Sartre and Yannaras Against Skyping Your Parents

We have come to expect the constant presence of the people we love. We don’t leave our friends after the party: Events are trailed by a comet tail of pictures and videos keeping us present to our recent past. We don’t leave our lovers: Broken relationships continue to sing siren songs from our pockets. Even death promises a residue of interaction: Corpses leave their Facebook pages open for our messages, and developers assure us that, through effective AI, our dead will one day message back.

“Being present” has become a moral “ought.” “Connectivity” is a holy word. Mark Zuckerberg, in his push to give every human being a smartphone and a Facebook page, has based his philanthropy around a dogma of presence: “The more we connect, the better it gets.” But it’s not clear that “it” is any “better.” The age of presence is an age of loneliness. The number of Americans with “no close friends” has tripled since 1985. Our social media use is positively associated with depression. A report from the Mental Health Foundation found that young Brits are more likely to “feel lonely often” than the elderly. Given the failure of constant presence to make us happy, we ought to give equal sufferance to its dark side and dare to ask: “Are we absent enough?”

Jean-Paul Sartre describes absence in his work Being and Nothingness. He remembers going to a café…