ghosts in our own lives

notes on caring more

I

On a Sunday a few months ago, I met my friends for brunch at a lovely café with a view of the street, at a set of tables hastily pushed together to accommodate our group of 8. As the hours unwound, so did our limbs and our topics of conversation as we got more and more comfortable. One friend then asked me, “what’s happening with your magazine?”

Patina, my digital magazine documenting the living edges of culture, had ground to a halt in the previous weeks. I walked my friend through it: So many of the essays I got were AI-generated even if the pitch came from the warm, glowy heart of a human. The fact that they could turn something that bright into the dull, polished, symmetrical lines of an AI-generated essay was disheartening. I found myself giving feedback to an essay generated by AI, and that in turn was probably fed back into that LLM to spit out a response. I was conversing less with the writer, more with their mouthpiece. We spoke about what I might do to tackle that: how I might set up “no AI essays” as guidelines, or commission trusted writers, or try a different medium altogether.

“Why bother?” I remember myself asking. Why bother creating platforms for writers who wanted their name attached to a piece of writing more than they wanted what the process of writing might do to them? Why fight the current of people giving into the path of least resistance?

II

Let me offer a different scene, although the pattern is the same.

I live in an apartment building, and naturally sound carries in unexpected ways through the concrete. A few weeks ago, around four in the evening, someone upstairs began drilling. The clock struck 5pm, then 6pm: the communally agreed time to stop any interior work that could create noise. But the drilling continued, creeping over the deadline, towards 7pm.

Messages began flowing in on the apartment owners’ group, asking for the drilling to stop as people were trying to have some quiet time with family. The offender never replied, and eventually only stopped drilling when they were done drilling.

Over the next few weeks, more drilling work happened in different apartments. All of them went past 6pm, and no one said a word.

III

A third scene, if I may. This video shows up on my social feeds at least once a week, and once a week I watch it almost religiously.

During the final stages of MasterChef America’s fourth season, one of the three remaining contestants runs out of butter. A minor disaster in a competition decided by fractions of flavour. Jesse asks another contestant for help. That contestant says—as the camera lingers on her station stacked with butter—no.

Then Luca Manfé, the third contestant, tosses Jesse a stick of butter. The judges whisper to themselves that he might have just given away a quarter of a million dollars. We cut away to Luca’s interview, where he says: “I don’t think a piece of butter is going to make her dish stand out that much. If it does, good for her. I’m going home. Tomorrow I can still look at myself in the mirror.”

IV

The human condition today is defined by a jarring dissonance. We’re more connected than ever before, information travels at the speed of light, and artificial intelligence promises to optimise every conceivable metric of existence. And yet, exactly at this apex of efficiency, the sociological and psychological indicators of human flourishing are flashing red.

Historically, human identity was forged in the lap of community. I knew myself in the reflection of my family, my tribe, my environment. But today, our identity is co-constructed with technology. Human consciousness is in a continuous, recursive dialogue with machine feedback. We’re nudged towards personalities and identities that are legible to the machine and shareable on screens.

I think a byproduct of this system is that the “other person” is now a data point, or even an NPC serving to take the Main Character’s story forward. Like Narcissus, we default to interacting with reflections of the self because those are much easier to deal with and we always come out right. We habituate ourselves to relationships where the “other” never resists, and we lose the capacity to tolerate the “otherness” of real humans. We become intolerant of the messiness, the slowness, and the inefficiency. The musculature we require for genuine connection atrophies. We stop caring.

Cultural scientists have a phrase that describes the bone-deep weariness of this moment: cultural acedia. It’s “a disillusioned detachment, disengagement or dissociation that stems from an incapacity to cope with the realities of the moment”. How would a battery sound if it could no longer hold its charge? Probably like us. Thoreau, in Walden, clocked it: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.

Possibly the only reaction, then, is to withdraw care. To let our skin calcify into protective armour.

V

Why is care first to go? I think it’s because care is the opposite of optimisation.

Care is inherently slow; it resists acceleration and there’s no way out but through. When you cultivate deep friendships, you give it time, energy and effort over a sustained period of time. You naturally have to push sometimes, pull other times, until the scale evens out. When you work on something that matters to you, the world blurs and your focus levels completely on this thing that resides outside yourself. When you have a panic attack, no amount of optimisation can take you through what is essentially a deeply personal experience that you have to ride out.

So in a world governed by the logic of speed, care appears as dysfunction. It’s metabolically expensive in that it requires attention even when proceeding on autopilot is a much more tempting option. How does one consider the other when your own needs are loud and immediate?

Ironically, the cruellest trick of the moment is that we’ve never appeared to care more.

We’ve perfected the aesthetic of care: the emojis, the correct tones, the neat algorithmic amplification of our concern. We can support a hundred causes before breakfast without once having to sit with real discomfort.

Fake care is weightless, and evaporates as soon as you close the platform it’s being performed on. It’s making us ghosts in our own lives.

VI

When we’re told that things don’t matter again and again, we slowly but surely turn into passive consumers. Generating an AI essay takes zero energy. Not caring about your neighbours’ wellbeing takes zero energy. Many a time, these don’t even have immediate consequences at least on a personal level.

But I think adhering to a code of simply giving a shit, even (especially) when no one forces you to, is an act of agency. It is anti-entropy. In my head, care is something you do so the floor doesn’t collapse. It’s structural, it’s about upholding your end of the invisible social bargain. We don’t care to save the world in the epic sense because that’s so much weight on a single shoulder. But we care to keep the commons generative rather than hellish. Being the person who gives a shit is often the only thing preventing the baseline from crashing to zero.

This is something I’ve only made my peace with very recently: real care creates obligations. When someone actually cares about you, you feel it as a kind of tether: sometimes comforting, sometimes constraining, but always present and accountable.