suffer puppets
i spend a lot of time on tumblr. i'm not quite sure how it started: i woke up one day and went to post a link or something, and saw that my account was suddenly following three teens. i went along with it; i have seen a whole new world. they're funny! they're astute! they're smart and woke as hell! they're nice!
i suppose i shouldn't be shocked—and of course this is a biased sample, literally three teens and their internet friends who apparently spend all day reblogging memes—because isn't the whole point of generations to do better? i dunno. but what i do know is that the internet has a lot to do with it. there's a kind of long-range empathy in the tumblr teens that's the product of seeing and hearing firsthand the way hurt accumulates—an accretion of casually (or not-so-casually) delivered insults that turn into the baggage everyone carries. teens get empathy, and they seem willing to do the work required to meet people halfway, to understand them.
when i have nothing else to do, i occasionally spend time browsing reddit's relationships forum. it's a catalog of suffering—sometimes it's pregnancy fetishes, but most of the time it's racist families and dead spouses and sexually transmitted diseases. there are entire lifetimes of hurt posted! visiting is a form of emotional voyeurism, sure, but it also feels like a more accurate way to understand humanity in aggregate; these are anonymous people baring their naked emotions to the internet, and strangers freely offering both solutions and comfort. it is one of the more generous corners of the internet. everyone deserves to be seen and heard, and that is exactly what the redditors provide. anyone can post there about anything, too—if it matters to you, it matters to them. i think this kind of thing invaluable.
what the teens and the redditors have in common is their awareness of emotional labor, something i've been thinking about because of the holidays. i recently traveled to san francisco to visit my friend anna; we did a lot of walking, and ended up talked about the sheer work involved in relating to one's family. it's so much more than caring. it's more exhausting, too.
anna, her boyfriend, and myself had a nice night—we were a little high and had some wine, anna baked cookies—but what stuck out to me the most was the way they expressed how much they care for each other. he picked anna and myself up from a bar in a car so we wouldn't have to walk in the rain, then bought groceries; the next morning, anna took me to a coffee shop and bought her boyfriend a latte and me a coffee, though she's a tea drinker. this is not in itself remarkable: it is admittedly very basic stuff. but the way it happened—unconsciously, without stress or complaint—was memorable. (neither of them, it should be said, are teens.)
after i said goodbye to anna and her boyfriend, i took an hour to walk through san francisco. i saw a lot of human kindness on the way, but there was a lot of human neglect there too. near the end, on market street close to the piers, i walked by homeless person after homeless person. it didn't seem like anyone else could see them. but then i guess it didn't look like i could, either. how could anyone? seeing is a form of empathy, just like anything else.