Writing

I was considering how to start this entry, “post” (whatever) and I guess I wanted to acknowledge the trope of confessional writing, when you become the “you”, the “subject”, the “object” of the written word. It is self indulgent. It points towards a culture that is accepting of, that has a vested interest in, low-grade narcissism and largely feeds on the spectacle of interiority. All that being said, it serves some utility insofar as it makes others feel less alone. In our attempt to assert individuality we seem to conjure some kind of acute universality in our suffering, our faltering. If I were to lean into the idea of having a “true calling”, or a soul's path, I think mine is to ameliorate as much loneliness as possible, it is the sole reason I do what I do, it has defined my career path and my interpersonal sensibilities. Because I remember how it feels, a kind of loneliness that isn’t cured, only managed. Like humidity or debt. The condition of our time. I assume you’ve made peace with yours, too.

Change. I don’t know how to manage it. The moment I reach stasis, I start clawing for a fault line. I have always been this way. I have a habit of mistaking safety for stagnation, of perceiving it as a kind of deranged imprisonment. I’m only now realizing I play both roles: the prisoner and the masochistic guard, pacing the same small cell. No one enforces these conditions but me. This realization arrived, predictably, in the debris of my latest self-inflicted lifestyle implosion. The triennial event (I am fundamentally predictable). I finished graduate school, moved across the country, and ended what had felt like the most meaningful relationship of my life. I still don’t understand what compelled me to do any of it (particularly in the destructive manner in which things unfolded), especially in regards to the latter two. I like to tell myself I’m intuitive, guided by some deeper knowing, but I suspect the impulse is fundamentally grounded in a refined addiction to chaos. The deeply juvenile kind that makes reality only feel explicitly Real when everything is on the verge of collapse.

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes with moving somewhere like New York. Particularly when one does not listen to the whole “wherever you go, there you are” thing, which, I do not really have an excuse for. I had the belief, that I often hold, that running would fix everything. When you reach the immaterial finish line, and feel absolutely nothing, it is viscerally horrifying. There is nothing cinematic about this experience, you can not contextualize yourself within the beautiful imaginative world you have created to escape from your own ill conceived nightmare of a material reality. The experience mostly feels like being miscast in your own life. There’s no singular moment of arrival, only a slow unraveling of reference points. The person you were doesn’t quite make it through baggage claim; her tone, her gestures, her small rituals dissolve in the glare of a place that demands constant recalibration. I watch myself, going through the motions, ordering coffee, buying another pack of twenty dollar cigarettes, crossing streets too quickly, as though I’m impersonating someone who used to exist, far away, absolutely not here. Everything feels a few degrees off, like being conscious in a dream where the dialogue keeps looping. I used to think alienation meant not recognizing the world, but, really, I think it’s the eerie intimation of not recognizing the person that is at once witnessing, and existing within it.

Egoic death sounds somewhat nice when you say it out loud, particularly from some kind of immature masochistic perspective, like a spiritual detox or some noble transcendence. But it’s more like the slow amputation of a limb that you can only really observe, and do nothing about. You don’t rise above anything, you just lose the scaffolding that used to hold your reflection in place. Your ego doesn’t really die, it just gets humiliated into silence. It watches as the architecture of identity collapses under the weight of change, and you have to keep living inside the debris. You tell yourself you’re evolving, that this is necessary, but most of it feels like grief: for the person who knew how to be competent, who had reached the well adjusted state, in the old version of Your Life, who had a context, a vocabulary, a mirror. In New York, you can feel yourself dissolving inside a crowd of eight million, and no one notices your small extinction, your own, individual, pleistocene environment, you are just an organism in the biomass. There’s something liberating in that, but you slowly become a ghost who still has to pay rent (bad). Really, time is the only solvent for this kind of rupture, and it moves like wet cement. Every instinct in me wants to hack it, to outsmart the process, to intellectualize the ache into something legible. But there’s no shortcut through the kind of (almost campy?) horror of becoming. You can’t trick time into meaning, and you can only surrender to its pacing. Eventually, the rawness dulls, the shock wears down, and what once felt totally unbearable in its abject misery, becomes tolerable, then, almost imperceptibly, ordinary. That ordinariness is what has seemed to steady me, though it never announces itself. I think healing is mostly the gradual erosion of disbelief, realizing that you are still here, still conscious, still carrying yourself forward through the tedium of adjustment. Normalcy. That your continued survival, as banal as it may be, can be an act of faith, even when devoid of some sort of divine grandeur. Your will to live lies implied in your heart beating.

I keep thinking about what it means to feel safe within yourself. Not in the sentimental sense, but in the practical, almost bureaucratic one, a kind of abstract, internal contract. Change has a way of humiliating you into the realization that this sense of deep, internal safety, is essential for beingness. Change strips away the false forms of safety, the external scaffolding, the illusion of stability, the security that allows for the performance of being “well adjusted.” What’s left is whatever you’ve built internally, whatever part of you remains when everything familiar feels extraordinary far awat. I’ve spent years forfeiting agency in subtle ways, handing it over to circumstance, to other people, to whatever narrative seemed most convincing or exciting at the time. When you abandon yourself, you also abandon choice; you become reactive, mechanical, governed by the external. Safety, in its truest form, is the return of authorship, of agential capacity. It’s the potential to move, to act, without performing for some imagined witness. To know that you can rely on your own continuity, even when all external context is gone. When you are safe with yourself, you are never truly alone. You cease negotiating your existence through proximity, through recognition, through sex, through love, through consumption. There is just you, and that is, somehow, enough.

In these moments of profound atomization, I have found myself moved by the kindness and deep intricacies of near strangers, the capacity for connection, and moments where you feel briefly known. I am moved to tears by the way the sun shines relentlessly through the dulled windows of the train. I am struck by how when I turn on to my street, I can feel my cognition signaling “home”, and I feel safe. I am deeply touched by the warmness of both friends and acquaintances' smiles at parties, by recognition. These moments, they arrive without announcement, without any promise of permanence, and still manage to rearrange something deeply felt inside of me. After months of dislocation, of trying to create a semblance of coherence, I find myself startled by how simple it can be to experience that which is just findamentally Human. Not through intensity, but proximity, wholeness. The awareness that even within change, a complete fracturing and reassembly, you can still be met where you are, and for a second, you just are. If there is anything to hold onto, it is this.

The modern future no longer glimmers, it glowers. In its most potent form, the imagination of what is to come now arrives laced with dread. Climate collapse, social unraveling, artificial sentience; these are not simply material crises, they are eschatological whispers echoing through secular mouths. This kind of futurity speaks not in utopias, but in endings, often ambiguous and unlocatable, but (almost) always imminent. It is a fearful orientation, a psychic disposition wherein the unknown is not ripe with potential, but fraught with danger. Our imaginative capacity is hijacked by catastrophe, and yet even this fear functions as a strange kind of devotion, what Schiller might call a “sublime fear,” the horrifying magnitude of something we cannot grasp, but must bear witness to.

In this, we hear the echo of judgment day, not the Christian variant with angels and Holy fire, but the existential moment Kierkegaard describes, where man stands before himself, trembling in the face of his own becoming. The end is not orchestrated by divine decree, but by human hands, trembling and bloodied, reaching toward power and deliverance. This is what makes the modern apocalypse so bitterly intimate, it is not that God condemns the world, it is that man, in full possession of his capacities, might do so himself. Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” is not terminal because it kills the body, it is terminal because it disconnects the self from the eternal, from spirit, from the possibility of a truth that transcends our mortal limits. So what, then, are we afraid of? Not just death, but meaningless death. Not just judgment, but judgment without grace.

This is where a discreet spiritual war takes place, not in churches or political assembly, but in a war of interiority. We live in an age of competing gospels, some transcendent, some seductively, malignantly, immanent. Among them is the so-called redpill, a secular mythos masquerading as revelation. It positions itself as gnosis, promising illumination through unveiled cruelty: the world is what it is, say its prophets, and only those willing to endure the pain of this knowledge will be liberated. Not unlike ancient heretics, the redpillers seek salvation through insight, through a disillusionment so total it becomes a kind of armor. But this, too, is a theological posture, it has faith in its own cosmology of despair.

There is something fundamentally Gnostic in this framing. The world is fallen, corrupted. The flesh is weak. Knowledge saves. And yet this knowledge does not elevate, it corrodes, debases. The redpill is a heresy precisely because it reclaims the structure of revelation, but strips it of all metaphysical dignity. It offers no resurrection, no grace, only an endless unveiling of rot. Spinoza might call this a perversion of conatus, the striving for self-preservation that ought to align with joy and reason, but here becomes compulsive, recursive, feeding on despair. The striving persists, but it becomes anti-vital, a drive toward knowing more only to believe less. And yet something about this resonates. We are tempted by these heresies not because they lie, but because they expose partial truths. The world is broken. Systems fail us. There is something poisonous in the water. But the heretic forgets that revelation without compassion is just another form of violence. The true spiritual act is not to expose the world’s failures, but to hold fast to love in their midst. This is the spiritual war: not angels versus demons, but fatalism versus hope. The former is often louder. The latter, more dangerous.

Here the distinction between the philosophy of mortal truth and that of transcendental truth becomes sharp. Mortal truth, grounded in the empirical, the flesh, the historical, seeks what can be touched. It speaks in data, decay, diagnostics. But transcendental truth, as Kierkegaard and Schiller suggest, speaks in longing. It speaks from the wound. It knows that fear is not the enemy of faith, but its prerequisite. The leap into spirit does not ignore the abyss, it jumps directly into it. Maybe that’s where we find ourselves now, standing at the threshold, devoured not by the future, but by our response to it. There is a kind of psychoanalytic return here, a confrontation with the Real in Lacan’s sense, the domain of what resists symbolization, what cannot be known or tamed. The apocalyptic future is the Real par excellence. It terrifies because it cannot be controlled. It strips us back to our most elemental fears; Will I be safe? Will I be loved? Will I be saved?

We were not made for endless unveiling. There is a limit to how much truth the body can bear before it fractures, before knowing becomes an act of violence against the self. The redpill’s error is not in its identification of rot, but in its belief that rot is all there is. It confuses lucidity with liberation. But clarity without care is its own form of blindness. The soul cannot subsist on exposure alone, it requires beauty, mystery, nourishment. Not the anesthetic beauty of curated surfaces, but the kind that disorients, the kind that ruptures time, the kind that demands reverence. Beauty can be an end in itself. And perhaps this is its defiant power in a decaying world: to behold something that does not instrumentalize, that does not dominate, but simply is, and to love it anyway.

Choosing, upon your own volition, not to despair, is a radical act. In a time of cascading predictions, despair masquerades as wisdom. But to hope is not to close one’s eyes, it is to open them differently. Spinoza’s joy, the ethical flowering of understanding, begins with this reorientation. Not the flattening of feeling into naïveté, but the spiritual clarity that sees the necessity of all things and chooses, still, to affirm life. In this sense, joy is not opposed to dread, it is born within it. A joy that knows the dark but does not worship it. The redpill heresy cannot imagine this, it can only desecrate what it cannot control. So we return, recursively, to the site of the wound. To the part of ourselves that still aches for transcendence, even after ideology, even after disillusionment. We carry both mortal truth and the pull of the transcendental, that which is infinite. And it is in this tension, in the impossibility of resolution, that we become most alive, we come into contact with the Real. The future will come. Perhaps it will devour. Until revelation, our bodies, the corporeal form, persist. To feel, to oppose numbness, to find sanctity in that which is alive and trembling. This is not retreat. It is fidelity to what endures. To what cannot be reduced. To what still, impossibly, calls itself Holy.

We are not asked to be gods. We are asked to remain human. Which is to say, to feel, to suffer, to choose, to strive. To believe that spirit is not a fantasy, but a dimension of reality we must keep choosing to see. The war is not won through certainty. It is endured through fidelity, fidelity to the idea that transcendence is still possible, even now. That something sacred remains. That even in rapid decay, the soul, humanness (pure in its imperfect state), endures.

I’ve been thinking about melancholics lately, mostly because I keep recognizing myself in the older typologies, the ones that predate our obsession with personality quizzes and instead read like diagnoses of the soul. Disposition as opposed to a monicker posited for legibility online, or on dating apps (Bad). The melancholic as someone governed by phantasy, intuition, and the kind of speculative interiority that both enriches and distorts experience. I know this pattern too well: the imagination staging elaborate scenes of understanding, which is to say, romanticism, yearning, long before anything material actually occurs. The fantasy of understanding, romantic pleasure as rehearsal, as hypothesis. Sometimes I think my desire has more in common with Kant’s notion of the “schematism” than anything biological, experience pre-formatted, pre-narrated, required to pass through an internal grid before becoming real.

This isn’t romanticism as excess, but romanticism, connection, as calibration. Pleasure is not the goal (to some extent this should probably never be the goal, for anything); it’s the test case. Every time I’ve pursued someone out of that specific melancholic impulse, it hasn’t been because I believed in the urgency of the body, but because my mind had already constructed a world around the possibility, a world so vivid it felt irresponsible not to verify it. Nietzsche writes about the “dangerous privilege of those who think too much”: to be seduced not by life, but by the image of life. That’s what it feels like. To want the projection more than the encounter. To chase the speculation because the speculation, unlike the body, does exactly what you tell it to.

The instability that comes with this is predictable. It’s not moodiness, nothing so picturesque. It’s the quiet volatility that happens when experience can’t quite keep pace with imagination. I’ve had moments, usually in the aftermath of some encounter, where I can feel myself splitting: the me who lived it through corporeal experience, and the me who imagined it. And the latter is always sharper, more convincing. It’s embarrassing to admit how many times I’ve mistaken anticipation, projection, for intimacy. Or how frequently the fantasy of connection has felt more structurally sound than the connection itself.

I used to think this meant something was wrong with me, some defect in my capacity for embodiment. But I don’t necessarily think that anymore (although I am kind of a woman who is teeming with contradictions). Klossowski writes about the “phantasm” as both wound and resource, something that destabilizes but also animates desire. It makes sense that the melancholic goes toward sensual pleasure not for any reproductive logic (which has always felt vaguely alien to me, some evolutionary mandate that never took), but for the temporary reprieve from the self. A dissolution. A loosening of the psychic grip. This feels complicated to me as someone who wants to live a life that is (generally, as much as possible) aligned with God’s will, that which is Good.

Most of the connective experiences that have mattered to me weren’t even that extraordinary on a sensory level; they mattered because of the way they interrupted the administrative part of my mind. The part that organizes, interprets, translates, regulates. Sometimes I think that is the real pleasure for melancholics, the brief suspension of one’s own interpretive machinery. A small revolt against interiority’s totalizing force. Just get out of your head. Okay.

There have been moments, rare, but memorable, where the body outran the imagination. Where sensation arrived without warning, without script, and I could feel the internal scaffolding lag behind. Those moments taught me more about myself than any relationship ever has. Not in a grand “healing” sense (I don’t trust that vocabulary and also it’s Dumb), but in a factual one: that I am not entirely composed of speculation. That I can still be startled by my own aliveness, which, often eludes me. Sometimes this feels quite foreign because of my general instinct towards malaise and mundanity.

With all that being said, the cycle always returns (recursivity, I’m kind of always talking about this). The phantasy life reconstitutes itself. One can reconstruct the scene, reinterpret the meaning, fold it into some broader narrative about who one Truly is or what one will become. I’m less judgmental of this now. There’s a certain kind of fidelity in the melancholic pursuit of sensuality for its own sake, a refusal to attach it to utility, futurity, or biological obligation. Deleuze once said that desire “has no object; it is a field.” That feels accurate. Sensual pleasure isn’t the point; it’s the terrain through which the melancholic travels, trying to locate the coordinates of their own embodiment.

If I’m honest, the most stable part of my romantic life has always been the part no one sees: the prelude, the imagining, the contemplative drift. Not because it’s purer or safer, but because it is (at least) mine. I think romanticism can become a form of self-study, a way of checking in with the parts of oneself that remain otherwise inaccessible. I can be amenable, I can be hospitable, I am not indifferent, I am not Cold (although I often act as such when it comes to the latter two). And maybe that’s why melancholics seem so prone to emotional instability, not because we’re fragile, but because we are constantly negotiating between two versions of ourselves: the one who feels (because naturally, we are inclined), and the one who imagines feeling.

What seems consistent, at least in my reading of this temperament, is that the instability isn’t a problem to be solved but a structural feature. The speculative and the lived remain slightly out of sync, and that mismatch simply governs the rhythm of things. Human connection, communication, functions as an interruption in that rhythm, not revelatory, not redemptive, just a brief suspension of the usual analytic pressure. The experience doesn’t alter anything fundamental; it just momentarily disengages the apparatus that makes melancholic life feel so mentally overdetermined. And perhaps that’s the closest this temperament comes to equilibrium: not resolution, but a temporary lapse in the need to interpret, before the machinery starts up again.

I’ve been considering the low grade narcissism embedded in the feeling of being “different,” not the theatrical version but the quieter, subtler one that animates a lot of contemporary interior life. It presents itself as an intuition rather than a declaration: a sense of operating at some tangent to the rest of the world, a conviction that one’s consciousness moves at a slightly atypical frequency. It hangs in the background, at parties, in intimate conversations, like the soft hum of an appliance you didn’t realize was running. The belief doesn’t come with grandeur or superiority, just the vague notion of being structurally misaligned with others, and because it’s understated, it masquerades as honesty rather than ego. But beneath it is a familiar impulse, the need to preserve a myth of singularity, a narrative that one’s interior life is more intricate, or more endangered, or simply more other than the lives unfolding parallel to it. It’s narcissism in its most mundane, infrastructural form: not loud, not flashy, just quietly insistent. We all deeply crave legibility, and this schema precludes the possibility.

What’s strange is how quickly this belief calcifies, especially in cultures organized around self disclosure and the spectacle of interiority (something I’ve already critiqued in my own writing, even as I participate in it)(I am beyond guilty). The constant invitation to “go inward,” to mine the psyche for material, to foreground one’s inner life as the primary site of meaning, produces a subtle inflation. The self swells, not heroically but bureaucratically, accumulating layers of micro-distinction. Before long, feeling different becomes a sort of psychological reflex, a default interpretive framework. You start reading ordinary alienation as evidence of some rare psychic topology. The fact that most people feel this way, most people feel untranslatable, mismatched, adrift, only makes the phenomenon more absurd. The universality of the experience contradicts the story it tells about itself. Everyone feels different, and everyone thinks the feeling is unique (at least upon initial inquiry).

This is where the language of “existential loneliness” tries to enter the conversation, even though the phrase itself feels totally moronic and uncomfortably sterile, like the turn of phrase of a psychiatrist from zocdoc that really serves a singular purpose. And yet, the experience it gestures toward is real, the basic structural gap between one consciousness and another, the impossibility of ever fully transmitting one’s interiority, the sense that there is always a surplus of self that cannot be absorbed by the world. It’s not melodramatic; it’s mechanical. The loneliness isn’t a void, or Lack, it’s the leftover residue of awareness. Being a subject means witnessing the world from a vantage point that cannot be shared, and no amount of intimacy, language, or observation disturbs that fundamental architecture. To feel “different” is often just to become too aware of this gap, to mistake a universal structural condition for a personal affliction. But because the feeling arrives internally, it masquerades as proof of some singular emotional or cognitive complexity, when really it’s an artifact of the basic human predicament.

The irony is that this belief in one’s own difference ends up producing the very isolation it claims to describe. If you see yourself as fundamentally misaligned with others, you start acting in accordance with that assumption: withholding, mistranslating, filtering, preemptively distancing. The posture becomes performative even when the performance is unconscious (as it usually is). You start relating to others as though you are an exception, and the world obliges by reflecting the distance back to you. A feedback loop. The feeling of separateness creates the conditions that confirm it, and soon the loneliness feels not only accurate but inevitable. The mind becomes its own echo chamber. What began as a faint distinction ossifies into identity. This is particularly compelling during a time in which culture pushes us towards over identification with interiority, whilst also crippling our capacities for true individuation due to the influences of Media (but that's a conversation for another time).

I think what complicates this further is how the narrative of difference gets tethered to meaning making. People begin to treat their sense of being out of sync as a sign of depth, or sensitivity, or uncommon perceptiveness, when really it’s just another form of self organization. A way of structuring one’s interior life around a stable axis, even if the axis is ultimately fictional. Feeling different becomes a tool for interpreting experience, a shortcut for explaining discomfort, disconnection, or contingency. It gives these experiences a kind of coherence. And because the narrative is psychologically convenient, it persists long after its usefulness expires. The myth of being singular is easier to maintain than the more banal truth, that one is neither remarkable nor defective, simply a person among other people, each of whom believes (quietly, privately) that they are exceptional in their estrangement.

There is something clarifying in recognizing this, even if the recognition is unsentimental. It doesn’t ameliorate the feeling, it simply reframes it. The sense of difference becomes less like an existential condition and more like a habit of interpretation, a residue of overidentified interiority rather than evidence of ontological specialness. The loneliness that accompanies it feels less bound to the totality of The Real, more procedural. A function of consciousness rather than a crisis of identity. And in that reframing, one begins to chip away at the calcification. Not dramatically, not redemptively, but enough to interrupt the self perpetuating loop (and perhaps create something productive from it). Enough to see the feeling for what it is, a small, persistent fiction that has been mistaken for truth simply because it’s familiar. That familiarity is powerful, but it is not a destiny, it is not universal truth. It’s just the mind, doing what it always does, constructing a story and then mistaking the story for a structural fact. We are storytelling creatures. We want connection, legibility. We are deserving of more.

I keep returning to the way digital spaces reshape the psyche, not in the catastrophic “we are losing our humanity” sense, but in a more procedural, administrative way: the way they streamline instinct into something displayable. Digital identity often feels less like an extension of the self and more like a distilled operational mode, a simplified interface where the raw material of the ID gets translated into signals, fragments, impulses rendered legible by repetition. Online, the unconscious isn’t subterranean, tied directly to the subconscious; it’s exported into the digital self, The Profile. What emerges is not the whole self but an optimized subset of it, the part that acts first and explains later, the part unconcerned with coherence, the part that finds satisfaction in being instantly mirrored back.

This is, I think, why people find such unembarrassed pleasure in showcasing their symptom online. The digital environment rewards immediacy, affect, micro-confession. The symptom, which in embodied life is inconvenient and often humiliating, becomes aestheticized, formatted into a stable motif. The medium encourages a kind of psychic minimalism. Instead of wrestling with contradictions, you foreground the one feature that organizes everything else. The symptom becomes shorthand for identity, a recognizable pattern that makes you legible to others without requiring actual proximity. You don’t have to explain yourself; you just have to express the part of you that reads the clearest.

What complicates this, what gives it its odd moral texture, is the way online expression has evolved into a digital confessional that requires no absolution. People disclose not for healing, but for circulation; not to be forgiven, but to be acknowledged as existents. The platforms, in their architecture, encourage this low-stakes atonement: small offerings of self-exposure meant to signal sincerity without incurring real psychic risk. It becomes a secular ritual, a way of managing one’s internal debris by externalizing it into a public that is largely indifferent but functionally attentive. There is something vaguely medieval about the impulse, this sense that confession stabilizes the self even if it solves nothing. The disclosure becomes its own end, a gesture toward transparency that doubles as a distancing mechanism. You reveal your wound to avoid being defined by it, even though the act of revelation inevitably becomes part of the definition.

What’s striking, if one cares to trace the lineage, is how closely this digital mode of disclosure resembles older forms of confession, except stripped of any transcendent framework. Augustine wrote his Confessions as an address to God, a movement toward alignment with the divine; the confession was meaningful because it presupposed an external witness capable of granting coherence, perhaps even grace. Online confession replicates the form without the metaphysics. There is no God, only an algorithmic audience, faceless, shifting, largely inattentive, yet strangely powerful in its capacity to validate or erase. In this sense, confession becomes less about truth and more about circulation. The aim is not purification but proof of existence. Lacan might say the subject is speaking not to be understood but to confirm that the Other, the symbolic order, the network, the feed, the profile, is still there, still listening, still capable of returning a sign. And that small return, however hollow, produces a sense of provisional coherence. Public penance becomes a soft identity. You confess not to unburden yourself but to reinscribe yourself into the digital order; the symptom becomes your credential. The exposure signals moral seriousness even when no transformation is demanded. It’s confession as self branding, absolution outsourced to the scroll, where continuity matters more than redemption. The ritual persists because it stabilizes the self, even if only for a moment, even if only as data.

There’s also the strange relief of collapsing the psyche into something quasi-manageable. Offline, impulses compete with obligations, social norms, long-term narratives of self. Online, these impulses can exist without counterweight. They can surface without consequence, be instantly archived, circulated, and forgotten. It feels honest not because it reveals the whole interior landscape but because it reveals the part that typically remains unspoken. A technical exposure, not an emotional one. And the medium, algorithmic, responsive, hungry and aching, rewards this exposure with the immediacy of recognition. A feedback loop of self affirmation built out of fragments rather than substance.

But the pleasurable part isn’t simply being seen. It’s being seen as the symptom, without the burden of integrating it into a coherent self. The digital ID offers a low-stakes arena where one’s psychic excesses can be stylized rather than scrutinized. Instead of understanding the symptom, you perform it; instead of resolving it, you refine its presentation. This isn’t exactly narcissism, at least not in the diagnostic sense. It’s closer to a desire for internal consistency, a way of giving form to what would otherwise remain an unmanageable cluster of impulses. The online symptom feels pleasurable because it bypasses the friction of interpretation. It becomes self explanatory, self reinforcing.

And maybe that’s why the phenomenon persists, the digital sphere allows the psyche to offload its least governable elements into a format that feels both safer and more legible than the internal experience itself. The enjoyment comes from the small suspension of psychic labor, the temporary reprieve from having to negotiate with all the other parts of the self that complicate the narrative. The symptom can exist without apology, without context, without consequence. Not as a confession, not as pathology, but as a signal among other signals, recognized, repeated, absorbed into the flow. It’s not catharsis; it’s not revelation. It’s simply ease. And in a world that demands so much internal management, even that small ease can feel like a kind of freedom.

I realized I’ve been orienting my writing lately around self concept and confession, this feels revealing, maybe some primordial impulse towards change and transformation as the year comes to a close. Largely, I have been reflecting on how earlier models of selfhood relied on something external to the self to establish orientation. The soul was answerable to God. The individual was situated within a role, a community, a symbolic order that exceeded personal preference. This did not necessarily make life easier, but it made it intelligible. Augustine’s confession makes sense within this framework because it presumes a witness capable of ordering the self, not merely observing it. Confession was not an act of expression but of submission, an acknowledgment that the self was misaligned and that correction, not validation, was the point. The confession mattered because it addressed something that could judge, reorder, and ultimately absorb the self into a larger coherence.

What’s striking about modern subjectivity is not its freedom, but its lack of orientation. The self is no longer accountable to a transcendent authority or a stable communal role; it is answerable only to itself. This is often framed as liberation, but it produces a subtler, less overt kind of instability. Without an external standard, there is nothing against which to measure alignment, only internal consistency. The self becomes both actor and judge, witness and defendant, endlessly evaluating its own motives, desires, and failures. There is no final appeal. The result is not autonomy in any meaningful sense, but a kind of recursive self-surveillance that masquerades as freedom. Post-modern narcissistic impulses, a fixation on the self, have created the panopticon in our own heads.

This is where freedom begins to feel like a burden. Radical autonomy collapses into total responsibility. If nothing determines you, no God, no fate, no fixed role, then every outcome appears traceable back to personal failure or mismanagement. Nietzsche’s critique of guilt is useful here, except the creditor has changed. Guilt no longer circulates between the self and God, or the self and society, but loops internally. The self becomes indebted to itself, constantly accruing moral and existential debt it can never quite repay. Responsibility without limit stops feeling like agency and starts feeling like exposure. We are not holy beings; we do not have an unlimited capacity for knowing, for agency. We are guided by intuition, by feeling (spiritual in nature) and to some degree, this makes our limits evident.

In this context, it makes sense that there is such a persistent desire for temporary self suspension. Ego death, anonymity, drug use, absorption, devotion, these are not primarily about pleasure or escape, but about relief from authorship. They offer moments where the demand to be a coherent, accountable self loosens. The appeal is not disappearance, but reprieve. A temporary abdication of the role of being someone who must decide, justify, narrate, and stand behind every aspect of their existence. In these moments, responsibility thins out; causality feels suspended, the id function blooms. Action no longer has to be explained or metabolized into identity. There is comfort in no longer having to mean anything in particular, in being acted through rather than acting. The self recedes just enough to allow experience to occur without immediately being claimed, interpreted, or folded back into a story about who one is supposed to be, who one wants to be, who one ought to be.

Simone Weil’s notion of decreation gestures toward this impulse with unusual precision. Decreation is not annihilation, but the easing of the self’s grip on itself. A consent to diminishment. In a world where the self is required to be endlessly generative, expressive, and accountable, the idea of letting go, of not insisting on one’s own centrality and interiority, feels almost transgressive. And yet, this is where many people locate relief: in experiences that reduce the self’s prominence rather than intensify it. In devotion, routine, absorption, or even silence, the self briefly ceases to be the primary organizing principle of reality.

What these moments reveal is not a desire to escape responsibility altogether, but a fatigue with having no external anchor. The modern self is overburdened not because it is weak, but because it is required to be everything at once, source of meaning, site of judgment, author of coherence. Earlier frameworks distributed that weight elsewhere. They imposed limits, but they also offered legible orientation. Without that distribution, the self collapses inward, managing its own excess until even freedom feels oppressive. We yearn for God.

None of this is an argument for returning to older forms of authority wholesale. But it does suggest that the fantasy of absolute autonomy has costs that are rarely acknowledged. Ultimate choice is not freedom. When the self becomes its own highest authority, it also becomes its own prison. The longing for self suspension, whether through faith or the hedonistic ouroboros, reads less like avoidance and more like an attempt to recover proportion. Not to erase the self, but to loosen its grip on the psyche. To allow, even briefly, for a form of existence where the burden of being someone is not entirely one’s own. As we near the beginning of the new year, I find myself wanting less authorship and more orientation, less insistence on choice for its own sake, and more willingness to be held, shaped, or interrupted by something outside of me, even if only provisionally. I hope you find this, too.

There is something spiritually dissonant about the contemporary impulse to render love immediately visible. To narrate it in real time, to publish its rhythms, to translate its most private textures into prose before they have had time to sediment into meaning. I do not mean that love should be hidden out of prudishness or fear, but that it resists exposure by its very nature. Love is not an object to be displayed but an event that works upon the subject slowly, often destructively, and almost always in silence. When it is made public, oriented toward legibility, too quickly, it shifts from something that acts spiritually upon the self to something arranged for comprehension.

I have noticed in myself a growing aversion to speaking about love while I am inside it. Not because the experience lacks intensity, but because it feels ethically fragile, easily cheapened by language, especially language meant to be received. There is a point at which articulation begins to feel like theft, as though something that does not belong to me alone is being converted into my narrative possession. I felt this most sharply the last time I left a love I believed would be the one I would spend my life inside, a love whose seriousness made it feel especially vulnerable to explanation. In the aftermath, my mother said to me, almost gently, “Maddy, you will have a lot of love in your life,” and what struck me was not the consolation but the reorientation, love not as a singular monument to be defended, but as a recurring force that does not require constant narration to prove its reality. Intimacy, once exteriorized, subtly changes its orientation, it turns outward, toward recognition, rather than inward, toward attention. What was once lived as encounter becomes filtered through the question of how it will appear.

Simone Weil’s writing on attention offers a vocabulary for this discomfort. For Weil, attention is not an act of assertion but of suspension, a disciplined waiting that refuses to appropriate its object. Attention is ethical because it resists use. To love attentively, in this sense, is not to grasp or explain the other, but to consent to their irreducibility, to remain present without trying to secure meaning prematurely. It requires silence, restraint, and a willingness to remain unknowing. Publication operates in the opposite direction. It assumes that what matters about an experience is its legibility, that meaning is something proven through articulation rather than undergone.

This is where the vulgarity enters, not in desire, not in the body, but in the evacuation of inwardness. When love is immediately translated into narrative, it becomes aesthetic rather than ethical, tied to the core compononents of our deep Humanness. The question shifts from what is happening to what can be said. What was once an interior demand becomes an exterior performance. I have felt this shift acutely, the way speaking too soon flattens an experience, how language, when rushed, replaces attention rather than deepens it. How the desire to possess obfuscates expression and experience. The pressure to explain interrupts the process by which love changes us.

Roland Barthes understood this fragility well. In A Lover’s Discourse, he resists offering a coherent theory of love, insisting instead on fragments, repetitions, and interruptions. The lover does not possess a story so much as a series of intensities that refuse synthesis. Public declarations of love tend to betray this structure. They smooth the fragments into a narrative arc, substituting legibility for truth. But love is not linear. It does not move cleanly from absence to reunion, from longing to fulfillment. It circles, stalls, contradicts itself. Its meaning, if it arrives at all, does so obliquely.

There is also a moral risk in narrating another person’s interior life. Even when framed as devotion, it assumes a right of access that love should actually call into question. To love someone is to encounter the limits of one’s entitlement, to realize how little of the other is ever truly available. I have become increasingly sensitive to this boundary, the sense that to speak about certain gestures, vulnerabilities, or rituals is to cross from intimacy into appropriation. What feels like reverence can quietly become a form of aesthetic consumption, where the other is rendered as material rather than encountered as mystery.

Goethe writes that one should beware of explaining what ought to be experienced. His work returns again and again to the idea of formation, Bildung, as something that unfolds slowly, through immersion rather than analysis. Love, like art or character, forms us over time, often without our awareness. To interrupt this process with constant self-interpretation is to arrest it prematurely. Explanation, when it arrives too early, becomes a defense against being changed.

What is lost in all this is mystery. Love needs opacity in order to breathe. Its most formative movements occur beneath language, in confusion, in waiting, in misrecognition. Silence, here, is not repression but true integration, connectivity. To withhold speech is to protect something still in the process of becoming. The modern impulse runs in the opposite direction, toward total legibility, toward the belief that what cannot be named, clarified, or shared has somehow failed to be real. Yet to love another person is to confront, again and again, the discomfort of holding what cannot be fully known, the unease of remaining in relation without mastery or resolution. The desire to render the other transparent is less an act of intimacy than an attempt to soothe this anxiety, to domesticate alterity through explanation. But love does not abolish the otherness of the other, it intensifies it. I have come to believe that some experiences lose their ethical weight the moment they are made fully legible, that they require darkness in order to retain their force.

To love well may require enduring the anxiety of not being understood, not being seen, not being affirmed. But that endurance is not empty. It is the condition under which love remains something other than spectacle, something closer to grace (and thus, that which is Truly Holy, our greatest task in our humanity). Not an object to be displayed, but a force that reorients the self quietly, irrevocably, and without witnesses.

Desire no longer appears primarily as primordial hunger, ache, or longing, the motivating force behind the Lacanian sense of Lack. It increasingly presents itself as a disembodied, identity, that which is not connected to the soul. It moves through images, is refined through the feed, and is rendered legible through performance. What circulates online is not simply libido in its raw state but its aestheticized form, desire translated into image, into branding, into a visual language meant to be consumed. The algorithm does not merely distribute objects of desire, it structures the field in which desire can appear at all, privileging those forms that are legible, reproducible, and profitable.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this marks a profound transformation in the libidinal economy. Freud understood sublimation as the redirection of instinctual energy into cultural production, art, thought, creation. What we are witnessing now is a technologically accelerated sublimation in which erotic and relational drives are not repressed but converted into continuous self presentation. Desire is no longer lived so much as it is styled and aestheticized. It becomes an image of wanting rather than the experience of wanting, a symbolic performance that substitutes for the instability of actual longing.

Lacan’s insistence that desire is structured by lack helps clarify what is lost here. Desire persists because the object that seems to promise fulfillment never quite delivers it, something always remains missing, and that sense of missingness is what animates the subject. The algorithm intervenes by filling this gap with endless substitutes, each one offering the illusion of satisfaction while guaranteeing its postponement. What results is not fulfillment but a stylized circulation of wanting, a libidinal treadmill on which desire is continuously activated but never allowed to deepen, never satiated. We are hungry ghosts.

Within this system, libido becomes something to be seen rather than something to be felt. To be desirable now means to be visible in the right way, to perform one’s erotic or emotional orientation in a form that can be recognized, rewarded, and reproduced. The self becomes a curated site of libidinal display, images, captions, innocuous flirtations, moods, and aesthetic signals all function as micro performances of desire. We no longer want (for its own sake), we learn how to want in ways that will be legible to an audience, then diffused through the machine.

This is where Reich’s work acquires new relevance. Reich believed that neurosis arose when libidinal energy was blocked, when the body’s capacity for pleasure and expression was constrained by repression. But the contemporary subject is not repressed so much as endlessly stimulated. Libido flows, but only through channels that render it aesthetic, visible, and monetizable. Desire is not dammed, it is siphoned, and rerouted into surfaces and signals that keep it circulating without ever letting it accumulate enough intensity to threaten the system that contains it. The result is not freedom but estrangement. One begins to experience one’s own desire as something to be managed and stylized rather than inhabited. The question begging to malignantly shift from “what do I want?” to “how does my wanting look?” Desire becomes a genre, something with recognizable tropes and expected performances, rather than a force that disrupts identity, that transcends conscious cognition.

This aestheticization of libido also collapses the difference between desire and selfhood. What one wants becomes who one is, or at least who one presents oneself as. Sexuality, attraction, even longing itself are folded into personal branding, and to deviate from one’s curated libidinal image begins to feel like a threat to coherence and legibility. The algorithm rewards consistency, not depth. It prefers desire that behaves. Yet, the nature of desire, with its inextricable link to the ID, is that it does not behave. It is excessive, contradictory, often humiliating. It attaches to the wrong objects, returns to what should be over, that which cannot be Had. These unruly movements of libido are precisely what the algorithmic system cannot tolerate. They cannot be easily optimized, predicted, or aestheticized. So they are smoothed out, replaced with more manageable simulations of wanting.

This is why so much contemporary desire feels thin despite its intensity. Not because people feel less, but because feeling has been converted into performance. Even heartbreak becomes content. Even obsession is stylized. The private, chaotic, and transformative dimensions of longing are filtered out in favor of what can be shown.

Underlying all of this is that which is (essentially) the supercomputer trend egregore, the vast, self reinforcing intelligence that tracks every gesture of attention, aggregates it, and feeds it back as culture. Trends no longer emerge from collective experimentation or subcultural friction but from predictive systems that detect the slightest libidinal flicker and amplify it into a wave. What we experience as taste, fashion, or desire is increasingly pre-selected for us by machines that know how to convert our impulses into patterns. This egregore does not merely reflect culture, it actively castrates it. By harvesting libidinal energy at the level of micro-preference, it prevents desire from coagulating into something strong enough to become art, devotion, or even (simply) a salient emotional experience. Creative and erotic impulses are intercepted before they can mature, turned into fleeting signals that dissipate as quickly as they appear. What might have become a coherent piece of work, or even an expression, the experience of passion, instead becomes a trend, optimized into harmless circulation.

In this way, the algorithm does not repress desire, it infantilizes it. It keeps libido in a state of perpetual adolescence, constantly aroused, constantly curious, but incapable of sustaining commitment or depth. The subject becomes rich in stimuli and poor in meaning, surrounded by endless objects of interest yet unable to attach to any of them with enough intensity to be transformed. What appears as abundance is in fact a thinning of experience, a condition in which nothing is allowed to matter for very long. Desire, deprived of duration, loses its capacity to become commitment, creation, or even genuine suffering (which precludes ecstatic experience, the sublime).

To desire someone or something deeply now feels almost antisocial, not because it is hostile to others but because it withdraws energy from the circuits of visibility that organize contemporary life. Deep wanting does not broadcast itself easily, it does not resolve into images, metrics, or updates that can be circulated without loss. It lingers, it fixates, it risks disappointment, incoherence, and abject misery, all of which make it economically useless but existentially indispensable (and thus spiritually important). What we call intensity is precisely this refusal to remain mobile, this stubborn attachment to something that cannot be efficiently replaced. Real desire takes time in a way that the algorithm cannot tolerate, it grow, accumulates in ambiguity, in the slow creation of meaning that cannot be made legible on demand. It resists optimization because its power lies in what cannot be predicted or streamlined.

This is perhaps why genuine longing now feels almost sacred, not in a sentimental sense, but because it is one of the few remaining forces that has not yet been fully aestheticized, flattened, or converted into that which can be consumed (“content”). In a world where libido is constantly being styled for display, to want in private becomes a radical refusal, quiet insistence that one’s longing belongs neither to themselves, an audience nor to the machine that organizes it. And in that refusal, unseen, unmeasured, and unprofitable, something like life, the experience of Humanity (which is to say, God) in all its unruly intensity, begins to return.