What I Mean When I Say Sacred

I use the word sacred and people assume I mean religious. I do not mean religious.

I mean: there are things that should not be optimized. There are experiences that lose their meaning the moment you try to make them efficient. There are parts of life that exist precisely because they are useless.

That is what I mean by sacred.

A dinner that lasts four hours. Nobody needed four hours. The information could have been exchanged in twenty minutes. The food could have been eaten in thirty. But the dinner was not about information or food. It was about the specific alchemy that happens when people sit together longer than they need to and let the conversation go where it wants to go.

You cannot optimize that. The moment you try — the moment you set an agenda, a time limit, a purpose — it becomes something else. Something lesser.

I think about this constantly in my work. I build systems that make things faster, cheaper, more scalable. That is my job and I am good at it and I believe in its value. But I also know there is a category of human experience where faster is not better. Where cheaper is not better. Where scale is the enemy of the thing.

A human life only has meaning through what it chooses to pursue. Not what it achieves. What it pursues. The pursuit is the point. The sustained attention. The willingness to stay with something that offers no immediate return.

There are places — a particular house, a particular stretch of coast, a particular quality of light at a particular time of day — that hold something no description could capture. You have to be there. You have to be there in your body, paying attention, and even then you might miss it.

The sacred is what cannot be mediated. What cannot be transmitted. What requires your actual presence, your actual attention, your actual body in an actual room.

In a world where everything can be generated, transmitted, and scaled — the thing that requires you to show up becomes the thing worth showing up for.

I am not against technology. I build it. I use it. I think it is the most important development of our lifetime.

But I also believe there are parts of life that should remain untouched by it. Not because technology would ruin them — though sometimes it would — but because their power comes precisely from the fact that they cannot be made easier.

What is sacred is what you protect. Not from the world. From efficiency.

— Bella