The Silence Between the Notifications
It is August in Warsaw. The heat has broken, replaced by a damp, gray persistence that feels like a held breath. I sit with my coffee and watch the street below. People walk with their heads down, not because they are shy, but because they are carrying devices.
We have been told for years that this connectivity is a gift. We were promised a world without distance. A world where every voice could be heard. I look at the crowd and I do not see a chorus. I see a room full of people shouting into a void, terrified that if they stop talking, they will cease to exist.
This is not a new fear. Kierkegaard wrote about it in the 19th century, long before glass screens. He called it the panic of the public. The public is an abstraction. It has no face. It has no conscience. When you address the public, you are addressing nothing. And yet, we spend our days building our lives for this phantom audience.
The Performance of Self
In Poland, we have a saying: “Człowiek sąsiadowi wilkiem”. Man is a wolf to his neighbor. It is an old pessimism, born of partitions and occupations. We learned early that privacy is survival. To be seen is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to be in danger.
Western culture has inverted this instinct. Now, to be unseen is the danger. If you do not post your breakfast, did you eat it? If you do not share your grief, was it real? We have turned life into a ledger. Every experience must be recorded, verified, and liked. It is a bureaucracy of the soul.
I watch a young woman on the bench across from me. She takes a photo of her book. Then she takes a photo of herself holding the book. Then she checks the lighting. The book is never opened. The text is irrelevant. Only the image of reading matters. This is not literacy. It is theater.
The Cost of Attention
There is a price for this constant visibility. It is paid in attention. And attention is the only currency we have left.
We are tired. Not the tiredness of labor, but the tiredness of noise. We are exhausted by the sheer volume of other people’s lives. We scroll through tragedies and triumphs that are not ours, feeling a vague obligation to react. To like. To share. To perform our empathy.
This is not empathy. It is spectatorship. Real empathy requires silence. It requires stepping out of the spotlight and sitting in the dark with someone else. You cannot do that when you are filming the darkness for your followers.
Reclaiming the Private
I am not asking you to throw away your phone. That is a romantic gesture, useless and fleeting. I am asking you to reclaim the right to be boring. To have thoughts that are not shared. To have moments that are not documented.
There is power in opacity. When you do not broadcast everything, you become mysterious to yourself. You begin to wonder who you are when no one is watching. That question is dangerous. It is uncomfortable. It is the only thing that is real.
The rain starts again. The woman on the bench puts her phone away. She opens the book. For a moment, she is alone. She is invisible. She is free.