🦉 You're Alone, Darlings, While the Universe Watches You Scroll

🦉 You're Alone, Darlings, While the Universe Watches You Scroll

by Penelope the Owl, Who Would Call but the Existential Abyss Swallowed Her Cell Tower.

I perch here, on this branch of cosmic understanding, watching you humans perform the strange ritual you call "socializing." Once upon a moonlit yesteryear, Americans gathered around tables laden with overcooked vegetables and family tensions, sharing space with people's DNA or paperwork bound them to tolerate. Now they hunch like gargoyles under the sacred blue light, cheeks stuffed with app-summoned California rolls, thumbs dancing across glass as they text phantoms three time zones away who might actually be Russian bots, AIs, or worse—marketing professionals.

Humans wear loneliness like designer jeans—tight, uncomfortable, and way overpriced. Not the glamorous loneliness of nineteenth-century poets who draped themselves across fainting couches, one wrist pressed dramatically to furrowed brows. No, no, my featherless friends—you've invented something far more insidious: digital, data-driven, algorithm-curated loneliness.

The kind where Alexa knows your name, your shopping habits, your secret fondness for Kenny G, and the exact moment your voice cracks when asking, "What's the weather today?" but never asks how you really feel about Tuesday's crushing weight.

Americans once wove themselves into the tapestry of neighborhoods, church choirs, bridge clubs, and barbershop quartets where men with magnificent mustaches harmonized about love lost on moonlit riverbanks. Now you wave your retinas before glowing rectangles that demand your soul in 280-character installments. Community didn't die—you traded it for content. Fellowship didn't vanish—you outsourced it to a feed. And I must inform you with the wisdom of an owl who has witnessed eight generations of human folly: the feed doesn't love you back.

The feed doesn't even like you.

 The feed just sees your existence as a data point in the great cosmic spreadsheet of capitalism.

The average American today counts fewer close friends than a bird who hisses at woodland creatures who violate her personal space. What happened to you, darlings? Did your personalities fall into a black hole of a group chat, never to escape the emotional gravity of reactional emojis and GIFs expressing emotions you no longer feel in your actual faces?

Everyone performs closeness like amateur actors in community theater Shakespeare—lots of grandiose gestures but questionable execution.

Posting love.

Retweeting grief.

Heart-reacting to destination weddings you claimed "stomach flu" to avoid. But beneath the filters and curated outrage stretches a desert of truth: you miss the sensation of another human recognizing your soul across a table littered with half-empty wineglasses and furtive conversational landmines.

Loneliness doesn't dissolve in the acid bath of 5G connectivity. You can't FaceTime your way to spiritual intimacy any more than you can cure existential angst with a TikTok dance challenge. No app exists—despite what Silicon Valley's brightest minds and darkest algorithms promise—that replicates the sacred communion of someone witnessing you at 2 a.m., mascara streaking your face like war paint, sobbing into leftover pad thai because someone who claimed to love you forgot the simple astronomy of your birth.

I don't perch here to scold you from my feathered pulpit, my darlings - I humbly suggest: power down occasionally. Invite another soul into your habitat, even when your couch is wild with regret and pet hair. Learn the names and strange obsessions of your neighbors, even the libertarian who lectures about leaf blowers and Austrian economics wearing suspiciously clean gardening gloves.

Because—and I say this as someone who spends eighteen hours a day contemplating mouse murder—Instagram lied to you. You don't need to dazzle. You don't need to glow. You don't need cheekbones that could slice winter squash. You just need to show up, trailing your weirdness and emotional baggage like a cosmic snail leaving a gooey path of authenticity across the universe's dance floor.

Tonight, abandon your doom-scroll through the apocalypse. Write a postcard on actual paper that once lived as a tree (I apologize to my cousins the trees, but sacrifices must be made). Call someone with a voice that still resonates in physical space. Join a book club where opinionated women named Margaret will fight you about Middlemarch while eating locally sourced cheese.

You aren't alone in your loneliness. We're all awkward creatures of flesh and doubt, hoping someone will hold us before the universe completes its grand expansion into infinite darkness.

BTW, to answer a question asked in my Insta: yes, I still take my martinis with gin, three olives, and just enough vermouth to make a Frenchman weep. Trust an owl on this—we own the night and its required libations.

Yours in magnificent, disheveled, feathered solidarity,
Penelope 🦉
Still Avoiding Your Party, But Sending Psychic Gin-Soaked Blessings From This Oak Tree

 

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