Be Seen Or Die
Everything once protected by interiority - You - the contradictory, half-formed, slow-growing parts of a person, is now dragged into a marketplace where attention functions as breath.
Visibility has become the proof of existence; silence reads as vanishing. You never wanted applause. You wanted a witness who didn’t consume you. That species is extinct.
Biology set the trap: recognition meant survival; rejection meant death. The digital world has taken that primal circuit and wired it into a global panic.
The “tribe” is now everyone, everywhere, forever. The nervous system interprets non-recognition as mortal threat, so your body chants be seen or die while your mind watches, horrified, knowing the premise is deranged.
Older worlds solved this terror with metaphysics:
God sees you → you matter.
Community knows you → you’re real.
Your work ties you to being.
Strip away those stabilizers and a void yawns open:
If no one sees me, what anchors me to existence?
The gaze becomes a secular sacrament. It’s ontological scaffolding. To be seen is to live.
Capitalism learned to charge for it.
The self is collapsing into being-for-others. Except now the Other is a distributed machine with infinite patience and zero mercy. You don’t want to be seen to impress; you want to be seen to remain locatable within reality.
You catch yourself editing a private thought mid-formation, but not for clarity—for how it would sound if someone were listening.
No one is listening. You’ve become your own guardian, your own performance review.
That is the paradox that defines us:
The gaze keeps you alive. The gaze strips you of what’s alive.
Visibility is compulsory, performance inevitable. Disappearing feels like suicide; appearing feels like self-dismantling.
The true horror isn’t surveillance, bad enough as it is.
No, the true horror is the internalized spectator who narrates your solitude and critiques your thoughts before you’ve even had them.
Privacy didn’t just vanish; it was annexed.
So the counter-instinct rises: not a noble desire for invisibility, but a radical hunger to become illegible. To slip out of the algorithm’s grammar. To be a person instead of an indexable artifact.
But invisibility only seduces because you believe you can come back from it. As a permanent state, it is indistinguishable from erasure.
What you want is sovereignty: to appear and disappear on command. A divine switch. See Me / Leave Me The Hell Alone.
Modernity will never give it to you.
Modern life traps us in a brutal double-bind: we starve unless we are seen, and we are skinned alive the moment we are.
There is no pure option. No monastic escape. No angle of existence untouched by optics.
A self that cannot withdraw cannot regenerate. A self that cannot stop performing becomes taxidermy. A self that fully withdraws becomes a rumor.
Between exposure and erasure, we improvise a life — a tightrope strung over existential absence.
Some people manage it, of course. They’ve learned to metabolize the gaze and to offer just enough to remain visible without becoming consumed. But watch them closely: they’re constantly working a second job no one pays them for. The cost isn’t in what they give; it’s in the constant calculation of what to withhold.
We keep searching for the exit, but every act of withdrawal is performed for an audience, even if that audience is only the self we imagine we could have been.
Tomorrow you’ll wake up and check your phone before you remember your own name. This is not a metaphor.
And I’ve written this essay to be read.