Staying Human

I want to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly.

When was the last time you had a conversation that went absolutely nowhere?

Not a networking conversation. Not a productive exchange. Not a discussion with clear takeaways and actionable next steps and a tidy resolution that made everyone feel efficient.

Just… a conversation.

That wandered. That doubled back. That went from the weather to a childhood memory to a heated disagreement about whether a hot dog is a sandwich to a surprisingly tender moment neither of you planned for.

A conversation that existed for no reason other than the fact that two humans were in the same place at the same time and found each other interesting.

Can you remember the last one?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Because somewhere between the optimization of everything and the digitization of everything else, we have begun — quietly, incrementally, without anyone calling a meeting about it — to sand down the edges of our own humanity.

We communicate in bullet points.

We process grief in Instagram captions.

We build relationships in comment sections and convince ourselves this counts.

We consume AI-generated content — and yes, I am aware of the particular irony of a newsletter raising this concern — without always stopping to ask what we are trading away in the exchange.

Efficiency for texture.

Speed for depth.

Information for wisdom.

And underneath all of it, the slow, mostly unexamined question:

What does it actually mean to stay human in a world that is moving very fast in a direction that is not entirely clear?

I don’t have a tidy answer.

I’m suspicious of anyone who does.

But I have some observations. Gathered slowly. Paid for in attention.

Staying human looks like discomfort.

Not the productive kind that self-help books celebrate. The ordinary kind. The kind where you sit with someone in their pain and resist the urge to fix it. Where you disagree with someone you love and don’t immediately reach for your phone. Where you are bored — genuinely, unproductively bored — and you let yourself be bored instead of medicating it with content.

Staying human looks like inefficiency.

The long dinner that runs past ten. The letter written by hand to someone who would have been perfectly happy with a text. The detour taken because something looked interesting. The book finished not because it was on any list but because you simply wanted to know what happened next.

Staying human looks like being wrong.

And saying so. Out loud. Without a carefully worded statement crafted to minimize reputational damage.

Just: I was wrong. I didn’t understand. I’ve changed my mind.

Three sentences that have become almost radical in their simplicity.

Staying human looks like feeling things that are inconvenient.

Grief that doesn’t resolve on a timeline. Anger that isn’t useful. Love that isn’t strategic. Joy that has no justification.

Feelings that exist not because they serve a purpose but because you are alive and alive things feel.

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

The forces currently reshaping our world — technological, political, economic — are not particularly interested in your humanity. They are interested in your attention, your data, your compliance, your productivity, your consumption.

Your humanity is, from a systems perspective, largely inefficient.

It is also the only thing worth protecting.

Because when this particular chapter of history is written — and it will be written, by someone, eventually — the question will not be how productive we were.

It will be whether we remained recognizably human while everything around us pressured us not to be.

Whether we stayed curious.

Whether we stayed kind.

Whether we stayed capable of the wandering conversation, the unnecessary letter, the ninety-second pause to look at a tree.

Whether we kept showing up for each other in the slow, impractical, deeply human ways that no algorithm has yet figured out how to replicate.

Stay human, friends.

It is harder than it sounds.

It is more important than it sounds.

And it is — I genuinely believe this — one of the most quietly radical things you can do right now.

Julie Bolejack,
The Mindful Activist

🎲 Bonus: Random Info You Didn’t Know You Needed

The Romans had a god for absolutely everything.

And I mean everything.

There was Cardea, goddess of door hinges. Forculus, god of doors specifically — not hinges, that was Cardea’s department, they had boundaries. Limentinus, god of thresholds. These were three separate deities responsible for the experience of walking through a doorway.

There was Sterculius, god of manure and fertilizer. Someone had to do it.

Cloacina was the goddess of the sewer system. She was later merged with Venus, which raises questions nobody seems to want to answer.

The point being: the Romans paid attention to everything. Nothing was too small, too ordinary, too unglamorous to deserve acknowledgment. Even the hinge. Even the threshold. Even the thing beneath the city that nobody wanted to think about.

They stayed human by noticing what was human.

Every last inconvenient, inefficient, slightly absurd bit of it.

We could learn something from that.

Possibly also from Sterculius.