Learning to find the thing worth having in the transient, the imperfect and the weathered.
As far back as I can recall, I thought of the transition from an analog world to a digital one as a form of transcendence. After all, any physical object is prone to wear and tear. Ourselves included. The mending process requires finite resources and the human touch; and there is no genuinely reliable way to back up something precious, something one of a kind or, someone. Say, an old film photograph of a long-gone relative. Black and white, worn around the edges, the back of it stained yellow. To an outsider looking in, such a photo has no inherent significance — unless they happen to know the people in it. To us, however, it is but one of the few remaining links to a unique moment, long since lost to time.
Meanwhile, our smartphones are rapidly running out of storage, filled to the brim with snapshots of varying significance, copies of which already exist across a dozen social platforms. The internet seems to remember our lives better than we do ourselves. There is something comforting in that. There is comfort in the near-limitless count of words, of photos, of videos, of songs, of voice-recorded conversations. Deliberation becomes optional; spontaneity costs nothing. A digital artifact asks little care of us, and even that little can be automated. All that remains is to summon the desire to provide the system with inputs. This, too, will soon be a thing of the past. The wheel will have gathered enough momentum behind it to spin on its own. A perpetuum mobile, in practice.
I don’t think myself qualified to make educated comments on our readiness as a species. What I do know is that a great many of us were never taught how to take good care. No, not in the technical sense. If anything, there is an abundance of READMEs, how-tos and troubleshooting guides. Yet for all their detail, even when pooled into a larger omnibus of specialized knowledge, such works only ever dance on the periphery of what it might mean to treat one’s life as an act of compassionate stewardship.
There ought to be a word for that, and as far as I can tell there isn’t — not in English, not in Bulgarian. A word for the regard owed to the things we make and keep, and to the care folded into them. Without it — without the small framework such a word would enable — the rift between the endless possibilities of the digital and the brevity of a single life only widens.
At some point, a finite little dot with a heartbeat will stare into the infinite electric hum of a supermassive black hole, and wonder…
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