Zennui of the Ineffable

“Me and my emergency contact always in the same emergency together” coded photo

The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign. Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately. Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s. The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants. Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept." They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans. If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.

On beaches around the world, shells have declined by 60-70% over the last few decades. Hermit crabs are left to live in our trash. A 30-year study in southwest Florida documented the shell loss as tourism rose 300%. Researchers found no other factor that could explain the drop. The cause was tourists, picking up one shell at a time. 30% of wild hermit crabs are already wearing shells that are too small for them. In spring, when crabs grow fastest, that number jumps to 60%. Crabs without proper shells get killed by predators, can't reproduce, or fight each other for the few good shells left. Collecting shells, rocks, and driftwood is illegal in US National Parks and most state beaches. The reasoning is what the data shows: at the scale of millions of visitors, "just one" becomes the whole beach. Take the photo. Leave the shell. Somebody's looking for a house.

Somewhere today, someone you barely remember is describing you to a person you'll never meet. They built a whole version of you out of one afternoon, and they still carry it around. You live inside hundreds of these little stories. You'll never hear one. A researcher named Charles Cooley worked this out back in 1902. You build your entire sense of who you are by imagining how other people see you. Other people are the mirror. So the truest version of you has never really sat inside your own head. It has been living in theirs. Your brain runs a quiet system for this. Get to know someone, and you build a small copy of them that you carry everywhere. You can hear their voice and guess what they'd say before they even say it. Everyone who knows you is doing the same thing with a copy of you. That copy keeps running after you leave the room. It keeps going after you leave their life, and sometimes after you leave the world. And those copies stay busy. Scientists once recorded what people talk about all day. About two-thirds of it was other people who weren't even in the room. So at this exact moment, in a kitchen or a group chat you'll never see, someone is telling a story with you in it. A 2018 study found something gentler. Almost everyone underestimates how much other people like them. We get so busy picking apart how we came across that we miss the other person walking away glad they met us. In their memory, you are the warm one. The cold version mostly lives in your own head. Even dying does not switch this off. For most of the last hundred years, experts thought the job of grief was to slowly let the person go. In 1996, researchers found the opposite was healthier. We keep the people we lose alive inside us. We go on talking to them and telling their stories for years. About 1,500 years ago, a Roman writer named Boethius wrote that being forgotten is its own kind of death. People later put it plainer. You die twice. Once when your body stops, and once more, much later, the last time someone says your name. So that ache you felt reading the phrase was pointing at something true. It never fully goes away. You spend a whole life leaving small pieces of yourself inside other people, and you never get to read a single one. The stories with your name in them will always outnumber the ones you hear. And they keep going after you stop.

In fiction evil is often written to have depth and complexity while good is written to be simple and boring. But in real life evil is boring and predictable while good is complex and unique every single time.