Another Week Ends

1. I don’t yet know what to make of the new internet word “slop,” which is slang for meaningless, boring, low-effort internet content (especially content generated by AI). Even calling the things we consume online “content” is a telling linguistic choice, akin to food service companies talking about their latest “product” to serve customers. So clinical, so sterile, so unappetizing … I hope what Mockingbird puts out strikes you as something above mere “content.” Slop, however, takes it to a new level, leveraging the imagery of pigs feeding in a trough to describe our relationship with social media, the internet, and media in general. So when Freya India declares that “We Are The Slop,” our heads are right to turn. She’s making the point that our social media exhibition, our voyeuristic observations of others’ lives, and the emotional investments we put into both those practices just don’t have the weighty significance we have endowed upon them.

They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.

We have been posting about our lives for a long time. But now I notice something else, something more than a compulsion to capture and share moments. I see people turning into TV characters, their memories into episodes, themselves into entertainment. We have become the meaningless content, swiped past and scrolled through. Experiences, relationships, even our own children, are cheapened, packaged, churned out for others to consume. For some of us growing older has become a series of episodes to release: first the proposal, then the wedding, followed by house tours, pregnancy reveals, every milestone and update, on and on, forever. We exist to entertain each other. […]

I worry about young people imitating these influencers. The disappointment they are setting themselves up for: when life gets low ratings, if the new season flops. This is the trade. By inviting strangers to watch, you not only welcome praise and adoration but critics too — ready to review the show, comment on the character development, poke holes in the plot, follow the franchise. Your baby belongs to us now; your marriage competes on the market. Sell yourself like a product and get treated like one. And the worst part is that these influencers think their views go up because people care, because they finally matter, forgetting they have declared themselves entertainment.

Marketing your memories also desecrates them. You hand over your hope, your hurt, your life to be consumed, reducing it to reality TV. Your precious memories are my mindless entertainment. Your trauma becomes my background noise. Your life-shattering divorce my slop. Your children my characters; your pain my distraction; your feelings my filler episodes. I will swipe past your birth video when I get bored. I will downvote your divorce if it isn’t entertaining enough. Your life is what I clean my kitchen to, what I kill time with. And if you fail to entertain me, fine, I will scroll for another life to consume.

If sharing our lives has become something as degraded as pouring a bucket of scraps into a pig trough, then we can say both the sharer and consumer are degraded. It’s a massive perspective shift to think that our kid photos, our life milestones, and our deepest thoughts are fodder for a swiping thumb, which we know to be true because we swipe the kid photos, milestones, and deepest thoughts of others. It was never a worthwhile endeavor to seek our validation and justification through the enterprise of likes and swipes, but in the social media shifts of the last three years, it’s not only futile, but also possibly degrading? Pearls before swine indeed.

2. Speaking of public self-expression, the Atlantic asked this week whether a tattoo “counts” if its owner didn’t feel any pain when they got it. John Semley, himself a fan of tattoos, profiles the rise of boutique anesthesia tattoo parlors, which cater to high-end clients wanting body art without the pain and recovery time. But isn’t the prick a part of the appeal? Isn’t the status conferred to a tattoo connoisseur the fact that their art requires some level of suffering to display?

To a certain type of person, the appeal of these procedures is self-evident: Getting a needle jabbed into your skin hurts. But for another type of person — one who feels personally, professionally, or even ideologically invested in the culture and traditions of tattooing — this trend will be unnerving. Blasphemous, even.

Getting tattooed is a way of “teaching you something about what you’re capable of,” Don Ritson, an artist based in Winnipeg, Canada, told me. “In this postmodern world where we don’t have these same feats of strength, it gives us an opportunity to prove to ourselves that we’re capable on some level.” As someone with a few dozen tattoos, each of which was at least a little painful to receive, I appreciate that argument. But I also balk at the idea that having a doodle dug into your body is a measure of your prowess. I don’t think anyone would take a look at my tattoo referencing a joke from the sitcom Frasier and think, Wow. What a strong guy. I wonder what feats of strength he’s capable of? Even the outward projection of physical strength — something I also value, and work to maintain with waffling levels of commitment — seems preposterous in a world of pricey gyms and personal trainers.

For “Sweet” Dave O’Connor, a tattoo artist in Hamilton, Ontario, who has done a number of my tattoos, the transformation of a parlor into a medical clinic negates its social meaning. O’Connor works in what’s called the “traditional” style, characterized by bold outlines, a crisp color palette, and familiar tattoo-shop imagery: anchors and horseshoes and vipers and clipper ships and jaguar heads and whatnot. His thinking about the enterprise is similarly old-school. The move toward tattooing under anesthesia is “the complete end-game of the ‘Customer is always right’ attitude,” he told me. “The one common thread through every tattoo, regardless of the size, shape, style, the person getting it, is that there’s pain involved. It’s the one thing that unifies all tattoos. And if you take that out of it, then what is there? You didn’t do anything for it. Other than pay for it. And take a nap.”

The link between meaning and suffering is a foundational belief that most of my tattoo-culture connections share. And there is something to be said about the Christian belief that meaning can be found in suffering, though the demand that someone must suffer to find meaning isn’t always true (sometimes meaning arrives as a gift). What is, I think, insightful about anesthetized tattoo parlors is that it lets people have their cake and eat it too: they get the status and appearance of one who suffers for their art without actually having to do the suffering part. It reminds me of the viral photo of the man at the Charlie Kirk memorial dragging a cross to represent Christian discipleship, but the cross had casters attached to the bottom to make it easier to drag. ‘Tis a far cry from a burden so exhausting that Jesus needed Simon’s help to complete the task. Perhaps the wheels were required by the venue to keep the cross from damaging the arena floor as it was dragged?

3. We are still talking about Charlie Kirk’s murder, aren’t we? At least, we’re still talking about it in my Western PA neighborhood, where the grief is still fresh and the people are genuinely down. This isn’t surprising, I think. Kirk may very well be the first influencer who was murdered because he was an influencer, a new style of parasocial relationship brought about by the smartphone age. It’s a type of death we simply haven’t experienced before as a culture. The closest comparison I can offer is my experience living in Los Angeles when Michael Jackson died in 2009. Despite never knowing the man personally, the whole city was racked by very real grief, plenty of spectacle, a somewhat macabre uptick in merchandise for sale.

All this to say: I don’t envy Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s task of teaching media literacy 101 to undergrad students the day after the activist’s death. It’s all new ground, and we’re all learning. She writes about that class at The Cut, offering the tantalizing title: “How to Talk Kids Through Their Brain-Rotting Hot Takes.”

I started the class by dialing it all the way back, so we could all agree on some basic shared beliefs. One of the lessons I’ve learned from conversations I’ve had with my sons over the last few years is that curiosity goes a very long way. Many parents feel creeping dread about the mental landscape of children, and that is very unhelpful when it comes time to actually talk with them. The more online a parent is, the more flambéed their own brains have become about what is ostensibly going on with the kids; if this is you (and it’s definitely me), I urge you to account for your own biases before trying to parse theirs. When in doubt, I’ve found that pretending I know nothing, like I was born yesterday, can be a generative starting point.

If there’s one lesson millennials can offer to our kids, it’s that slowing down and thinking through their beliefs is the best defense against being manipulated by ideologues. They need to be able to rise above the churn. And we, for our part, need to be able to drop the obsession with staking our claim of the hallowed ground of the Correctest Possible Take. This is not how shared understanding is built across divides of age and opinion.

But in the midst of this crisis, what we need to give young people is not just an extra-warm hug. They also need precision. They need an invitation to clarify their thoughts, to sharpen their opinions, not in twisted morality pageants or in stark, condemnatory terms, but with our encouragement and faith that they know as well as we do the difference between right and wrong.

I think David Zahl nailed it yesterday: there’s more to life than insisting people arrive at the “Correctest Possible Take” on a matter, especially matters involving death. Let the people be sad and give them space to process. And if Freya India is right (see article one above), our online public displays of grief and Correctest Possible Takes are really fodder for the food troughs anyway. Kudos to KJM for trying to organize a place where the real, thoughtful processing of difficult news can take place. We’re our worst selves online anyway, aren’t we Ms. Showgirl?

4. In humor this week, Thomas Pease’s dog calls him out for his hypocritical double standards.

Why is it when the doorbell rings, and I bark, you tell me to shut up and go lie down? Moments later, you tell the guy where he can stick his religious literature. How is that not being aggressive?

When I’m off chasing squirrels and don’t come when you call, I’m a bad dog and get put on a leash. Yet, when you’re watching the game, and Shantelle announces dinner is served, you don’t respond. After her third attempt, your dinner should be mine.

You drink from the juice carton, but I’m not allowed to drink from the toilet. Which makes no sense, since no one has to drink after me.

I’m glad my golden retriever Ginger can’t read, else she would wholeheartedly agree.

Also this week: “Producer Of €25 Sourdough Loaves Accused Of Preying On Vulnerable Hipsters,” from the Onion archives there’s “Therapists Recommend Treating People Like S*** If You’re Having A Bad Day,” and Reductress has “Manifesting? This Woman Asked Her Friends If They Were Mad at Her So Many Times That They Got Mad at Her.”

5. At the Hedgehog Review, Nick Burns offers a eulogy for baseball umpires, as Major League Baseball announces that robots will be assisting with calls and strikes in the 2026 season. Is it possible, asks Burns, that by outsourcing our quest for justice to robots, we are sacrificing something much more valuable?

Fairness and exhaustiveness in the application of justice generally comes at the cost of speed, and this may be the worst part of the change: an interruption to an at-bat while we wait for the robots to have their robotic say. Soccer fans often find VAR review a tedious and energy-draining affair (unless, of course, it vindicates them), and baseball already has tedious pauses when, since a rule change a few years ago, calls on the field are appealed, interminably, for review — “by New York,” as the announcers invariably describe it, a synecdoche for the technical HQ that reminds us that city still retains, in this narrow, literal sense at least, its status as cultural arbiter.

One pities the umpires who, with this MLB ukase, are demoted from petty tyrants of the infield diamond to mere functionaries, their rulings now merely provisional. Why have them at all, if the robots have the ultimate say? For the finer points of the game, one assumes: for balks, those subtle things; for deciding if the batter “went around” (another matter of taste); and, most importantly, for deciding how much backtalk, from a disgruntled player or manager, is sufficient to throw him out of the game. Sovereign is he who decides upon the exception.

But in the final analysis, the search for justice in sports — one which leads us ever deeper into combining technology with a simulacrum of law — seems to be a kind of category error. Baseball is not murder: It’s no great outrage if a batter strikes out when he should have walked. The batter might be mad, but he can cry all the way to the bank.

Little injustices like that give fans something to complain about, something to blame instead of their own team’s insufficiency in the event of a loss. No one wants to watch a film where everyone gets exactly what they deserve. Baseball is supposed to have a tragic element — it’s supposed to break your heart. It’s a play, of a kind, a simulacrum of life, with the injustice of the umpires standing in for the injustice of the world. Yet by that same token, perhaps the rule change simply updates the staging for our new circumstances. Appealing to the inhuman justice of the robot, the human creation unresponsive to human appeal: It’s the sort of thing we’ll all have to get used to doing.

6. We’ll give the last word this week to Yoichi Fujiyabu and his tiny Baptist congregation in Japan, which oversees the Telephone of Life. Kazusa Okaya profiles him for Christianity Today. May we all find such a gracious voice on the other end of the phone in our own moments of crisis.

People visit Shirahama, a resort town along Japan’s southern coast, for its sandy beaches and restorative onsens (hot springs). But some travel there because they want to die.

At a church close to Shirahama Beach, the piercing ring of a phone slices through the stillness of the night. “Moshi moshi?” Yoichi Fujiyabu answers. On the other end, a trembling voice whispers in Japanese: “Please … help.” Fujiyabu grabs his keys, jumps into his car, and speeds into the night. His destination: Sandanbeki, a majestic cliff overlooking Shirahama’s shores. It’s also one of Japan’s most infamous suicide spots.

The headlights cut through the suffocating darkness. There, a lone figure emerges in the beam. Fujiyabu steps out of the car. The ground crunches beneath his feet as he walks toward a shadow before him.

This scene is from the 2019 documentary The Pastor and the Cliff of Life and is one that Fujiyabu, the pastor of Shirahama Baptist Christ Church, reenacts over and over again, often in the wee hours of the night.

For nearly three decades, Fujiyabu has stood on the frontlines of suicide prevention in Shirahama. To date, he has stopped more than 1,100 people — he records the details of every person he has rescued — from taking their lives at Sandanbeki. […]

As I walked toward the cliff with Fujiyabu, we came across a public phone booth. Most of these booths have vanished across Japan, but the town has kept this one operational so desperate people can call the Shirahama Rescue Network (SRN), a nonprofit run by Fujiyabu and his church.

Outside the booth, a large sign bears the words Telephone of Life along with a paraphrase of Isaiah 43:4: “You are precious and honored in my sight. I love you.” Under it, bold letters plead, “Please call us before you make [this] important decision.” The SRN hotline is the only number listed on the sign. Fujiyabu and his team have placed five of these signs in the vicinity, in hopes that people will reach out before deciding to end their lives. Inside the booth, a cross adorned with flowers hangs above a worn paperback Japanese Bible and a bright green telephone.

Strays:

• “I’m not entirely sure where I stand on anything these days.” Nick Cave explains why sometimes he feels that silence is a sacred duty.
• “The rapid creep of AI into every nook and cranny of life represents a golden opportunity for our churches to grow and flourish. All we have to do is not use it.” Insights on AI and the church from Zac Koons over at Christian Century.
• “Because you hated me so deeply,” he said, “I always prayed for you.” Also from Christianity Today this week, Yassir Eric shares his testimony of conversion from radical Sudanese Islam to Anglican Bishop.
• Godspeed to the Swifties out there enjoying Life of a Showgirl today!