The world is like a swimming pool… It has a shallow end comprised of virtue signals, yelling masses that become background noise, political stances that gut friendships. It has a deep end, where people leave the yelling masses and actually care for one another in real ways… Tangible ways. Where yelling at a deaf institution is recognized as futile.
From the deep end, the shallow is loud. Not just in volume, but in spectacle. It thrashes with fluorescent rage, like kids splashing water just to be seen, not to swim. Everything’s performative. Everything’s about being perceived as good. Empathy has been replaced with algorithms. Intent has drowned in optics. What used to be a place where people learned to float has become a dumping ground of wreckage… plastic crusades, choreographed grief, and outrage rented by the hour.
And yet, the deep end remains. Quiet. Heavy. Unbothered by applause. It’s where eye contact still means something, where love doesn’t tweet, and where protest isn’t a hashtag but a midnight grocery drop-off for a neighbor too proud to ask. The deep end doesn’t argue with the shallow… it just watches. Watches the noise spin its own cycles. Watches people scream into mirrors and think they’ve spoken to someone.
There is a line, invisible but cold, that runs between protest and meaning. One performs in front of others. The other shows up when no one’s looking. Hope is often mistaken for progress. Protest is often mistaken for sacrifice. Real acts of meaning don’t announce themselves. They don’t wear matching shirts. They don’t hold signs. They hold hands, and groceries, and trauma that isn’t theirs… because someone has to.
Sometimes it feels like everyone wants to fight the system, but no one wants to sit with a person who’s actually been broken by it. They want to tear down statues but not clean up after a suicide. They want to scream into the sky but can’t knock on the door next to theirs. It’s not that the world is shallow… it’s that we’ve started celebrating the shallow as if it were sacred. As if yelling loud enough replaces building anything worth keeping.
From the deep end, you stop trying to pull people in. You just stay there. You become a weight, a center. You love different. You speak different. And you stop needing credit. Because when you’ve touched the bottom, you don’t care who’s watching anymore.
You just want to make sure someone else doesn’t drown.
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