In this together
The years before we were born seem antiquated and old-fashioned. I can prove this by people posting things on Marketplace from the 90s and calling them vintage. Other evidence: in spite of the 70s ending only 5 months before I was born, that decade has always seemed impossibly distant to me in culture and time: vintage. The clothes seemed funny, the attitudes strange, the music from some other planet, the worldview lightyears in the distance. Yet everyone else who had been on earth before me knew good and well that those things had only just occurred. Those years were a part of everyone else’s frame around reality. However, without having been there myself, they always belonged to someone else.
Of course it’s the same way for those who are younger than you. As the elder in the room, though, you realize how truly close those times are, even if they seem so distant and strange to, say, your niece or your little cousin or your younger sibling. Or your child. There’s no way to tell them that they aren’t understanding time correctly or to fully deliver the past to their lived experience.
If just moments ago the world had been purple—the whole world, all parts of it—everything was some shade of purple. And then suddenly, instantly, exactly at the moment you were born, a rainbow of new colors appeared. Of course all you would ever know would be a colorful world. But everyone else would have always known the purple world. You could see pictures. Videos even. But nothing could give you the years of living in the purple world as a reference to what reality can sometimes be like. We are deeply defined by the present state of things—the things we experience firsthand, and the way we experience them, in spite of this secret being true: people in other timelines know other truths and realities that are just as real. This became quite suddenly clear to me when none of my students had experienced 9/11. It wasn’t in any way possible or perhaps necessary for me to implant that morning into their filter of reality. It was a shock to me that they didn’t share the collective experience of that moment. My parents and teachers had the same experience with me as a child, just with different major events. But it’s not just time that forms these gaps. A similar experience can happen when you make a friend who grew up in a different culture from your own, though there’s a different slant on how the variations are perceived compared to time differences.
All of this has been on my mind recently because we’ve had the good fortune of spending time with friends who are not Phone People. (Phone People are the ones who are on their phones all the time.) Our luck has been we’ve gotten to be with people who look us in the eye. They experience in-person moments with us, tell and listen to stories, share food, laugh, connect, grow closer, play, work through the big and little issues of life, and hate to say goodbye. Regular life stuff. (If you are a Phone Person, then I am not judging you for using your phone. I am a Phone Person at night when I’m in bed falling asleep, in the bathroom, and occasionally when I get really curious about something and pulled in, or else it’s one of those texting days where everyone is talking at me through the beeps. Life is tricky, and a lot of its tools have been bundled into one device. However, I also miss the old us and want you to come back now.)
Anyways, so it got me wondering about the young ones who are Phone People. Like the world was all colorful, and now for them, it’s all purple. Do kids who were born after the phone addiction epidemic not know about the rainbow world? Do they think *I* lived in the purple world and *they* live in the rainbow? Can they only ever kind of imagine what it was like in the before-times? To them, does it seem as simple and insignificant as bell bottoms and long hair but they can’t see the cultural currents underneath? Do they read about it in books, and is that enough to give them a sense of it? What is connection like for them—I mean connection with other humans? How does the filter of the algorithm affect their reality? Can they be in a room alone with their thoughts? Can they sit and wait? Have their facial expressions changed as a generation? When they look in the mirror, what do they think about what they see, and what has informed that opinion? Is early phone use so changing the way they’re wired that I don’t truly understand them? Can they understand me? And in what circumstances does the same technology that hurts actually also have the ability to help? In what ways does the same sort of technology pull people out of isolation, whether physical or mental? In what ways do they wish I would understand, but I can’t? Are those of us who were kids in the generation before easy internet but were here as young adults when social media arrived the bridge builders? How would we go about it? What are the answers?
Oh, there have been studies. Plenty of studies. The results are coming in. I suppose one needs a phone or tablet or computer to read them. And that is the way of things. And it’s honestly pretty convenient to read an article online if you can resist getting sucked into a black hole of tiny video reels.
So I’ve been thinking on all this and wondering about it, and I realized that, though tech keeps being new, the disconnect is not. There are regularly, in the heartbeat of existence, periods of time where major shifts happen. What tech is doing to humanity is not something new under the sun. It’s just this time period’s particular challenge. (Nor do I think my ideas are new. They are just my expression of old thoughts and ideas.)
All of that said (the intro, the explanation, and the long current example about phone people), I suspect that this is a universal truth that someone else has probably said better than I will:
I can’t somehow go back in real time before my time, so I shall never fully, truly understand it. Nor can I go forward and be born later and completely understand life through the lenses of those younger than me. But I can try to empathize with what it was and how it affected those who were there, and how the new world is affecting those younger than me.
You may say, “Why should I care what the elders/young ones (depending which end you’re on) experienced, learned, and faced?” Or maybe even, “Why should I care what lenses the people who are different from me are wearing? What difference does it make to me?”
I would like to submit that making these connections could be the actual purpose of life—my life, your life, all the lives. Biological systems on earth have beginnings, endings, connections, and cycles. Humans included. There is a design for each. For humans, hidden within the seeming disconnect of people in their separate generations and realities is the key to understanding the design. Am I talking about God? I might be, but I’m not smart enough to know that. Right now, I’m talking about us and how we work, regardless of (though obviously because of) the origin of life.
So if that is my belief: that connection is the key to our design, then the next obvious question is, Why?
“Why are things like this? Perhaps time could have been twisted around in some other order. But it wasn’t. So why does the design work in this particular way and head in this particular direction that so separates us? Why, too, are we so easily separated that someone’s gender, family dynamics, location, and personal preferences can divide us? And why, at the most extreme consideration, are we stuck in our own minds, stuck without any way to dive into the thoughts of another person unless they tell us what they’re thinking? Why are we born alone in our thoughts, never to leave our own brains, alone in our times, alone in our healing from pain, and alone in our mourning? Why are we such obviously separate pieces? Why is humanity’s design as a species full of gaps?”
It sounds like a real mystery. The separate minds thing has puzzled me and really, truly bothered me for years. It’s so lonesome in a brain that never stops thinking but cannot by some miracle of telepathy connect fully with another brain. Does that ever bother y’all? (The closest I have come is to feel like God was speaking to me into my brain, but I’ve never been 100% sure it wasn’t just me speaking to myself. I don’t mean that to sound like I don’t have faith. I actually do. But I also still have doubt, and they aren’t mutually exclusive by a long shot. They’re sort of best friends.)
Anyway, so the answer to Why seemed like a mystery to me for a long time, but I don’t think it truly is one. I think the answer is rather obvious, and I’m kicking myself for not realizing it before. In fact, lately, this word seems to be the answer to nearly every question I’ve got: Community.
In short: we’re in this together.
The design is on purpose. The gaps are intentional. We must connect to survive. To thrive.
If you’ve ever deeply connected with someone, then I don’t need to say much else. You already know. If you’re a mom who was at some point so validated by another mom being super real with you about motherhood, so real that you burst into tears, then you already know. If you’ve ever looked somebody in the eye and felt like you almost *could* see the other person’s thoughts because you all were somehow, just like…CONNECTED, then you know. If you had that moment with your child, your friend, your loved one, your partner, some stranger, where you saw the universe in the dark circle of their eye, then you know. When you were lonely to the point of mental illness, but then you found a crew and your brain stopped being sick, like what happened to me and is still in progress, then you know. Alternatively, when you said goodbye to someone, and you felt a chunk of yourself go with them, you know. There’s a lot of times when you could have felt it. I don’t know your ones. But you do. They are all proof that there is something more to our connections than being things that fill our days. They ARE our days.
That is not to say that there’s not a deep significance in the paths we walk alone. Also critical. Also in the design. That’s another article. But this one is about us, not I.
I think part of the design is that we trust some of the ones who were here before we arrived to know what’s going on, to pass down their wisdom, to care for us until we can care for them. And they eventually trust us to know what’s happening now as they lose a grip on the present day. Who’s leading and who’s following in a given time or situation may change and flow back and forth like seasons. We are an organism with individual parts. We are beholden. We are best together.
The problem is, our parents were right: it makes a difference who your friends are. Those connections that make us sick can break the system. Can take a while to heal, or maybe never do. I am not interested in connecting with every single body, and I actively avoid people who make me sick. But how is connection truly ever possible then? If we avoid those who could break the system, then eventually, we will find ourselves alone again, because even those who love us the most can hurt us the most. Jesus’s response about the people who can make you sick (your “enemies”) was this: love them, do them good, bless them, pray for them, lend without expecting anything in return. “Whatever you want people to do to you, do that to them.” This sounds like utter insanity if you’ve ever known a real taker—one of those people who sucks the ever-living life out of you. It’s a terrible idea at first glance. But when I think about it, it’s this genius thing—it’s a turning of the tables from being a person who is made sick by someone, to being a person who is applying medicine to the entire situation. It’s not a command about how you let them treat YOU. Not at all. It’s a command about how you treat THEM. And not only are you now like a physician, you are like someone who has been called the great physician. See, at the end of that passage, it says: “You will be children of the Highest. He is generous, you see, to the stingy and wicked. You must be merciful, just as your father is merciful.” In so many words, one way we can get into the psyche of God is by showing mercy to our “enemies,” however that word manifests in your situation. I have seen this firsthand particularly in parenting, so enemies isn’t quite the right word in all cases, but there are endless ways of getting a glimpse at the mentality of mercy.
And so, I guess the takeaway is this:
I believe there are two things being juggled here. First, there is the sense that we must connect—that community is the key to understanding reality, thriving as a species, and finding the secret treasures of life that are found when we come together, and that there may be some deeper truth still about how finding the pieces of God in each other helps us see the truth that’s hiding in front of us. Second, there is the reality that even the best of you can break the system on any given day, and yet there, too, lies a treasure: the act of being the merciful one and the act of being the one who has received the gift of mercy are both the glue that holds humanity together. At least in a broken world. And we must know that the fire inside us sometimes craves connection so intensely that we find artificial fuel for the flames. Perhaps in our age, for some, one of those artificial fuels is the monetized, cheap flow of instant hits of dopamine. They feed on our rhythms and are masked as true connection. Other generations have had other artificial fuels. The future has its own. We know them because they make us feel sick instead of loved, lonely instead of filled. And so we juggle mercy in our real relationships, we fend off the draw of imposters, and we keep searching for the treasures that reveal the truth.
Of course it’s the same way for those who are younger than you. As the elder in the room, though, you realize how truly close those times are, even if they seem so distant and strange to, say, your niece or your little cousin or your younger sibling. Or your child. There’s no way to tell them that they aren’t understanding time correctly or to fully deliver the past to their lived experience.
If just moments ago the world had been purple—the whole world, all parts of it—everything was some shade of purple. And then suddenly, instantly, exactly at the moment you were born, a rainbow of new colors appeared. Of course all you would ever know would be a colorful world. But everyone else would have always known the purple world. You could see pictures. Videos even. But nothing could give you the years of living in the purple world as a reference to what reality can sometimes be like. We are deeply defined by the present state of things—the things we experience firsthand, and the way we experience them, in spite of this secret being true: people in other timelines know other truths and realities that are just as real. This became quite suddenly clear to me when none of my students had experienced 9/11. It wasn’t in any way possible or perhaps necessary for me to implant that morning into their filter of reality. It was a shock to me that they didn’t share the collective experience of that moment. My parents and teachers had the same experience with me as a child, just with different major events. But it’s not just time that forms these gaps. A similar experience can happen when you make a friend who grew up in a different culture from your own, though there’s a different slant on how the variations are perceived compared to time differences.
All of this has been on my mind recently because we’ve had the good fortune of spending time with friends who are not Phone People. (Phone People are the ones who are on their phones all the time.) Our luck has been we’ve gotten to be with people who look us in the eye. They experience in-person moments with us, tell and listen to stories, share food, laugh, connect, grow closer, play, work through the big and little issues of life, and hate to say goodbye. Regular life stuff. (If you are a Phone Person, then I am not judging you for using your phone. I am a Phone Person at night when I’m in bed falling asleep, in the bathroom, and occasionally when I get really curious about something and pulled in, or else it’s one of those texting days where everyone is talking at me through the beeps. Life is tricky, and a lot of its tools have been bundled into one device. However, I also miss the old us and want you to come back now.)
Anyways, so it got me wondering about the young ones who are Phone People. Like the world was all colorful, and now for them, it’s all purple. Do kids who were born after the phone addiction epidemic not know about the rainbow world? Do they think *I* lived in the purple world and *they* live in the rainbow? Can they only ever kind of imagine what it was like in the before-times? To them, does it seem as simple and insignificant as bell bottoms and long hair but they can’t see the cultural currents underneath? Do they read about it in books, and is that enough to give them a sense of it? What is connection like for them—I mean connection with other humans? How does the filter of the algorithm affect their reality? Can they be in a room alone with their thoughts? Can they sit and wait? Have their facial expressions changed as a generation? When they look in the mirror, what do they think about what they see, and what has informed that opinion? Is early phone use so changing the way they’re wired that I don’t truly understand them? Can they understand me? And in what circumstances does the same technology that hurts actually also have the ability to help? In what ways does the same sort of technology pull people out of isolation, whether physical or mental? In what ways do they wish I would understand, but I can’t? Are those of us who were kids in the generation before easy internet but were here as young adults when social media arrived the bridge builders? How would we go about it? What are the answers?
Oh, there have been studies. Plenty of studies. The results are coming in. I suppose one needs a phone or tablet or computer to read them. And that is the way of things. And it’s honestly pretty convenient to read an article online if you can resist getting sucked into a black hole of tiny video reels.
So I’ve been thinking on all this and wondering about it, and I realized that, though tech keeps being new, the disconnect is not. There are regularly, in the heartbeat of existence, periods of time where major shifts happen. What tech is doing to humanity is not something new under the sun. It’s just this time period’s particular challenge. (Nor do I think my ideas are new. They are just my expression of old thoughts and ideas.)
All of that said (the intro, the explanation, and the long current example about phone people), I suspect that this is a universal truth that someone else has probably said better than I will:
I can’t somehow go back in real time before my time, so I shall never fully, truly understand it. Nor can I go forward and be born later and completely understand life through the lenses of those younger than me. But I can try to empathize with what it was and how it affected those who were there, and how the new world is affecting those younger than me.
You may say, “Why should I care what the elders/young ones (depending which end you’re on) experienced, learned, and faced?” Or maybe even, “Why should I care what lenses the people who are different from me are wearing? What difference does it make to me?”
I would like to submit that making these connections could be the actual purpose of life—my life, your life, all the lives. Biological systems on earth have beginnings, endings, connections, and cycles. Humans included. There is a design for each. For humans, hidden within the seeming disconnect of people in their separate generations and realities is the key to understanding the design. Am I talking about God? I might be, but I’m not smart enough to know that. Right now, I’m talking about us and how we work, regardless of (though obviously because of) the origin of life.
So if that is my belief: that connection is the key to our design, then the next obvious question is, Why?
“Why are things like this? Perhaps time could have been twisted around in some other order. But it wasn’t. So why does the design work in this particular way and head in this particular direction that so separates us? Why, too, are we so easily separated that someone’s gender, family dynamics, location, and personal preferences can divide us? And why, at the most extreme consideration, are we stuck in our own minds, stuck without any way to dive into the thoughts of another person unless they tell us what they’re thinking? Why are we born alone in our thoughts, never to leave our own brains, alone in our times, alone in our healing from pain, and alone in our mourning? Why are we such obviously separate pieces? Why is humanity’s design as a species full of gaps?”
It sounds like a real mystery. The separate minds thing has puzzled me and really, truly bothered me for years. It’s so lonesome in a brain that never stops thinking but cannot by some miracle of telepathy connect fully with another brain. Does that ever bother y’all? (The closest I have come is to feel like God was speaking to me into my brain, but I’ve never been 100% sure it wasn’t just me speaking to myself. I don’t mean that to sound like I don’t have faith. I actually do. But I also still have doubt, and they aren’t mutually exclusive by a long shot. They’re sort of best friends.)
Anyway, so the answer to Why seemed like a mystery to me for a long time, but I don’t think it truly is one. I think the answer is rather obvious, and I’m kicking myself for not realizing it before. In fact, lately, this word seems to be the answer to nearly every question I’ve got: Community.
In short: we’re in this together.
The design is on purpose. The gaps are intentional. We must connect to survive. To thrive.
If you’ve ever deeply connected with someone, then I don’t need to say much else. You already know. If you’re a mom who was at some point so validated by another mom being super real with you about motherhood, so real that you burst into tears, then you already know. If you’ve ever looked somebody in the eye and felt like you almost *could* see the other person’s thoughts because you all were somehow, just like…CONNECTED, then you know. If you had that moment with your child, your friend, your loved one, your partner, some stranger, where you saw the universe in the dark circle of their eye, then you know. When you were lonely to the point of mental illness, but then you found a crew and your brain stopped being sick, like what happened to me and is still in progress, then you know. Alternatively, when you said goodbye to someone, and you felt a chunk of yourself go with them, you know. There’s a lot of times when you could have felt it. I don’t know your ones. But you do. They are all proof that there is something more to our connections than being things that fill our days. They ARE our days.
That is not to say that there’s not a deep significance in the paths we walk alone. Also critical. Also in the design. That’s another article. But this one is about us, not I.
I think part of the design is that we trust some of the ones who were here before we arrived to know what’s going on, to pass down their wisdom, to care for us until we can care for them. And they eventually trust us to know what’s happening now as they lose a grip on the present day. Who’s leading and who’s following in a given time or situation may change and flow back and forth like seasons. We are an organism with individual parts. We are beholden. We are best together.
The problem is, our parents were right: it makes a difference who your friends are. Those connections that make us sick can break the system. Can take a while to heal, or maybe never do. I am not interested in connecting with every single body, and I actively avoid people who make me sick. But how is connection truly ever possible then? If we avoid those who could break the system, then eventually, we will find ourselves alone again, because even those who love us the most can hurt us the most. Jesus’s response about the people who can make you sick (your “enemies”) was this: love them, do them good, bless them, pray for them, lend without expecting anything in return. “Whatever you want people to do to you, do that to them.” This sounds like utter insanity if you’ve ever known a real taker—one of those people who sucks the ever-living life out of you. It’s a terrible idea at first glance. But when I think about it, it’s this genius thing—it’s a turning of the tables from being a person who is made sick by someone, to being a person who is applying medicine to the entire situation. It’s not a command about how you let them treat YOU. Not at all. It’s a command about how you treat THEM. And not only are you now like a physician, you are like someone who has been called the great physician. See, at the end of that passage, it says: “You will be children of the Highest. He is generous, you see, to the stingy and wicked. You must be merciful, just as your father is merciful.” In so many words, one way we can get into the psyche of God is by showing mercy to our “enemies,” however that word manifests in your situation. I have seen this firsthand particularly in parenting, so enemies isn’t quite the right word in all cases, but there are endless ways of getting a glimpse at the mentality of mercy.
And so, I guess the takeaway is this:
I believe there are two things being juggled here. First, there is the sense that we must connect—that community is the key to understanding reality, thriving as a species, and finding the secret treasures of life that are found when we come together, and that there may be some deeper truth still about how finding the pieces of God in each other helps us see the truth that’s hiding in front of us. Second, there is the reality that even the best of you can break the system on any given day, and yet there, too, lies a treasure: the act of being the merciful one and the act of being the one who has received the gift of mercy are both the glue that holds humanity together. At least in a broken world. And we must know that the fire inside us sometimes craves connection so intensely that we find artificial fuel for the flames. Perhaps in our age, for some, one of those artificial fuels is the monetized, cheap flow of instant hits of dopamine. They feed on our rhythms and are masked as true connection. Other generations have had other artificial fuels. The future has its own. We know them because they make us feel sick instead of loved, lonely instead of filled. And so we juggle mercy in our real relationships, we fend off the draw of imposters, and we keep searching for the treasures that reveal the truth.
