On Ghosting

Experience

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ post of the week. These are reflections on lived life.

Best,

Sam

ON GHOSTING

I was talking to a friend recently about online dating. We were discussing all the benefits of it - the relatively clear expectations as opposed to IRL encounters, the ability to meet all kinds of unexpected people outside one’s usual socioeconomic parameters, the sheer excitement of it - but then the friend pointed out the problem, the underlying anonymization of it, that if it doesn’t “work out with someone you just send them back to the Internet.” 

There was something about that phrasation, and the plaintive way my friend said it, that got me - it seemed to encapsulate so much about our era and its signature malady of ‘ghosting.’ There was very much an older equivalent of ghosting in the figure of Harlequin or Don Juan, the gleaming-eyed adventurer traveling from place to place and leaving a trail of mischief. Entire professions came under scrutiny for ghosting - musicians, performers, soldiers, later on traveling salesmen. This form of ghosting was understood to be a male phenomenon; it accounted for, who knows, some dazzling percentage of dramatic plots and love ballads over the course of centuries. And it survives in vestigial form, say, in the phrase ‘Irish Exit’ or ongoing patterns of bad male behavior. Recently, I had a conversation with a soldier who discussed having three children in three very different parts of the country. “It’s the military way,” he said, like he was the keeper of an ancient tradition. 

But that particular brand of ghosting seems ridiculous at the moment. ‘Skipping town,’ ‘running off,’ ‘getting out of Dodge,’ are all pretty much meaningless when you have a smartphone, Facebook account, location tracking, etc. But, ultimately, technological accountability is no match for inconsiderate human behavior - and ghosting emerges in a new, epoch-defining form, using technology as its cloak. 

“E-mail is the new form for ignoring other people,” I remember being told around 2005 - which were wise words and gave the lie to the reigning utopian belief about greater connectivity through tech. It became very easy to hide from any tech-delivered message. The excuses, if there was ever a confrontation, were almost too abundant - “must have fallen to the bottom of my inbox,” “must have gone to spam” - but the vast majority of the time no excuse was needed: you very well might not see that person anyway; and ignoring-a-message seemed like the most polite possible brush-off, almost to the point of being harmless. 

But, of course, it wasn’t really harmless - it was a way to be a jerk without feeling bad about it. And, by the late 2010s, I’d started to feel, ‘ghosting’ supplanted the aughts phenomenon of ‘flaking’ as the predominant mode for showing casual disrespect to other people.

By the early 2020s, ghosting had reached full maturity, not just as louche behavior but as best practices in a variety of endeavors. Business correspondence - I noticed this fairly recently - had shifted from polite demurral, the rejection note, to simply ‘radio silence’; and, behind that, it was possible to sense the sage advice of the in-house counsel, the belief that a refusal, rejection, however artfully contrived, however ostensibly respectful of the interlocutor’s basic humanity, could be held against the institution, could feature in some hard-to-anticipate-but-very-terrifying lawsuit. In online dating - which by this point pretty much was dating - ghosting was, if anything, a form of delicate politeness. If a first date didn’t work, if the conversation trickled out, it was more trouble than it was worth to send some kind of a ‘it’s not you it’s me’ message - better to say nothing at all. “Silence tells you something” became a sort of zen saying of the online dating community. And entire industries - ‘customer service’ most conspicuously - seemed, virtually overnight, to ghost. If the old glad-handing business wisdom emphasized the value of repeat customers, ongoing relations, constant deference to the customer’s every whim, the new metrics dispensed with all of that - the practice was to just drop off a product and let the customer deal with it; ‘customer service’ was understood to mean just dealing with people complaining, and it must have been exhilarating for corporations, as well as cost-effective, to finally be free of it. 

The phenomenon of ghosting was blamed always on technology - on social media, on the dating apps - but, as usual, the technology served as a prism for deeper sociological truths. Simply put, there were too many people, the ties between them were too weak; to ghost, one didn’t even have to skip town, begin a new life or whatever, you just ignored, at worst, two or three increasingly irate messages and then you were free! To some extent I sympathized with the whole phenomenon - it was an extension of the logic of the city, the anonymization, the lack of accountability that made the modern city so thrilling, such an ideal setting for self-discovery. But the technology added another layer to that atomization and made it endemic - not only was there no sense of community with people one was encountering (the critique always of country people for the city) but there was no sense of consequence either. Even if one happened to find oneself in a professional or sexual entanglement with someone else and didn’t want to continue it, there was no issue with simply disengaging - as likely as not in online dating, in professional relationships conducted entirely digitally, there were no shared acquaintances, there was no risk of blowback. 

Usually, at this point in one of these essays, I offer a ‘way out,’ some heightened sense of personal integrity, some tightening of the moral screws, that points the way towards a different kind of society. In the case of ghosting, though, it’s such a natural, inevitable offshoot of the way we live now, the deracination, the loss of community, that it’s almost futile to argue against. The world (I’m talking about in the field of social relations as opposed to whatever some sort of U.N. index might come up with) has become less violent, more polite, imbued with a greater sense of gentleness, of mutual humanity, but all of that does very little, interestingly enough, to help us be less jerky to each other. And it’s in the interrelated phenomena of flaking, ghosting, conscious ignoring, that modern misbehavior largely resides. So if there is a way out I guess it’s this - some concerted effort to not do it, to have the courage to tell somebody that you don’t want to work with them, don’t want to date them, whatever it is; and for the other party to have a thick enough skin to face whatever unpleasant truth is being directly communicated to them. Not an easy ask. I wouldn’t expect any of that to happen anytime soon.