Most of us have mastered the answer to “How are you?” Good. Busy. Can’t complain.
We deliver it smoothly, automatically, before the question has even finished landing. And the person asking exhales, relieved they don’t have to hold anything heavy today.
We’ve built an entire social infrastructure around the collective agreement to not actually say what’s true.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about: that performance has a cost we rarely account for. Not just the energy of maintaining it, but what it forecloses. Every “I’m fine” is a door quietly closed on real connection. And we wonder why we feel lonely in rooms full of people who supposedly know us.
Matt Gottesman wrote that honesty is the highest form of intimacy. I’d go further. I think it’s also the only form. Everything else is just proximity.
The real ask isn’t for someone to have it together. It’s for someone to show up as they actually are, right now, with whatever that looks like today. That’s the thing that makes another person feel less alone in their own unfinished state.
We’re not afraid of other people’s mess.
We’re afraid of being the first one to put ours on the table.
Someone has to go first.
What if it was you?
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