The Thing We Cannot Lose

A reflection on what remains essentially human while the machinery of dehumanization perfects its art

Hello in there, hello

The homeless man on the stoop holds something I recognize but cannot name—while I hold something that recognizes nothing at all. My phone. It buzzes. Another notification, another micro-hit of manufactured urgency designed by teams of neuroscientists in Silicon Valley who studied addiction patterns to better understand how to capture human attention. The homeless man becomes background noise, visual static, an inconvenient interruption to my algorithmically curated experience of reality.

This isn't accident. This is architecture. This is by design.

We're living in the aftermath of the most successful psychological operation in human history, one so elegant that its victims defend it, pay for it, carry it voluntarily in their pockets. Somewhere in a boardroom, someone calculated exactly how much human connection they could monetize away before we noticed. They missed their mark—we're past noticing. We are past caring.

John Prine knew this was coming. In "Hello in There," he sang about the invisible among us, but he couldn't have imagined a world where invisibility would be programmed, where algorithms would learn to make us literally blind to human faces in favor of screens. Prine died during the time we turned against each other, when caring for others became controversial. But he died before we understood that the turning was deliberate, profitable, precise.

The elderly woman at the bus stop I saw out of the corner of my eye? She isn’t waiting for a bus—she's competing for our attention with a device engineered to be more compelling than any human being could ever be. The dopamine pathways in my brain have been rewired through years of careful conditioning to find her irrelevant, boring, unworthy of the attention I lavish on strangers' opinions about strangers' breakfast photos.

And here's what strikes me as I walk these streets, trying to keep my eyes up instead of down: we were always ready for this. Americans have always been good at selective blindness. The same hands that built this country were in chains, and we got comfortable with not seeing them. The "good Germans" didn't invent looking away; they just perfected what we'd been practicing for centuries.

When the screens lit up with reasons to fear our neighbors—when suddenly the person next to you at the grocery store became a potential vector of disease, political contamination, moral failure—we already had the muscle memory for it. We already knew how to make people invisible. The algorithms just made it easier, more rewarding, more addictive.

This is where the comfortable narratives break down. Because this isn't really about individual failures of compassion anymore. This is about systematic engineering of human disconnection. The homeless man isn't unseen because I'm busy or uncomfortable—he's unseen because I've been neurologically conditioned, like a lab rat, to find my phone more engaging than human faces.

We tell ourselves stories about social media "bringing us together," about technology "connecting" us. But connection was never the product—attention was. And attention, it turns out, is a finite resource that can be harvested, concentrated, and sold to the highest bidder. What's left over for the woman at the bus stop, for the man on the stoop, for the child pulling at their parent's sleeve while the parent stares at a screen?

The cruelest part isn't that we've been manipulated—it's that we've been manipulated into believing the manipulation is our choice. We call it "staying informed" while we scroll through carefully curated outrage designed to keep us clicking. We call it "connection" while we lose the ability to maintain eye contact with strangers. We call it "freedom" while we surrender our attention to algorithms written by people who won't let their own children use the products they've created.

Can I fix it? Can any of us?

Here's where every piece like this usually pivots to hope, to individual agency, to the small acts that supposedly matter. But what if that pivot is part of the problem? What if focusing on individual solutions—"just put down your phone," "just say hello"—is another form of looking away from the machinery that makes those individual acts feel simultaneously necessary and insufficient?

It's like suggesting we solve climate change by recycling while ExxonMobil burns the world down. It's like telling someone to budget better while someone else is systematically devaluing their wages, raising prices and inflating their rent.

The thing we cannot lose isn't just our capacity for individual kindness—it's our ability to see that individual kindness, while necessary, can also function as a moral sedative. It makes us feel better while the larger systems of dehumanization march on. It lets us believe we're good people while we participate in structures designed to make goodness irrelevant.

But maybe—maybe—recognizing this is the first step toward something else. Not the naive optimism of "just say hello," but the harder work of understanding why saying hello has become so difficult, so rare, so revolutionary that we mistake it for a solution instead of recognizing it as evidence of how far we've fallen.

The homeless man on the stoop has a name, a history, dreams that haven't died despite everything. He also exists in a society that requires his misery to function properly. His visibility would be dangerous—it might make housed people start asking why we have empty investment properties and homeless humans in the same cities. His suffering has to be naturalized, made into background noise, transformed from a policy choice into a personal failing.

The woman at the bus stop was young once, loved someone, made someone laugh. She also lives in an economy that has commodified care, that treats human beings as disposable once they're no longer productive. Her isolation isn't algorithmic collateral damage—it's the predictable outcome of a system that profits from turning connection itself into a product you have to buy.

This is the deeper machinery we're not supposed to see: an entire economic system that requires a certain level of human misery to function. The homeless man isn't just invisible because of our phones—he's invisible because his visibility threatens the foundational lie that everyone gets what they deserve. The lonely woman isn't just ignored because we're distracted—she's ignored because attending to her isolation might make us question why care is an expensive commodity instead of a given.

Our engineered disconnection serves specific economic interests. Empathy isn't just being harvested by tech companies—it's being deliberately starved because fed, connected, empathetic people start asking dangerous questions about why things are the way they are. They start wondering why we have the technology to coordinate global supply chains but somehow can't coordinate housing for everyone. They start noticing that the same system that can deliver a package to your door in 24 hours somehow can't deliver medication to people who need it to live.

They are not symbols of societal failure. They are products of societal design—carefully maintained products of a design that depends on most of us never looking closely enough to see the blueprints.

"Hello in there, hello."

Three words. Not enough to change the world. Maybe not even enough to change the moment anymore, when moments are manufactured, packaged, and sold back to us as "experiences." But enough, perhaps, to preserve some small record that we were here, that we noticed, that we refused to let our attention be entirely colonized by people who profit from our blindness.

In a world that has industrialized indifference, even this small act of witness becomes a form of resistance. Not because it solves anything, but because it preserves something. The thing we cannot lose without losing ourselves entirely: the ability to recognize that our disconnection isn't natural, isn't inevitable, isn't our fault—but it is our responsibility to understand and resist.

To see the machinery that makes us blind, and still choose to look.

---

---

Image ©2025 Gael MacLean