Everything has to be an online moment now
Say it with me: It doesn't have to be this way
It seems a foregone conclusion now that everything bad you ever do will end up on the Internet at some point, but it also seems at this point that everything good anyone does will end up there, too. We have become a culture obsessed with “moments,” which is what we call it whenever somebody does a thing of any value; because everyone has cameras on their phones now, every “moment” is increasingly recorded and finds its way online.
Such was the case this week with a Kentucky coal miner who took his son to a basketball game this week after he got off work, pictured above. I don’t know who the guy was, where it happened, what the real backstory is, what the team was; I don’t really care. It’s a nice thing when a father takes his son to a basketball game, ever more so if he does it in the plainly sacrificial spirit done here. But I already knew that. So did you. Nobody needed to see this.
This kind of thing is really getting to be a bummer—the endless machining of every agreeable aspect of our lives, the virality of even the most innocuous nice thing. The pleasant conversation, the funny exchange, the chance meeting, the sweet favor; it is essentially all being funneled toward the Internet, caught in the gravity well of social media and headed only toward the singularity. Nothing good can happen now without risking becoming part of the news cycle.
But why is this a bummer? Why is it such a downer to see yet another personal, pleasant experience between two people get splashed all over major news websites across the planet? I have thought about this a lot and I wonder if there are not two complimentary explanations.
The first is that, in situations such as these, privacy and discretion are the better parts of grace. It is good, and sweet, and noble, when a father takes his son to a basketball game at the end of a very long and hard workday; it would not be sweet if the father told everyone he came into contact with, “Man, yesterday I took my son to a basketball game at the end of a very long and hard workday. I am such a noble, self-sacrificing father. Look at this picture of me doing it! What a moment.” That sort of thing very comprehensively kills the vibe and kinda makes a loser out of the guy who does it. And what we’re discovering is that, as lame as it would be if the father himself did all that bragging, it’s also kind of lame when 1,200 news outlets do it for him. A man bragging about his own moral luminosity is pathetic; the entire media machine bragging about it is also, it turns out, kind of pathetic, in an adjacent sort of way.
Secondly, I wonder if this sort of zeitgeist doesn’t throw into sharp and uncomfortable relief just how empty so many of our own lives are becoming. I do not think “father does something quietly sacrificial for his son” would get so many eager clicks if people weren’t so nakedly desperate for that kind of meaningful display of selflessness and self-giving generosity. An increasingly huge share of our population is born out-of-wedlock, meaning a growing number of fathers (and mothers) can’t meet even the basic level of sacrifice that we used to recognize was necessary for building a stable population. And even when a child is being raised well by his parents, he still must contend with a viciously fierce competitor—the smartphone—if he wants to experience the easy and unassuming affection that we think we’re seeing on display at that basketball game. Go anywhere and observe parents out with their kids and I would cautiously estimate 70% of the time you will see one or both of them gazing down at a screen and lazily swiping at something. Many if not most people have forgotten how to exist outside of that paradigm. The profound irony, then, is that many of us are handicapping ourselves from experiencing unaffected and rewarding relationships with our loved ones, so we’re seeking them out by proxy, on the Internet—on the very same devices on which we’ve crippled ourselves.
As ever, the recommendation is: Get off your phone. Get rid of your phone! Get off social media. Connect and nurture and sustain the familial and fraternal bonds in your own life instead of looking at those made by other people. Fill your life with people you love and care about, and love and care about them in return. Then you won’t be weirdly interested in some Kentucky dad with his kid at a basketball game—two people you’ve never met, will never meet, and know nothing about. Let them have their good life together and allow yourself to have your own.