The People Behind Eight Thousand Likes

The People Behind Eight Thousand Likes

I had finished a job and picked up my phone. Something on the screen was moving in a way it never does. My posts usually gather about ten likes. This one had eight thousand five hundred, and the number was still climbing. A hundred and ten thousand people had seen it. I had written a small piece about Hideo Kojima, and Kojima himself had shared it.

I will be honest: I did not know his reach ran that deep. The messages kept arriving. One of them said, "Hideo Kojima has been my whole life since I was a little girl." Behind every number on that screen was a person like her — someone he had reached long ago and never let go of.

What struck me was not the count. It was the size of what one person can give. I sell used consoles from a small room in Japan. I clean them, one at a time, and send them out. I will probably never reach a hundred thousand people in an afternoon. But that morning I felt no envy and no pride. I felt something closer to a direction.

There are eight billion people in the world. The tools to reach them exist now, and whether I use them well is up to me and no one else. I want to see those people smile — not as a phrase, but the real thing: a stranger on the other side of the world, holding something I cleaned until it looked like its first morning, and smiling. That is the work. A repost reminded me how far it can travel.