Some of it was just entertainment. But a lot of it was real journalism — people doing careful, honest work, trying to tell the truth about the world. And somewhere in the middle of all that watching, a heavy thought landed on me.
As a society, and maybe as a species, we have let ourselves become un-serious. Our public conversation is loud and low and a little ridiculous. We have so much in us, and almost none of it makes the screen.
This really hit me. And then I want to be careful, because there is a lie folded inside it.
The lie is that we are the shallow ones. That people are the problem. But that is not what I actually see. The feed is not a mirror of us. It is a machine, and the machine is built to reward whatever is loudest, angriest, and cheapest. The serious conversations don’t disappear. They just don’t sell ads. So they don’t get shown to you.
Some of you are in classes right now, studying languages or literature or chemistry. Some of you attend recovery meetings, counting your days one at a time, doing the bravest work there is. Some of you do tai chi in the early morning, moving slow while the rest of the world is still asleep. Some of you sit with dying parents. Some of you raise other people’s children. And some of you are just trying to get through the week.
None of that trends. All of it is serious.
So I have stopped believing that we are a degraded people. I think we are a hungry people, kept on junk. There is a difference. A person living on junk food is not a person without appetite. They are a person who has not been offered a real meal.
That is the whole reason I keep building small rooms — our Zoom church, our little gatherings — where the serious conversation is the normal one. Where nobody is performing. Where you can bring your grief and your questions and your slow morning practice, and be met.
This world could be so much more than it is. I still believe that. Not because the algorithm will change, but because you have not changed. The depth is still in you. It was never really gone.
Come sit in a room where it’s welcome. And bring someone with you.
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