Missed Connections

Let me tell you about one of the best feelings.

You have a problem.

You bang your head on it for a while.

Through the banging, you formulate a string of keywords describing the problem.

You put those words into a search engine.

You land on a forum or a blog post and read someone else’s words containing those keywords and more. Their words resonate with you deeply.

They’re saying the exact same things you were saying to yourself in your head.

You immediately know, “This person gets it!”

You know they have an answer to your problem. They’ve seen what you’re seeing.

And on top of it all, they provide a solution which fixes your problem!

A sense of connection is now formed. You feel validated, understood, seen. They’ve been through what you’re going through, and they wrote about it to reach out to you — across time and space.

I fell in love with the web for this reason, this feeling of connection. You could search the world and find someone who saw what you see, felt what you feel, went through what you’re going through.

Contrast that with today.

Today you have a problem.

You bang your head on it.

You ask a question in a prompt.

And you get back something.

But there’s no human behind it. Just a machine which takes human voices and de-personalizes them until the individual point of view is annihilated. And so too with it the sense of connection — the feeling of being validated, understood, seen.

Every prompt a connection that could have been. A world of missed connections.