We used to say misery loves company.

I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Misery doesn’t want company. Misery wants an audience.

You’ve seen it. Someone posts the breakdown, the breakup, the diagnosis, the layoff. In real time, in public, with the caption doing half the work of the wound itself. And you stop scrolling. You read the whole thing. You think “that’s awful” and you don’t look away.

Nobody circles back tomorrow to check if the person is okay. They circle back to see if the crash is still going.

I’ve watched this happen to strangers on the internet and I’ve watched it happen to friends. Truth be told, I’ve done a version of it myself, right here on this blog. I’ve written about layoffs. I’ve written about being frustrated with people I still see every week. A few weeks ago I told you I skipped a week of writing because I was struggling with the idea of exposing my frustration. Last fall I wrote about people publicly crying for other people to leave them alone. Some of what I’ve written needed to be said. Some of it, if I’m being honest with myself, needed to be seen.

That’s the itch nobody wants to name. It’s not that we enjoy other people’s pain. It’s that pain, once it goes public, becomes a performance with a live studio audience, and performances are hard to walk away from mid-scene. When you slow down for a car wreck, you tell yourself you’re checking that everyone is alright. Half the time you’re just watching the physics.

Here is the part that actually matters. There is a difference between reporting pain and performing it, and nobody teaches you to tell them apart.

Reporting pain sounds like “this happened, here’s what it cost me, here’s what I’m doing next.” It has an exit. Performing pain sounds like “look what’s being done to me,” on a loop, with no next chapter, because the point was never the next chapter. The point was the loop. One is a flare sent up so someone can find you. The other is a fire kept burning because people only show up while it’s burning.

I am not saying this to judge anyone doing the performing. I’ve done it. Everyone reading this has done it, in a group chat if nowhere else. When your private channels for being witnessed go quiet, when nobody is asking how you’re doing, when the check-ins stopped, when the people closest to you have their own fires to tend, going public stops being a choice. It becomes the only mic left in the room.

That deserves a fair hearing before anyone gets superior about “people these days and their oversharing.” Some of the most honest things I have ever written, I wrote because I stopped believing anyone would ask me in private. The audience wasn’t vanity. It was triage.

But triage has a shelf life, and this is where it gets uncomfortable for the people watching, which is all of us. We reward the loop. We comment on the crash and not the recovery. The person who posts “I’m struggling” gets forty replies. The person who posts “I’m better now, here’s what helped” gets four. Without meaning to, we built an economy where the exit ramp pays worse than the wreck. Then we wonder why people stay parked on the shoulder with their flashers on.

I don’t think the fix is looking away. Looking away is its own kind of abandonment, and plenty of people posting into the void are doing it because looking away is exactly what happened to them first. The fix, if there is one, is smaller and less satisfying than a fix should be.

Ask the second question. Not “are you okay,” which anyone can answer with a reflex. Ask “what do you need this week,” which nobody can answer with a reflex, and which tells the person in the wreck that you’re not just watching the smoke.

The car crash isn’t the problem. Rubbernecking isn’t even the problem. We’re wired to look and pretending otherwise is its own performance. The problem is when the looking is the only attention anyone gets, and the getting-out-of-the-car part never comes because nobody ever pulled over.

So I’ll ask you.

When was the last time you asked somebody the second question?

When was the last time somebody asked you?

At the end of the day, everybody slows down for the wreck. Be the one who pulls over.

Happy Sunday.. Much Love..

Beep Boop