Capitalism is so entrenched that we honestly believe it’s a means of expressing love, which predates money and requires nothing but itself. Unconditional love is reserved for the gods and new mothers. We forgot that we can all do it.
We aren’t encouraged to remember.
In our collective fatigue under what amounts to elective mental slavery we are too spent to see past the trap into the world we left behind for false security. We have lost touch with the human connection to the point where we offer each other symbols of our affections instead of ourselves.
We sell our real time to chase semi-real money (a symbol itself) to buy these hollow placeholders. Eventually, only the symbol is there and the meaning is lost. The symbols fade into the background and we forget them.
The yearning for the love they’re meant to represent haunts us, but we stop knowing what it is or how to satiate it.
We are lost, desperate, and frenetic beneath a veneer of false connection so convincing that we have sworn allegiance to it and have forgotten it was a charade.
But enough lamentation. What do we do?
Stop giving presents. Start giving presence. Allow yourself to see and feel your wounds and do what you must to heal them. You owe it to yourself and everyone you care about to let yourself out of the prison of habit.
In time and with work your capacity for real love will return and become natural again. This time it will be inexhaustible because it comes from you and you won’t need the hollow-gram or the people you’ve given authority to, who dole out conditional approval in exchange for your compliance.
Because you’re becoming a producer instead of a consumer, you’ll be able to give of yourself without giving yourself away. Your love will be renewable and free in every sense. As intended.
That’s the true gift. Try it this season. Try it this moment. If you need help, get help. You deserve it and the people who really love you won’t see you as less than a champion for fighting to empower yourself.
Never stop trying.