In the quietude of midnight, a teenage girl stays awake, her face illuminated by the blue glow of her phone screen, thumb suspended over a message she will never send. She stares at a name that has not lighted up her notifications for days, maybe weeks. Her message reads, “Did I do something wrong?”, but she deletes it, knowing no answer will come. This is not an anomaly, it is a scourge of our times. Relationships today often begin with a heart reaction and end with silence. The practice is called “ghosting”, and it is merely one of the many symptoms of an epoch defined by emotional outsourcing, algorithmic mediation, and the spiritual evaporation of intimacy.
Human connection has never been easy, but the digital scaffolding we have built around it has twisted it into something brittle. Among the young, especially, love and friendship now come with expiry dates. One day, you are someone’s entire universe, chronicled in stories, shared playlists, and midnight calls. The next, you are a phantom presence, blocked or “left on read”, your existence downgraded to a mute spectator of their life. And this retreat, this vanishing act, comes with no explanation, no accountability. It is as though people have come to resemble the apps they use: quickly deleted, easily forgotten, perpetually replaceable. What we are witnessing is not just a shift in modes of communication, but a reconfiguration of emotional ethics.
The digital world offers an illusion of infinite choice. Swipe, scroll, discard. Attention, once tethered to shared time and presence, now flits from face to face with the velocity of a thumb. In the process, people are not only growing lonelier; they are growing numb. The ghosted become ghosters. Feelings ossify into emojis. Grief is posted, not processed.
Consumable experiences
Young people, born into this matrix of immediacy and abundance, often experience relationships less as journeys and more as consumable experiences. Dating has turned transactional, with apps enabling micro-decisions based on curated profiles, filtered photos, and punchline bios. Aesthetic is privileged over essence. Ambiguity thrives. “Situationships” replace commitments; relationships without the vocabulary of love, merely the residue of it. And yet, paradoxically, everyone is still searching for something real, aching for a connection unscripted by algorithms. They yearn for the chaos, the vulnerability, the unpredictability of being known beyond a screen.
But this chaos is precisely what the digital order resists. The psychological architecture of our platforms is designed to maximise engagement, not understanding. It rewards performativity over sincerity. The result is a generation hyper-aware of how they are perceived and yet increasingly unsure of who they are without the digital mirror. We curate ourselves to fit grids, stories, captions, but in doing so, we lose the messiness that makes us human.
George Orwell, in 1984, warned of a future in which surveillance would be the enemy of freedom. But what if the inverse has also come true? What if voluntary hyper-visibility, the self-surveillance we perform daily, has become our new cage? We document everything: meals, thoughts, dates, heartbreaks. In doing so, we unwittingly submit ourselves to a form of emotional panopticon. You are always seen, always available, always expected to perform. No off-switch. Even solitude is now an aesthetic.
In Orwell’s world, the telescreen watched you. In ours, we watch ourselves, and we crave being watched. But this gaze is not intimacy. It is something colder, more uninterested. The more we share, the less we feel. The more visible we are, the less seen we become. One need not look far to see the fallout. Mental health concerns have spiked. Loneliness, that old haunt of the elderly, now grips the young. The ubiquity of presence — the ability to text or call at any time, has paradoxically led to an absence of meaningful interaction. We talk more but speak less. We listen less but scroll more. Empathy gets algorithmically throttled.
Of course, it is not all gloom. The digital has also offered avenues for connection that transcend geography and identity. Friendships bloom across borders; marginalised voices find communities they never knew existed. But these blooms are fragile, and they require something our digital culture is increasingly allergic to: time, patience, and sustained attention. If anything is to be salvaged, we must learn to reclaim slowness. To resist the tyranny of the instant. To let silences mean something other than abandonment. To confront discomfort without ghosting. Perhaps we need to reintroduce friction into our interactions. Friction that demands presence, accountability, and courage. The courage to stay. The courage to say, “I’m not sure how I feel,” instead of disappearing. The courage to be flawed, inconsistent, human.
In the end, our devices may be smart, but love remains stubbornly analog. No app can automate the ache of longing or the solace of being understood. And until we stop treating each other as consumable profiles and start recognizing each other as entire, trembling worlds, we will continue to swipe past the very thing we hunger for: connection without a back button.
sandrajozf@gmail.com
Published – July 13, 2025 03:40 am IST
