On Slop, Sadness, and Shared Humanity

Any given Monday at the jail contains no small number of sadnesses. I feel sad when I see grown men and women who can barely read. Sad when I see inmates being yelled at. Sad when I hear loud crude conversations out the door as the inmates make their way to chapel. Sad when I read incident reports. Sad when I hear stories of the damage inflicted by damaged people. Sad when I see inmates whose birth years are earlier than my kids’. Sad when I hear people tell me that jail is the only place where they feel safe from themselves and their addictions. Sad when I hear about the casual chaos and violence in which so many lives are (mal)formed.

Yesterday’s sadness was time related. The guys had come down late due to a scheduling mix-up. So, we had less time than usual. We were just getting into some fairly meaningful sharing. One guy, in particular, was kind of baring his soul, speaking quite vulnerably about a long and painful journey, talking about how God had met him in a very dark place. He was part way through his story when the door mechanically opened, which is a signal that time is up. The guard is outside waiting. The guy started speaking faster, and faster. He wanted to get to the end of the story. Some guys nervously started shuffling, making to stand up, glancing at the guard. I did the same. I tried to give the guy some visual cues to wrap it up. People started standing up and he did, too. But he kept talking, words tumbling out of his mouth. He finished his story as we were stacking the plastic chairs, as half the guys were already out the door.

And it made me sad. How I wished we had simply had time for this guy to tell his story. To not feel like had to race to get it out in time. To not look up and see people leaving while he was just getting to the important part.

Recently I have been noticing that this is a common experience. And not just in the jail. So often, I sense people racing to get a story or a thought or an opinion or an anecdote out before the window of opportunity closes. So many people are used to nobody listening. To being ignored or interrupted or shouted down. To having people scrolling on their phones while half-listening. To having to compete with a bloated and distorted communication ecosystem where everyone is always busy “connecting” online, but nobody is really listening to actual human stories in anything resembling human time.

This morning, I read a truly terrifying article by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. It’s about how degraded online life has become and how AI is making it infinitely worse. He talks about how ours is becoming a culture of “slop”:

This is how it feels to live in the golden age of slop, a catchall word used to describe the spammy quality of easy-to-generate AI material. I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species…

Booksellers have spent the past two years battling a deluge of both AI slop rip-off books and chatbot-generated book reviews on retail sites such as Amazon. There is “code slop.” In corporate life, “workslop” abounds in the form of bad emails, slide decks, and lifeless memos; teachers everywhere are drowning in academic slop, to such an extent that some are rewriting their curricula. There’s slop in your Spotify playlists and on TikTok and probably in your group chats. Some of YouTube’s most-subscribed-to channels are full of automated slop… There is no realm of life that is unsloppable.

All of this exacts a fuzzy psychological toll. To live through this moment is to feel that some essential component of our shared humanity is being slowly leached out of the world…

At its core, slop invites a kind of nihilism into all aspects of our life…. Its infrastructure of meaninglessness makes the very act of creating something of meaning almost irrelevant.

This article sent an honest-to-God shiver down my spine. What a world we are creating for ourselves and for generations to come. A world where we spend our days mindlessly scrolling through AI generated slop engineered to keep us tethered to our devices and to make obscenely wealthy corporations even wealthier. A world where we increasingly can’t tell the difference between what is real and what isn’t (and often don’t much care). A world where the vulgar and the stupid and the titillating and the sensational and the outrageous inevitably float to the top of the slop pond.

How can actual human stories compete with this? How will we ever (re)learn how to listen to one another when our attention spans have been shorn down to the length of a reel on Instagram? From where will we find the patience and the discipline to attend well to one another when we have been hijacked by algorithms designed to batter our brains with automated garbage and to incentivize our worst instincts and proclivities? How will we connect with the true meaning of our lives in an infrastructure of meaninglessness?

One of the best things about the jail is that there are no phones allowed. Some of the guys even tell me that it can be a relief not to have a phone. They are forced to read a book or draw a picture or write a letter (like, an actual letter on paper that is put into an envelope with a stamp) to a loved one. Or to listen to each other. This, too, does happen, despite the time constraints at any given chapel service. On the unit, there is plenty of time, if not always the permission to speak about spiritual things that being in chapel can grant.  The question—for the inmates and for all of us—is how will we use it? Will we give each other space to speak? Or will we communicate—subtly or not so subtly—that we’re all on the clock, so get a move on? There’s slop to attend to.

As I was leaving the chapel yesterday, one of the inmates put a piece of paper in my hands. It was from another inmate who I had gotten to know in previous weeks, who told me he had written a song that he wanted me to read, and who had now been transferred to another institution. He was yet another guy who always seemed to have more to say than the people around him had time for. He had a big heart and a huge smile.

The paper was crinkly and rough. Something had clearly been spilled on it at least once. I opened it up and read these words:

Like a lamb that’s lost,
I ran away from the Shepherd’s calling
But to what cost?
I dug a hole and kept on falling
The world’s promise a cruel mistress
that doesn’t keep you warm come wind or rain.
Call the Father’s name, a shelter from the storm.

I smiled as I thought of the guy who wrote this. I prayed that he would indeed find shelter from the storm. And perhaps someone with the time and shared humanity to listen well.