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15th July 2025
What does it mean anymore to say we like something? Does the verb still carry any weight?
What it used to mean, once upon a time, feels substantially different from what it means and how it gets used nowadays.
I was prompted to write about this after watching Red on National Theatre at Home, Michael Grandage’s production of John Logan’s play imagining the working relationship between the Latvian-born American visual artist Mark Rothko and a fictional studio assistant during the late 1950s. Within just a few minutes of the play starting, Rothko gets Ken to look at a huge painting of his, hanging on a rack upstage, a great expanse of dark crimson marked with some wide vertical bars in a paler almost-pink, and this is part of that initial conversation:
ROTHKO: But do you like it?
KEN: Mmmm.
ROTHKO (impatient): Speak up.
KEN: Yes.
ROTHKO: Yes, yes, of course you like it. How can you not like it? Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the crackerjack. Everything becomes everything else. It’s all nice and pretty and likeable. Everything’s fun in the sun, huh? Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what — listen to me now! — what has significance?
The bold type is my emphasis, and I’ve been thinking about Rothko’s questions a lot in recent weeks. To anyone below a certain age — shall we say 50? — the first Pavlovian response to the word “like” will quite possibly be to think of the little red heart on a social media post. That, for most people, is what “like” has devolved into — a thing to bestow on a stranger's post as a way of saying “I’m here, and my opinion matters!” — or worse, a thing to want a stranger to bestow upon us, a tiny dopamine hit reminder that we’re here, and our existence matters, if only for a moment. (When was the last time you looked back at anything you've liked on social media, to see if you still like it, to see if you ever really liked it?)
Maybe we all need to stop using the word “like” for good; maybe we need to retire it forcibly from the English language.
People, especially young people, are finding new ways to circumvent the overexposure and inadequacy of “like” by co-opting other verbs in its place. The effect is not always as successful as any of us might hope. If anyone has ever looked you in the eye and said “I really appreciate you,” I’m guessing you’ll know how toe-curling and insincere a sentiment it comes across as, however sincerely it might be meant.
Rothko’s speech pounces on some much meatier, juicier words — nouns, interestingly, rather than verbs. Discernment, arbitration; respect; significance. Worthy sneaks in as an adjectival interloper, but I’m here for that, too. Perhaps we are at a stage where verbs, traditional doing words, have lost much of their power to express a meaningful emotional response to a picture on a wall or a person or anything else. Maybe we’re entering a new age where the nouns and the adjectives are about to do the heavy lifting of communicating what we really feel.
This, I suspect, will be another gap that AI is alert enough to try filling, but one where it will be no good at covering its tracks. It’ll probably default to a set of quite sentimental or hackneyed terms that draw attention to its presence. (Remember, over-use of “beloved” is already a good AI giveaway in a piece of text.) I certainly can’t imagine AI grappling with the kind of concepts Rothko interrogates. Discernment and arbitration, worthiness and significance — these are judgements which still need to be processed through a human brain filled with the lingering electrical impulses of actual lived and thought experience.
Here’s a fun little moral dilemma for us all to consider… If this post has resonated with you, will you still want to reach for the little clear heart and turn it red with a click? Or have I killed the value of the “Like” button for good…?