II chase a state of wholeness — some inner symmetry where everything about myself finally slips into place. Yet the more I push forward, the further my horizon recedes.
Desperate for closure, I strive to earn the right amount of money, eat the right foods, wear the right clothes, meet the right person, vowing that one day my ideal self-image will be made of flesh.
But every breakthrough reveals another wall. Every answer opens another question. I peel back one layer of self-deception only to find another waiting beneath it, and then another, until I start to suspect there is no ground: only an infinite regress of selves observing selves, each one critiquing the other, conspiring to convince me that I am nearing some absolute destination.
Still, I never arrive. An excess always remains. A piece of me is endlessly out of place.
Curves of a Body
The ambient body desires to totalize its own gaze, but cannot. Like an orifice trying to swallow itself whole, I strain to contentualize my form.
As echoed in the displacement of linearity, my striving resembles a continuous field — like velocity, straight and uninterrupted in its own order — curving from the vantage of acceleration, which remains, in turn, linear to itself.
I cannot see the ground beneath my feet without first stepping elsewhere, cannot know of myself except through layers of otherness. A reflection in a window, an expression flickering across another’s face, a stranger’s judgment about me in a comment thread.
Yet who am I to accuse others of missing the “real me” when no unmediated form is accessible? How can I feel indignation towards your opinions about me when my own introspections are mere distortions, when the me who observes is alienated from the me I observe?
Like two warped mirrors facing each other, we each demand from the other a faultless image, a final answer to the question “who am I?”
In my attempts to arrive at the solution, an ambient body is traced — our commons — a continuity that seeks its own ineffability as a discrete object of analysis, displacing failure to ever-higher orders where I am always either too much or too little, one step ahead yet always one step behind, just as my “present moment” appears one moment too late.
Alas, my perfect arrival is only accessed at a distance. An amorphic mirage uniquely visible from the site of incompleteness. The pursuit of wholeness is asymptotic. You can look but can’t touch.
Phantasms, Phobias, & Metamorphosis
Inside the gap between knower and known, a screen receives my projections: phantasmic fruits dangling just beyond my fingertips and a kaleidoscopia of phobic monsters salivating at my throat.
Here, my metamorphosis is governed by lost futures and re-constructed pasts; who I am is held hostage by who I could have been. I try to escape but am crushed by the gravity of my own worldline. The heaviness of aging pins me against the deep end, where catalogued humiliations and missed opportunities counter-balance my cries for a better tomorrow. I am nailed to a ticking clock. And this paralysis just makes me crazier — dreaming bigger, wider, more impossible.
To this extent, my failure to close the gap feels destined. “Meant to be.” A birthmark of the human condition. As if without this tension, without the lag between myself and my own otherness, the subjective field collapses. Nonetheless, within this limited locality, only degrees of certainty are certain. My hopes and fears are all I reliably possess.
And so I keep trying. To fill up every void. Cut off every defect. To reach a singularity that would paradoxically negate the screen, the gravity, the projections, annihilating the only room where I am granted access to my own becoming. Again, I find myself caught in the middle; trapped from within and trapped from without, damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.
In my uncontrollable striving for perfection, I encounter impossibility in three stages.
Claustrophobia
The first is claustrophobia: the suffocating demand that the lag should be fixable. It tightens around my neck. Obsessing, fussing, spiraling.
Micro-revolutions. As a child, I fight to hasten my arrival into adulthood, a destination I believe will afford me righteous liberation from oppressive constraints. I want to peek behind the velvet curtain, unmask parental conspiracies and illuminate the silence cast by their whispers. As an adult, I am now haunted by the present absence of an idyllic innocence out of reach: heat radiates from my fallacious rememberings of the unmediated love once injected through an umbilical cord.
Smothered by the loss, I chase a surrogate womb. I cake myself with one cosmetic layer of post-digital makeup after another, desperate to farm your adoration through the worship of an algorithmic membrane. Yet, in my attempt to suture the split between fantasy and actuality, I soon come to realize that every augmentation of my undesired reality only uncovers ever more delicate artifacts and imperfections. My reflection remains distorted. As if what is lost to both my future and my past is never possessed in the first place.
As views, follows, and subscriber counts excrete mathematical proofs of mass appeal (or lack thereof) at an unprecedented scale, my depth is flattened into a social score that is simultaneously repulsive and alluring. I am hurled before a cheering crowd, tasked to contort my ‘self’ into a consumable, merely to find that increasing my virality doesn’t thicken the superficiality of “virtual hugs.” Something is amiss. I confront a variable that refuses to fit the socio-technological equation. And so I beg for a way to compartmentalize my yearning for a something more, something that neither synthetic gloss nor analytics can equalize.
Macro-revolutions. Spit out by the crowd, I seek charity from the oracles of society. Demagogues shower me with promises that gesture towards a beyond — a realm of perfect justice, total freedom, romantic pluralism, puritanical traditionalism — promises that numb the sting of my impotence. Cradling their axioms, I attempt to see better with my eyes closed. A blissful ignorance soon interrupted. For in time, my hallucinatory Eden fractures under the weight of novel betrayals, purges, and scandals: wounds that incubate the next generation of promises. The asymmetry displaces “upward;” my societal crisis never ends. It simply finds a grander uprising.
And today, as irony distances itself from its own distancing, receding like any other horizon, the revolutionary in me prepares for postmodernism’s postmortem. An innovative sincerity ferments. But as its rise expands through the proliferating cracks of contemporary culture, this new beginning at once orchestrates the very conditions that will ensure its own inevitable subversion.
Revolt
As I recognize that my striving for closure is unsuccessful, that eye-rolling the eye-roll is just another eye-roll, I am urged into a second stage: Revolt. I kick and scream against my own powerlessness. I scorn my failure to arrive at finality by spiting the absurdity of existence. Unable to close the gap by force, I reject the temptation altogether — refusing to push the boulder, laughing at the gods.
This is it. My resistance. A period of apathy where I relinquish all striving. I am finally “letting go,” free-floating in a mist of subliminal beliefs about un-thinking: a mind scheming an escape out of itself.
Yet I sleep with one eye open. A feeble attempt to seize control by rejecting it. The active passivity (or passive aggression) of my spiritual awakening. I yearn to stop clinging, to divorce the ‘I’ from my ‘self’ and breathe the prelapsarian air of revelation in the vacuous margins of thought. For a moment, I experience a semblance of liberation. A “mood.” Could this blissful state be erupting from a primordial essence, or is this no more than juvenile enjoyment in the taboos of inner-transgression?
Soon enough, the euphoric haze begins to lift as my self-narrative complexifies through its own momentum. I come to find that my dissociation from thought only feels liberating because it scribbles inside the lines, safe from actual danger. Never straying far from the environs of identity, I play pretend like a child who confidently wanders near the edge of an unknown all while knowing that mother’s watchful eye is hovering, that her voice will eventually call out their name. And I hear my name. My calm, my liberation, my depth—all of it woven from the very knot that enlightenment promises to untangle.
The ambient body remains intact. My horizon continues to recede.
Empathy
Thus, I begin instead to re-orient towards a third attempt.
In discovering that my failure to coincide with myself merely traces the curvature of a shared body — that I am only one stretched limb among countless others, each extending from the same paradoxical core, all reaching toward the abyss for an impossible mercy — my locality shifts to a peculiar elevation.
It is true: in our stubborn attempt to uncover where we stand, we shall remain both one step ahead and one step behind, never exactly where we are. Yet this failure to self-totalize is where we are most at home. It is here, in this shared incompleteness, in the space between our scattered localities of preferences, schemes, and scapegoats, that I feel most complete — most familiar to myself and others.
Ambient Empathy, then, begins with compassion toward my own failure to coincide with myself. From this newfound benevolence arises an even higher order of awareness for every other locality doing the same — for our childhood nostalgia, liminal aesthetics, post-digital facelifts, political fervor, algorithmic fantasies, commodified “anti-“s, apathetic collapses. These are not fauxthenticities to reconcile. They are perfectly authentic displacements of the same ontological asymmetry.
This is not a technique or triumph. It does not promise to solve conflicts or eliminate differences. Impossibility is constitutive; bickering displaces, it does not disappear. Creatures war until larger threats unite them, only to resume fighting once the threat passes. For all war is ultimately a self-directed demand for totalization.
‘Ambient Empathy’ cannot symmetrize the world, but it can transform the texture of our failure.
When I catch myself chasing the horizon, accumulating more knowledge, starving for self-improvement, even voicing these very sentiments, I can smile at the ambient body expressing our generative core.
The impossibility of actualizing my perfect ending is precisely what creates room for meaningfulness, the only room for my “happily ever after.” And recognizing that the same impossibility curves everyone else, my angst softens into something closer to affinity.
This ambient body, as an idea, is baked into its own process. It is my locality’s latest attempt to contentualize its own form. This too will curve, reveal its blind spots, recede. And I am powerless to stop it.
But somehow, in confessing my powerlessness, I feel less alone.