It's really sad to witness how many mothers do not pay any attention whatsoever to their child. All glued on their screens. No wonder that so many people have incredibly troubled emotional lives, when the people who gave birth to you barely pay attention to what is going on in your life.
I do not wish to criticize mothers here, I mean for one fathers tend to be absent from a child's life in the first place, which makes them even worse. Parenting is very emotionally draining and time consuming, on top of managing your relationship with your partner and your personal life. What I wish to point at however is probably one of the most felt decline in the modern world, which is the decline of care: things are made mechanically and as cheaply as possible to increase profits, people don't really spend much time with one another, and when they are, they're on their phone, and no one is really present to anything, able to care about an experience for its own sake.
Modernity pushes this idea that all the big problems around us require big solutions, by which I mean more advanced technology, massive bureaucracies and institutions, all of which require tremendous amounts of funding and coordination. But what about the other direction? As Mother Teresa puts it:
Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
Go back to the list of blog posts
2024-08-05