The Beauty We Automated Away

Last week a woman turned fifty-two. A total of rorty-three people wished her happy birthday. Every one of them found out from a notification, not a memory, and most clicked "Happy birthday!" without opening her profile, without wondering how she actually was, without a single thought crossing their mind beyond the prompt in front of them.

She told me later that it was the loneliest birthday she'd had in years, and she'd had more messages than ever.

That's not a technology problem. That's a friction problem.

Connection used to cost something. You had to remember a date without being told. You had to dial a number and sit through the ring, not knowing if they'd pick up. You had to show up to the awkward pause in a conversation instead of scrolling past it. All of that effort was the message. Somebody carrying you around in their head enough to notice the day, that was the gift, not the words that came after it.

My mother kept a birthday calendar on the back of the toilet door. So did her mother before her. I've never worked out why that particular spot, maybe it's the one room in the house where you're guaranteed a moment to sit and think, but it worked. You'd see whose birthday was coming up next week, or tomorrow, or today, and you had time to actually plan something. It wasn’t a five-second reflex, but a thought that got to develop before it turned into a phone call, a card, a cake.

And here's the thing I genuinely miss: not knowing. If you were out when someone rang the home phone, that was it, the call was gone. If you didn't have an answering machine – and plenty of us didn't – then you had no idea anyone had even tried. No missed call blinking away at you, no red dot demanding an explanation, no guilt to carry around for the rest of the day. You simply didn't know, and there was a strange kind of peace in that. You couldn't disappoint someone you didn't know had been trying to reach you.

I don’t know about you, but these days my phone can tell me when a courier attempted a delivery, or a stranger liked a photo I posted in 2019, and when someone from a work conference a decade ago wants to reconnect, all before I've had my coffee. And if I’m completely honest with myself, not one of those needs my attention… but all of them get it anyway, because now I know.

Facebook removed the calendar, the pause and the lead time in one go, and without anyone voting on it, took a good deal of the meaning right along with them. Now the platform remembers for us. It taps you on the shoulder and you tap a button back, and the whole exchange can happen without either person thinking of the other at any point in the process. You can be wished happy birthday forty-three times and still be right: nobody really thought of you today.

You know that feeling when LinkedIn tells your connections it’s your birthday… and it doesn’t discriminate either – it can be someone you shared a panel with once, or accepted a connection request from three years ago and genuinely cannot place, yet all of a sudden forty other vague acquaintances have already written "Happy Birthday!" messages, and if you’re anything like me, you obediently hit the auto response to say “thank you!”.  I'll be honest about that one, because what's the point otherwise: it makes me feel a bit icky. Not because anyone sending it means unkindly. Because there's no actual ‘me’ in the message. It isn't a memory. It's a calendar entry wearing a party hat. Being wished happy birthday by forty-three people who couldn't tell you what suburb I live in doesn't feel like being celebrated. It feels like being tracked.

I keep coming back to something I wrote about recently: women posting under fake names for the most harmless questions, wary of being seen even when nothing is at stake. This is the same instinct wearing a different coat. One hides behind a username. The other hides behind a notification. Both let you look present in someone's life without ever risking the effort of actually being in it.

But it's more than birthdays.

Online has its place. I use it, you use it, and in plenty of cases it's genuinely useful, staying loosely in touch across distance, keeping half an eye on people we'd otherwise lose entirely. I'm not arguing against any of that.

What I am saying is that nothing replaces personal, non-tech connection. Nothing.

When I started VA Institute, one thing I refused to compromise on was our yearly VA Summit. Everything else about the business was online. That couldn't. We got people in a room together, in person, every single year, and that decision has outlasted almost every other one I made in those early days. The value of it is hard to put a number on, because it was never really about the event. It's what happens to someone the moment they step out from behind their desk, out of the safety of a home office, and into a room full of people they only knew as a name and a profile photo. That's a different kind of connection. It doesn't exist any other way.

I've recently made the same commitment in my own friendships: seeing people in person, as often as I actually can, instead of letting a feed stand in for a friendship. It takes real effort. Everyone's busy, myself included, and it would be far easier to let a like or a comment do the work a phone call or a cup of tea should be doing. But the effort is the point, the same as it always was. The polished version of somebody's life that shows up in your feed is nothing next to sitting across from them and hearing how they actually are. Even a phone call closes a gap that scrolling never will.

The world has changed, and I don't think it's going back, nor should it entirely. But real connection was never going to arrive on its own. It has to be built on purpose, by people willing to get out from behind the desk and into the room.

We didn't lose connection. We just automated the part that required us to show up for it.