how do we create limits that help people care again?🌹

the heart needs something to run out.

i don’t think we’ve ever cared less about anything than we do now, and i believe this because today we can have nearly everything, almost instantly, and without paying anything that actually costs us. for example, most of the art i see now i don’t even encounter as art first, because it’s presented on the same feed, in the same way a piece of content is, and it takes me a moment to understand that what i’m looking at is something permanent and not ephemeral. even though most of us are having this experience, i still dare to question why people find it so hard to grasp the idea of paying for that piece in either a digital or physical form when they can just save and consume it for free, for as long as they want and whenever they want.

walter benjamin, in the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, wrote almost 100 years ago that once a work of art can be copied without end, it loses a quality he called “its aura, its here and now, the sense that it exists in one specific place and time and that you have to go to it”. and i feel the absence of exactly that every time a piece of art becomes a thumbnail i thumb past. the same emptying happens with music, because why would i buy a song when i can pay $5 a month and have access to an endless catalogue that holds nearly everything ever recorded, waiting for the moment i decide i want it? this is a reflex that, once you catch it in yourself, you start seeing it everywhere, including even in the way we hold people!!! everything has become so reachable that reaching itself has stopped meaning anything.

but the reach on its own explains nothing, because i can have a great deal of something and still love it. so i need to go deeper and think about what exists beneath this accessibility, which may be the thing we “were taught” to want in the first place. we are “raised” to chase money and status, to believe that status arrives with money and money arrives with status and there is nothing past this small circle worth reaching for, and we inherit this so early that most of us never stop to ask whether it even belongs to us.

i’m mostly speaking about my own generation and the ones younger than me, because at 27 i was raised right alongside social media as it became the thing we shaped ourselves around, and the belief that money and status are everything came dressed in that. i see the same desire in people older than me too, though i suspect that for some of them it grew from somewhere else entirely. and to be honest, i don’t think we even care about money and status themselves. we care about them because we were promised they would make us happy, and i genuinely don’t believe they will, so in my eyes we end up living in a mirage. we are actually caring about nothing.

so now i am wondering, how do we start caring again? and the answer that’s been on my mind for some time is finitude. i believe that when a thing ends, really ends, we hold it with a different attention and more intention, and most of the time these aren’t things designed for us. for example, there was a person i met once and never again, and i already know that i never will. the fact that i couldn’t choose it or press play on it again is what made it stay with me for more than 5 years now.

but then there’s something that breaks my own answer clean in half, because these same limits have also made people care about the worst things. when streetwear became really popular here in romania, it did so together with the term hypebeast, and i remember everyone in my generation and the younger ones wanting to be one. the famous supreme box logo tee and many other collaborations were suddenly the most coveted things around. instagram and facebook were full of them. most of the kids wearing or chasing these things didn’t even care about the culture, or even know what they were actually wearing. what they knew was that the harder it was to get, the more they had to have it.

but later this scarcity, and the bragging that came with it, moved from physical to digital. the “nike snkrs” app is an app where you enter a raffle for the chance to buy a limited sneaker release, and winning got so scarce that people stopped bragging about the sneaker itself and started bragging about the fact that they won the raffle. screenshots of “wins” were worth more than the shoe. so here we see how the very thing i just called the cure is also the exact machine that hollowed those kids out and did, in a way, real damage to the culture underneath them.

i used to believe the line ran between natural and manufactured scarcity, but that isn’t it, because almost all of it is manufactured to some degree. so maybe the line is in what the limit is facing. to me, a limit can face toward the feeling, built so the encounter goes deeper, and a limit can face toward the wanting, built so that more people want in. the person i met once faced inward, because i couldn’t wear it or resell it or even hold it up for anyone to see. the raffle, on the other hand, faced outward, because its scarcity could be worn, counted, and converted, which runs straight back into money and status. so maybe the limit was never even the real thing.

i assume most of us have a song we could replay a thousand more times, and it would still mean more to us than most of what we only heard once. so i believe it was never fewness that made me care, but the care itself, and a limit may be one of the only ways care is still preserved in a world that wants to turn everything into something to be consumed. but at the same time, a person can still choose to stop consuming something even without any scarcity, and that is the ideal i wish existed.

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i don’t have a way to reach it, and maybe if i did, that would already make me part of the sickness that wants to break everything into steps to follow, which to me is the exact opposite of caring. the most i’ve come to is that the limits worth anything are the ones that can’t be shown or counted or even wanted, and even those seem to come apart the moment i try to engineer them into being. maybe that means we don’t really create them at all. or maybe i’m wrong about even that. i don’t know yet. but what i do know for sure is that i’ve ended up right where i began, with the one question i can’t put down and am no longer sure has a finite answer:

how do we create limits that help people care again?🌹