Does It Truly Matter?

Before you craft your next post, allow me to ask a question, and I want you to be honest with yourself: Does it truly matter?

Beyond the likes, the fleeting comments, and the self-congratulatory validation, what is its real-world impact? Will it save a life? Will it give a parent one more precious hour with their child? Will it make you a better person when you turn off the screen?

This question isn’t an attack; it’s a ghost that haunts me, born from a profound and irreversible regret.

Wind the clock back about 22 years. I was working from home, long before it became the norm. My world was often confined to the four corners of my monitors, their glow pushing back the darkness of a late evening, the hum of the computer a constant companion. It was the wild west of Electronic Health Records. We weren’t just developers; we were convinced we were pioneers, digital prophets building the future. We called ourselves “disruptors,” and we wore our long hours like a badge of honor.

I was utterly consumed by it. I saw my work as monumental, world-changing. And standing silently right behind my monitors, so patiently it breaks my heart to remember it now, was my 8-year-old son.

He wouldn’t make a sound. He would just stand there, waiting for his dad to turn around. I could feel his presence, sometimes catching his small outline reflected in the dark screen between windows. I was physically in the same room, but mentally a million miles away. “Just one more minute, champ,” I’d say, my eyes never leaving the code. “I’m solving a really important problem.”

One minute would bleed into ten, and ten into an hour. The problems were always important. The deadlines were always critical. And he just waited.

Today, that “monumental” code I wrote is almost certainly obsolete, buried under layers of new technology, completely irrelevant. But the time I lost with my son—that is a debt I can never repay. No career achievement, no title, no amount of money could ever fill the void left by those stolen moments. The truly “critical problem” wasn’t on my screen; it was standing patiently behind me, and I was too blind to see it.

So when I scroll through feeds today, I see the same trap, just in a different form. I see people meticulously documenting a life instead of actually living it.

What real, tangible moments are we sacrificing for this digital echo? Stop posting. Start living. Go out and be messy and imperfect and completely present. Invest your time, your focus, your entire self in the people who share your air, not just your Wi-Fi.

Those are the only connections that will ever truly matter.