Dina-Perla Portnaar: It serves no purpose
There’s a peculiar kind of exhaustion surrounding human conversation these days.
In emails, meetings, news reports, customer service interactions, and even personal exchanges, we increasingly encounter language designed to function immediately. Correctly phrased. Swift. Frictionless. As though no time may ever again be wasted on hesitation, searching for words, or silence.
Perhaps this is precisely what a world that never stops does to human beings. A world in which presence itself is gradually rendered inefficient.
Consider a small act of kindness.
A museum security guard notices someone standing in front of the same painting for far too long. The lights have already been dimmed. The cleaning staff are waiting. And yet, the guard doesn’t approach to announce that the museum is closing. Instead, he remains at the other end of the room and briefly looks away, as though he has seen nothing.
An almost invisible gesture. One that nobody will remember, either.
It serves no purpose.
And yet, there’s something remarkable about such a decision. One human being allows another a little more time to exist outside the logic of schedules, circulation, and closing hours.
Perhaps small acts of kindness begin precisely with decisions of this kind.
Not with grand gestures or public morality, but with the interruption of a system that is perpetually moving forward. With the antichrist of perfect efficiency.
After all, an increasing number of human activities are being judged according to the same criteria: speed, clarity, productivity, and scalability.
Even creativity can barely escape this logic. Artists learn to produce for algorithms. Students grow accustomed to texts in which no thought is ever allowed to struggle towards its own expression.
Condolences can be generated. Love letters are endlessly refined. Answers appear faster than questions can fully take shape.
Perhaps the technology itself matters less than the mindset it reveals. A civilisation that is beginning to experience every form of delay as a defect.
When, in fact, it is precisely within such delays that much of what makes us human comes into being.
A doctor who, during a video call with family members, does not immediately fill the silence when someone begins to cry.
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A teacher who chooses not to correct a student straight away, but first tries to understand why their writing feels so empty.
A friend who does not immediately offer comfort, but remains seated long enough to resist the urge to organise someone else’s despair out of existence.
None of these moments is efficient.
They cost time, concentration, and sometimes discomfort.
Perhaps that’s why they’re gradually disappearing from view.
One of the strangest developments of our time, however, is that language increasingly sounds perfect while people simultaneously feel less and less heard.
As though correctness and presence are beginning to drift apart. As though words are losing their traces of vulnerability.
A clumsy sentence, in which someone visibly struggles to find the right words, can sometimes contain more humanity than a perfectly formulated response.
Because genuine attention is rarely seamless.
It stumbles. It waits. Sometimes, it loses its way for a moment.
Perhaps this also explains why certain small moments can move us unexpectedly. Because, within them, someone briefly escapes the economic logic that has come to permeate almost everything.
Someone decides not to move on immediately. Not to bring everything to a conclusion. Not to seal every moment of silence with language that serves a purpose.
For mercy has little in common with our contemporary obsession with optimisation.
Mercy accelerates nothing and scales poorly. It is difficult to measure. In a sense, mercy is even a refusal to approach human beings as though their value were exhausted by their functionality.
This makes mercy almost subversive in our time.
In a world that produces answers at ever greater speeds, small acts of kindness may well begin with those who are still willing to lose time for one another.
Not to solve anything.
But simply to prevent other people from disappearing altogether.
To remain present long enough to feel, in the most fundamental sense, that other human beings are alive.
