etly
everyone that
loves you.
A dark map of the world with a warm light on every city where someone who loves them is standing. Touch one and you hear their voice. Watch it play and every line of light ends with them.
Two people are wrong about this,
and one of them is you.
The person you'd make this for has no idea how many people love them. Nobody does — the count is scattered across a decade and four countries and has never once been in the same place.
And you have no idea how much it would land. People who tell somebody what they mean to them reliably underestimate how good it makes the other person feel, and overestimate how awkward it will be. They keep getting it wrong even afterwards, having watched the reaction.
Both of those are measured errors. This is a way of correcting the first one, and the second is the only reason you'd hesitate.
Boothby & Bohns, 2021, on compliments; Kumar & Epley, 2018, on expressed gratitude. Third parties predict the reaction correctly, so the error is anxiety about yourself rather than ignorance of them.
Birthdays are the obvious one.
The sharper ones are the unhappy ones. Someone who has just emigrated and feels like they've lost everybody. Someone in treatment. Someone grieving. Someone who is not okay, and who needs evidence rather than encouragement.
Being told you are loved is easy to argue with, and the people who most need to hear it are the best at arguing with it. A name, a city, a voice and the exact distance between you is not.
Everyone is asked one question
“From where you are right now, tell them what you'd say if they walked through your door tonight.”
It anchors what they say to a place, and it collapses the distance to nothing. That is why the map is a map, and why it works.
And they answer it out loud. The same words carry differently — listeners judge a speaker as warmer and more thoughtful than readers judge the identical script in text. Voice is the default here; text is the fallback, never the other way around.
You invite their people
Everyone who loves them gets one link and one question. No account, no app.
They answer, from where they are
A voice note, a photo, a city. Two minutes. Their actual voice, not a typed message.
One person opens a map
Their people light up one by one, and every line of light ends with them.
Two minutes each, no account for anybody but you, and one link to send.
The further apart their people are,
the harder it lands.
When the people you love are scattered, distance reads as loss. You see a list of people who aren’t here.
On this map the same distance reads as reach — the length of a line somebody is still choosing to hold. Every one of them terminates in the same place.
- people
- 7
- cities
- 5
- km of it
- 73,948
The demo map, on 4 continents.
Somebody you love is not as sure of that as you think.
Make one for themThree questions. You'll have a link to send in about a minute.