Reluctant Sainthood and the Forensics of Freedom

Jan 12

So I, along with all the chronically online this week , stumbled upon a comment section interrogation over a simple but creative way of acknowledging the passage of time. If you have managed to escape the cruel techno-sociological experiment that is social media or if your fyp was pre-occupied with conformity-gate or the ever-despairing state of U.S. politics, I’ll briefly summarize.

Inspired by the new year, a 2026 “rebrand” trend has been circulating the internet. It consists mostly of people in elaborate skin care masks, scrolling Pinterest and drinking from glass straws. A reasonable installment in the decade-long, dystopian saga that is humans comparing themselves to products. It is in one such video that a commenter shares that they lost track of the passage of time in 2025 and that in 2026 they would use 365 buttons everyday as a means of giving time a more tangible quality. It wasn’t framed as a suggestion for others, citing a pop-neuroscience article, and linking an amazon product listing. It was just a pure, unincentivized idea that the commenter was sharing. Immediately, other commenters began an interrogation. What would they do with the buttons? Where were they getting the buttons? Who told them to do this? Appropriately exhausted by the response, the original commenter writes what they did not expect to be the internet’s initiation into a kind of sainthood: “hey so it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.”

Much like a reed cross for Brigid, Tik Tok commenters made their own votive offerings (engagement) at the shrine of the original commenter (their account). They begged for a series, for a manifesto, for a guide to complete indifference.

But the original commenter (who I do not name because they seem to genuinely not want the clout for this) remained chaste. They did not succumb to the seduction of internet relevance, rather they fiercely guarded the purity of their idea. And I, an artist who is desperately trying to succeed in selling my work on the internet, can’t help but also worship this commenter. I mean what is this post but a prayer to the Saint of 365 Buttons?

Coincidentally, the week of this debacle I broke through a bit of art block I had been having and began a new painting. It was the kind of flow state that makes artists briefly believe themselves to be vessels for divinity before deciding that the last thing they need in their lives is religious psychosis. Anyone who has followed me for a while knows about my obsession with wounded lambs as imagery, but this time I found myself drawn to paint a wounded bird. Maybe if I hadn’t been the fourth generation of tarot reader in my family I would have dismissed it as a continuation of a strange, creative pre-occupation with wounded animals. But I always like to investigate what causes me to paint the symbols I do so here we are.

Throughout my childhood, whenever I came across a dead or wounded creature, particularly birds, I would contemplate it deeply. I would take my time investigating its posture and expression and sometimes I would recreate the image in sketchbooks. Now, due to a Shayne Dawson induced hysteria around Sociopathic tendencies when I was a child, I was deeply misunderstood for my interest by my peers and quickly developed a complex I have to this day around being a dangerous person unbeknownst to myself. But, in retrospect, my fascination was not derived from sick pleasure in the pain of something. I just didn’t understand why we disregarded the dead. Why we quickly averted our gaze, buried and burned dead things as a means to preserve our own illusions of immortality. I felt that ignoring a dead animal was to deny it its dignity. A prime example of how autistic people can express compassion differently.

Additionally, there is also a tragically symbolic beauty in a dead bird. Birds transcend us and as such embody a complete freedom that humans yearn for in dreams. To us, they are the ultimately unbound, riding the currents of the wind like dry, soft fish. So it is jarring when, as we roam the only plain we are able, we stumble across our symbol crooked and still, ever so slowly becoming enveloped into the very thing it did not answer to in life. And I think that’s why some of us are so compelled to examine this image. It reminds us that no matter the heights we reach in life all are equal in death.

But how on earth does this have anything to do with 365 buttons? I think that this entire discourse, weirdly enough, inspires the same considerations of freedom in me. Like a dead bird, like a saint, it’s symbolic. I think we are all so compelled by this commenter because they seem to transcend us. The capitalistic propaganda of our time can feel like the very concrete we are bound to. An inescapable plain. But the Saint of 365 buttons soars above it. They ride the currents of their own will and are not bound to the influence of others. Perhaps in our worship we are trying to own the commenter, to cage them. But they manage to evade us.

I think the Saint of 365 buttons represents our particular cultural moment very accurately. Where our sickest desires are fantasies of flight. We are exhausted and we don’t even know what to do with ourselves when there is no one there to tell us what to do. The most earnest thing to do would be to let the 365 buttons commenter fade in irrelevance and to throw our devices into volcanoes.

But here I am typing on a computer. Here I am assigning sainthood to a Tik Tok commenter. So I guess I’m the fool.

And as a fool I will do the most foolish thing by ending this article by trying to sell you things. However, of all the things to buy in this world I would say that these are less foolish than others.