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Nick Carus's avatar

An excellent and very timely article, thanks Seth.

What I find most powerful in your piece, is the provocation that disconnection is no longer just a social phenomenon and has become an ontological condition of late modern life. We're not merely failing to connect - we're losing the capacity to be with one another in the deep and reciprocal way that once defined being human.

But let's recognise that the cultural drift you're describing is not incidental, but systemic. It's a result of architectures - technological, economic, institutional - that privilege transaction over relation, convenience over presence, and efficiency over reciprocity.

The rise of hikikomorism is perhaps the starkest signal of this condition, not simply as a psychological pathology, but also as a societal mirror. When millions retreat from the world altogether, choosing the safety of solitude over the risk of encounter, it reveals that our public spaces (social, digital, emotional) have become too hostile, too hollow, or too indifferent to sustain the delicate work of relation. It's also a symptom - not of individual weakness - but of a civilisation that no longer knows how to hold one another with dignity, trust and empathy.

I sometimes wonder whether even the word “connection” has become too thin for what’s needed. We can “connect” in a thousand superficial ways without ever entering into "relation". What I think we're really longing for, is attunement - a subtle, mutual responsiveness that only arises when two beings risk being changed by encounter. It is the subtle choreography of being-together that our culture has forgotten how to sustain.

In that light, the act of continuing to want to reach out and connect - not naively, but knowingly, even when our invitations fall-flat - becomes so much more than being just a personal virtue. It is a quiet form of resistance, and even of civic practice - a refusal to let the dominant logic of isolation dictate the terms of our humanity.

And perhaps, as you rightly imply, the work is not to lament what has been lost, but to learn how to become "civic soil" again - to seed ourselves and grow into environments that nurture the conditions in which relation can once more take root.

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Annie Gottlieb's avatar

You might relate to this: “In June, I wrote about how the most generous thing we can offer is permission to remain opaque. Now I’m thinking the same applies to relational geometry. Not insisting on resolution. Not demanding proximity or distance change. Allowing the careful calibrations people have been making, maybe for years, to stand. … [sometimes] engagement would collapse options you need kept open. These aren’t dysfunctions. They’re compositions. Spatial arrangements that hold multiple possibilities in suspension, preserving geometric optionality through strategic ambiguity.“ https://open.substack.com/pub/shadesofabsence/p/love-is-proximity-pride-is-distance-shades-of-absence?r=16gkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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