The Story About Meewee

Once upon a time, my young nephew invented a word. "Meewee," he would say, pointing at anything that caught his attention. At first, we thought it was just another piece of toddler babble, but soon we realized that meewee had a specific meaning: it was his word for anything interesting enough to share with others.

"Meewee!" he'd exclaim, pointing at a butterfly landing on a flower. "Meewee!" - when discovering that ice cream melts into liquid. "Meewee!" - when realizing his own shadow follows him everywhere.

The Birth of Meaning

What fascinates me about meewee is how perfectly it captures a fundamental human impulse: the desire to share experience. Before we developed complex language, before we built social media platforms, before we invented photography - we had this basic need to point at things and say "look at this with me."

The word itself sounds like a combination of "me" and "we" - which feels oddly appropriate. It sits at the intersection of personal discovery and social connection. Every meewee moment is simultaneously deeply personal (I noticed this!) and inherently social (you should see this too!).

The Digital Meewee Machine

Today, we've built elaborate technological systems to facilitate our meewee moments. Instagram, Twitter, TikTok - these are essentially industrial-scale meewee machines. But something interesting happens when we institutionalize this basic human impulse.

The pure joy of spontaneous sharing gets transformed into metrics, engagement rates, and dopamine loops. The child pointing at a butterfly becomes an influencer carefully crafting their personal brand. The authentic "look at this!" transforms into "look at me looking at this."

Yet underneath all the algorithmic optimization and social competition, the basic meewee impulse remains unchanged. We still fundamentally want to share what delights, surprises, or moves us. We still seek that moment of shared attention, that brief synchronization of consciousness with another human being.

The Paradox of Mediated Experience

There's a growing tension between our meewee instinct and the tools we've built to serve it. When everything is potentially shareable, we risk losing the ability to fully inhabit our experiences. We become cameras more than witnesses, broadcasters more than participants.

I've caught myself reaching for my phone to capture a beautiful sunset, only to realize that in trying to share the moment, I'm partially removing myself from it. The meewee impulse is natural and beautiful, but our technological implementation of it can sometimes get in the way of the very experience we're trying to share.

This is not a luddite argument against sharing platforms - they've enabled connection and community in wonderful ways. But perhaps we need to rediscover something of the toddler's pure meewee spirit: spontaneous, unmediated, free from metrics and measurements.

Learning from Meewee

What my nephew understood instinctively is that sharing attention is a form of love. When he says "meewee," he's not trying to accumulate likes or followers. He's inviting others into his world of wonder, offering his discoveries as gifts.

As we build the next generation of social technologies, perhaps we should take inspiration from meewee. What if we optimized not for engagement but for genuine connection? What if we designed for spontaneous delight rather than addictive mechanics?

The word meewee eventually faded from my nephew's vocabulary as he acquired "proper" language. But I find myself missing it. It captured something essential about human nature - our fundamental desire to share experience, to point at the world and say "isn't this amazing?"

In our age of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, as we push the boundaries of what's possible in human communication, it's worth remembering that at the heart of it all is this simple impulse: meewee. Look at this with me. Share this moment. Be here together.

The most meaningful technologies will be the ones that serve this deep human need without getting in its way. The ones that help us point at butterflies together, that let us share our discoveries without turning them into commodities, that preserve the pure joy of saying "meewee" and having someone look where we're pointing.