Affirming the Wrong Things

a wordle parable, and the oppressiveness of “getting it right”

Anyone still playing Wordle? It remains an essential part of my morning waking-up routine, along with Connections, one of the newer New York Times games and a lot of clever fun. 

I always check Wordlebot afterwards, because I like to see how many words I’ve eliminated from Wordle’s dictionary with each guess:

Not my Wordle, but you get the idea.

What I don’t like about Wordlebot is the commentary at the bottom of the screen. For being a computer program, it’s pretty high on judgment and sass. It tells you things like “That guess wasn’t my favorite” (What’s it to you?) or gives you a grudging “That was a bit of a lucky guess” (Who knew a bot liked to eat sour grapes?). As my uncle said some time ago, “Wordlebot is the East German judge.” 

Yesterday I got the solution (RESIN) in three guesses, and my second guess narrowed the options from 34 possible words to 2. Pretty great, huh? Not good enough for the bot though!

“PESKY was a good guess, but ROSES would have been more efficient.” 

More efficient. 

Here’s the thing. A human doesn’t play Wordle the way a computer does. When I make a guess, I’m trying to narrow down words, sure, but I’m also trying to guess the solution. So yeah, ROSES would have eliminated every option but one, but it had zero chance of being the answer because Wordle doesn’t use plurals in its solutions. PESKY, on the other hand, is a plausible solution. With some luck, I could have solved the puzzle in 2 guesses. It didn’t work out in this case, but I still got where I needed to go. 

There’s an artistry to Wordle, in other words, a meandering unpredictability—just as there’s an artistry to life… a tangled human finesse that doesn’t always stack up to careful calibration. PESKY feels right to play, even with that relatively rare K in there, not because it’s perfectly optimized for efficiency, but because it represents thought and creativity and well, humanity.

The problem is all the “bots” out there, cultural and otherwise, tut-tutting at us for not living up to standards we never agreed to in the first place, or did at one time but now see them as utterly ruinous.

I recently heard author/speaker/theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber on Glennon Doyle’s podcast. (That may be the most white-lady sentence I’ve ever typed.) Nadia is a titan of what I call the Guru Industrial Complex, but after three bestsellers and 90 airplane flights in a single year, she’s downshifted to a simpler, less visible life. Time and maturity have helped her see she has nothing left to prove, and that the hustle was taking its toll. 

I appreciated that Nadia, Glennon, and her co-hosts spoke honestly about how hard it is to step off the grind. “I got off the book-publishing bandwagon,” Nadia said, “but that does not prevent my friend’s new books from arriving at my house every few days. Then I have feelings. I’m like… I’m so lazy. I’m too self-involved. Or, oh, if I don’t capture it again, it’ll be gone forever.” 

Then Glennon’s sister Amanda said this:

You don’t have to be a New York Times bestseller to understand that phenomenon. I live in a very type A hustle, [with] parents raising little mini people to do whatever it is the hell we think they’re going to do. [And] when you decide to be like, actually I’m just going to let them be whatever they are, you can feel good about that in your house at night when you go to sleep. And then when you wake up and see everybody else doing all the things that they’re doing, you kind of have a panic attack.

Amanda, it turns out, lives in Northern Virginia, which is probably why her comment hit such a bullseye in my heart. Because oh my friends, I felt this. After the season we’ve had—2023 has been the hardest year of our family’s life—I felt this all the way down. When depression hits your family, or you, you have to do things differently. Yes, you strive for healing and progress, but you also have to let things be where they are. The usual yardsticks don’t work anymore. Even a ruler is too imprecise for the incremental shifts you’re trying to mark: Not the National Merit Finalist; the kid who conquered their anxiety to sit for the test at all. Not the lead in the school play; the kid who went to school all week despite feeling like shit because the medication isn’t dialed in right. Again. (Pro tip: the strongest people you know probably aren’t the people you think.)

It’s devastating to downshift like this, to see your old life whisked away and to know it will never return. Sometimes you’d like it back, but it would be ill-fitting. It’s a precious thing now, to cherish the things you once accepted as a given. We’re all still here. As Jane Kenyon says in her poem, it might have been otherwise.

And then, as Amanda puts it, you wake up and see everybody else doing the things they’re doing. You see the bots, in all their clipped efficiency and patronizing commentary and aw-shucks braggadocio, only the bots are human this time, and they are legion, and they’re all around you. And it’s not a word puzzle, it’s the whole game of life they’re effortlessly acing—or are they? Maybe they’re just keeping up appearances, which is even more infuriating, because if we all shouted from the rooftops how oppressive “efficient” is, how bankrupt the idea of “normal” is, we could probably crash the whole system, and good riddance. 

It’s December 1, a time of year when the bots swarm even more than usual. The cookies never burn and the royal icing doesn’t run. The smiles are all relaxed and genuine in the family photo, and the cards go out on time, and the presents don’t add to anyone’s credit card debt. 

I’m done with that. And if you’re done too, welcome. An embrace if you want one, and a grim nod or fist bump to you if you don’t. 

If you can’t even fathom a happy holidays with that empty chair at the table,

If the latest IVF failed, or you could never dream of affording even one round,

If you wish your family accepted who you are or who you love,

If you find yourself standing up in front of a congregation, leading from convictions you no longer have,

If you’re so bone tired of trying to live in systems set up by and for those who are able-bodied, or white, or male, or straight,

If you can’t muster much holly-jolly while terrorism and genocide happen halfway around the world,

If you eye that stack of medical bills by the front door and don’t even know how to start dealing with them,

If it takes every ounce of strength you have just to make it through the day,

I know. 

I mean, I don’t know, because your story is yours, but… I know.

And I think you’re lovely.

What I’m Up To

As always, I’m grateful to all of you for reading and sharing and accompanying—and subscribing. I’ll be writing more about the topic of today’s post and related matters in the new year, as I fumble my way toward book number four. (Wordlebot would hate writing; it’s never efficient.) Supporting subscribers will have a front-row seat for that work, with early snippets and drafts, online conversations as I work out the content, and other possibilities as they arise. Subscriptions begin at $5 a month, or $40 for the year. Members and friends of Trinity Presbyterian, Herndon are eligible for complementary gift subscriptions; just ask.

Steady on.