I have always felt a connection with “Message in a Bottle” as I think many who felt like they haven’t been listened to do. My entire life I have felt that people have not been listening to me, or more broadly people who are like me. This should not come as a great revelation here on my blog.
This song though is especially relevant now, however. Look at the millions of blogs out there, Instagrams, X, Reddits, Threads, and whatever else out there that are filled with people making revealing posts about their lives and how they aren’t going as they hoped or planned. Millions, I not billions, of people throwing their metaphorical messages in a bottle out into the great ocean that is the Internet.
They are feeling alone even though they are not. They are desperate for anything that will help them improve their lives. Many of them are not receiving the help that they need but some of them are receiving something that feels like help to them but in fact is making their lives worse.
I’m not going to talk about the people who are turning to artificial intelligences for therapies, there was just recently a good article in The Economist which talked about that. I’m not even going to talk about the people who have been radicalized on platforms such as Roblox or the sounding boards like Telegram and 4Chan. There’s great writing on those too.
No, I want to talk about the people that I’ve tried to help through the Internet and how in turn they have helped me. Unlike governments, I do not have enough money to grant a universal basic income, nor am I rich enough to help people find a place to live or help them buy a needed piece of medical equipment. I though have picked up those bottles and read the messages in side. I did it with my friends in person at university, I did it camping, I’ve done it with complete strangers while sitting in bus stations.
I did give one man in a bus station my cheap compass and showed him how to use it after he told me that he needed to get across the country and was terrible at direction-finding. I hope he made it.
The vast majority of the listening that I have engaged in has been in virtual spaces and mostly in text. Is this real help? Sometimes. Sometimes all we need is someone to listen to us, to help us talk through our decisions, to provide a different perspective. Sometimes they just need help finding resources. Sometimes people just need someone to rant around so they feel heard.
I have been all that. It’s not easy and you can hear a lot of things that you might rather not hear. People can reveal a lot of a perfect stranger that they might not reveal to family members or their own therapists under certain circumstances.
I know from my own personal experience that listening to and caring for people you meet online, and may never meet in person, is risky and not for everyone. How do I know this? It nearly cost me my first university career, twice. So, I can say from personal experience that if you have unresolved issues yourself, it can make them worse. Handling other people’s stresses can bring you more stress and anxiety. It may even drag you into your own fragile state, depression or even worse. It’s not for everyone but I believe that we would all be better off if more of us listened just a little more.
One of the best pieces of advice that my father gave me was, “Always listen more than you speak.” This advice he really should have followed himself more often but how many people are good at following their own advice? I certainly am not.
My hope is that through my listening to people, I have helped a little.
Attempting to help just a bit more is why I join with organizations like Virtual Ability. Even online communities can be a big help for some people and even the helpers at times need help.
Long before I earned a masters degree in communication, I studied how people communicated. I think thanks to my father’s advice. In part I think that this is one reason why I have been paying attention to government for so long Most people don’t really consider the messages they send out unless they work in marketing, politics or public relations.
I try to link these posts to the songs themselves in other ways, especially if I can link it back to my short years working for the concert promotion company. However, at the moment I don’t have any connections to the Police or this song.
When I was considering this song though I started thinking about concert contracts. In the early 2000’s when I started working at the company, I was the gopher that took these hundred page contracts to FedEx to be mailed to the subcontractors. I liked to joke that we alone kept FedEx in business with all the paper we moved. Finally we started receiving and sending contracts by email but still people printed them out because all these old people found it easier to mark up a contract by hand. Then at some point 7 to 10 years in the future, some lucky like me had to sit there and feed all these contract copies into the shredder.
Concert contracts were a message in a bottle of a different sort. They’re the kind that screams for attention, demands the absolute best of everything and makes it sound as if the entire deal will be tossed out the window If you can’t provide 3 cases of three different brands of imported bottled water. We three would sit there with red pens in hand, striking out whole paragraphs with a kind of sadistic glee at times. You need 3 bars on the ceiling and two pots for pyrotechnics? Sorry, not at are venue. You only get two ceiling racks and no pyro. See how you like that.
ZZ-Top took the gig anyway.
To bring it around again, please do your best to pick up a bottle now and then and listen to the message inside, even if you’re sending out your own. Even if you’re not able to actually help someone at the moment, just providing an ear at the right time can be a little help and maybe sometime in the future they will be able to help you.
I am not a person who believes in karma but I do believe in effort. If you make an effort to change the world in positive ways, some people will notice and at least attempt to help you in a positive way.
Of course there are people who are negative and who will attempt to harm or distract people who act positively but remember that this too is a message in a bottle.
