On the front page of the subreddit r/me_irl today, we see a touching scene; as user jmk2017 so helpfully transcribed:
"Two Golden Retriever puppies, a white one and a yellow one, on a road. The yellow puppy (with a black leash) is sitting, while the white puppy (with a purple leash) is holding its front paws on the yellow one's shoulders. What's more, the white puppy is resting its head on the yellow puppy's one. They look at you with a somewhat sad expression.
Yellow puppy: meWhite puppy: literally nobody"
The internet has been engaged in the great project of reducing millennial despair into its most fundamental forms for some time now. This inchoate yearning, which some years ago crept fitfully on stage, has assumed its correct and urgent position at the forefront of the American digital consciousness; the frontier of human conflict spirals ever more spiritual, and we have reached in these past decades a new plateau of development -- social organization via online platforms.
The well-justified destruction of face-to-face social "institutions" -- the church barbecue, the company picnic, the block party -- has ushered in a great new age of ennui, as individuals are left without the means of fulfilling their needs. Progress is development from implicit to explicit patterns of organization -- first, a dark age, in which the logistical complexity of ensuring that each person can fulfill their needs presents itself as intractable; then, enlightenment, in which society has amassed the computational and communicative power to address scientifically the matter of fulfilling one's needs.
We have just exited a period of enlightenment -- beginning with the printing press and ending with the internet -- in which the art of emotional fulfillment was codified into a science. Not, of course, a complete science, no more than the discovery of cause and effect was a complete physical science -- but a first significant refinement of the relationship between means and ends. What are civil rights, after all, but the fuller codification of the patterns of behavior best suited to the fulfillment of the human need for love? That is to say, how and how not to treat people -- but not when to treat them.
The dilemma which faces us today presents itself in the sad eyes of the golden retrievers gracing the front page of r/me_irl: Given that we know how to recognize what a person is and we know to construct mutually beneficial relationships with them, how do we know when it is appropriate to approach them in the first place? Relationships in the past were founded on circumstantial interaction -- shared work, proximity of homes, subjection to the same feudal lord -- but the internet by virtue of its shrinking of space has exposed the arbitrariness of all this. Why should one settle for any old friends, any old lovers, when the world has grown small enough that any manner of person may be found? This is the problem of our era, perhaps of our generation, and the answer will be found the same way it always has been: conversations about cute animals and deep-seated despair.
The Starving Aesthete: r/me_irl: Bastion of progress
