Note: This post is just a penning down of wandering thoughts - not meant to attack any technology or organization.
When it comes to grief, loss, nostalgia, longing, and pain, Nature follows an implicit framework to regulate and shape the human heart. Consider a profound loss like the death of one’s parents (setting aside exceptions as they are called exceptions for a reason). In general, Nature prepares the heart and mind over time: parents age gradually—white hair appear, reflexes slow, down strength fades, posture weakens, breath shortens. What begins as difficulty climbing stairs may end in a wheelchair, and eventually visit to a hospital that they never return from. The pain is immense and the loss irreparable, yet Nature equips a person to endure it. Family & Friends provide a shoulder to cry on, own children help rediscover joy of life, and time softens the wound. They naturally find ways to navigate the grief and finally learn to live with it. This is Nature’s framework—designed in strict accordance with how the human heart works.
However - mankind has witnessed a development over the past decade that has deeply unsettled the regulation of emotions. An algorithm has emerged that commercializes what and how the consumers feel. You could be sitting in your lounge sofa on a slow evening sipping tea - when you run into a reel that abruptly plunges you into a deep emotional state, without notice - reminding you of death of a childhood friend, the fragrance of your late mother's embrace, your childhood home and how colorful it felt, the darkness of the day your grandparent passed, the late night strolls with your cousins and best friends before life took all of you down separate never converging pathways, and so on the list goes. Reel after reel, unannounced bombardment of emotions - unchecked and unending. And on top of it, the algorithm recognizes your engagement and feeds you more and more of such content.
And you sit there, unsure of how to feel and process everything, wondering where do you put all this grief, pain, nostalgia and longing that barged into your home unannounced on a random Wednesday evening.
In the past, everything was slow and organic - including how and when grief found you. Finding an old forgotten letter when clearing the messiest room once in a while, waking up to a specific date or morning of a festival, running into a postman who brought the news of a loss etc,. It was slow, organic and not all at once.
One also wonders if we need to question who gave an algorithm or a social media app the moral authority to decide how a person feels at a given point in time. Why should it have the power to hook into your heart, and flood it with emotions that you were never designed to process all at once?
Commercialization and glamorization of grief is a tragedy that must be fought back. Detach. Reclaim your emotions, reclaim your heart.