The Opposite of Squishy Is Ghostly

A metaphor for all things unresponsive 👻

Yūrei or “faint spirit”, from the Bakemono no e, a handscroll of supernatural creatures from Edo period Japan (c. 1700)

In 1895, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that happiness is “the feeling that power increases — that a resistance is overcome.” I was reminded of that quote when, this week, Sasha Chapin wrote in similarly tactile terms that “life is good if it squishes nicely when you poke it.”

Sasha argues that responsiveness is what humans desire most. We like it when whatever interact with interacts back. This includes people: those who seem most charismatic are those who react expressively to what we say, or reply with something clever and witty. It includes jobs: we don’t care that much about being overworked; we care about how much responsibility we deal with and how much impact our work has, whether on coworkers or on the world at large. It includes video games, which are engineered on purpose to react to whatever buttons players press. It includes, I’d add, Mimosa pudica, the plant that folds itself whenever it is touched:

So satisfying. (gif source)

Wanting to dwell with this idea somewhat more after reading Sasha’s essay, but having no idea how to express it better than he did, I considered just writing down a list of situations like Mimosa that are satisfyingly “squishy” when poked. But then I realized that many of the examples I came up with were negative. Often, what feels good is that we got some squishiness, some haptic feedback, where we feared there’d be none.

What feels good is avoiding ghosts.

What is a ghost? In one interpretation, it is the immortal spirit of a departed person, forever wandering the earth, aimless and forlorn. The aimlessness and forlornless are an important point. Superficially, such a ghost might seem to have received a good deal: he cannot die, or suffer physical harm, and is free to float around and observe whatever he wants. Yet the ghost is unhappy — because he cannot really do anything. Deprived of a body, he cannot impact the world, except in the most indirect ways. In some tales he can play weak tricks on the living, whom he envies. He has no power; nothing is squishy to him. He is cursed.

To a living person, a ghost is similarly unsatisfying. Ghosts are transparent and wispy. You put out you hand and it goes right through him. A ghost is barely real, and he most definitely does not squishes when you poke him. Trying to act on a ghost is futile, frustrating, sad.

Ghosts, in the literal sense of spirits, do not truly exist. But they exist metaphorically: anything or anyone that you interact with and does not respond, in some sense, is a ghost.

The most everyday use of the metaphor has become a verb: ghosting refers to terminating a relationship with someone without ever telling them why. They send you messages, and you do not reply. You purposefully become a ghost to them.

I cannot claim that ghosting is never appropriate under any circumstance. Sometimes we need to get rid of relationships with people who have wronged us, and ghosting is the only practical way. But if you can avoid it, please do not ghost the people around you. It is one of the worst feelings. There are many reasons for this — but certainly one of them is that the lack of responsiveness feels downright horrible. When a person whom you once considered a friend or lover stops talking to you without giving you so much as a reason, it feels as if the world suddenly stops making sense.¹

In a similar but less depressing vein, I have observed that I am much happier to receive negative news about something I submitted, like the manuscript of my novel, than to receive no news at all. It is disappointing and painful to see a job application be rejected, or a request to be denied, but at least we can deal with the disappointment and move on, whereas we can’t do much if the application or request has been sent the way of a ghost, never to come back.

Likewise for posting anything online, or doing anything slightly unusual in public. We’re all afraid of ridicule, but deep down I wonder if we’re even more afraid that no one will notice us. That we are in fact ghosts. Lately my Twitter experience has been one of stagnation; it seems that nobody likes or even sees the few tweets I sent out. It is overall a far less agreeable situation than ending up in arguments with annoying people. Even when something annoying happens, at least it happens; at least you’re not a ghost.

What else is made of ghosts? Bureaucracies: they are so slow to react to anything that they might as well be incorporeal. Accordingly, they are among the most unsatisfying and unhappy entities known to man, whether we’re talking about their constituent employees or the citizens who have to deal with them.

Video calls, and most things virtual, are ghostly too. The latency of online tech reduces the quality of responsiveness, and as a result such experiences are always slightly less satisfying than the equivalent real life ones would be. There are of course many great things to be gleaned online, some of them not ghost-like at all, but the lack of concreteness, of physicality, makes us a bit unhappy overall, I think. Sensory feedback is important. In some way, the world has become more ghostly, as many of our interactions with things are now through patterns of pixels on screens, rather than buttons that make a satisfying click when they are pressed.

But the most heart-wrenching type of real-life ghost is the person who, despite still being alive, has totally given up on doing anything. This sometimes happen to old people as they age. Sometimes it happens to people who are much younger. You know people like this: they have lost what we might call the spark of life. They don’t live dazzlingly. They don’t “put behavior into the world,” so that they “get behavior out,” to cite Sasha Chapin again. These people have ghosted themselves. It is the saddest thing in the world.

I wrote in what remains my second most popular essay here, Remaining Ambitious, that we should strive to make it easier for people to deal with rejection, since otherwise we might be making everyone weaker, less ambitious, and less happy than they could be. I think the ghost metaphor suggests the first and easiest way to do this: we should react.

When people ask something of you and you can’t give it to them, tell them. Perhaps you operate a large business at scale, and you can’t possibly be nicely squishy and reactive to everyone. That’s okay — but at least tell them. An automated email is better than no email at all. And of course, if you can do it, a personalized email is better than an automated one. If you are in a position to give them quality feedback, do so: that’s almost never truly pointless.

Or perhaps you’re an individual who must sadly end a romantic relationship or a friendship. That’s okay — but at least tell them why. Do not bring a new ghost into the world; they make it a sadder place.

Yume no seirei or “dream spirit” from the Bakemono no e (c. 1700)

1. For those who like movies, The Banshees of Inisherin is a hilarious exploration of the theme of ghosting a friend.