Let’s talk about thoughts and prayers.
Thoughts are good things, and if you’re religious, so are prayers. There’s nothing wrong with either thoughts or prayers in the face of a major tragedy, whether caused by man or nature, both of which we have had a distressingly large number to deal with this year. There have been many thoughts, many prayers, extended to many people, across the world.
The problem is that we are in a world which demands responses from everyone to everything, preferably minutes after the event on social media. This isn’t a great venue for either measured thought or meaningful response, there’s very little opportunity to be unique or different in the face of a shocking event.
Thoughts and prayers, as a phrase, has become the autopilot sympathy response. It’s like writing “Live Laugh Love” on your kitchen wall or a generic birthday message on Facebook for someone you haven’t talked to since high school – it’s something people do, but without much thought as to why they’re doing it. They just know they must do something, and the phrase feels like something appropriate, especially now that it is used by so many people, so frequently.
The problem with having a sympathetic response on autopilot is that people quickly get sick of hearing it, especially if people hear it a lot in a short time period. There’s nothing wrong with having such a response, it’s totally understandable that someone isn’t able to react with much more in the face of a large loss of life, for example. But at a certain point people get sick of hearing it, and instead of thoughts, or prayers, they want action.
Naturally, you need thoughts for action. If you’re religious, you may pray for direction. Thoughts and prayers, for many people, would be the first step in the process of figuring out action. If you’re offering thoughts and prayers, maybe it’ll be followed by some sort of action, and in many situations where thoughts and prayers are offered, action is really what people want.
What riles people up is not the idea of thoughts and prayers, but instead that it can seem like just typing it as part of an automated response to any event is, ironically, completely without thought. That so many people say the exact same thing makes it even worse – it’s not even your own response, it’s someone else’s, from long ago, making it difficult to seem sincere since so many people are using the same string of words for the same sentiment. At a certain point the automatic nature of it becomes obvious and, honestly, a bit irritating, especially to people who are confronted with a tragedy and need more than just thoughts and prayers to go on.
I understand how the phrase has become ubiquitous, and also how that ubiquity can make people very irate when they see it in front of them. The solution is that we need to have some actual thoughts, and possibly prayers, and do something different from just the stock thoughts and prayers when faced with something that requires a response. More thoughts (and possibly prayers) are needed to think of new words to express that necessary concern.
