Modern Love Letter

While researching how to make mobile apps more and reconsidering everything (once more) so the top post of the react native subreddit had an app for couples. Tracking important milestones and whatever else.

Anyway, a couple of comments had it pinned as a “modern love letter” and for whatever reason I found this amusing.

Amusing since, well, I think a lot of technological relations are about trying to find the love between extortion and AdSense. Maybe you could consider your own website a labour of love. Which, I mean, if you reduce love down to a simpler definition: that which you spend attention on.

A lot of time and attention to make an app or a website, though do you think it holds the essence to share? Everything I’ve ever made I don’t feel love in it or anything. It just is. It made me wonder whether there’s something more to the phrase.

That is, modern love letters are everywhere, aren’t they? They take up most of the computation cycles. But I wonder if there’s a misunderstanding underlying: the love you put into the screen won’t radiate out, necessarily. If it did, well, there’s a radiance everywhere and, as the candle to smudge out, how long do you think you can last? How many love letters lost in archives and habitual database migrations, cleaning!

You could spin up an email and an evening crafting perfect paragraph transitions. And you could even move to a private messenger and stare at the is typing… until your turn for an evening more. But these evenings get lost in the snap of next daybreak. They’re forgotten in a week’s time.

A famous contributor to the Ruby community back in the early 2000s took arduous lengths to spark a love in programming. Delicately crafted introductions, a fusion between art and mathematics outlined in a script you could paste in your terminal. After all, he found that same spark and thought it was something magical and everyone ought to know it.

But one day he disappeared. He deleted everything and went rogue, to much initial aghast: where did he go? There were secrets littered throughout his final contributions. Where he describes programming as an island council of flute players, and the flutes accelerate your aging before you can make sense of the sound, but everyone is convinced there’s something between the breath.

More concretely you could see from the Wikipedia entry:

programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more

That is, you could believe yourself to be upon the Big Wave only to find yourself washed out watching the next ones burn brighter in another Big Wave behind, a consistent treadmill to irrelevance. This guy was a paragon of modern love letters and after he gave everything, he up and went and accepted it to be something forgotten.

I think it’s this feeling of investing so much time and “love” into — what seems to be — a bottomless pit that makes one inclined to raze everything. Raze everything and disappear. The repeated message wherever you head is something like, “you filled today’s energy quota, see you tomorrow” until the end of time. It’s hard to argue what you get in return. Where if you dare to clock out and step back you’ll discover the faceless entity on the other clawing at your jugular until they get distracted by the next candlelit cabin four blocks down.

A sobering thought is to realize that if you deleted your account tomorrow, the same as the Ruby evangelist, so in the most extreme for a week or two others could wonder where you went. They could speculate, they could try to piece together your motivation the same as a crime case. But the world still turns, and on week three so the next topics take reigns and the new blood inject their energy into the money making machines. Even if you’re found, do you even want a message? Your modern love letters already said everything.

It seems one could consistently conclude that modern love letters are a poor use of time. So why does one still feel inclined to try?

We could give a lot of reasons, probably. Perhaps it’s an ironic affront to the whole situation: even if you’re falling into the abyss you could drag your paintbrush along the walls to leave a streak of green. Or perhaps because one is condemned to still thread something lovingly together even if it’s incinerated in a few weeks time.