A Lighthouse Selling Rocks

I know my hands are on the wheel.

Let me say that before someone says it for me.

I know I can close the app. I know I can scroll past the picture, ignore the message, put the phone down. I am responsible for what I choose to do with my attention, my money, and my desire.

I also know when someone is trying to influence those choices.

Apparently, acknowledging both makes the conversation complicated.

A lighthouse is supposed to mean something. There is a reason a person at sea looks toward it. The signal carries an expectation: somebody knows this shoreline. Somebody can see what I cannot see from out here.

I am thinking about that expectation when a stranger speaks to me through a screen as though we have already begun something.

Where have you been?

I was hoping you’d stop by.

Don’t leave me waiting.

We have never met. She does not know whether I have children, whether I slept last night, whether I am happily married or sitting alone in a house that has become too quiet. Yet the invitation arrives already dressed in familiarity.

I recognize the technique. Sometimes the absurdity almost makes me laugh. A person with hundreds of thousands of followers has apparently been waiting for me, specifically, and the next step in our remarkable connection requires a subscription.

My wallet stays closed.

But recognition does not make me immune to feeling something.

That is where I want us to stay for a minute.

I can recognize a sales pitch and still respond to the person delivering it. I can understand the business model and still notice the voice, the expression, the apparent welcome. I can feel desire without mistaking it for love. I can want to be wanted while knowing perfectly well that I am looking at an advertisement.

There is a strange humiliation in having to explain that much before I am permitted to question how the advertisement works.

The conversation so often begins and ends with my appetite.

Why did I look?

Why did I stay for another second?

Why am I allowing it to affect me?

Those can be useful questions. I ask them myself. But there are other questions available, and I notice how rarely they receive the same attention.

Why is a commercial message written as though my absence has hurt someone?

Why is access being presented as closeness?

Why does a person who has never spoken to me imply that I am neglecting her by leaving?

And why does declining one invitation seem to deliver me to another version of it a few minutes later?

The lighthouse keeps turning.

---

I need to be precise about what I am criticizing.

A woman’s beauty does not create a debt to me. Her clothing does not promise access. Her confidence, sexuality, or enjoyment of being seen does not mean she wants a relationship with anyone watching.

I can admire someone and keep walking. She can be desirable without being available. There is nothing confusing about that.

The confusion begins when someone deliberately performs availability while selling attention.

When the language is personal but the relationship is transactional.

When the message suggests, I want you here, while the mechanism underneath it says, I need you to keep engaging.

A paid exchange can be understood and agreed to honestly. What troubles me is the calculated uncertainty: the suggestion that somewhere beyond the next click, the next payment, or the next display of loyalty, the exchange might become something else.

The invitation must feel close enough to matter and remain unfinished enough to keep working.

I can see that arrangement. I am allowed to describe it.

---

Sometimes I imagine this lighthouse with a gift shop at its base.

Inside are polished pieces of the reef, little fragments of timber, photographs of the waves striking the shore. Everything that happened below has become something attractive enough to sell.

Outside, people discuss the foolishness of sailors.

They should have known.

They should have watched their heading.

They should have controlled themselves.

And yes, a sailor has responsibilities. I have already said that. I am interested in why the keeper’s responsibilities disappear from the story.

If your invitation is innocent, why must it sound so much like personal longing?

If everyone is expected to understand that it is only business, why does the business keep borrowing the language of attachment?

You cannot carefully choose words for their emotional effect and then insist that the emotional effect has nothing to do with you.

That is the double standard I am trying to name.

My responsibility to recognize persuasion does not make persuasion impossible to question.

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For me, this reaches into something older than social media.

I was a child when someone used attention to bring me closer to harm. I did not have an adult’s understanding of intention. I could not evaluate the difference between being noticed and being used. I lived with what followed.

That history does not make every invitation dangerous. It does not make a stranger responsible for knowing my past.

It does mean that my response to an invitation can contain more than the invitation itself.

There can be desire in one part of the experience and alarm in another. I can know I am looking at a screen while feeling something physical that belongs to a much earlier time. I can reject an offer immediately and still spend time dealing with what it stirred.

The transaction can fail to get my money and still take something from my evening.

That cost is difficult to explain because nothing dramatic may be visible.

There is no payment to dispute. No relationship to end. No conversation, sometimes, beyond the one a stranger has recorded for everybody.

There is just me putting the phone down and discovering that putting it down has not finished the experience.

Then comes the familiar second injury: the way I speak to myself.

Why are you like this?

Why can’t you just look away and forget it?

Why does everything have to become something?

I can be remarkably cruel to myself for having a response I did not choose.

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There are people behind these accounts. Some may be making deliberate use of loneliness. Some may believe they are offering straightforward entertainment. Some may be under their own pressure to remain visible, desirable, and profitable.

I cannot know every intention from a post.

I can pay attention to the behavior.

I can notice when a boundary is followed by guilt. When declining becomes a challenge to my masculinity. When a sales message suggests I have failed to care for someone I do not know.

I can also ask what the platform gains by placing these invitations among the ordinary things I came to see. I open an app for a friend’s update, a song, a soccer photograph. Then I am being asked to manage another encounter I was not seeking.

Having the ability to leave does not mean I asked to arrive there.

And choosing to leave does not require me to pretend the approach was harmless.

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What I want is an honest signal.

If something is for sale, let it be for sale.

If attention is being performed, leave enough truth in the performance for me to understand what I am being offered. Do not make my loneliness the part of the transaction that must remain unspoken.

I can accept that someone does not want me.

I can accept that a beautiful person is a stranger, that a fantasy is a fantasy, that a message has been sent to thousands of people.

I object to the effort spent making those facts momentarily difficult to feel.

I object to having my response used as the entire explanation for an encounter somebody else carefully designed.

I know my hands are on the wheel.

I am learning when to turn away, when to put the phone down, when to give my evening back to the people and things actually in it.

But I will not call every light a harbor just because someone has made it beautiful.

And I will not keep discussing the wreckage as though nobody built the beacon.