THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

When people knew how to be human.

My paternal aunt is nearing 102 and I’m 84. We both have witnessed a staggering exponential advancement in technology and a depreciation of what it means to be human. We lived in the same three-story tenement in East Boston, not far from what was to become Logan International Airport. Before I was born, she likely saw or heard twin-prop planes flying low overhead, with well-dressed passengers lounging in deluxe cabins while being served full-course meals. A mere seventeen years after I was born, four-prop planes were larger, but the seating was crowded and the meals had become skimpy and tinned.

We lived in the poor Irish/Italian section of East Boston, where everybody knew somebody by name within ten blocks. It was a village community with its Most Holy Redeemer Parish and parochial school on Havre Street, where even the priest knew my name. Meridian Street was lined with small shops like Woolworth’s and a coffee shop with racks of unground beans. Barber shops, a post office, and a drug store were sandwiched together. Below-sidewalk grocery stores displayed racks of produce that women scrutinized for meals the next day. These were owned and operated by small-time grocers you knew by name.

There was also the milkman rattling glass bottles and the local beat cop keeping a steady, protective arc. I remember the eggman who thanked me for telling him about some kids stealing eggs from his truck, and the postman greeting me with a handful of letters and calling me by name. The iceman would lug a heavy block of ice on a leather pad, secured with his metal tongs. In the summer heat, he’d let me chip a piece to suck on.

A loaf of Italian bread was always stored in our bread box. Garlic clusters grown in the Victory Garden in our yard below hung from our porch rafter. Telephones were heavy Bakelite fixtures anchored to hallway walls and were sometimes shared across party lines where neighbors could listen.

Yes, everybody knew everyone back then. But not anymore. Today, I hardly know the neighbors living around me.

Gradually, all that was engineered away in the relentless pursuit of efficiency. The local tradesmen vanished, swallowed by mass-market distribution and sterile convenience. In their place arose an invisible fortress of protection and automation. Today, we navigate our daily existence gated by sixteen-digit passwords, two-factor authentication, and constant digital vigilance—forced to prove our humanity to machines, using strings of random characters, simply to keep ourselves safe from other machines. We order produce online and expect instant delivery.

But first …

PROVE THAT YOU ARE HUMAN!

Neighborly trust in the corner grocer has been outsourced to distant servers, leaving the individual to act as a solitary vault keeper of his own identity. Worse still is the psychological toll of these advancements. For millennia, grandparents were revered by the young as living reservoirs of historical memory, their lived experience serving as a survival manual for the young. Today, because the technological baseline shifts entirely every few years, an elder’s hard-won culture of endurance feels abruptly sidelined by an algorithm that updates by the second. Society has learned to worship raw, disembodied AI automatons while discarding the slowly matured wisdom of elders. This is the painful isolation we elders feel now.

This cultural acceleration has bred a profound and pervasive emotional isolation. We built amazing tools designed to connect the entire human race in milliseconds, yet we also engineered an environment where a person can feel utterly invisible in a room full of Zoom screens. When young minds are splintered by that deep, systemic alienation, our media hasten to report any resulting grim theater with cold-hearted efficiency.

We have achieved things our ancestors could only dream of, flying across continents in hours and holding the sum of human knowledge in the palm of a hand. Yet, in our haste to outrun the physical limitations of our world, we have built another Tower of Babel. The supreme irony of our century of progress is that in mastering the art of connection across hundreds of languages, we have forgotten how to dwell together harmoniously, as we did back when my aunt and I were kids.

Richard M. DellOrfano spent ten years on a cross-country pilgrimage following Christ’s instruction to minister without possessions. He is completing his autobiography:  Path Perilous, My Search for God and the Miraculous.

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