The Mercy of Being Online

The internet has become our collective nervous system, transmitting signals of joy, outrage, and curiosity across billions of human minds. Yet for all its connective power, we often find ourselves feeling more isolated than ever. This paradox—of being simultaneously more connected and more alone—defines our digital era.

When we log on, we enter a space where time compresses and expands in strange ways. A tweet from five years ago can suddenly resurface with renewed relevance, while today's trending topic might be forgotten by tomorrow. This temporal fluidity creates a unique kind of mercy: the mercy of perpetual reinvention.

Online, we are granted the ability to craft and recraft our identities, to experiment with different voices, to find communities that understand parts of ourselves we've kept hidden in our physical lives. For many, this has been genuinely liberating—a chance to express truths that local geography or circumstance might have otherwise suppressed.

But this mercy comes with a cost. The same mechanisms that allow us to reinvent ourselves also fragment our attention and commodify our engagement. We become products in a marketplace of ideas, our worth measured in likes, shares, and follows. The algorithms that connect us also shape us, nudging our behavior in ways both subtle and profound.

Perhaps the greatest mercy of being online is the permission it gives us to be incomplete. In physical spaces, we often feel pressure to present a coherent, consistent self. Online, we can be contradictory, evolving, unfinished. We can share a half-formed thought and let others help us develop it. We can admit uncertainty and find others navigating the same questions.

This incompleteness mirrors the internet itself—a vast, ever-expanding network that resists finality. There is always another link to follow, another perspective to consider, another conversation to join. The internet refuses to be finished, and in doing so, it grants us permission to remain works in progress ourselves.

As we navigate this strange digital landscape, perhaps we should embrace both its mercies and its challenges. We can acknowledge the ways it has expanded our horizons while remaining critical of its excesses. We can appreciate the communities it has enabled while working to make those communities more humane and just.

The mercy of being online isn't just about what the internet gives us—it's about what we make of it together. It's about the cultures we create, the norms we establish, and the futures we imagine. In this collective project, we find not just connection, but the possibility of transformation.