Do You Need a Reading, or Are You Looking for a Shortcut?

A white truck merged onto the highway last week and plowed straight into my lane. My son was in the car. There was a gap behind me and cars ahead. A semi sat on the other side, so I had nowhere to go. He could have slowed down and merged in behind me where there was room. He chose not to.

Three saved seconds mattered more to that man than whether my son made it home safe. That’s the kind of disregard I keep seeing everywhere now, not just on the highway.

I ride a motorcycle, and these days I’m scared to take it clear across town. Drivers are on their phones, going twenty over the limit, distracted. I’ve had people cut me off on purpose, close enough that I know it wasn’t an accident. Somewhere along the way we stopped weighing anyone else’s life against our own convenience. It isn’t because we lost the ability to care. We just stopped choosing to use it. The moment can be life or death or barely worth mentioning. The failure underneath it is exactly the same size every time.

Even Family Gets This Treatment

This doesn’t start on a highway. It starts smaller, and it starts at home. Nobody sits down and decides to stop calling their family. It just gets easier to send a text than to pick up the phone. Easier to like a photo than to ask how somebody’s day really was. The drift is so gradual, nobody can point to the day it started.

Some of that is probably social media. We’ve spent years training our brains to expect the next thing instantly. No waiting, no friction, no work required to get what we want. Swipe, and there’s the answer. Scroll, and there’s the next hit of whatever kept you scrolling in the first place. It would be strange if that mindset didn’t bleed into how we treat the people closest to us.

One small convenience over one small effort, repeated enough times. That’s how a family drifts apart without anybody deciding to leave. It’s also how it spreads. What starts as choosing a text over a phone call doesn’t stay contained to family. It becomes the model for every other relationship, every stranger, every person whose need is inconvenient to notice.

It Shows Up Everywhere

I’ve asked for help in stores and gotten flat out ignored. Other times I get what I needed, but not without a sigh big enough to make the point. Apparently asking someone to do their job makes me the inconvenience. Showing up is treated like it should be enough, gratitude expected for the bare minimum. Ask for anything further and you get a look that says you asked for too much.

Restaurants aren’t different. Servers who won’t check on a table, who you have to flag down for a refill or a condiment. They’ll stand in the back on their phones, or talk to a coworker, instead of doing the job they were hired to do.

Then there’s the version that costs someone something real. I’ve seen a woman with kids broken down on the side of the road, trying to change a tire herself. Cars pass. A police cruiser drives by more than once and never stops to ask if she needs help. I’ve seen people watch a fight happen in public and do nothing, not step in, not call anyone, just watch. Plenty of people will film it. Fewer people help an elderly person load their groceries into the car these days, and it isn’t because nobody notices. It’s because noticing doesn’t come with an obligation anymore.

Taking More Than You Earned

On the other end of it, everyone’s become a professional barterer. Agree to a price, pay it, then decide afterward that dissatisfaction is worth arguing over. Somewhere along the way we learned that complaining hard enough gets you a discount or a refund you didn’t earn. People want something for nothing, or they pay for something and find a way to get part of it back anyway. The system rewards the argument more than it rewards the honest transaction.

The same instinct shows up online with nothing to lose. Someone leaves a review meant to hurt a business, not because the business failed them, but because they disagree with something about it. Its values, its politics, its owner, doesn’t matter which. There’s no accountability attached to typing something cruel from behind a screen. No name gets remembered, no face gets seen, no consequence follows the person home. It gives people permission to be as mean as they want. The internet was built without a way to hold anyone to what they say on it.

Nobody Wants to Own Their Part

Blame is the same convenience, turned inward. Relationships can fall apart. Jobs don’t always work out. Parents and children sometimes wind up estranged. Whoever’s in it rarely stops to consider the part their own choices played in getting them there.

We all play a part in our circumstances. No one person is ever fully responsible.
Owning that is harder than handing it to someone else. It’s always easier to point at what the other person did than to sit with what you didn’t do. The effort you skipped. The conversation you avoided. Easier is what this whole thing has become about, and blame is just easier than reflection.

The Spell You Asked For

This same thing shows up in my own work, and it’s usually shaped like a request for a spell. Someone wants me to fix a dilemma for them. Force a person to feel something they don’t. Make somebody come back who left. I won’t do it, and it’s not because I can’t.

Could I read my partner, or my son, and use what I get to sway what they do or say? Possibly, but that takes their free will and replaces it with mine. That’s the same call the white truck made when he decided my son’s safety mattered less than him being in a rush. Someone else’s autonomy isn’t a convenience I get to override because I want a specific outcome.

Making a wish and blowing out a candle. Adding herbs to a soup to help someone who’s sick. All of that is intention focused on a result. None of it replaces what a person has to build the traditional way. Trial and error. Learning someone’s triggers and expectations. Spending real time and real attention on a person instead of finding a shortcut around them. That’s where accountability comes from. That’s where patience and discipline come from. No workaround gives you any of that. It gives you instant gratification, then the disappointment when it doesn’t land the way you wanted.

My Own House

I’m not writing this from outside of it. I’ve done the same thing under my own roof. There have been stretches where my attention went to the blog, to what needed posting next, to whatever was due that week. The people who keep my life running got whatever was left over. It’s easier to focus on a task than to be present with someone who already knows you love them, so you assume they’ll understand.

They shouldn’t have to assume. I’m working on saying it and showing it more often, instead of leaving it implied the way a text with no context leaves the tone up for guessing.

None of this reverses in one grand gesture. It didn’t erode that way, and it won’t rebuild that way either. It comes back the same way it left, one small choice at a time, until choosing it stops being the exception and starts being the default again.

Effort isn’t reserved for the hard days. Most of the erosion happens on the ordinary ones, the days nothing is wrong, so nothing feels urgent enough to show up for. It’s the choice to slow down and let someone merge instead of closing the gap. It’s the choice to sit through what a reading asks of a person instead of handing them an ending they didn’t earn. Same choice, showing up everywhere, every day. No spell required for any of it. Just you, deciding today that somebody else’s life, wishes, or free will are worth more than what you’d save by ignoring them.