Loving humanity, negotiating with one person at a time

Company here is available constantly and diffusely. A stream of people at a distance produces something that feels a great deal like being accompanied, and it works: this is real contact with real people, and it is not nothing.

What it does not do is what the closer version does. Nobody in a wide arrangement notices that you have gone quiet for two weeks, because there was no arrangement, and the absence of any such notice is the tell rather than the loneliness itself.

People with this position tend to end up making the small version deliberately and slightly artificially: a standing arrangement with two or three people, which sounds mechanical and does the job that proximity used to do by default.

Compassion in this placement is broad, sincere and better at scale than at close quarters. Suffering somewhere far away is felt accurately; the difficult relative in the next room is a separate and much harder problem.

This is not hypocrisy. Distance is what makes the feeling clean, and the person nearby comes with history, demands and no aesthetic distance at all. The pattern is worth watching mainly because the far version is so satisfying that it can absorb the whole of an available capacity for care.

At the scale of an era it produces genuine moral progress and a familiar complaint: movements run by people who are admirable in public and hard to live with, because the abstraction is where the warmth was spent.

For this age group the places that matter are not all made of matter. A group of people who have never been in the same room can constitute a real community, with real obligations and real grief when it ends.

Older generations mistake this for pretending, and it is not: the relationships are genuine and the medium is unusual. What the medium does not carry is the body, so a friendship of years can end simply by nobody typing, without any of the friction that would normally mark an ending. Losses of that kind are rarely spoken about, since there is no vocabulary for mourning somebody who has not gone anywhere and simply stopped appearing.

The collective imagination here runs to the redesigned world: how everything could be arranged if the arrangement were built from principles rather than inherited.

The visions are often good and characteristically missing the transition. How to get from the current arrangement to the better one, who pays for the interval and what happens to the people caught in it are questions that this cohort finds much less interesting than the design itself, and the gap between the two is where most of the disappointment eventually lands.

The designs are not worthless for being incomplete. A generation that can imagine a different arrangement at all is doing something the practical people cannot do, and the useful pairing has always been between the two.