It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your boyfriend brings you flowers,

Everyone is numbing out - Catherine Shannon

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2024-11-13 03:30:13

It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your boyfriend brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice. Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers. Maybe you take it a step further: “ Actually, flowers are really basic and lame. Only basic girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.”

If this goes on for long enough—even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—you will see them as a kind of joke. Flowers are now a bit. It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your “receptors for flowers” for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.

I’m deeply troubled by the fact that I see this happening at a massive scale, all around us. Except the problem is not a lack of bouquets, of course. It’s a lack of meaning.