When Perception Loses The Other

Modern life no longer suffers from invisibility so much as from a saturation of attention. Images, voices, opinions, and selves circulate constantly, soliciting response and recognition, asking to be seen. Beneath this glare of visibility, however, something quieter has begun to fail. Perception itself, once rooted in encounter, has become unmoored from the world it claims to apprehend.

For most of human history, perception arose in friction with what resisted us. Ground had to be broken. Weather ignored our intentions. Bodies tired, healed, and aged according to rhythms beyond preference. To perceive was not merely to register an image but to meet something that did not bend to the will. Meaning emerged slowly from this contact, shaped by limits, by reciprocity, by the steady pressure of a world that answered back.

Today, perception increasingly operates in a different register. It no longer meets the world directly so much as it circulates within systems designed to mirror and amplify attention. We do not so much encounter as react. We respond to signals that have already been curated, filtered, ranked, and framed for response. What appears as connection often functions as a closed circuit, in which perception loops back upon itself, measured not by depth of relation but by frequency of engagement.

This shift marks a subtle but profound alteration in how being itself is experienced. When perception becomes primarily a matter of feedback, existence begins to feel contingent upon response. To be noticed is to be affirmed. To go unacknowledged is to hover at the edge of disappearance. The ancient philosophical question of what it means to exist quietly re-enters the modern psyche, no longer as abstraction but as lived uncertainty.

Samuel Beckett staged this condition with clarity in his 1965 film Film. Drawing loosely on the philosophical maxim esse est percipi – to be is to be perceived – Beckett imagines a figure who attempts to escape all forms of observation. Mirrors are covered. Faces are avoided. The hope is relief, perhaps even erasure. Yet the experiment fails for a simple reason. Even when all external eyes are eliminated, awareness remains. The self continues to perceive itself.

The unease Beckett reveals is not the absence of witnesses, but the impossibility of escape from self-perception once awareness has ignited. Consciousness becomes a sealed chamber, watching itself watch. There is no Other left to interrupt the gaze, no resistance to break the circuit. Existence persists, sustained only by its own visibility.

Decades later, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han would diagnose a parallel condition at the level of culture. In The Expulsion of the Other, Han argues that contemporary society has not become impoverished through lack of connection, but through the erosion of otherness. Otherness, for Han, does not simply mean other people. It names whatever resists assimilation – whatever remains opaque, difficult, or unresponsive to immediate consumption. Without such resistance, perception loses depth. The self no longer encounters what is beyond it, only what confirms it.

In this way, society drifts toward a state of perpetual self-relation. Communication proliferates, yet encounter thins. Difference is flattened into variation. What remains is a world increasingly shaped to reflect the self back to itself, endlessly optimised for comfort, affirmation, and control.

Digital technologies did not invent this condition, but they have accelerated and refined it. Platforms built to facilitate connection have gradually transformed attention into a form of currency. Visibility substitutes for presence. Response becomes a measure of worth. Language itself reveals the shift. Audiences become followers. Engagement becomes proof of existence. Silence registers as failure.

Within such systems, perception is continuously solicited but rarely grounded. Images circulate faster than trust can form. Voices can be reproduced without bodies. Authority is simulated. Expertise is approximated. Even the distinction between the real and the fabricated grows porous. The result is not liberation, but a pervasive uncertainty. When perception can no longer rely on stable referents, anxiety takes root.

The psychological consequences of this environment are subtle yet far-reaching. Self-worth begins to oscillate in response to external signals. Attention becomes compulsive, not because it satisfies, but because it momentarily quiets the fear of vanishing. Comparison proliferates. The self, deprived of genuine encounter, turns inward and begins to monitor itself, measuring its own visibility against an imagined gaze.

What emerges is a condition uncannily close to Beckett’s sealed chamber, but scaled to a civilisation. Awareness persists, hyper-stimulated yet unanchored. Perception is everywhere, yet rarely met by resistance. The world no longer answers back so much as it reflects.

This is not a call to reject technology, nor an argument for retreat or renunciation. Tools are not inherently destructive. They extend human capacity when they remain subordinate to judgement and use. The crisis arises when tools quietly reorganise perception itself, shaping what is seen, valued, and remembered.

Perception requires otherness to remain sane. It needs resistance, opacity, and limits. Such otherness has never disappeared entirely – it has simply become harder to meet. Without it, awareness collapses into self-reference, and being becomes a performance sustained by attention rather than relation.

At the threshold of spring, when air stirs and movement quickens, questions of perception sharpen. What do we attend to. What attends to us. What have we allowed to shape our sense of reality. These are not questions to be answered quickly, nor resolved by prescription. They ask instead for discernment, for a slowing of the gaze, for a renewed capacity to encounter what cannot be mirrored.

If perception has become unmoored, the task is not to seek ever more visibility, but to recover the conditions under which seeing becomes meaningful again. Not by multiplying reflections, but by restoring the possibility of meeting what is other, resistant, and real. It is there, in the presence of what does not immediately answer back, that perception remembers what it is for.

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© 2026 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.

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