 3,000 views in a day. Weird.
But today I want to talk about something else. About love and friendship. About our relationships with others, and about how they are being affected by the strange world in which we live.
- (Note: You can also watch this in video version, above. Some people prefer it)
I think it was the pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer who said it, but it could have been somebody else. He said that people are like hedgehogs. If they get too far apart, they feel lonely, but if they get too close, they prickle each other with their thorns.
It’s true, but it’s also true that we cannot live without human connections. And while we may have thorns, we also learn to love each other despite them. We accommodate to each others’ thorns.
But the world were we live is against all kinds of human connections.
Forming a family has become increasingly hard for young men and young women. Birth rates are collapsing in most of the world.
Even friendships are becoming more difficult, sometimes for reasons no one can understand. It’s hard.
Weird programs of social engineering have been created to set people increasingly apart, or to make them suspicious of each other. In no other age as in the modern world have there been so many people living alone.
It’s not just families. All kinds of social relations are being affected. People are increasingly hesitant to engage with others.
In Bowling Alone, written 20 years ago, Robert Putnam talked about how people were reducing their social interactions with their fellow citizens. There were less and less people joining clubs, joining the church choir, playing sports, organizing charity events.
Now, it’s much worse. Connections are mostly virtual. Even dating has become a completely online phenomenon, and everybody hates it.
And increasingly they want us living alone in pods, or locked inside a virtual world.
Covid was the worst. They forced families to be apart, made nonsensical rules about social distancing, and in some countries they even forbade people to go out and socialize with friends if they didn’t have a vaccine pass.
Now the Covid operation has been forgotten, as if it had never existed, and while the extremism of the policies has passed, the bad feeling caused by them remains.
And they continue with other policies to separate people, maybe not as extreme, but no less insidious.
It’s hard to live like this. But we must fight against this order that wants to destroy not just the family but any form of human relationship. They want atomized consumers, not humans. And so, even if it’s hard, we must rebel.
We must form communities again. We must form families again. We must form churches and clubs again. Even if it has to be outside the system.
We must learn to love one another again.
And we must not feel anxious if things don’t always work.
It’s going to be a slow process.
Remember, there is a reason for everything, even if we don’t always know it.
