The Nature of Things

Life goes on, until it doesn't – and yet...

Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash

As some of you will know, I have been a ghost for a long while now. Actually, it’s approaching 20 years, so I should consider arranging a party and invite… me. Because, that’s the thing about being a ghost: nobody would ever show up at your party, should you arrange one.

It began abruptly, for me, when moving to Sweden. Here, in that safe and almost happiest corner of the world, people are afraid of being in contact with each other. The easiest way of dealing with that is to pretend that all others do not exist. So, when they bump into you in the supermarket, there is no eye contact and an “I’m sorry” – they just look the other way and move on.

No eye contact. Ever. Swedes only do that if they have a very profound reason. For instance, if you go to a hairdresser, and they ask you how you want your hair cut. Then they’ll look you into the eyes for the moment it takes for you to answer – through the mirror, though, not directly.

But this story isn’t about Swedes, hairdressers, or me. I just know how it is, how life works or not, because I’ve tried it.

Ghosting is a common thing now. Jobseekers experience it all the time when they do not get a response after having sent an application or even been at an interview. In fact, the automated job seeking systems have started ghosting people up-front, which of course is much more rational – no need to waste a lot of time and computing power if you can scare people away from applying in the first place. It works in several ways, but for instance by asking to fill out a long form, then requiring the reading and approval of Terms & Conditions, but when you click on the link for those, the form with all the information you have filled into it disappears and will never come back. You can try again, fill out everything once more, and maybe you’ll be lucky; maybe it will allow you to send off the application by then, maybe not.

I know about such things, in their current state, because I am doing that now. Seeking a job. All of a sudden, all freelance work opportunities disappeared and even most of those that are being proposed now and then, and to which I reply with a hopeful “yes, I can do that”, end up with the proposer ghosting me.

That’s not the only place. Most computerized aspects of life – and that is actually most of life – have adopted such a behavior. I wanted to cancel an online subscription but was led into an endless loop of logins. Just as an example. Online shops usually offer a button to push if you want to change or cancel an order, but these buttons increasingly lead to nothing: at best, a message that “we will see if it’s possible to change the order”, followed by an email telling that it wasn’t. And yet, it takes another week before they send the items (I’m looking at you, Amazon).

The claimed support level that isn’t there when you want to make use of it, and the malfunctioning webforms, they are part of that ghosting mechanism that is spreading all over the known universe these days. Bad service being automated. No respect for the humans and their feelings about it all, just a rough and impersonal behavior, treating you like if you weren’t human.

Much of this has been so excellently described in many articles by Cory Doctorow, who calls it enshittification. There is a lot more to the e-word than I have mentioned here, but I read his articles with the lack of respect for humans in mind; since that’s how I see the driving force behind it.

We, as a human race, do not want to be treated like ghosts. We do not want to meet a mechanical behavior from the systems or people that surround us, and we want eye contact, in some form, real or symbolic, with other people. We want them to say “I’m sorry” if they happen to bump into us, so that we can say “don’t worry about it”, making both of us feel good.

We want to feel good.

Life goes on, businesses continue through their business continuity plans, and even if the world is shocked from time to time by the extreme events of nature or some people who do not understand that we want to feel good, or, at least, who do not want to act upon such an understanding if they have it, the world does continue to be there.

We, the ghosts who are being treated inhuman, who do not feel good, we may come and go, but the larger picture is that the whole circus continue, revolving around a spinning globe in a spinning solar system in a spinning galaxy in a, possibly, spinning universe.

That’s the nature of things.

That’s what has been described by so many great minds during times. We, each of us, are insignificant.

But no. I’m not accepting that!

And that’s what this article is about. While we probably can’t change how the universe might be spinning, we can change how we treat each other. Be it through the systems (mirrors or webforms) we use for our communication, when we for some reason want to avoid eye contact, or through that occasional direct contact we are bound to experience and should take seriously – when we bump into each other in the supermarket.

It is so easy to ruin the world and ignore the people in it, because it’s all insignificant and will be gone tomorrow, so why even bother. It’s harder to pick out those elements of the world that are human, connected to people who need something now, no matter if they will be here tomorrow. “Now” is what matters, because life, and that’s the nature of it, consists of a lot of nows after each other.

Let every now count for someone. Let that be your aim in life. Don’t worry about the long run, or the big picture – worry about the people. Now.