Episode 08 - The Problem With Ghosting
Transcript
Ellie: 0:07
Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
David: 0:09
And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:12
The podcast where two friends,
David: 0:14
who who are also professors,
Ellie: 0:16
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
David: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
Ellie: 0:26
David, I have a question for you. Have you ever ghosted anybody?
David: 0:31
Uhhhh, I don't want to answer that, um, but since you put yourself on blast in a previous episode with your cottagecore teen identity, I have to put myself on blast here and say that, yes, I'm guilty of having ghosted.
Ellie: 0:50
Wow. I've never ghosted anybody. Been-
David: 0:55
Are-
Ellie: 0:55
ghosted.
David: 0:57
you serious about that?
Ellie: 0:59
I've orbited and I've breadcrumbed, but I've never actually ghosted. So I want to hear a little bit about this. Who did you ghost?
David: 1:08
Well, that's the thing about ghosting that- I, okay. So it is a serious subject , but I don't remember the person that I ghosted. This was in my early twenties, and I was on a couple of dating apps and I talked to people and in a couple of cases-- so I think I ghosted two or three times and yeah. Yeah. So like not quite a serial ghoster, but not like a one-time pony either, you know, it's between pony and serial ghoster.
Ellie: 1:38
So how- how well did you know these people? Like what was the ghosting situation? What was the level of egregiousness?
David: 1:45
Yeah. In the two or three cases, it was somebody that I met probably for a date, never more than that. And I decided that it was not a good fit and I didn't know what to do when they continued reaching out to me. And one act of indifference led to a second one, led to a third one, and-
Ellie: 2:06
How many times were they reaching out? Like did, did they text you once and you just never responded or they're texting you like four or five times and you're just like, "I don't see you."
David: 2:16
Yeah just like a complete fly on the wall. Um, no. So for it to count as ghosting, on my view, they had to reach out once, twice, maybe three times, and I didn't respond. And so that's how I define ghosting . Ellie: Okay. Well good, because that doesn't sound that bad. I've not responded to somebody who followed up after a single date and I've just like, kind of forgotten. Sometimes I'll text them back two weeks later and be like, "Sorry, I never got back to you, like, I'm just not interested," but sometimes I'll let that go. But yeah, it's like more than a couple dates or more than a couple of times that they're reaching out. Then I get that. So you have ghosted, you have ghosted?
Ellie: 2:54
Wait, but okay. Imagine I go on a date with somebody and neither of us follows up afterwards. That's not ghosting.
David: 2:59
Oh, no, no, that's just like a mutual spook. It's just like- like a peekaboo, like-
Ellie: 3:05
It's not even a spook, it's just like a, nothing, you know, it's like, um. Okay, so it has to be the case that you've gone on at least one date, the other person has followed up and you haven't responded.
David: 3:15
I'm not sure how committed I am to the date requirement. I mostly would define ghosting in terms of built up expectation. So even if we've never met, if we've been communicating for a month or two, and then one person suddenly disappears, I would also consider that ghosting.
Ellie: 3:33
So I liked that you brought up expectations here because I completely agree with you that even if you've never met somebody in person, if you've built up an online communication with them or something like that and then you suddenly stop, that would count as ghosting. However, I would say there are cases when you meet somebody in real life and you don't build up those expectations, so it's not ghosting. So I would say like, if I go on a date with somebody, I'm not really interested and they text me and I just forget to text back, I don't know that I would consider that ghosting because I haven't, by virtue of just going on one date with them, built up the expectation that we're going to see each other again. If, however, I end the date and I'm like, "Can't wait to see you again," and then I don't respond-
David: 4:12
I call shade on all of this because I agree with you. Yes. I agree with you that there is no expectation on going on a second date, but once you've met somebody, presumably you've already talked to them for a few days, you've already established a rapport. You've agreed on a meeting spot. You've talked about your interest. So there is an expectation that at least you will text them back to say, I'm not interested in following up.
Ellie: 4:38
Oh, see, maybe this is just like my practices of dating. I will just text somebody and be like, "Want to grab a drink? You seem cool."
David: 4:44
That's fine, but by the time that date ends, there is already a dynamic. And so to never follow up on a text, once you've already met in person, to me, that's ghosting. And so it seems. Ellie, that you're actually a serial ghoster from the sound of it.
Ellie: 5:02
No, I'm just, I'm not a serial ghoster I- I just like totally reject that. Not because I want to deny that I haven't followed up with people sometimes, but because I just don't think that counts as ghosting. I would say that in order for something to count as ghosting, there has to be at least some level of romantic interest expressed. And I-
David: 5:20
Well, a date is that.
Ellie: 5:23
Arguably. For me, romantic interest often usually emerges like two or three dates in with somebody.
David: 5:29
Everything that you've described, \I would have just named ghosting if I had done it.
Ellie: 5:33
Cause-
David: 5:34
I am defensive because I don't want to be the only ghoster in the room. That's what it really boils down to. No, but-
Ellie: 5:40
You can be, it's okay.
David: 5:42
I'm sure it would be okay for you, if I'm the only ghoster.
Ellie: 5:46
See. Yeah, for me, ghosting is the practice of cutting off communication with somebody that you've already established that you are interested in as well, and I don't think a first date clears the bar for that necessarily.
David: 6:00
So I guess we just disagree on that. If you go on a date with somebody, that's an expression of some kind of interest. If it doesn't develop for you, then you have a responsibility to tell them, "Hey, it didn't work out for me."
Ellie: 6:12
Yeah. Well, and frankly, I think when most people think about ghosting, they're more interested in the cases that involve actually an established relationship of some sort, where somebody is cutting it off. If I'm dating somebody for a month, and then suddenly they don't respond to one of my texts, and then I follow up and they don't respond to a second one of my texts, I'm wondering, did they suddenly die? Did their phone break? Did it get stolen? What the hell is going on? Did they suddenly decide that they don't like me anymore? If so, what was the reason? Those are the cases that provoke, rumination and questioning.
David: 6:45
Because they're a bigger kick in the guts.
Ellie: 6:48
And seem more- much more morally ambiguous.
David: 6:50
I think they're less morally ambiguous. I think it's clear that we're entering into territory of harm.
Ellie: 7:02
Today we'll be talking about ghosting. What's wrong with ghosting? And why does it feel so bad to get ghosted?
David: 7:12
And what can we learn philosophically about the concept of ghosts? Is there a connection here?
Ellie: 7:19
Let's find out. Ghosting was added into the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2017 and is defined as the act or practice of abruptly cutting off all contact with someone, such as a former romantic partner by no longer accepting or responding to phone calls, instant messages, et cetera.
David: 7:38
According to a study conducted by the dating site Plenty of Fish, 78% of people between the ages of 18 and 30 report having been ghosted. Ghosting, it has to do with the act of cutting off communication with somebody that you've potentially met in a dating site.
Ellie: 7:57
And it involves cutting communication off completely, right? It's not like similar phenomena, like orbiting, which is where you're kind of like remaining in somebody's orbit, looking at their Instagram posts, watching their stories, or breadcrumbing, right?
David: 8:12
Right. And bread crumbing I find to be equally morally problematic as ghosting. And because it's when you essentially give somebody just enough emotional support and express just enough interest to keep them attached to you, but without actually following through on that implied promise. So you them, you just give them breadcrumbs, emotional breadcrumbs.
Ellie: 8:38
Yeah. And ghosting it's just like, poof, they're gone leaving you haunted.
David: 8:44
It's object impermanence in the context of sex and romance.
Ellie: 8:49
I found a Vice article from 2015 where a woman describes the story of being ghosted. And like, it might not be Jane Austen level prose, but I want to quickly read an excerpt from it.
She writes the following: 9:01
"It happened again. I hooked up with someone. This time, it was an adult skateboarder who repeatedly told me he wanted to see me again. This foolishly made me believe he might want to see me again. Rather than respond to my text two days later, he chose to pull the digital version of that scene in every teen movie where one pretends to be a lifeless mannequin while on the run from mall cops. Weird. He was just here a minute ago."
David: 9:28
Clear case of object impermanence. He was here a minute ago and suddenly he's disappeared. Although if you're going on a date with an adult skateboarder, consider- No, I don't know how-
Ellie: 9:43
No shade, no shade.
David: 9:45
A little.
Ellie: 9:47
So a lot of people talk about the pain of being ghosted. What is it like to get ghosted?
David: 9:54
Well, as somebody who, by his own definition has ghosted, but has also been ghosted, there are feelings of rejection. There is a feeling of impotence because you can never extract
an answer: 10:06
why did you ghost me? And there's a sense of frustration with the randomness of it all. It's just unmotivated, unexplained, just this question mark that hovers over you.
Ellie: 10:18
Yeah ghosting makes me so angry because it leaves you completely confused, in a way, even unmoored in the world. If you really were excited about somebody, you thought there was relationship potential there and you get no feedback about why that might not have been the case for them. Was it them or was it me or was it something about our interaction? Those questions can start just like running around and becoming a huge distraction.
David: 10:41
I would go so far as to say that ghosting is an expression of gaslighting, because it makes you really question interpretation of reality. Did I imagine this thing that I thought we had in common, especially in those cases where there is a clear investment from parties, right? Like there has been multiple dates. You've met the friends. You've made some suggestion that there is a future together.
Ellie: 11:06
Yeah, something similar to that happened to me one time where I was beginning a relationship with somebody who suddenly ghosted me, and I found myself in a really weird position because I wanted to check up on them and like make sure that they were okay because a part of me was genuinely concerned that something had happened.
David: 11:22
Turns out they were okay!
Ellie: 11:23
And so I- yeah, yeah, they- they were, I- I later found out, um, but like, I didn't have any mutual friends with this person. And so I couldn't ask anybody else, are they alive? Are they healthy? Are they safe? Did their phone break? And I was just wondering all of those things and not wanting to come off as a creep by continually texting them, but also like genuinely being concerned for their well-being.
David: 11:45
No. And that's part of the violence of ghosting. It's not just the disappearance, but it's that the disappearance, plus the lack of explanation, makes the ghosted go through a series of emotions of increasing intensity, right? At first we were like, "Oh, they're busy right now." Then you one scale up and you're like, "Oh, I guess I hope everything is fine." So now there is concern and then you move up to the next level where it's like, "Oh my gosh, panic, maybe something is really wrong." And then you go all the way to rage where it's like, "This asshole ghosted me." It's always too late, right? You always only come to that recognition that you've been ghosted after it's been too long and you should have read it a long time ago.
Ellie: 12:28
Absolutely. And researchers from the University of Kentucky at Lexington have actually suggested that pain of this sort, the pain of ghosting, is akin to physical pain. It activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical pain does.
David: 12:43
Yeah. So next time I'm ghosted,. I'm just going to pop a Tylenol and call it day.
Ellie: 12:49
Yes. The study actually says Tylenol can ease social pain.
David: 12:54
I mean, I don't disbelieve that, but there's- there's something to social pain that goes beyond a quick pharmaceutical fix.
Ellie: 13:03
There's obviously something wrong with ghosting. The people ghosted are being harmed. How should we grasp this harm of ghosting? What's the moral problem with it?
David: 13:13
I think one way to think about it is in terms of the refusal to be recognized as an agent who is entitled to certain things from the ghoster. Just generally, people in the course of interacting with one another, as we move through the world, we need a sense of validation from those around us. We develop certain expectations because human interaction is always normative, right? It follows certain norms and it's when those norms are violated that we are ethically harmed. On this interpretation, one of the things that is wrong with ghosting is precisely that, that it breaches, that it violates, a very basic expectation, which is if you're not into the other person, just let them know so they don't go through all these stages of mourning your absence.
Ellie: 13:59
Yeah, and I mean, a lot of philosophers will talk about how we need recognition from other people in order to feel validated as a self. So my self doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in being recognized by others. So for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre has his famous theory of the look, which suggests that in order to gain a sense of self, I need to be looked at by another. And a lot of feminist theorists and philosophers of race will talk about the pain of not being recognized as a subject, as a self, by another person. So when we don't get that validation, we're just sort of left questioning not only our relation to the other person, but also our own existence, questioning our own validity.
David: 14:40
And there is a way in which the lack of recognition translates into what some people call social death, where you might be biologically alive, might be in perfect shape, but to be denied those basic forms of recognition, being treated with fairness, not being systematically lied to, just the things that make social interaction meaningful, and meaning-making in the first place. Once that's taken away, the kind of harm that befalls you really is social in nature because you're being uprooted from your belonging in a community of agents.
Ellie: 15:16
Wow. And that's so interesting to think about the term social death. I hadn't thought about that here, because when we think about ghosting, we think about the ghost as being the person who well, ghosts you, who gets out of the picture. But if I, as somebody who's ghosted, experience a form of social death, then getting ghosted also turns me into a ghost in some sort way.
David: 15:38
No, I think that's right. And when you read, for example, accounts of being ghosted online, one of the things that a lot of people will complain about is that they feel the sense of frustration at not being able to do anything. So there is this absence or this lack of causal power, which of course be what ghosts would suffer from, uh, on of not having a body. So you just-
Ellie: 16:00
Yes, you can't actually do anything.
David: 16:02
Yes. You can't make an imprint on the world and you might text the person that ghosted you, you might call them, you might try to find out where they are, but if they've cut off communication with you, it's almost as if they've taken your very power of causality away from you.
Ellie: 16:19
Yeah. And that can feel so harmful too, because sometimes being ghosted makes you feel like you don't have any moral ground to stand on because maybe the ghoster hasn't technically done anything wrong. And yet they still have violated social norms in some way.
David: 16:34
Yeah. And I think this is precisely where we can talk about the morally ambiguous territory that is sometimes constructed around ghosting, where people can hide in the gray areas of technically not being in a relationship, in order to justify something that is pretty clearly harmful, especially if you're looking at it from the perspective of the ghostee.
Ellie: 16:55
This is what I want to talk about though, because I think a lot of people who ghost would hide behind excuses and say, for instance, like, "Oh, well we weren't 'in a relationship' yet. We hadn't defined things. And so I didn't technically break any rules." There's this way that ghosters get to hide behind our moral ambiguity around dating norms and the idea that all's fair in love and war. And you just do you when you're dating, um, this sort of complex of romantic mystique and, um, the capitalist underpinnings of dating, right? And then just be like, nah, not into it. I don't need, I don't owe you any explanation, the idea of not owing somebody anything is what's- what's interesting.
David: 17:37
Correct. But even the language that you've used of hiding behind these excuses suggests that if anybody were to agree to having ghosted somebody, they will recognize that it was wrong. Typically people will just deny having ghosted, or, um, they will come up with excuses to justify the ghosting and put it into some kind of context. But I think in general, there is widespread agreement that ghosting is unethical and yes, it can be very easy to justify because of the kind of thing that it is, but I don't think it's really morally ambiguous. I don't think we're in morally muddy waters, we're in waters that are easily rendered muddy, if that makes sense.
Ellie: 18:17
Yeah. To me, a classic case of ghosting is when you've built the beginnings of a relationship with somebody, you've had some emotional and physical intimacy with them, and then suddenly they cut off all communication, but they're not yet like your partner, right? You haven't had the DTR, the Define the Relationship Talk. And so in that type of case, the ghoster can say, "Well, we weren't in a relationship, so I didn't break any rules." There's a kind of social contract that they don't feel they violated, but have they actually done something wrong, because I feel like they have.
David: 18:49
No, I think they have. And I think the cases that you're describing actually captures the vast majority of- of instances of ghosting. Right. Where it's before the talk, it's before being official on Facebook or on Instagram, it's before having- mean, I don't know. Um, I've been, Oh,
Ellie: 19:06
Official on Instagram? You can't be official on Instagram!
David: 19:08
Before being official on MySpace. Uh, um, but it's before any verbalization, and because it happens right below that threshold, it allows the violator to really enjoy the moral ambiguity of being able to claim that there was no rule for them to violate.
Ellie: 19:28
Totally. And this is very nefarious to me because it trades on the American tradition of liberalism and social contract theory where you're not violating another person, unless you're violating an explicitly agreed upon claim.
David: 19:44
Exactly. And it's clear that it violates implicit norms that are very easy to deny in discourse, "I didn't know that that was happening," but if you even attune to the dynamic, to the emotional exchange, to the emotional contagion that happens, let's say, when you go on a date with somebody, it's clear that something is being built up, that you want to walk away from, but you don't have the language or the courage, or the self-awareness to know that you don't want. And so you just ghost.
Ellie: 20:15
Absolutely. And I think it's worth pointing out here that in our cultural imaginary, ghosting is highly gendered. If you look at accounts online, it's often women who described themselves as the ghosted and men who described themselves as the ghosters. And I think it's interesting here to think about the impasse between something like social contract theory, which for a lot of feminists is implicitly masculinist, and something like care ethics, which provides a different perspective emerging out of the feminist tradition and basically says that look, even if I don't have an explicit agreement or contract to be in a relationship with somebody, we're still interdependent, right? And that still means that I have moral responsibility, even if it doesn't come in the form of explicit obligations.
David: 20:59
And so one way to think about it is in terms of the tension between something like a hyper-rationalist approach to morality, where you need to know which rules have been broken by which subjects at what time, in order to be able to hold them, and a different tradition that pays attention to context, to dynamic, to expectation, to care, those things that are not always codifiable into, let's say, a Kantian categorical imperative or a cost benefit calculus, which is what typically moral theory, at least in the West, trades on.
Ellie: 21:34
Yeah, the feminist tradition of care ethics asserts, in contrast to those types of views, that responsibility isn't just a matter of formal bonds or previously stated duties. And Joan Tronto, a prominent care ethicist, says that the ethics of care actually treats ignoring others as a form of moral evil. And so if I'm ignoring somebody, if I'm withholding recognition, even if I haven't trespassed against an explicit bond, I'm still doing harm and I'm still actually responsible for that harm.
David: 22:03
Yeah, and I like this language that you're using, because we tend to think of ignoring something as a failure.
Like, : 22:08
Oh, I didn't know, so I overlooked it." But there is a willful element. There's an active indifference, an active ignoring, that happens in the case of ghosting, right. You don't ghost by accident. It's not like, "Oh, I slipped on a banana and I accidentally didn't answer any of your texts in which you were telling me, you were freaking out about what was happening with me." So there is something here that has to be actively constructed and produced by a subject who happens to benefit on the moral ambiguity that this a gray area, at least from a legalistic, rationalistic point of view.
Ellie: 22:45
Okay. So ghosting is wrong because it is violating implicit norms and failing to recognize the subjectivity of the other person, as well as your relationship with them, even if it's not called a relationship relationship and our like American obsession with labels.
David: 23:00
Correct. And I think there is a disregard for their emotional wellbeing, above all. There's just this sense that it doesn't matter if there's suffering. It doesn't matter if I'm causing them to question the very fabric of their social reality. As long as we haven't had the talk, I can do whatever I want because I can not be held accountable in the court of public opinion.
Ellie: 23:24
Totally. And I think at the same time, there's still often an implicit acknowledgement by the ghoster that they've done something wrong. So why might somebody have ghosted?
David: 23:35
So I think that ghosting, and for thinking about this, we might appeal to the ancient Greek concept of virtue, I think ghosting happens because there is a lack of truth telling and a lack of courage. The ghoster finds themselves in a tricky situation, maybe you went on a date with somebody that you then realized you're not super interested in, and you just don't know how to bring that situation to an end. And so you do the cowardly thing, which is you just step back and effectively watch them turn themselves inside out emotionally because you're getting their texts, right, so you know what's happening.
Ellie: 24:17
Or refuse to watch them. Ahh, because sometimes even if you're getting texts from them, you're not actually seeing the harm in many cases.
David: 24:25
There are cases in which the ghosted will amp up the emotional charge of their text messages. Like, "Hey, are you okay? Is anything wrong? I haven't heard from you in about a week or two. Hey dude, what's happening? Okay. You're an asshole." And the
Ellie: 24:41
It sounds like you're speaking from experience here.
David: 24:43
From ghosted. I'm a petty ghosted person. I will haunt you weeks and weeks and weeks.
Ellie: 24:50
Yeah, I'm the opposite. And I think this might have to do with gender norms. As a woman, I'm so scared of coming off as desperate that if I get ghosted, granted I've only been genuinely ghosted one time, but if I get ghosted, I will send like one or two followups as I mentioned earlier, in the case of somebody I thought died. And then I was just like, ah, I'm going to leave that now because I don't want to look crazy.
David: 25:12
Yeah. And so I will be crazy, uh, but-
Ellie: 25:16
Must be nice as a cisgender man.
David: 25:18
No, I think that's exactly right, because that is never a worry that I have, of being perceived as hysterical or irrational. But so, in terms of thinking about how people rationalize their ghosting, that's a really tricky question.
Ellie: 25:35
Yeah. I think a little bit about Aristotle's concept of akrasia here. Akrasia is basically translated often as incontinence or weakness of-
David: 25:46
Which is a lamentable translation.
Ellie: 25:49
Very lamentable translation, but it's better known as weakness of will. Akrasia is a lack of control or mastery over our desires. An akratic person goes against reason, right, so they know better.
They're like, : 26:04
I know ghosting is wrong, but my feelings are leading me in a different direction." And often those feelings are feelings of laziness. You're just entropically resting on your laurels and feeling like, yeah, I don't really owe anyone anything. And so the akratic person knows that their actions are base, but they do them anyway because of their feelings or desires.
David: 26:26
Yeah. And the classic example of the akratic subject is the person who knows that smoking is bad for them. But they keep smoking anyways. And so there is a way in which the problem here is not cognitive. It's not rational. It's not lack of access to what the right course of action is. It's just that, you know what it is, and there is something about your constitution, something about the way in which reason relates to the emotions, that makes you unable to take that step toward the right thing.
Ellie: 26:58
Yeah, and interestingly Aristotle says that akrasia is not a vice exactly, but it's a condition of character that seems base and blameworthy, even if it's not like an outright moral evil.
David: 27:11
Yes. He says that the problem with akrasia is that it actually tells us something about your failure to cultivate your virtues, right? So you'll become akratic because you haven't taken the time to do the kind of work that you need to do on yourself as a moral agent so that you can always do the right thing once you're able to identify it, because that takes virtue. It's not simply knowing the right thing, it's having the will to enact it.
Ellie: 27:39
Absolutely. And Aristotle is a philosopher who insists constantly on the social nature of humans, right. We live in communities and our virtues don't exist in a vacuum. Our virtues are built up through our interactions with other humans, or they're not built up, in the case of ghosting. You're just like hanging out akrasia.
David: 27:58
Yeah. And in the Nicomachean Ethics, he lays out a number of virtues, right? And every virtue comes with a corresponding vice. And, uh, two of the virtues that he describes that I think are particularly relevant to the context of ghosting are courage and truth telling. Because courage is something that I think the ghoster lacks because it's hard, it's difficult, to tell somebody that you're not interested in them. And that truth telling is also hard, especially when it is inconvenient or uncomfortable, but that's what would be required in order not to ghost somebody, right? You need a combination of courage and truth telling.
Ellie: 28:39
And in order to develop that, you have to habituate yourself to it over time by practicing the virtue. So there's this weird way that in order to develop virtue, you need to practice it, in Aristotle. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
David: 28:50
And I think that's precisely why I think ghosting is such a problem. It's not just the act of having ghosted one person or another, it's that this is something about your character. When you meet somebody that's a serial ghoster, especially serial ghosters, it's like, "Ooh, I think I've got you read. And that seems very aggressive, like you're rushing to a judgment, but I think I would stand by that claim that if I know about you, that you're a serial ghoster, I know a lot more about you at the same time.
Ellie: 29:24
Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review Overthink on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let's talk a little bit about how modern technology enables ghosting.
David: 29:38
So it seems as if ghosting, almost by definition, is something that happens through a very specific kind of technology. We're talking about dating apps, we're talking about texting. And so to what extent is technology itself responsible for this mess?
Ellie: 29:53
Yeah, you can't ghost somebody in person. It's like, somebody asks me. So when do you want to see me again? And I just like close my eyes and back away slowly. Not the same!
David: 30:02
I mean, I've tried it, it did not work. Nope. There's a way in which technology really problematizes things that we tend to think of as unproblematic. And so here, it makes me think about the time in which I ghosted somebody accidentally. So I had a situation in which somebody expressed interest in me and I also had interest in them, and they texted me at a particular point and I couldn't respond because I was busy. And so two hours or three hours later when I was suddenly available, I forgot to text them back because I started doing other things and I didn't have my phone with me. And suddenly I came back to my phone, let's say six, seven, eight hours later, and by then, there was a slew of messages where again, this person went through the stages of feeling ghosted. And I think it's because certain forms of technology set up certain expectations. Texting, in particular, sets up an expectation of availability that is unreasonable. And when that expectation is not matched, because life happens, then meaning is produced by the very nature of technology that maybe wouldn't have been there.
Ellie: 31:20
Especially when technology is your primary medium for communication, and there's not also communication that's happening in person in the context of a community. And so it's very different from a small community, where you know that someone in your town is, uh, marriageable, to put it in like very old school terms, and you're interested and they're interested. And then you're sort of hearing it through the grapevine, or you might think about like high school. I didn't really date in high school, but, you know, I know it was a thing. And you sort of like hear through the grapevine that somebody is interested in you and you know what their dating history is, right? There's a sort of comfort. I mean, this is also certainly the case in college communities. There's an awareness of the person's dating history and their behaviors that you can rely on. When you're using technology, especially when you live in a big city, you just don't have that access. You have no mutual friends with the person in many cases, and you don't know what their dating history is like they could be lying to-
David: 32:13
Yeah, of course. And there are so many aspects to technology that also make it very easy to block somebody, right? Every single dating app will have a block button that doesn't even ask you for a justification as to why you're blocking somebody, you just block, block, block. Ghosting, I think, is just an extension of that. I think it's something that is made easy by the technology that we use to interact with one another these settings.
Ellie: 32:41
One thing I'm thinking about here is something that the 20th century philosopher Jacques Derrida says about technologies. He says that technologies retain presence after death in a sort of strange way. So for instance, when I'm watching an interview on TV of someone who is now dead, there's a spectral presence that's there, nonetheless. It's almost as if I'm watching their ghost. And even if I'm watching a live interview with somebody who is still alive, we can still apply the same logic there, because the person is not physically there in front of me. I'm experiencing them through the medium of technology.
David: 33:18
And there is a very long history of scientific technologies sort of authorizing beliefs in ghosts. When the telescope and the microscope were discovered in the 16th and 17th centuries, people were seeing things for the first time that weren't there before. And so there was this question about the metaphysical status of these things that we can only see with this instrument.
Ellie: 33:42
Yeah.
David: 33:43
Or I think about the magic lantern in the 18th century, which was an early projector that would project moving images on- on-
Ellie: 33:50
Proust talks about this.
David: 33:52
It was, it was the rage because it creates moving apparitions that people considered ghosts. So there was a major debate really in the 19th and 18th centuries about the scientific possibility of there really being technological evidence of- of ghosts.
Ellie: 34:13
Which is so interesting, cause I think nowadays we associate technology with, you know, the sort of scientistic paradigm of positivism, um, rather than with something like ghosts. And so to think that like ghosts and technology were once bedfellows is very foreign to us.
David: 34:28
Well, and not just, they were one bedfellows, they have always been and continued to be bedfellows. And it's retroactively that we extract the occultism out of science and technology in order to create a positivist image of it. Um, and so there is, for example, Carl du Prel, who explicitly says occultism is the very philosophy of technology, because that's what technology always does.
Ellie: 34:54
Wow.
David: 34:54
It makes that which seems impossible possible for the first time.
Ellie: 34:59
So how can we think about this in terms of texting, which is a primary medium for ghosting?
David: 35:06
This is what happened with my accidental ghosting story, right? Somebody was interested. They texted me, "Hey, David, really nice to see you," whatever it was, they saw that I read the message because there are read indicators.
Ellie: 35:22
You have read receipts on?? Oh, David. That's your first mistake. You got to turn read receipts off.
David: 35:26
I'm an amateur about pretty much everything, sex and romance being at the top of the list. Uh, just like mistake after mistake. But so- so here you can think about that blurry distinction between the metaphysics of presence and absence. From that person's perspective, I clearly was present, because they had every reason to believe that I was reading their messages live.
Ellie: 35:48
Okay. That is a crucial part of the story. Wow. Cause you said it was only later that day that they were sending you all these texts being like, why didn't you respond to me? But they saw that you had read it.
David: 35:58
Because I was seeing them for the first few hours, I just couldn't respond because I was doing something else. And so I was both present and absent. Probably in the same way that Derrida thinks about the spectrality of language, the spectrality of social relations, the spectrality of technology. So, technology enables ghosting behavior and problematizes the distinction between what is present and what is absent. Is there anything we can learn about ourselves or about the world from ghosting?
Ellie: 36:29
Yeah, I think there's a lot we can learn about ourselves and the world because in a way, this play between presence and absence that we find in ghosting might actually be indicative of the way that we relate to each other even when we are fully present in relationships where we're not ghosting. I think the French post-structuralist tradition of people like Jacques Derrida, Roland Bart, and Julia Kristeva has a lot to say here. Derrida in particular comes up with the word hauntology to describe something like the constitutive absence of our relations to others.
David: 37:03
One thing that I really like about the Derridean notion of hauntology, and this is classic Derrida, Derrida 101, is that it's a linguistic pun on the word ontology, which is the study of what there is. And Ellie, I know you've read a lot of Derrida, you published about Derrida, you wrote a dissertation about him, so you are the ghost to Derridean, ha get it?
Ellie: 37:28
Oh my-
David: 37:29
To talk about ontology.
Ellie: 37:31
So ontology, O N T O, is the study of being and Derrida plays on this to describe something he calls hauntology, which we might say is the study of being haunted. I think this is an interesting word here because, in general, Derrida and the French post-structuralist philosophers with whom he is usually aligned, are interested in the way that even what seems to be present to us still has absence inscribed within it. So we said earlier that if I'm watching an interview on TV, whether the person is alive or dead, they're still appearing to me as a kind of ghost. But for Derrida, we can also extend that to people who are actually even physically present to us, because what happens when I'm facing another person is that I'm never going to see their subjectivity, as it appears from the inside. I never have access to, you know, this fullness of being.
David: 38:28
The ghost inside the shell. That's what we can't see.
Ellie: 38:33
If there even is one, you know, of course not, but, and so human interactions give me the sense that there's always more to the person than I can access. And so no matter how close I am to another person, there is still a trace of their absence, which makes them always already a ghost to us.
David: 38:51
Yeah, and what I like about the Derridean account is that he really blows up the concept of hauntology to apply, not just to that limit that I will always hit when I interact with another person, which is that I can't experience their consciousness from within. But he says, even things like, think about your property, right, Ellie. It refers to you. Ellen? Oh my, how did I not know that? This name that you have, that I just learned about you, um, it refers to you, but it also refers to a ton of other Ellens. And so there is an individuality and a generality, a presence, and an absence, that according to Derrida is just constitutive of language. Every time we speak, we produce presence and absence at the same time.
Ellie: 39:38
And so in that sense, it is particular to ghosting that it's usually happening via texting and/or other technological mediations. But, we might say that those technological mediations, the particularity of them, is actually revealing something that's already at work in other modes of human communication, even in-person conversation.
David: 39:58
It's almost as if the technological medium amplify something that is already there. And here, we might think about the double meaning of the term medium, right? As that, which enables something. And also in the context of paranormal phenomena, the medium is the person that conjures up a ghost.
Ellie: 40:18
Oh my God.
David: 40:19
Social media is our medium that leads to ghosting and being ghosted.
Ellie: 40:26
So we're learning here something about the contingency of human relations and the constitutive absence of people to us. I'm thinking here too about Roland Bart, another French philosopher of the same period that Derrida is writing. In his 1977 book, A Lover's Discourse, which is just a beautiful reflection on the nature of love, and you know, a lot of it's negative- as- well. Well, he has a chapter in his book on the absence of the Other. And he says here within the context of discussing sort of like the 1970s version of ghosting, which is when somebody has left you and you don't want to be left, that desire is always the same, whether the object is present or absent. He asks isn't the object always absent, because I can never-, even if somebody says, I love you, even if somebody's there for me, I can never actually be sure of what they feel for me, because I can never experience it directly.
David: 41:26
And this makes me think of two things. The first one is just that the psychoanalytic concept desire is tied up in a notion of lack. Insofar as there is desire, there's lack and there's absence. There's no way around that. And the second is Derrida's claim that when you love somebody, it's really impossible to know whether you love them for the singular, individual person that they are, or for the general attributes that they represent. It's, it's impossible to know. So let's say. Ellie, that I was in love with you, would I love you because of you independently-- you would ghost me, probably let's be real about this, uh, and then I would- I would haunt you because I'm petty, we've established that-- but
the question- the question here is: 42:11
would I love you for you, or would I love you for some of the things that are secondary attributes, like the fact that you're blonde, the fact that you're white, the fact that you're a woman?
Ellie: 42:24
Stunningly genius.
David: 42:26
Yes secondary and tertiary attributes. I do think you're a genius. Um, but how many of those could I change until I didn't love you anymore?
Ellie: 42:37
Yeah. And the point is that we can never know, as beloved, why another person loves us or even that another person loves us. And actually for ourselves, we can never answer the question why we love another person with full confidence either. I mean, I think this actually gets us to another point, which is that we are always already ghosts of ourselves too.
David: 42:59
Yes. And this makes me think of the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva who makes this argument in a book entitled Strangers to Ourselves, where she says there is no way for us to know ourselves in order to satisfy, let's say, that all Delphic model of know thyself. I will always be a stranger in my own house. So in the context of dating, I have to say, when I ghosted- one of the things that was really shocking is that I felt comfortable committing a kind of violence just because it was unspoken and passive and invisible. I then realized, "Oh, maybe I am the kind of person that does this. And I didn't think I was." And I truly felt like a stranger myself. Like, you know, this- this self, the self becoming ghost to itself.
Ellie: 43:53
Ah, yeah. So it's teaching you something about yourself, and part of what it's teaching you is actually your own opacity to yourself. The fact that you don't have transparent self-knowledge, and perhaps also that you are haunted by past choices, by present choices, by possibilities that you don't enact, such that your character is never a fixed thing that you could know to begin with. So Derrida, for instance, says, I am means I am haunted. To be is to be haunted. And when we think about the responses one might have to being ghosted, one of them is getting caught up in reverie and thoughts due to one's curiosity about why this may have happened. And so what's happening when you're being ghosted is the sudden absence of the Other is provoking a new mode of self-relation. You're constantly relating to yourself as Other, right? Trying to see yourself from the outside as the Other might have seen you, trying to wonder what they might have liked or not liked about you. You're trying to self-assess, but that is in principle impossible, because you are always a ghost to yourself.
David: 45:03
Even the act of self-distancing in order to see yourself from a different perspective, it entails what Derrida calls auto-distancing or self-distancing or diffrence, which is his famous concept, because you have to establish a certain difference from yourself to see yourself, or to try to see yourself, from somebody else's perspective. So you step outside of yourself-
Ellie: 45:27
Which you can't do, especially in the case of ghosting, because the other person is giving you no feedback about what they think.
David: 45:33
Yeah. So it's like ghosts chatting with ghosts, who are ghosts to themselves. So everybody's trapped in a Gothic novel about ghosts. That's relations in a nutshell.
Ellie: 45:46
Well, and what's interesting here too, from my perspective, is the way that this thought loop, right, this attempt at self-relation, has historically been associated with femininity. So I mentioned earlier that ghosting in our cultural imaginary tends to be gendered, right, um, it's generally men who are taken to be ghosters and women who are taken to be the ghosted, and Bart actually gets at this already, in A Lover's Discourse. He describes how amorous absence, right, this absence of the loved one to me, functions in a single direction. It's expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves. And he says that historically, the one who stays, the one who stays behind, the one who is ghosted is the woman. She's the one who's sedentary, spinning, uh, wool, hanging out in the home, reflecting on the man who has left and Bart talks about the fact that the man is typically seen as the one who hunts, who journeys. He sails, he cruises while woman waits. And so he says it is woman who gives shape to absence. For she has time to do so. She weaves and sings. She reflects on the experience of being ghosted through her domestic practices of weaving, singing, or thinking.
David: 47:09
Yeah. My only worry is that sometimes when philosophers make grandiose claims that associate women with absence or with lack is that we're just getting a new version of that very old Freudian equation of women with castration. A new version of the Freudian theory of penis and view-
Ellie: 47:28
Yeah, I do think our literature also bolsters this, though. If I'm thinking about, you know, for instance, the Odyssey. The Odyssey, the story of a wife, who's waiting at home and her husband going out and journeying and yes. And-
David: 47:40
Yeah, she weaves and unweaves a mantle, no? Like that's what she does.
Ellie: 47:43
Oh, yes, yes, yes, exactly. Or if we think about the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility, that is a classic tale of ghosting. Um, we might think too about, you know, I, I think what Bart probably has in mind here, is the Stendhal reference, Stendhal talks about how man journeys and woman stays at home and basically like fixates on the romantic relationship.
David: 48:08
Yeah. And I think in the context now of modern date- dating and ghosting, there is a way in which these old mythologies that we've inherited through philosophy, through literature, and through culture, self replicate in the way in which we approach dating. So I think the takeaway here from this French post-structuralist tradition is, in short, that we're all ghosts talking to other ghosts who are relating to themselves in the way we are relating to ourselves, which is as auto-ghosts. So we're all trapped in a Gothic story from the 19th century and nothing is real and nothing is permanent.
Ellie: 48:50
Thanks for joining us today. We talked about why ghosting feels so bad, because it involves not being recognized as social beings by other people, and how this might originate in moral harms.
David: 49:01
We also talked about the ways in which technology might enable ghosting and problematizes the very distinction between presence and absence at a metaphysical level.
Ellie: 49:12
Finally, we discussed how there's something about the presence and absence that's always happening between people, even in cases that aren't clearly ones of ghosting, which still doesn't mean that you should ghost people. In fact, if you're feeling akratic, experiencing weakness of will, and ghosting, maybe you should try developing your courage and truth telling virtues.
David: 49:33
Don't ghost.
Ellie: 49:34
And with that, see you next time. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
David: 49:44
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.
Ellie: 49:52
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
David: 50:05
Thanks so much for joining us today!