Archive of Substack articles @leonghiew
See the original articles at https://leonghiew.substack.com/
When the Bedroom Door Closes
What the ordinary ritual of putting children to bed reveals about what matters in life
Sep 09, 2026
We lose many things when a marriage ends. I didn’t expect bedtime routines to be one of them.
When I was married, I was home every night during the children evening routines. Their bath, the dinner, brushing teeth, bedtime stories. The aim of the routine is to overcome the children’s tendency to stay up and play, to get them to bed so they get enough sleep. Every night, as I turn off the lights and close their bedroom door, a sigh of relief and a sense of achievement follow.
But something else also stirred, as I paused for a moment after closing the door, and wondered what that sensation I was experiencing was. I knew it was more than the success of getting them to bed on time. Rarely would I be thinking, “how do I make this more efficient at getting them to bed?” There was something else I could not identify.
When marriage ends, as with all separated parents I have to grapple with the fact I could not be in the children’s bedtime routines every night anymore. I missed my children on those nights when the children’s beds at my house were empty, and their teddy bears on the beds stared at me, reminding me of the warmth I wish was there but was not.
Over time, my longing and perspective began to change, as I started to adjust and see the separation through the children’s eyes. They still needed their routine, they needed someone they love to share it with, and they continued to have that every night with a parent and family in different households.
The change in perspective also came from my realisation that all parents, separated or not, at some stage reach the point where their children’s bedtime routine is no longer a part of the life they share. All children grow and eventually have their own lives. I was just grieving something all parents have to let go of eventually.
Realising that children’s bedtime routines eventually disappears for all of us made it matter even more to me, not less. It made me wonder why something so ordinary matters so much in the first place.
As a parent, I can think of the things I do as tasks. Getting the children to bed is a task. To do it, I need to solve problems: reduce arguments, side-step delays, create routines that take less time. I need to be competent at getting two boys to stick to schedules. The more skillful I am, the more success I have. When I succeed, I am rewarded with more time in the evening to relax or complete other tasks.
All that is useful, and important. But it doesn’t explain why I miss it, why I wish for it and look forward to it, why something is missing when it doesn’t happen. Something is in the bedtime experience that is much more than what it objectively looks like.
There are encounters, where we are present to one another. There is participation, where we enter each other’s lives and live those lives together. There is relationship–building, as parent and child, with trust, intimacy and care. We are embodied, with tired bodies, hugs, irritation, laughter, the kiss goodnight. There is meaning, where we interpret what is happening, we create memories, form identity, create stories, build hope. All that we do have consequences, that tonight came from yesterday and changes tomorrow. We practice, do it again and again, through actual actions rather than just thinking and talking about the routine. And through all of this there is formation, they are becoming who they are, and so am I.
All of it is dynamic, that makes human experiences human. It takes place in time. It involves dependence and vulnerability. We are always uncertain about what will actually happen. Every night is particular and irreversible. And eventually it ends.
I began to map this out for myself.
Image 1 The Nature of Human Experience: A map of core human experience that helps me think about the richness of my daily experiences, and helps me think appreciate my interactions with other people, even when the experiences and interactions are difficult.
Marriage separation also left me with stretches of time to myself without my children. Some of that time went into parenting in less visible ways—laundry, meal planning, reading school updates, fixing our home, finding places for us to go. But there was still time left.
I began exploring the online world my children were growing into. I had begun my career in technology, but years focused on work in aged care services and then fatherhood meant that the Internet I returned to was very different from the one I remembered.
And I began noticing how easy the digital world makes us see some things, and makes invisible other things. That world put spotlights on views, likes, followers, rankings, transformations, entertainment, productivity, wealth and accomplishments. Views can be counted. Transformation can be shown in a before-and-after reel. Wealth can be photographed. Entertainment can reach large audiences and across borders.
None of these things is necessarily inherently bad. They speak to our achievements. I know the satisfaction of hard work that leads to achieving something difficult.
But I kept thinking about bedtime routines. How does that fit in this picture of human life?
Family evenings would make terrible content. The routines are boring and repetitive. Nothing spectacular happens. Nobody wins. There are no big revelations. These things are difficult to count, commercialise or broadcast. From the outside, almost nothing is happening.
And yet I know how much the evenings matter, especially when they are not there.
Perhaps that is the problem. Are we mistaking the things that are easiest to see for the things that matter most?
Scottie Scheffler, golfer and multiple major championship winner, when he reached the pinnacle of his sport, openly wondered “what’s the point?” in a press conference. He did not dismiss his achievements. Winning brought tears to his eyes, and he described the sense of accomplishment from living out his dreams as special. But after finally winning the tournament that he had worked towards his whole life, the celebration lasted a few minutes. Then came the ordinary question: what are we going to eat for dinner? Life went on. As he said, “This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
Emma Chamberlain, one of the largest creators to emerge from YouTube, has spoken about a related problem. After years of documenting and posting about her life online, she wondered: “Am I even living for real life anymore? Yeah, I’m literally just doing things to film it.” She described having to reprioritise: “you have to learn how to live first, document second.” When almost anything we do can potentially go viral or build an audience, she said that it can be difficult to remember that “some things still have to be for me.”
Other large content creators have expressed similar sentiments. YouTuber Ali Abdaal has reflected on how a podcast he originally enjoyed gradually shifted “from the joy of conversation to the strategy of audience engagement, retention and growth”, until it became another platform producing content “for the sake of algorithms and audiences, for growth and monetisation.” Lilly Singh, another well-known content creator, described in an interview how views and subscriber counts became her definition of success: “It doesn’t matter what I’m making… you have to get those views.” Eventually she realised: “Numbers never fulfill you because there’s always a higher number.”
To me, perhaps the clearest person to articulate the sentiment is Lea Salonga. After a distinguished career on Broadway and musical theatre, she was asked in an interview what she would tell young people who wanted to follow her path. Her answer was, “Be a good human first and then a good artist second.” She explained that being a good artist is “entirely contingent, connected, integrated into the kind of person that you are.”
Perhaps we have become very good at recognising and celebrating the things that are visible from the outside — the artist, the winner, the creator, the success story—while ignoring the other things in human life that matters to us.
What are those things?
Our sense of belonging, being a part of our family and community, matters to us. We want to care for others and experience others caring for us. It matters to us that we contribute ie. to make a difference to something outside of ourselves. We value being curious and making discoveries. We want to express ourselves, to give form to what is inside us. Our play is important to us, to enjoy interaction with each other that doesn’t need outcomes. We want to experience beauty and wonder, to be moved by something we cannot describe. All of this can come together to form a sense of purpose, to give direction to our lives.
Image 2 What Matters in Human Life: A map of different things that are important in human life, that makes me appreciate the richness of what we pursue, especially those things that are less visible, less talked about, but still matters to us just as much.
I look at bedtime very differently to the way I did many years ago.
The children and I go through what we need to to get them to bed on time. The evening routine is the same, but every night countless unexpected things happen that make each night unique. We get there eventually.
As I sit beside their beds and tuck them in. I kiss them on their foreheads, and tell them I love them always.
I turn off the lights, close the doors. For a moment, as the door knob clicks, I pause.
And smile.
The Irreversibility of Life
Life is richer because what happened cannot unhappen
Aug 28, 2026
I had a conversation with my children near bedtime a few nights ago. I was trying to get all of us to bed on time. As time dragged on, they weren’t moving fast enough through their bedtime routines. I got caught up doing too many things myself and became impatient. The more stressed I became, the more stressed all of us became.
We needed to calm down, and somehow we did the opposite. The children did what children do and got more excited. My tone became firmer, in a way that made them listen to me even less. Everything took longer.
We got there in the end, but there were a lot of things I wish I had done and said differently.
You know how in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is a Time Stone, which allows us to reverse time, to go back and redo the past?
That’s what I wish sometimes, the superpower to go back and redo evenings like that.
It would be nice to reverse mistakes, and rewrite memories, so all of us came out happier. There are many evenings where things don’t go perfectly. They accumulate. They become a pattern that leaves a bad taste in life: the feelings of regret, the reminders of my inadequacies, and the accumulating fear that things will turn bad.
It would be nice to wish all that away.
But it is funny that I only want to reverse the events that turned out bad. I wouldn’t want to erase the things that turned out good.
If I reverse that evening, what happens to the rounds of singing we did together? I definitely don’t want those to change. I got a lot from the singing we did together, even though it wasn’t perfect.
That evening was not neatly divided into bits I want to keep, and bits I want to erase. It was all part of the one evening. Most evenings are like that.
If I remove the bad parts, what else also changes? What happens to all the ordinary bits that my kids and I build our relationship on?
Maybe tampering with bedtime events isn’t what I want superpowers for.
If I really did have time manipulation powers, what I really would want to use it for is so that my dad is still with us.
My dad passed away eight years ago. The boys were only two and four years old then, so whatever memories they have of him, if they have any at all, aren’t enough. I am sad about that, and most days I wish my dad were here again.
Technology offers strange imitations to that wish. I can create videos using AI with my dad talking about things I remember him saying to my children, things my children probably don’t remember. My dad once sat one of the boys on his lap and explained where his name came from. With technology, I can realistically recreate that scene.
I can put my dad into every family photo. I can clone his voice from recordings and have him speak to us again. As these technologies develop, we will be able to create experiences that reality does not allow us to have.
But technology cannot reverse time. It cannot give my children another moment on their granddad’s lap. It cannot give my dad a glimpse of what his grandchildren look like at 10 years old. It can only create fabrications based on traces of the past.
I don’t think my dad would want us to unravel the past. We have to let him go, and I think he’d want us to let him go. I think he would have wanted us to live our lives as they are now.
Part of that life is remembering him, wishing he were still here, sharing stories about him, and enjoying what he left us. The sadness of him being gone is part of our life now.
My boys discovered some old family photos on my phone recently. We sat together and went through those old photos and looked at what they were like when they were babies. As we jostled over each other trying to get close to the phone screen, we had a lot of laughs about how they used to stack up paper towels and knock them down for fun, how our old kitchen chairs have been replaced with a bench. Sometimes when we came across a photo with my dad, I paused a bit longer. I hugged my boys and they snuggled their faces into mine, and we smiled.
Memories make us rich.
People do leave us sometimes, but what they give us doesn’t leave with them.
Just as a difficult bedtime routine doesn’t erase the singing that happened that same evening, losing my dad doesn’t erase the life we had with him. It’s all remains part of our human experience.
We live a life where things that happened don’t unhappen. Perhaps that isn’t something I need superpowers or technology to fix.
On the Patio at Villa 27
The value of being human in an age of outcomes and optimisation
Aug 05, 2026
When I was a manager at a retirement village, there was a short period when I would go regularly over to Mr Sato’s house in Villa 27. I have known Mr Sato for many years, going through many stages of his ageing. When I started my regular visits, Mr Sato had recently lost his wife. He had dementia and was barely able to keep living independently in his house. With in-home support services however, he was still there.
We would chat for long periods, and he would usually tell me the same stories he told me the day before, and not remember that he had told me. I would tell him the same things I told him the day before, and there would be no signs he recalled I had already said them. We both would laugh at those stories, sometimes we would be sad about something in his past he regretted. On his patio, we spent many hours.
Each day when I leave his home to return to my work for the day, I would write in his notes that I had visited him. Besides dates and times, there was rarely anything new to add. I cannot determine that being with him helped his dementia, or slowed his decline. We talked about the same things, in almost exactly the same way. Most of the day’s occurrence would be wiped from his memory by the time I returned the next day.
And yet, I felt the visits was not a waste of time. It was what our relationship called for. It was when we recognise each other’s dignity as human beings.
I have told this story to many people before, and asked the question, “Did I waste my time with all those visits?” Almost universally the response is the same: of course those afternoons were worthwhile.
Yet when I asked why, we found it surprisingly difficult to come up with answers. If they achieved no clear outcomes, why did they feel so deeply worthwhile? It is one of those things I believe as humans we can feel and experience, but languages and words have not caught up with.
One possible reason for the anomaly is that we perhaps grew up learning to explain our actions by pointing to the results. Actions are justified by answers to questions like: What did we achieve? What did the actions produce? Did they make someone better?
Those are good questions. It lead us to many human advances. Most of the resources I enjoy is because people before me asked those questions.
But they are not the only questions human beings asks. The majority of human life is lived beyond those questions. During times when we sit with a dying parent, when we listen to a child who discovered something new, when we share a meal with someone, when we play music together, when we write in a journal no one else will read, or when we sit quietly with a cup of coffee.
These are times when optimising for an outcome is not the point. We live them, be present and immerse ourselves in the experience of encounters, relationships and formation.
Raising children is one area that requires an enormous amount of deliberate optimisation for outcomes. A parent has to ensure our children are safe, healthy, educated, and meeting development milestones. A lot of functional planning and actions go into organising schedules and attending appointment. We research schools and extra-curricular activities. We engineer opportunities for them to spend with their loved ones. We work on earning income, to budget and make wise decisions with their resources.
Raising children is like that. But I have also come to realise there is much more to the experience of parenting than that.
Recently I was driving my kids home after their weekly dance lesson, with them in the back seat. We knew where we were going. I knew how to drive. There was nothing to solve.
Somewhere behind me, they quietly picked up my phone and took this photograph.
I don’t remember what we talked about. Perhaps we hardly spoke at all. But they noticed the sunset the same time I did. They wanted to keep the moment. That’s now one of my favourite photographs.
I can’t point to what our car rides achieved, beyond the outcome of getting from point A to point B. It didn’t improve their grades. It didn’t make them healthier. It didn’t teach them measurable skills.
If we had a teleportation machine, would I have used it and got rid of the car rides? Most definitely not. The car rides were never merely about getting from one place to another.
I wonder if we have become so accustomed to asking about outcomes, we forget other questions:
What kind of human beings are we? What are we present for? What kind of people are we together?
Perhaps those ordinary moments are not interruptions to the life I am striving to accomplish. Perhaps they are my life.
Perhaps there is something in sitting with Mr Sato on the patio at Villa 27.
Note: The name Mr Sato and some identifying details, have been changed to protect the person’s privacy.
There Are Six Billion People in My Living Room
The Internet moved billions of strangers into our homes. How do we live together?
Jul 29, 2026
Both my mum and dad had nine siblings. I grew up in Malaysia in a large traditional Chinese extended family where weekends meant family banquets, birthdays, weddings, and children playing in packs.
My cousins and I organised ping-pong tournaments entirely within the family. Countless parents, uncles, aunties and grandparents helped us. We gathered and trained. We kept competition ladders. We held award ceremonies.
Family weddings routinely had guest lists in the hundreds. When we all gathered at my home to watch a movie on our small TV set, it was more like a theater crowd at the cinema than a family in a living room.
Looking back, I don’t remember anyone teaching me how to live with people. I just grew up surrounded by them.
When I was eighteen, I moved to Australia. Without realising it, the noise disappeared. Family and weekends became just my parents, my three siblings and me. There was a newfound sense of freedom, to be able to decide what to do without considering what the rest of the family was doing. For the first time, I could hear my own voice and be my own person. In that environment, I grew up and became the person I am now.
But something had quietly disappeared with that sense of freedom. I didn’t know what it was… for the next 30 years.
Over those 30 years I watched the Internet and then social media emerge. And I also became a father. It is when those two worlds collided, watching billions of people learn to live together online while simultaneously watching my children grow up, that forced me to ask the question:
What does it actually mean to live with other people?
For most of human history, the question of how we lived with other people had obvious answers. We learnt by growing up inside families, neighbourhoods, villages, schools, churches, sporting clubs and workplaces. There was no conscious study of how to live together. We absorbed that through ordinary interactions. You greet people when they arrive. You notice when someone is missing. You apologise when you hurt somebody. You congratulate people. You wait your turn. You forgive. You work through awkwardness because the same person will still be here tomorrow.
These tiny rituals were never particularly exciting. They were simply living life together.
Then, within a single generation, six billion people walked into our living room.
The Internet connected more than half of humanity into one shared space. We now have to learn how to live with one another at a scale no human civilisation in history has ever experienced.
The trouble is that our digital spaces weren’t really designed around living together. They were designed for competition, performance, consumption, transactions, and attention.
Even many of our kindest online interactions become performances. We perform parenting. We perform caring. We perform belonging.
We forget the feeling of being around someone. It is a lot easier to see a person as part of a label: an audience, followers, customers, creators, content. It is surprisingly easy to encounter thousands or millions of people every day by considering them as one “audience”. We forget how to simply be with another human being.
That missing piece that stuck with me since leaving Malaysia finally became clear to me. Beyond the banquets and the large family and the ping-pong tournaments, what I was missing was practice.
For eighteen years I had practised living with people. Without knowing it, my family had been giving me daily exercises in being human. Every gathering, there were invitations. People arrived. People left. Someone cooked. Someone washed dishes. Children fought and adults stepped in. Someone became sick. Someone died. Someone got married. Someone graduated. Someone sat beside me watching a movie.
Someone also said clumsy things… a lot! Someone made an insensitive joke. Someone boasted a little too much. When that happened, in my family an older aunt changed the subject, or an uncle laughed and let it go. Someone quietly gave another person the benefit of the doubt. Somehow, the room turned small sparks into background noise of a family that cares for everyone.
As a child, I absorb all of it without ever calling it a lesson.
Looking around online now, I wonder if we sometimes misunderstand what social media is for. There is a saying, “Content is king!”, ie. the videos, photos, livestreams, articles, comments. But perhaps the media content isn’t the point, or even the product at all.
Perhaps the content is simply the excuse to have a situation where we get to practise being human.
Do I make room for someone else?
Do I celebrate another person’s success without needing to redirect attention back to myself?
Do I stay when conversations are uncomfortable?
Do I acknowledge another person’s dignity with ordinary words of “hello”, “thank you”, or “I’m sorry”?
Do I exercise restraint when I could easily score points? Is this the moment to be gracious?
Do I invite someone in? Or quietly show them out?
These are the practices of civilisation. Civilisation needs millions of tiny daily rituals repeated over and over again to sustain itself, more than it needs grand ideas.
At this point I find myself strangely hopeful. Sure, the Internet has exposed humanity’s worst instincts: the divisions, the outrage, the need to perform extremes. But it has also created the greatest opportunity in history to practise our best instincts. Every comment is a chance to welcome someone. Every disagreement is an opportunity to remain present. Every livestream becomes a place where strangers learn, however briefly, what it feels like to belong.
Online, we like to spend time debating what social media is, arguing whether it is good or bad. Perhaps the more important question and the simpler one is: six billion people have walked into our living room. How shall we live together?
Because one day my children will inherit that living room. More than any assets or advanced technology we build for them, I hope they inherit the ordinary habits of living with other people.
The Privilege of Listening
The Internet taught me how to speak. It took thirty years to learn how to listen.
Jul 25, 2026
We’ve won.
For years, those of us who grew up silent fought for the capacity to speak. We have that now. Open any social media app, any group chat, any comment section, any livestream, and we have the ability to say what we want to say, and have that available to a lot of people.
Think back to 30 years ago, before the Internet, before social media. Back then, the only way I could express what I wanted to express was to say it to my little sister… and even then she could just go hide in her room and lock the door behind her.
Now there is no barrier. I can turn on a livestream and I can speak to the public. I can record a song, dance, perform on a global stage. I can talk about the latest news and give my opinions. I can put up a video to teach people something I just learnt. My voice is as loud and as far-reaching as I want it to be. That applies to the vast majority of us.
This is when we realise we don’t just want to be able to say what we want to say. What we actually want is to be heard. We yearn for someone to listen.
30 years on, I am still speaking and my sister’s door is still shut.
In the early 1990’s, while studying Computer Science at university, I recall the euphoria brought on by being able to reach people through emails, share on public bulletin boards (BBS), and put pages up on the World-Wide-Web. After that, the social platforms started to emerge: SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace, etc. They were built for connection. We could make profiles. We added people we knew. We sent messages back and forth. In our slow and clumsy way, we began to speak online, and we listened to people who spoke back.
Then came Facebook and Twitter. When the events of Arab Spring happened, we thought social platforms had arrived and we could finally hear voices from around the world.
However, just as we found our voices, we stopped caring about whether anyone was heard. We discovered that profit came from more talking and less listening.
In early to mid 2010’s, the feed arrived, along with the now familiar infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms. The side of the Internet that listened got quietly rebuilt so that we didn’t listen, we just consumed. We couldn’t sell ads or products with listening, but we could with scrolling. As consumers, we were more likely to stay, to react, to buy.
Without anyone quite deciding it, conversations and connections turned into consumption. Hardly anyone noticed the difference.
And the strategy worked. Everyone who wanted a voice got one. Everyone got a platform and channel. The brands, the politicians, the athletes, the entertainers, the parents, the fifteen-year-olds… your neighbour, me. Everyone can talk now. Everyone is talking.
But if everyone is speaking, who is listening?
The unsettling truth for me is that not many people are listening.
There’s a rule-of-thumb online (the “90-9-1 rule”) that says roughly 90% of people never post at all. They sit silently and lurk. Somewhere along the way we were trained to take in what is given, and move on to the next thing. We were never taught that we can actively listen to what is in our feed.
For a while I thought the answer was to leave the feed behind, and move to more private messaging apps. The Discord servers, the WhatsApp groups, the Slack teams. I joined many, built a few of my own. I find it hard to justify that they are significantly better. Their features were geared towards the amount of messages sent, minutes spent, notifications tapped. They are remarkably similar to social media, just in smaller spaces.
So I went further and signed up to accounts on community platforms like Circle and Mighty Networks. These platforms were explicitly promoted as doing community better than social media. I find again features to help me talk more, from better comments, faster chat, smarter introductions, to prompts to keep posting.
We have spent thirty years building infrastructure for speaking. Nobody has built the infrastructure for listening. Nobody asks, did anyone actually feel heard?
Is it that as a society, we dont know how to listen? That can’t be so. I don’t believe it is so. There are many community builders who are excellent at listening. There is an abundant amount of beautiful work on listening, but they are found in off-line dialogue circles, in work surrounding conflict resolution, and in old community organising. Very little has been adapted to suit online communications.
Our lesson from social media is that the resources available for listening are not naturally going to be adapted and adopted. Communication platforms we build naturally drift back toward talking, because listening doesn’t pay. If listening is going to survive, someone has to intentionally practice it.
To me, listening isn’t one skill. It is a handful of small, unglamorous habits. I am nowhere near mastering them, but I try. What I noticed is that listening asks of me to do the opposite of almost everything the Internet trained me to do. These include to wait instead of react, to receive-and-hold instead of reply, to stay curious about what someone meant, to stop and evaluate my own assumptions about people.
As I form those habits, I came to some particular practices that seem to work better online than offline:
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- Give people their words back. We are so used to others online speaking over us that we usually notice when someone is actually engaging in what we said, rather than using it as an excuse to say something else. If I understood someone, I should be able to say it in a way that sounds like them, not like me.
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- Stay in it when someone is annoyed with me. It is easy to listen to people who like you. The harder version is staying present with someone who doesn’t, without needing to defend myself. Sometimes, the act of staying brings the source of tension to the surface, and we discover something about ourselves and each other we would not have a chance to discover.
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- Do the small homework before I answer. A minute spent trying to understand where someone is coming from, before I reply, changes my perspectives and what I say, almost every time.
The more I listen, the more I realise that the point of public online spaces is the privilege of listening.
That privilege comes in different forms.
Recently, someone found their way into my social media comments[note1] while carrying the stresses from a lifetime of loss, harm, and of just trying to survive one thing after another. And now, finally, finding someone who loves her but couldn’t yet let herself believe she deserved it. I could tell it took her a long time to write it all down and send it. It was beyond me to fix any of it. I told her I read every word, and I thanked her for those words. I tried to give her back what she’d said, in her own words. What she chose to share with me was a gift in itself.
Another person left a comment about her mum, who had died, and what her mother meant to her. I didn’t know what to say back. Some things don’t have a reply that helps. I lit a candle for her mother, and devoted a moment of silence to her, and sent her a message about it. Just a way of saying I heard her, and I’m sitting with what she shared, for a moment.
These are gifts that only come from listening.
After 30 years, perhaps I should stop trying to talk my sister out of opening her door, and instead start listening so that she opens the door herself.
And perhaps my children, who watch me, will keep their doors open too.
Public Safe Spaces
On vulnerability, strangers, and what safety actually is
Jun 20, 2026
How safe are you online, especially when you are vulnerable?
This is an essay about something I do regularly on social media, that is: share my vulnerabilities in a public space, alongside others who also have vulnerabilities. In this essay, I want to talk about safety. What does it mean to share safely? Can I be safe? Who is safe and who is not?
Usually when we talk about safety online, we talk about a space free from harm, a place with walls where we can keep harm out. Safe spaces are almost always not public. There is a protected area. There is a gate. Bad actors can’t come in. We have rules and policies and moderators. Safety means being in or out of this area.
All that is fine as something to work towards. But being around people all my life, I notice that something is off with this picture. Because people can always jump over walls. It is very hard to tell who is a bad actor to keep out. Sometimes someone who is good today behaves badly tomorrow, and then is wonderful again the day after. Do we keep them out?
And when we bring vulnerability into the picture, we hit on a very difficult fact to swallow: vulnerable people are a threat to each other. A person living with anxiety is a threat to a child. A child who is immature is a threat to someone who is frail. A person who is frail and talking about end of life is a threat to someone with suicidal ideation. If we try to create a truly protected space for one vulnerable person, we almost have to throw out everyone else with vulnerabilities. We are living a myth, that we can have a protected space filled with perfect people who can bring no harm to someone who is vulnerable.
So for me, instead of looking at safety as what to keep out, I look at safety as what is present that is protective. Safety is defined by what is here that brings flourishing, things like trust, belonging, love, hope, grace, compassion and kindness. And when I look at it that way, I realise the primary responsibility for safety begins with me. Until I am safe, until I bring trust and love and hope and grace and compassion, I cannot ask my child to work on being safe. If I am not safe for you, I cannot ask whether you are safe for the next person.
Safety is mine to bring to wherever I am. It is relational, between all of us here together.
Harm may happen because you and I are imperfect. We work to prevent it and minimise it. But what ultimately protects us is what we bring to each other as people.
For three years now I have been posting my thoughts on social media. Some of them are about my vulnerabilities. At first they were minor things, little mistakes in daily life. As I became more comfortable, I posted about deeper vulnerabilities: depressive episodes, my receding hairline, my incontinence problems. In recent times, I asked you to share vulnerabilities you are comfortable sharing, knowing I cannot fix them. I wondered if anyone would respond to that. And you did, in large volume, about pain, and exhaustion, wanting to know if someone would notice you.
The comment sections of those videos became spaces where our vulnerabilities meet. And in that space, I felt safe.
I wonder why I feel safe there. I still wonder.
Is it because of reflection, that we look into our own vulnerabilities instead of prying into another person’s?
Is it because we have the time to let things sit and percolate, and transform into something else?
Is it because I am a parasocial presence, a stranger you have some familiarity with, but who has no ties to your family, friends, or life?
Is it because the comments are hidden away, free from the algorithm, and don’t get amplified? Is it like a secret corner in a cafe – public, but also warm and cosy, somewhere nobody goes unless they are sharing?
What is it that brings the experience of trust, hope, compassion, and kindness that gives us the sense of safety?
It is a mystery I still wonder about.
As I wonder, I recall my friend Wayne, and my memories of him on the streets of Brisbane where we met.
Wayne at one stage in his life had a stable home with family, and at other times struggled and slept rough in the city streets. He had an alcohol problem, a busted knee and a body full of injuries from years of rough living.
When he was at home with family, by our usual standards, he was safe there. But under that roof, he could not support the family he loved, and they could not support him. He had four walls that kept out the storms from outside, but could not keep out the storms that brewed inside him every day.
At the stages when he was on the streets, people knew him. At the community kitchen where he volunteered as chef, he had purpose. When we were together on nights he was cooking for a hundred people, he had hope. He is kind, and help others who were also caught on the streets as he was. With the people of that inner city community who knew him, he had belonging.
Whether Wayne was safe depended entirely on who he was with. With a crowd that was wary of his tattered clothes and crooked leg, who asked of him what he could not give, who he made demands of that they could not satisfy, he was unsafe. With those of us who welcomed him, who accepted his contributions and his kindness, and who worked through our own imperfections alongside his, he was safe.
Wayne died twelve years ago.
Today, when I walk through the streets of Brisbane, I see a little bit of him in everyone. I look at the person walking past me and I ask: what would make this person safe right now? What am I bringing to this moment?
And when I am on TikTok and YouTube and the streets we call social media, I ask the same question.
Safety is not what four walls and a set of rules can give us. It is what we bring, what we carry with us, and what we are willing to receive from each other.
So are we safe on social media? I feel safe. Do you?