Ephemeral, Ethereal, Ineffable

You literally have to just get over yourself every day

oh my god. most of life really is about the little things. a good haircut, a nice playlist, trying a new recipe that turns out well, a poem that hits home, a comfortable spot in the sun, spontaneous messages, a pen you enjoy writing with, tea with the right temperature to drink, buying that thing you’ve been eyeing for a while, a warm bed. yeah im so grateful for the small joys

maybe this is all that love is. the stray eyelash plucked so softly off their cheek, collars adjusted mid-sentence, the ladle passing back and forth as the sauce simmers (and how you blow it gently before they taste and still – ’it’s hot, careful’ – and then – ’more salt? more ginger? five more minutes? yes, five more minutes’) and voices humming in the next room, happily distracted, and no one there to hear it, to know about it, but you and you listen, stopped in the middle of whatever you were doing, to listen without saying anything, without walking in because it is a moment entirely theirs, not for anything but listening to, knowing that your place is to just be there, to hold that moment, because it is a gift beyond words that you’re lucky enough to be there to hear it, until the humming stops, and the world comes back and all you can do is go back to your task, aware suddenly of how delicate, how fragile all of it is.

I think like, the death of Vine and Rabbit, Wikipedia constantly needing to beg for money, Discord depending so heavily on venture capital, Facebook turning towards spying on users to generate a return on all the venture capital that got them started, Adobe creative suite turning into a subscription rather than a single product you buy, the strangulation of streaming entertainment as every company pulls their content and makes it exclusive to their service, are all great examples of how like, it really doesn't matter if something is legitimately useful, efficient, or beloved, it is next to impossible for a service to exist if it doesn't make shareholders increasing amounts of money year after year. Which may seem like a "no duh" type of statement, but it's a very simple window into how the profit motive makes products and services worse, not better. And how that's not just a matter of certain companies or ceos being bad and greedy on an individual level, but is an inescapable factor of an economy where existence is dependent on generating capital.