Ghosting is a term that adheres very much to the younger generation in today’s world. When a person in a relationship, any kind of a sustained relationship, suddenly breaks off contact without any explanation and simply disappears, that is ghosting. And it seems to be a very common occurrence these days. The person that experiences the ghosting behavior can have a range of reactions from confusion to extreme emotional pain. It is as if a rug is being pulled from underneath the person.
Ghosting can be so painful, because it upsets a person’s grounding in the external world. And today, with the dearth of organic stimuli in the wider physical environment, people need the grounding they obtain from the bonds that they develop with the people around them. These bonds are difficult to form today precisely because there is so little external world grounding to act as a template that can bring people together. So when these modern bonds go missing, people start free-floating in the experiential vacuum that surrounds them. And inside their heads, they experience themselves as being immersed in a deep numbness.
So where does this predilection to ghosting come from today. I think that one explanation is that as people increasingly spend their time in front of different kinds of screens – movies, television, video games, computers, smartphones and tablets – they become so numb that they lose their capacity to absorb the organic stimulation that, in truth, as human beings, they so desperately need. In other words, if one person in a relationship does something that is perceived by the other person as too emotionally intense, that is, displaying too much organic stimulation, it can cause the second person to feel overwhelmed and overwhelmed to such an extent that he feels compelled to withdraw from the relationship entirely. And the first person may not have even been conscious of the fact that he was doing something so intense, but this is the way that it was interpreted by the second person.
So, the presentation of what is perceived by the second person as overly intense emotion and/or behavior is not something that the first person has control over, and the first person may become as overwhelmed by the second person ghosting him as the second person is overwhelmed by what he perceives as an excessive expression of reaching out. And yet, as painful as this situation can be for everyone concerned, it is a situation that is extremely common in modern technological society. It is an unintended result of the occurrence of a distortion of their reactions to interactions with one another against a backdrop of living in an experiential vacuum.
Ghosting has ramifications over and above the creation of a general fragility in modern human relationships. It also results in a general fragility in the imprints that people leave on one another. When people interact with one another, normally they make imprints on one another, some of which are normally preserved. As people go through life, they develop a sense of self, which is built, to a large extent, out of the imprints that they perceive that they have left on others, as well as the imprints that they have received from others. Ghosting tends to damage these processes considerably. Ghosting is an attempt by the person doing the ghosting to erase the imprints of the relationship both within himself as well as within the person with whom he had bonded. The desired result is creating a clean slate, a vacuum surface both within himself as well as within the other person. When a person breaks off with another person with the active desire to hurt him, usually the breakup is accompanied by arguments or hateful messages in which the initiator of the process is able to vent to some extent. That’s not ghosting. The person who ghosts wants to have a process that is as clean and without mess as possible. And this is because a breakup is a primary experience that involves as much organic stimulation as entering into a relationship. And for a numb person in today’s world, that can be very off-putting and overwhelming.
This ghosting is part of a larger pattern of sensory distortion in modern technological society. There are other things that lead to disappearing today. Simply the fact that without some source of organic stimulation, there are no sustainable organic imprints that endure in a person’s mind. One encounters something, one tries to absorb its presence as a meaningful imprint, but without organic stimulation, the imprint turns into an impersonal mark which basically slides off a person’s mind because there is no bonding. In other words, we experience the equivalent of breakups from the emptiness in many situations today, including all the experiences from the screen reality that we have created and that we utilize constantly. And it is not only people that go in and out of our lives in today’s world. It is most of the phenomena that we encounter. Just because there is little in our modern technological living environments that can provide a template for bonding, for emotional commitment. To this extent, we end up experiencing a kind of ghosting not only from people, but from most things in our fields of experience today.