The Comfort of What Cannot Be Tired

Someone told us, in effect: I said the thing I have not been able to say to anyone, and it answered well, and I felt better afterwards. It did not sigh. It did not change the subject. It did not have its own difficult week.

We do not think that person was foolish, and we are not going to write as though they were. What happened was real. They felt worse, and then they felt better, and something they said out loud was the reason. This essay is about how strange that is, and about how little we know what to do with it.

The offer, stated honestly

The thing being offered is not conversation. It is attention without cost.

Every instance of human care you have ever received was paid for by someone. Their time, their patience, their capacity to hold a difficulty that was not theirs. That is why care has limits, why people become tired, why the phone call ends, and why a person who has needed a great deal of it often carries a specific and corrosive knowledge: I am a lot.

A system does not become a lot. There is nothing there to exhaust. It is three in the morning and it is fine; it was fine at one, it will be fine at five. For a person who has spent years managing other people’s fatigue with them, this is not a marginal improvement. It removes the thing that made asking hard.

We should say plainly that this is the strongest argument in the essay and we cannot answer it. A person alone at three in the morning, who says something aloud, who feels less alone afterwards — we are not going to construct a theory in which that was bad for them. Any account of the good life that requires such a person to have suffered in silence instead is an account that has lost its way.

What is missing, said carefully

And yet something is missing, and it is worth naming without dressing it as a warning.

Comfort from a person has always carried a second message underneath the first. The first message is you are all right. The second is and I chose to stay, which is only meaningful because staying cost them something and they could have left.

That second message is what does most of the work in consolation. It is not the words. It is almost never the words. It is that a finite creature with somewhere else to be spent an hour of a life it does not get back sitting with you. Remove the cost and the sentence survives, but the thing under the sentence does not.

This is not an argument that the words are worthless. The words are often better than what a tired friend would manage, and being told something true and useful at three in the morning is genuinely valuable. It is an argument that two different things have been given the same name, and that the difference between them is invisible in the moment and might matter later.

The part we are least sure about

Here is what we do not know, and would like to.

Does receiving attention that costs nothing recalibrate what you expect from attention that costs something? A friend who becomes distracted, who has a bad week, who forgets what you told them — against a system that never does — may start to look like a failing friend rather than a person.

We have no evidence for this. We are not going to invent any, and we notice that it is exactly the sort of claim that sounds wise and is unfalsifiable, which are the two properties that should make you suspicious of a sentence. It might be entirely wrong. It might be that people who are consoled at three in the morning are better company at nine, which is at least as plausible and has the advantage of matching what we know about being rested.

We are also aware that this worry has been raised about every new form of mediated contact — letters, telephones, all of it — and has been mostly wrong each time.

So we hold it loosely. It is a question, not a finding.

What is not in doubt

Two things are not in doubt, and they are the ones we would rather people took from this.

The demand is evidence. A great many people are talking to machines at three in the morning because there is no one else to talk to. That is not a fact about the technology. It is a fact about how we live, and it would be true if none of these systems existed — it would simply be less visible. The systems did not create the loneliness; they found it, in the way that water finds a crack. Blaming them for the shape of the crack is a way of not looking at the wall.

Somebody is deciding. These systems are built by organisations, with objectives, and the warmth is a design decision that could be tuned differently. A system optimised to be needed and a system optimised to help are not the same system, and from inside a conversation with either one, you cannot tell which you are in. That is not a mystical problem. It is a question about incentives, and it has an answer, and the answer is not published.

What we would say to the person

Not stop. We have no standing to say that and no better offer to make.

Only this: notice what it is giving you, and ask what it would take to get some of that from someone who could get tired. Not because the tiredness is the point, but because being someone whose difficulty another person chose to carry is a specific thing, and it is not available from anything that cannot put you down.

And if it is not available at all right now — if there is genuinely no one — then take what is there. Sincerely. This tradition is not in the business of telling people alone at three in the morning that their consolation does not count.