Signals across the abyss: Digital reaching and the fragility of the Other

Reading | Existentialism

Prof. Orlando Moreira, PhD | 2026-03-20

The digital paradox

We are more connected than ever. At any given moment, billions of people post, comment, scroll, message; each gesture a small reach outward; a shout, a sigh, a joke, a pain. These are not just patterns of consumption or expressions of opinion; they are existential acts. Each one says, in its own way: I am here. Do you see me?

The digital world has not created this need, but it has made it more present. Every timeline, every chat box, every status update is saturated with the hope, bare or buried, that someone will notice; that someone will answer. And in this saturation, something crucial emerges: relation, once rooted in presence, now takes place in absence, in delay, and in simulation.

The paradox is this: we have never been so able to reach; and yet, never so uncertain that anyone is truly there.

 

The six days

There was a moment, six days without sleep, when the structure of my world collapsed. I had been diagnosed with a tumor in my inner ear. The tinnitus and sound distortion had grown unbearable, but it wasn’t just the noise that destroyed me. It was what the noise replaced: silence, music, rest, talking with my children and wife. The things that had once made the world feel inhabitable were gone, and with them, my sense of direction.

I could not think clearly. I could not rest. I could not endure being awake, but I could not escape it either.

In that spiral, I turned to the only space still open to me: the internet. I posted on Facebook. I wrote on Reddit. Not to explain, not to inform, but because I had this primal need to express my despair and suffering. This is an example taken from my Facebook history:

Another sleepless night… even more deaf than yesterday.
My ear may be dead, yet it rings and screeches loud and strong all night long.
Caught between the sleep that evades me and the realization things are just going to get worse, I panic.
My chest hurts and my body shakes uncontrollably with trapped adrenaline.
The morning finally awakes, grey and devoid of hope.
There is no art or narrative to hide the sheer bestiality of this.
How do I get out of here?

 I threw it outward, not expecting a solution or practical help, just hoping somehow that someone might catch it, not knowing very well why I needed it.

And people caught it.

People I hadn’t spoken to in years messaged me. A few old friends. Some acquaintances. Even strangers. Some wrote long, careful replies. Others said little more than “I hope you get better.” There was no solution offered. No promise. But something in me shifted.

Because, at that moment, I felt that I wasn’t alone. I felt people cared.

That feeling interrupted my spiral.

It wasn’t proof. And it wasn’t physical. No one came to me. No one sat beside me. The voices were sincere, substantial, sometimes even profound, but they could not replace a hug.

Still, they mattered. They were a weight against the void, a suggestion that I hadn’t fully disappeared.

More importantly, as I got tired of talking about my problems and sufferings—and somewhat embarrassed by them, given how strongly I am aware that many people suffer composedly and quietly—I started asking them about their lives. And they shared; their hopes, their concerns, their worries.

As I gradually focused on how I could reciprocate the sympathy, on how I could help them, something else happened to me. I was no longer looking at my suffering and at my fears. I was engaged in caring for others, I was thinking about their problems, thinking what could help them, and suddenly the world felt less desolate.

Maybe the limited expressivity of a text chat across the digital world was what made that communication with distant friends so open, so intimate, so meaningful.

 

The hunger to be seen

It is easy to dismiss the craving for attention as shallow, fame-seeking, click-chasing, self-promotion. Sometimes it is. Sometimes there’s profit behind it: visibility converts into value, engagement turns into capital. And your attention, the time you spend clicking, reading and scrolling, that life you spend, that life that sometimes is robbed from you with cheap tricks, is indeed sold by somebody as a product. But often, it’s not about money at all. It’s about something older, more difficult to name; a hunger not for status, but for recognition; not to be admired, but to be seen.

This hunger comes from two directions, seemingly opposite, but emotionally identical.

On one side, the dread of being alone. Surrounded by disembodied voices, one wonders if any of them is genuine or even exists beyond a simulacrum. This leads to the fear of solipsism, isolation, and emotional disappearance; the terror that no one else is there, that no one hears, that no one will come; that you are pouring ideas, thoughts, emotions into a black hole.

On the other side, all these different voices create the dread of being too small to matter. Not alone, but unseen. One voice in a billion voices, swallowed by the feed, indistinguishable in the crowd. This is the opposite of solipsism, but it feels just as annihilating.

You are either alone or lost in the mass.

These are different conditions but they produce the same emotion: the fear that one’s presence has no weight. And the same instinct follows: to say something, to post, to message, to cry out, not necessarily seeking for praise or understanding, but for proof that someone, somewhere, still hears you.

I believe this is why people chase visibility. This is why even trivial content is poured into the world with urgency. Because being noticed, even momentarily, interrupts the dread. It suggests, even if it does not prove, that you have not disappeared.

Something like this was propelling me when I wrote my posts during those sleepless days. I was not performing. I was not marketing. I was throwing pain into the open, as if throwing that pain into the open was the only way it could be dealt with, somehow hoping that someone would answer, probably not to fix it, but at least to acknowledge it; as if the worst of the pain were that it had not been heard.  And when some did acknowledge it, something held: not certainty, but texture; not healing, but interruption.

I suspect that, like in my case, much of what we now call attention-seeking is not vanity. It is desperation in disguise. The same gesture, repeated across billions of screens: I am here. Are you?

And beneath it, always, the same fear and always the same  hope. That reaching might still matter.

 

The solipsism we already live in

But this is where the modern condition becomes more fragile than ever. Because the person who answers might not be a person at all. They might be a bot, a generated persona, an AI—an echo of our own preferences, reflected back through algorithms trained to maximize engagement.

The question of solipsism is no longer theoretical. It is structural. We already live in its architecture.

You may speak to a digital therapist, an intelligent assistant, a perfectly simulated companion. And you may be comforted. You may even feel seen. But the question lingers beneath every word: Is there anyone really there?

Or are you one tiny voice being smothered by thousands of automated responses, of chatbots, of generated texts, videos, sounds, each vying for your marketable attention, each being not more than a front devoid of emotion, of passion, of care? Just a cynical dead world of attention-harvesting machines?

Can your whole existence be reduced to this dead digital world that captures your attention, and to an analog world where you travel and walk and sit surrounded by other people—people who, like you, are present there in body only, each of us attached to our own digital media, to our podcasts, to our vlogs, to all these virtual presences that can be faked, to all these para-relations that confuse us?

Can existence be satisfying when, in the analog world, we pass each other every day like ships in the dark, physically present, but ultimately absent?

How much of the world you consume, what news we consume, what people, virtual or otherwise, we consume, has become fully customizable; to the point where we can live all our lives in a bubble of what we choose, or what “the algorithm” entices us to. A de facto solipsism. 

We are not just wondering whether the world is real. We are now wondering whether the emotions, the relations are real.

 

The programmed other

There is a domain where, through the years, the question of relation has gradually become both more vivid and ambiguous: the world of single-player video games. Particularly in narrative-driven role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate, Mass Effect, Planescape: Torment, you do not merely play a character. You enter a world built to respond to you. Characters speak to you, fight beside you, ask for your opinion. They express fear, loyalty, longing. Some remember your actions. Some fall in love.

These are NPCs (non-player characters). But that term is deceptive. What they simulate is not background, but presence. They behave like Others: emotionally textured, morally responsive, personally invested.

And for many players, they succeed. The connection may be manufactured, but the emotions they trigger—grief, affection, guilt, desire—are real. Players recall conversations with these characters the way they recall moments in their own lives. Not as fiction, but as memory. I can attest to that.

There are only a few women in my life who moved me as much as some of the characters I met in computer games. 

Because these NPCs are designed to dazzle us, charm us, entrance us, with their frailty, their indomitable spirit, their struggle, their dignity.

They are like fictional characters in novels, except for a crucial difference: they respond to me.

They are available to me.

Designed to matter to me.

Designed for me to matter to them.

That latter part is essential. These simulations are not simply emotionally compelling. They are emotionally flattering. They are scripted to make me the axis of meaning: the hero, the one who is trusted, confided in, loved. They are carefully crafted not just to offer presence, but to give me the feeling that I am necessary.

And even when their love needs to be won, it is through a gamified simulation of a relationship, designed to be played and enjoyed by me. Everything is made for me.

And this changes the equation. Because these programmed Others do something the real world does not always do: they respond without reservation. They offer the illusion of relation without the instability of real mutuality. They simulate not just connection, but centrality.

This is not simple escapism. It is something larger and more consequential: a structural substitute for relational life. Because these constructs elicit real emotion in me.

Solipsism is no longer an abstract fear, or a de facto condition; it is an entertainment system, packaged and sold as intimacy and meaning. 

And it’s only becoming more persuasive. As AI progresses, the realism of dialogue, gesture, and response deepens. We are not far from NPCs that learn from us, adapt to us, remember us across games, and offer a seamless continuity of attention and care.

As that happens, the boundary between emotional fantasy and relational reality blurs further. The question is no longer “Is the Other real?”

It is “Why bother finding out?”

 

Between collapse and connection

And yet.

Some of the most emotionally honest moments of my life have happened online.

In message threads. In email chains. In replies from people I had nearly forgotten.

There is a strange intimacy in mediated space; a clarity that face-to-face life sometimes cannot bear. Without the pressure of physical presence, people sometimes say what matters most. They speak from a part of themselves that reflects more and feels more, something that needs the quiet and slow rhythm of written conversation to emerge.

And that doesn’t make it less real. But it doesn’t make it real in the same way. It opens a space where truth can surface, yet always beneath the shadow of absence.

That difference still matters.

Because in the world of the real Other—flawed, unpredictable, unrehearsed—there is a kind of moral weight that no simulation can carry. The Other can disappoint you. The Other can demand something of you that was not scripted. The Other is not designed to matter to you and you are not guaranteed to matter to them.

And yet, when the real Other responds—freely, unexpectedly—that response carries a force no programmed gesture can match. It is not a reward. It is not a feature. It is a risk returned.

That is why it matters to find out.

Because only the real Other can refuse you.

Only they can help you believe, in their freedom, that you are not alone.

 

The Hope of digital reaching

There is one more thing. If we do not know whether the Other is real, then every digital exchange is suspended between two possibilities: a person, or a phantom. And the temptation, in this ambiguity, is enormous. The digital world, with its masks, its anonymity, its speed, encourages us to treat others as disposable; to use them as screens for our anger, our boredom, our fear; to lash out, knowing nothing will follow us home.

Yet the same anonymity that tempts cruelty also opens the wager of generosity. When you reach across the screen, you do not know if the figure you address is real or fabricated, friend or phantom. The temptation is to strike first, to treat them as less than a person. But if there is even the chance of an Other on the far side, the only way to preserve meaning is to extend recognition before certainty. In the digital void, kindness is the only bridge that can survive simulation.

To reach, even in uncertainty, is to address the possible Other as a peer.

To speak as if someone real is listening.

Because if we abandon that, we collapse the fragile hope of relation before it even begins. The internet becomes not a space of connection, but a field of mutual contempt, each voice shouting into what it has already decided is emptiness.

What interrupts the void is not certainty, but care; kindness; the willingness to invest in the possibility of another human being on the other side of the screen. And thus hope is born out of necessity and co-sentiment.

Digital space tempts us with reflections. It can simulate presence, answer back, flatter our need to be seen. But without the risk of another consciousness, nothing has been reached. A thousand responses that never bleed are only the echo of the self.

And this is the irony: the only way to preserve any chance of connection in the digital world is to behave as though connection is already there; to treat the uncertain Other not as a target, but as a neighbor; to resist the ease of cruelty, and instead practice the fragile art of recognition.

This is not naïvete but survival. Because only in that fidelity—addressing even the uncertain Other with dignity—does the digital space retain the possibility of meaning.

 

Conclusion: Reaching without guarantees

We do not need certainty to act. We do not need metaphysical proof to care.

What we need is the possibility of the Other.

That’s what I felt in those messages, those late-night replies, those flickers of attention across a screen. Not confirmation, but possibility: enough to interrupt the spiral; enough to give shape to the silence; enough to make me believe, however briefly, that someone might still be there.

But we don’t know what kind of world we are building.

Technology opens both doors at once: the possibility of a solipsistic multiverse, where every self retreats into simulation; and the possibility of a networked world where presence, attention, and emotional truth are shared more freely and more easily than ever before.

We are suspended between them, and we may remain suspended for a long time. But in that suspension, we must still reach.

Not because we know what’s on the other side, but because the alternative is disappearance.

There is no final reassurance, only the ongoing act of trying to be findable and hoping that someone will find me. 

And maybe someone will.

But in the meantime, someone else out there may be waiting for recognition. To offer it, in earnest, in kindness, in openness, is all we need to do. 

And it is such a simple thing,

such an invaluable thing,

for us to give.