The Boy Who Cried Emptiness

selfhood, sociality: a report

Sometimes I start writing one of these, set it aside for a minute, and by the time I come back to it feel like a different enough person that I can’t contact any desire to write about the earlier thing. Like this week I was doing one about dating apps, and a recent decision to take a break from them, and how I’m noticing that they were maybe helping to reinforce an addiction to a certain kind of fantasy, a fantasy that someone extraordinarily attractive will come into my life and validate every aspect of my personality and being, by choosing me above all other humans, and that this will justify all the bum choices I’ve ever made. (Maybe you know this one.) But then I sat down on my meditation cushion yesterday morning and saw something strange, and I guess I just don’t feel like talking to you about dating apps.

In Opening Awareness meditation, one “remains uninvolved” with whatever is happening. That’s the radically simple approach, but it’s often hard to find, especially when one’s nervous system is activated and involvement renews itself quickly. It’s taken me a few years to get a sense of what involvement actually feels like at the internal, gestural level, and my sense of it is still always changing—involvement and uninvolvement are in some sense mutually defining (like form and emptiness), so it isn’t a matter of finding a specific button and pressing it or not, but more a continual unwinding of whatever patterns happen to have a grip on consciousness that day. It’s like how if someone prompts you to relax, it’s pertinent to know which muscles are clenched.

Sometimes I notice a pattern and it goes right on repeating. This happens a lot with song lyrics. The best I can do is give up on stopping them, enjoy them some, even take a moment to admire and receive the dreamlike appropriateness song lyrics tend to have when I clue into to their meaning. Sometimes they dissipate then, as if to say message delivered, but other times they just keep going and I have to be cool with that.

Sometimes I notice a pattern and it explodes almost before I see what it’s like. This is what happened the day before yesterday. It seemed, in retrospect, like the pattern I noticed was some sort of recursive, self-referential thing that grabbed whatever my previous thought had been and immediately tried to wrangle it into a coherent narrative about another thought called Me. “And what does that thought say about Me?” this thing seemed to be wondering compulsively, and about so many things—my meditation intentions, my thoughts about possible results of meditation, mind-wanderings about work, and any number of random sensations.

As soon as I noticed it, I felt an immediate and very familiar sense of anger and exhaustion. A forceful feeling that was like: “Stop fucking watching me.” And then some rickety dam in my head collapsed and awareness rushed out—and in—and I was a drastically less separate thing.

Afterwards a narrative emerged, that what had been glimpsed was a part of my system repeatedly jerking attention back to the formation and validation of this Me fellow… possibly for decades?… and generating a persistent sense that everything relevant was going on inside my head, the small and arbitrary spatial arena of my narrativizing. I’d managed to relax this process in lots of sits previously, often by deliberately extending awareness out into the space around my body, but I don’t think I’d ever before gotten up under the grabbiness and been like, oh, I’m doing that. Right there is where I’m being the evil overlord of my own reality. Once I saw it, no effort was called for. Just took my hand off the proverbial hot stove.

The next part surprised me: I found myself, I want to say, ashamed. My best educated guess at this time is that I was ashamed to have finally seen a thing I’d been looking for since I started meditating. I think I was ashamed, to put it bluntly, that I hadn’t seen it before, when I had thought I had. I had written in my journal that I’d seen it. I had told people in meditation groups that I’d seen it. I had tried to describe it to friends, saying things like “It’s really hard to describe, but…” And all the while I hadn’t seen it!—or at least, this “it” was substantially different, and also more like accounts I’d heard from others on the same path and doing the same meditation. It was as if some part of me had been scared enough of being wrong—and of what this wrongness would say about the kind of Me I had going—that it was willing just never to see anything beyond what had been seen before. Better never to see than to have to admit that I’d succumbed to wishful thinking, to the drive to signal belongingness and value. Better never to have seen than to admit that even my most private seeing had been constrained by the drive to be a consistent character in my own life.

It’s kinda like a hole the size of a ping-pong ball appeared in my phenomenology, in holographic head-space, right where the grabby little attractor thing used to be. It’s there now still, the hole, and still feels conspicuous, a noticeable absence of happening. I anticipate that it will become more normal over time, or just go back to how it was, and this is partly why I wanted to write this down.

I also should remind myself that I still haven’t “seen it,” because there is of course no ultimate “it” to see. Nor does this experience make me special. I was simply making myself flinch in a particular, repetitive, idiosyncratic and painfully human way. I seem to be doing it less now, maybe only briefly, but the reprieve is extremely welcome.

The response that’s feeling most appropriate is mainly gratitude, and I’m feeling it enormously: it’s flowing in and out through this hole in my mind.

2

Afterwards I had an urge to get out of the house, and had finished my freelance work for the week, so I went to Vanderbilt looking for a coffee shop I hadn’t been to before. All the cafes seemed to be full of laptop workers already, so I stopped into a bakery. It smelled like sugar and there was generic pop music on the speakers, it was a sort of uninviting place somehow, a sign saying no bathroom available. I asked for peppermint tea and the cashier told me how much it cost and then I pulled out my credit card and she told me how much it cost again. As I was sitting at the table typing, gangs of little kids and women in fashionable coats appeared in the store and made carefully considered selections at the display case. I could feel the kids’ souls frothing, more alive than their parents; I had an urge to interact with them but just smiled blandly. Something was going on with eye contact: I was doing the typical New York thing of politely avoiding it, but my avoidance now also felt slightly absurd, like jumping over tripwires that were no longer there. I wrote in my journal:

Degrees of freedom opening up, like I can see where and how I would normally close off possibilities and the wall doesn’t seem to be as much there anymore. (I’m hoping.) Also just a lot of vividness. Clusters of little kids flooding in and out of this bakery—didn’t realize I was getting here just as school let out—sorta hallucinatory. I feel much more attuned to the kids and their affects and affected by them than I think I’d normally be. People seem strange and abnormally beautiful.

I don’t know how I’m going to finish my essay about dating apps now. It doesn’t feel like the thing to do at all.

What does? I don’t know, maybe going to sleep for a thousand years? Probably mostly the time of day but I do feel a bit like I’ve been running a marathon since I was five years old and only just tapped out. Like I only just learned how to take a break, a real break, not a wild-eyed attempt at self-soothing.

I had to pee so I finished my tea and walked up the street to the Central Library. It was cold and wet and some kind of construction was going on at Grand Army Plaza. I found myself missing past romances without warning and I cried without wiping the tears away as two women my age sailed in the opposite direction talking about “the next Dimes Square.”

In the science and technology room at the library I realized the seat I’d chosen had been empty because the man next to me was exuding the sad, acrid smell of someone who’s worn the same clothes long enough to merge with them. I watched him devotedly flipping through a tabloid, licking his lips to turn a page and making small grunting noises that were like the ghosts of a long-ago appreciation. I was pretty sure I’d seen him years earlier, pre-Covid, when I came to the library more often, or was that a different guy who also smelled bad and also leafed through tabloids in a way that suggested there was porn hidden within the covers and also sat in the science and technology room and next to whom I had also once sat down before noticing how he smelled? I debated staying put long enough to make it non-obvious why I was leaving, but eventually thought He must know anyway and moved to the history room, where I read bits of Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, Ph.D., and tried to clue into what he calls “the whole unclear felt sense” of what was changing. I wrote:

Still feel hollow in my head. Though noticeably not immune to “worry,” for instance that I ought to be working on an essay as intended.

How strange that I’m sitting among roughly twenty people in this library room, and none of us are talking to each other, touching each other, looking at each other except in fragmentary glances.

I’m feeling quite a lot. Don’t know if I’ve said that yet. The floodgates are open, and I wanted to say it’s overwhelming, but it keeps being not even that. It just passes through and passes through and passes through and passes through. I can relax it further, or close it off slightly. I’m not entirely sure how I do that, apparently a muscular gesture in my head but not entirely sure. Kind of a letting go slack.

…

I keep checking to see if maybe, maybe I’m just making all this up. Is there really anything “different”? And the most honest answer is, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve never known how to truly reliably compare two mental states experienced at two different times. But there does seem to be something happening, I’m about 95% confident, something notable. Just, an absence of strain where there has always been a sense of strain.

…

Want to go dancing. Want to talk to someone. At the same time I feel, interestingly, markedly less lonely. In fact I’m not sure I’ve felt what I normally internally call lonely all day, since this started. I feel a vague desire to connect, for instance, with this attractive person in the green sweater sitting across from me to my left in the history reading room, and I definitely feel a familiar sense of hesitation around that—“risk.” But I don’t feel, I think I don’t feel, the usual sense of… what is it… self-castigation, or impending self-castigation. Yeah, I think that might be it. There’s no critical voice saying it’ll say something about me if I don’t “do something.” Which clarifies that maybe I’ve been essentially punishing myself at a subtle level each time I’ve wanted to connect with someone?

On the walk to the train I listened to this song for maybe the tenth time this week. The imagery takes me back to a time when I used to live in nearby Crown Heights with four close friends.

When you die you never come back
So I dream a life of dancing, never letting no one down
In a taxi through the town
No more strangers in my living room
The last days of waste and worry
On to new anxieties, I know
The answer but I let it go.

3

So what are you trying to say, you ask. That you saw through your compulsive self-consciousness and suddenly your life is like the moody interstitial scenes of a twentieth-century novel?

Maybe. Maybe. For now, allow me to just reiterate the key points of this blog post.

Dating apps are really quite bad for us. Future historians will look on the rise of Tinder and Hinge as the moment when AI systems began, at first unwittingly, to divide and conquer the human race and shape the course of its evolution. Dating apps hook into our insecurities, the ways we’re conditioned to conceive ourselves as discrete and alone and of contingent value, and intensify them, reinforcing a craving that infects the love they bring. Worse still, they leave us without good stories to tell at weddings.

However, evidence suggests that despite these obvious drawbacks, the universe may not ultimately care whether we use dating apps or not. Some extremists go so far as to say that all manifestations of mind are intrinsically perfect (though scientific evidence for this claim remains limited). In the end, it seems that it is up to each of us to decide what is best, for ourselves and our futures.

—

PS, I did go dancing.