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The Ethiopian running secret
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Episode dtd 21.5
The Ethiopian running secret
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-uncanny-feeling-that-a-dead-person-is-still-close-by
The uncanny feeling that a dead person is still close by
by Alicja Nowacka, psychology researcher
The sense that a dead person is still with us is both eerie and common: can we find a naturalistic explanation for it?
After the devastating death of her 11-year-old son, Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, said that she received nightly visits from the boy. He stood at the foot of her bed, she told a relative, ‘with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had’. She sometimes also recognised another of her sons, who had died several years earlier.
A century and a half later, similar reports appeared after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Many survivors described seeing, hearing or feeling the presence of people who had died. These encounters were often experienced as moments of comfort or reassurance, as if the dead remained close in some way.
Across many cultures, people describe comparable encounters, all involving some sense that a deceased person is present. This presence may be felt simply as someone ‘being there’, or it may be accompanied by sensory experiences: a sudden trace of a familiar scent, a recognisable movement or shadow, hearing the person’s voice, or a fleeting sensation of being touched.
It’s very possible that you know someone who has had such an experience, or that you’ve had one yourself. Although the ‘ghost story’ templates shaped by movies like The Sixth Sense (1999) or Ghost (1990) portray encounters with the dead as vivid, dramatic and unmistakable, the experiences described by many bereaved people are quite different. They are typically subtle, spontaneous and brief, even when the bereaved person wishes they would last longer.
How should we understand these phenomena? Historically, psychologists have grouped them under the broad category of ‘anomalous experiences’, events that don’t fit easily into existing scientific explanations. Could they merely be tricks of the senses? About two decades ago, a research team attempted to create an artificially ‘haunted’ room using manipulated electromagnetic fields and infrasound. They asked people who spent time in the room to note any unusual sensations, and many did – including some who said they felt a presence. In the researchers’ interpretation, a person’s level of suggestibility likely affects how they make sense of ambiguous environments and whether they perceive anything unusual.
Some phenomena historically labelled ‘anomalous’ may reflect explainable psychological processes
But explanations based solely on suggestibility miss something important. Not all unusual experiences arise from the misinterpretation of environmental cues. Synaesthesia is a useful example: some people naturally experience a blending of the senses, such as seeing colours when they hear music or read numbers. For many years, this too was treated as an anomalous phenomenon because it didn’t fit with conventional understanding. Advances in neuroscience have since demonstrated that synaesthesia is associated with identifiable brain patterns. What once seemed mysterious became understandable as the underlying mechanisms were recognised. This shift suggests that some phenomena historically labelled ‘anomalous’ may reflect explainable psychological or neural processes.
Based on recent work in bereavement research, a similar reframing is possible for experiences of presence. This account does not rely on supernatural explanations. Instead, it suggests that the very mechanisms that enable human relationships in life also underlie moments in which the deceased still seem perceptually near – moments that can help shape what the relationship becomes after death.
Early in the grieving process, people often continue to seek proximity to the deceased. They hold on to physical reminders, keep belongings close, or create memory boxes as a way of maintaining their connection. According to theory developed by Colin Murray Parkes and John Bowlby and refined by others, when someone begins to accept that shared physical presence with the deceased is no longer possible, they typically move from despair and disorganisation toward a phase of reorganisation. During this shift, the connection with the deceased becomes more psychological – maintained through rituals, traditions and internal conversation with the person who has died. Continuing bonds theory proposes that a relationship does not end at death but instead takes a new form, within the life of the bereaved.
The writer Joan Didion captured aspects of this experience after the death of her daughter. Reflecting on the instinct to search for someone who is no longer physically present, she wrote in the memoir Blue Nights (2011):
I know that I can no longer reach her.
I know that, should I try to reach her – should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me … – she will fade from my touch.
Didion’s words echo what many bereaved people describe: the mind’s habit of looking for someone who is gone, and the painful realisation that reaching cannot bring them back.
To gain a deeper understanding of these experiences, it is helpful to examine what happens in the brain during the grieving process. The psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor’s work offers an important perspective. Drawing on neuroimaging studies, she suggests that grief involves a form of learning in which the brain must update its internal expectations of the world. Prior to losing someone, our routines, habits and predictions all assume that the person will continue to be present – we expect a message, anticipate their return home, or navigate daily life with them in mind. After a loss, these ingrained predictions do not disappear immediately. For a time, the brain continues to operate on its old model because it has been shaped by years of attachment and repeated interaction. This disconnect between expectation and reality may help explain the disorientation that characterises grief, and why moments of sensing someone’s presence often emerge in the early stages of adjustment.
The type of relationship did not predict whether someone reported a sense of presence. What mattered was emotional closeness
Understanding grief as a process of relearning has informed a recent theoretical model for a neurocognitive explanation. My research collaborators and I suggest that a set of brain areas involved in memory, emotion and social perception – what we call the ‘person network’, because it contains neural representations of specific individuals – can help explain why some bereaved people feel as if the deceased person is present. If the brain continues to expect the deceased to be part of daily life, it makes sense to examine the system responsible for storing the associations one has with that person.
In interviews with people from diverse backgrounds about their experiences of presence, I noticed a consistent pattern: the type of relationship (partner, parent, sibling, child, friend, neighbour, etc) did not predict whether someone reported a sense of presence. What mattered was emotional closeness. For those we care about deeply, the brain appears to maintain a rich, active ‘map’ of who they are.
People vary in how they interpret these experiences. Some described what they felt as a spirit. One person recalled times when they were feeling alone or scared, and then perceived ‘a hand on the shoulder or a hug’ or felt as if ‘they’re behind me … the guiding force behind me’, referring to deceased relatives. Other people described their experience of a presence as something generated by the mind. ‘I think it was partly my own brain,’ one person said. ‘This is just externalising what was in my mind’s eye.’ Some moved between both spiritual and psychological possibilities.
We propose that the brain’s representations of a close loved one may continue to be activated for some time after they die, especially while the brain is still adjusting to the loss of their physical presence. Through years of interaction, close relationships become deeply embedded not only as memories of shared experiences, but as deeply ingrained sensory patterns – the sound of the person’s voice, their movements, the feel of their touch, the way they looked, their scent, and how they tended to inhabit the space around us. When such ingrained representations are reactivated – whether by emotion, context or subtle sensory cues – they may influence perception in ways that momentarily recreate the sense of that person being physically nearby. In this way, what feels like an external presence may arise from the continued activation of neural systems that were built through repeated, lived interaction.
These bereavement-related presences are different from those described in the neurological literature, such as the ‘doppelgänger effect’ (the experience of perceiving a double of oneself from an external perspective). In neurological cases, the presence is often unfamiliar, ambiguous or occasionally unsettling. In contrast, grieving individuals tend to report immediately recognising the presence as belonging to their close person. We propose that recognising who the presence belongs to shapes the whole experience, including its emotional meaning, how it is understood, and the role it takes in the person’s ongoing relationship with the deceased.
People in our study often noted that moments of sensed presence became less frequent over time. This did not reflect a desire for the experiences to fade; many wished they would continue. Instead, it seemed to mirror the changing nature of the relationship itself. As grief evolved, the connection shifted from something experienced physically or externally to something internal. People described staying close through memories, inner conversations, rituals, or everyday reminders that helped them feel connected.
Not everyone reports sense-of-presence experiences, of course. One possibility is that some people simply do not notice the small moments that others would interpret as meaningful – a movement in the corner of the eye, a sudden scent, or a fleeting sensation. As many participants explained, their visitations lasted only seconds, and they rarely resembled cinematic depictions.
When these moments do register, the meaning someone assigns to them could be just as important as the sensations themselves. Our beliefs shape how we interpret, remember and value these experiences, and whether we recognise them as meaningful at all. The psychologists Edith Steffen and Adrian Coyle explored this meaning-making directly. They found that many people who experienced a sense of presence felt that the deceased continued to exist in some form. Many understood it as an expression of an ongoing relationship. Maintaining this bond not only provided comfort but also supported people’s sense of identity and self-understanding in the aftermath of loss.
A sensed presence might be seen as a reminder of how deeply the deceased remains woven into the self
In my own interviews, I saw the emotional significance that these experiences often held for the bereaved person. For some, the presence briefly eased the ache of longing:
I felt … devastated that my mom wasn’t here when I got married … all the things that she’s not part of. Which is why I’m so grateful when she turns up and lets me know that she’s here.
Another interviewee thought the person they had lost was sending them a message ‘giving permission for me to continue on with living, and, you know, that she would be there’.
Each person’s available frameworks will inform how this kind of experience is understood and integrated. Some, particularly those with religious or spiritual frameworks, might interpret a sensed presence as evidence that the deceased continues to exist and is actively reaching out, offering a sign of protection, guidance or reassurance. But it’s also possible to find these experiences meaningful without seeing them in supernatural terms. A sensed presence might be seen as a reminder of how deeply the deceased remains woven into the self, as an internalised presence, and an ongoing bond.
From either perspective, sensing the presence of the dead is neither strange nor unusual. It is a natural expression of how people hold on to significant relationships while learning to live with their physical absence. The bond remains; it simply takes on new forms.
Alicja Nowacka is a PhD student at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her work focuses on understanding how we sustain a connection with those who have passed away. She is particularly interested in understanding the neural connections that underlie these experiences.
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A teacher in school asked the students to write about what they wanted to become in the future… and what they did not want to become.
One little child’s answer brought a big smile to everyone’s face.
In his innocent imagination, becoming a Senior Citizen seemed to be the happiest and most enjoyable stage of life! 😄
The child wrote:
“I don’t want to become
a President,
a Doctor,
or a Scientist…
None of these.
My greatest wish is to become a Senior Citizen because that seems to be the most fun!”
Because my Grandpa:
😄 Can wake up late in the morning.
😄 Can take afternoon naps whenever he wants.
😄 Watches TV peacefully and sleeps early in the evening.
😄 Has no homework, no exams, and no tuition classes.
😄 If there is no work, he can simply sit under a tree and enjoy the cool breeze, or go to the park and play chess with friends.
😄 He can play video games for as long as he wants and nobody complains.
😄 Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, milk in the evening — life is wonderful!
😄 Free travel in buses, and kind people even offer him a seat.
😄 Half tickets in trains and movie theatres.
😄 He can eat whatever he likes because nobody stops him.
😄 He can do anything he enjoys — sing, dance, paint, play the piano or trumpet, climb mountains, or go trekking.
😄 And if he has money in his pocket, he can travel wherever he wants!
“So, becoming a Senior Citizen is truly amazing!” 😄
💡 Inspiration:
Sometimes Senior Citizens themselves do not realize how blessed and free they truly are.
🌹 Dedicated with love and respect to all Senior Citizens. 🙏🌹
Symptoms, sources, and solutions for sciatic nerve pain straight from a physical therapist.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/
The quiet grief of adult friendship
https://aeon.co/essays/young-people-now-and-the-mal-du-siecle-of-19th-century-france
Gen Z but two centuries ago
A generation of young people with ‘full hearts in an empty world’ sought hope in the face of insurmountable malaise
In 1833, the French dramatist and poet Alfred de Musset travelled to Venice with his lover, the novelist best known by her pen name, George Sand. The voyage was meant to ease the tensions of their turbulent relationship but, soon after they arrived, they both fell ill. As Musset’s condition deteriorated, Sand became infatuated with the Italian doctor who treated them. After a series of violent and jealous quarrels, Musset returned to Paris to do what he did best: write.
Drawing on fragments of his correspondence with Sand and on years of inner turmoil, he produced the semi-autobiographical novel Confession of a Child of the Century (1836). The story centres on Octave, who is driven to libertinage and near-madness by a duplicitous lover. Yet his unhappiness stems less from his mistress’s betrayal than from the disillusioned spirit of the age into which he was born. Feelings of melancholy and ennui were so widespread among Musset’s generation that they were grouped under a single diagnosis: le mal du siècle (literally ‘sickness of the century’).
Oval portrait painting of a man with brown hair and beard in a black suit, framed in ornate gold.
Today, many of us feel we are living in unstable times, marked by AI, widening inequality, war and a looming climate catastrophe, among other deeply unsettling realities. Yet our attitudes towards unhappiness and anxiety often downplay the broader sociopolitical context, placing responsibility on the individual (to practise mindfulness, cultivate work-life balance, and so on). Two hundred years ago, Musset and many of his contemporaries instead blamed the times for the pervasive mood of dissatisfaction and unrest that gripped their generation. They believed that the mal du siècle was shaped less by individual temperament than by far-reaching historical, political and cultural forces. Could we benefit from reframing our current malaise in similar terms?
Musset was not the first to articulate the idea of the mal du siècle. Some decades earlier, François-René de Chateaubriand had expressed his own generation’s malaise, warning of the ‘unsettled state of the passions’, the ‘tedium of the heart’ and the ‘secret inquietude’ of young people whose environment offered no outlet for their intense feelings. ‘With a full heart,’ he sighed, ‘we dwell in an empty world.’ The Romantic novelist Jean Paul helped give conceptual form to a similar idea by popularising the German term Weltschmerz, or world-weariness, the sense that suffering arises from the very order of the world. As the first decades of the 19th century unfolded, a number of other writers, not least Musset’s lover and principal interlocutor Sand, theorised and dramatised the moral malady of their age. Of all the expressions of the mal du siècle, however, the one Musset presented in the story of his alter ego Octave proved the most emblematic and enduring.
In the opening chapters of the Confession, Musset offers a panoramic, almost sociological, view outlining his diagnosis of the causes and symptoms of the mal du siècle. The young men who came of age in France around 1830, ready to take their place in the world, discovered that history had already run its course. In their fathers’ time, the destiny of France had been tied to one man’s indefatigable sense of purpose. Napoleon Bonaparte, capitalising on the momentum and chaos of the revolution, had emerged equal parts daring leader and egomaniacal tyrant. In Musset’s words: ‘One man only was then the life of Europe; all other beings tried to fill their lungs with the air that he had breathed.’
The old world was slowly dying, while the promise of a brighter future was endlessly postponed
In France alone, hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives in Napoleon’s wars, yet both in victory and in defeat the emperor maintained his legendary aura. Musset writes: ‘Never were there so many sleepless nights as in that man’s time; never was such a people of disconsolate mothers seen reclining on city ramparts; never was there such silence around those who spoke of death.’ And yet, he insists, there was also ‘so much joy, so much life, so much flourishing of war trumpets in every court. Never were there suns so cloudless as those that dried up all that blood.’ The emperor was as brilliant a war strategist as he was a self-mythologiser. With every impossible exploit and every deadly campaign, from the sands of Alexandria to the snowy banks of the Berezina, Napoleon expanded his imperial horizons, infusing France with a conquering raison d’être. But after the empire crumbled in 1815, the young men ‘conceived between two battles’ discovered that their world, which had once seemed boundless, had become too small to accommodate their dreams.
Like many of his contemporaries, Musset felt he had come of age at the wrong time. The old world was ‘still quivering on its ruins, with all the fossils of the ages of absolutism’, slowly dying, while the promise of a brighter future was endlessly postponed. He believed that the opportunity for a meaningful existence had passed his generation by, and that it would not return in time for them to experience it: ‘What a thick night on the earth! And we shall be dead when day shall break.’ Or as he put it in his poem ‘Rolla’: ‘I came too late into a world too old.’ As Musset’s generation confronted the impasse of their historical in-betweenness, they were left with ‘a feeling of inexpressible unrest’ and ‘an unbearable wretchedness in the depths of their souls’.
The notion of the mal du siècle cannot be dissociated from the spirit of Romanticism that was sweeping Europe when Musset was writing. This polymorphous, transnational and intellectually wide-ranging movement does not lend itself easily to neat definition but, in a broad sense, it can be understood as a general feeling of dissatisfaction with the excesses of rationalism and materialism in a post-Enlightenment, rapidly industrialising world. The rationalism of the philosophie des Lumières of the previous century had elevated reason, granting it the power to solve all of humanity’s problems. However, the cold, detached attitude of rationalism and empiricism left Musset’s generation feeling empty, searching for something to believe in that could not be explained away. In the Confession, Musset wrote: ‘you will feel that human reason can heal illusions, but not heal sufferings … You will find that the heart of man when he said: “I believe in nothing, for I see nothing,” had not said its last word.’
With industrialisation mechanising more and more aspects of 19th-century life, the Romantics sought to escape their disenchanted modernity by immersing themselves in distant cultures and epochs. The French writer Théophile Gautier, for instance, marvelled at the richness and vitality of his idealised vision of ancient Egypt: ‘Our world of to-day is puny indeed beside the antique world … The radiant suns which once shone upon the earth are forever extinguished in the nothingness of uniformity.’ Writers like Gautier and Musset yearned for emotional depth, imagination, higher meaning, self-expression, to glimpse the Absolute and touch the Infinite, but, in their view, reality mostly fell short.
In the 1830s, French Romantics encountered a further source of disaffection in the rise of a profit-driven bourgeois mentality. By the time Musset began writing the Confession, Louis-Philippe I was the third king to succeed the emperor Napoleon. The restored monarchy maintained a veneer of progress, aware that the people of France had retained their revolutionary muscle-memory and would not hesitate to use it at the first sign of absolutist relapse. In an effort to signal change, Louis-Philippe styled himself not ‘King of France’, but ‘King of the French’. In practice, however, his reforms were largely superficial and French society remained deeply unequal, with wealth and power still concentrated in the hands of an elite now dominated by bourgeois merchants and industrialists. Dreary considerations of material gain had replaced the greatness and glory of the past, and young men were ‘condemned to repose by the sovereigns of the world, given up to vulgar pedantries of all sorts, to laziness and to lassitude.’ This was not, Musset deplored, a world fit for ‘expansive souls’.
Octave finds no comfort, only cynicism and apathy, the postures of those seeking refuge in a disenchanted world
Musset’s relationship to Romanticism was ambivalent. On the one hand, he often derided Romantic pathos and refused to be labelled a Romantic author. On the other, in the character of Octave, he had created one of the movement’s most iconic heroes, embodying intense introspection and emotional excess while reflecting a profound dissatisfaction with the existence he has been given and the world around him. After his all-consuming first love ends in betrayal, Octave loses what had been, to his eyes, the only meaningful pursuit of his young existence and discovers that he has ‘no calling, no occupation’. None of the available career paths appeal to him, his ideas drift, shifting with each new influence, and even his tastes are scattered and eclectic, reflecting both his own and his generation’s state of disorientation: ‘Our age has no forms. We have not impressed the seal of our time either on our houses, or on our gardens … we live only in wreckage, as if the end of the world were at hand.’
Utterly directionless, Octave is forced to confront the unbearable discrepancy between his grandiose, idealistic and sublime aspirations of love and freedom, and what the fundamentally materialistic and unenchanting society he inhabits can realistically deliver. When he turns to his friends, he finds no comfort, only cynicism and apathy, the postures of those seeking refuge in a disenchanted world: ‘Mocking glory, religion, love, everything in the world, is a great consolation to those who know not what to do.’ Reflecting back on this time in her memoirs, Sand echoed this sentiment:
It was a time of horror and irony, consternation and impudence. Some mourned the ruin of their generous illusions; others laughed upon the first steps of an impure triumph. No one believed in anything anymore, some out of discouragement, others out of atheism.
(My translation)
For a while, Octave succumbs to the allure of cynical detachment, hoping to dull his restlessness through the sensual diversions of libertinage. But he emerges more restless and emptier still: ‘I expected something like forgetfulness, if not like joy; I found there what is worst in the world, tedium trying to live.’
It is difficult not to draw parallels between the suffering of Musset’s generation two centuries ago, and our present malaise. Of course, the causes and contexts greatly differ. While few today yearn for the glory of Napoleonic wars, a similar sense of a foreclosed future persists. Whether because of the climate, the lingering psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism, AI or the threat of nuclear war, many believe that the future will be worse than the present. While Musset’s enfants du siècle felt frustrated that a brighter future lay forever beyond their reach, many today don’t even dare to imagine that a better world is possible at all. Is this, then, a new mal du siècle?
As in Musset’s day, young people bear the heaviest burden. Recent studies point to a clear rise in anxiety and depression among teenagers and young adults over the past decades. Let us consider then, the condition of a member of Gen Z (born roughly between 1997 and 2012) through the lens of the mal du siècle, as a generational malaise, rather than as a mere aggregation of individual afflictions. Born after the late-20th-century promises of progress, stability and prosperity had faded, they grew up in a climate of uncertainty surrounded by warnings of ecological collapse, economic precarity and civilisational fragility. Like Musset’s contemporaries, Gen Z feel the weight of their historical in-betweenness and grow weary of inherited systems that fail to evolve fast enough to ensure their future survival. So it is perhaps not surprising that a great number of them withdraw into nostalgic escapism, romanticising a pre-digital past in which relationships seemed more authentic and the future appeared open. Meanwhile, they remain captive to the cold glow of screens, their social media feeds saturated with ironic fatalism. For many people, not only the young, pessimism and cynicism, or in contemporary parlance ‘doomerism’, seem to be the only response to a world gone awry.
Today, an increasing number of people feel frustrated by an existence punctuated by ‘doom scrolling’ and ‘bed rotting’, that is, spending long hours in bed in front of a screen as a never-ending slew of disjointed content leaves them feeling empty and exhausted. Long before the advent of social media, in a passage that could almost pass for a reflection on our digital lives, Chateaubriand wrote of the distress of having access to too much information without having the corresponding lived experience:
The more nations advance in civilisation, the more this unsettled state of the passions predominates; for then the many examples we have before us, and the multitude of books we possess, give us knowledge without experience; we are undeceived before we have enjoyed; there still remain desires, but no illusions. Our imagination is rich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute of charms.
While the youth of Chateaubriand’s day at least had their imaginations nourished by their reading material, today’s young people face real-time footage of war zones, updates on everyone they have ever known, unsettling AI-generated content, and tone-deaf advertisements selling them ever new reasons to feel inadequate, all before breakfast, let alone any real life experience.
‘There is not a single puppy leaving college who has not dreamed himself the most unfortunate of men’
Those who theorised about, and suffered from, the mal du siècle observed that it was transmitted and reinforced through social life and artistic expression. In a review of Étienne de Senancour’s Obermann (1804), a novel centred on another fictional mal du siècle hero, Sand wrote: ‘Our age distinguishes itself through a great multitude of moral maladies, unobserved up to now, henceforth contagious and fatal.’ This inevitably calls to mind the case of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s proto-Romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and the subsequent wave of associated copycat suicides that led to the book being banned in several regions. Today, our anxieties are similarly contagious, viral even, endlessly shared online only to be picked up, magnified, and fed back to us by opaque algorithms. This leaves us with the uneasy sense that our shared anxiety feeds on itself within what we have come to call ‘echo chambers’. The issue was once about how art reflected and shaped the world, but now it is about how our digital world, through invisible mechanisms, shapes and intensifies our distress.
The Romantics were adept at elevating their unhappiness into an aesthetic experience, at times even finding a strange comfort or familiarity in it, a sentiment vividly expressed by Victor Hugo in his novel Toilers of the Sea (1866): ‘Melancholy is a twilight. Suffering melts into it in sombre joy. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.’ For today’s doom-scrollers, who share memes about living through ‘the end times’ in the ‘worst timeline’, there can be a kind of twisted comfort too, since, in the belief that everything is lost, responsibility falls away. While Hugo was describing a profound emotional experience, our over-stimulated dopamine-fuelled brains rarely find the opportunity to explore such depths. But in both cases, fixation on one’s own unhappiness risks slipping into unhealthy self-indulgence. Other figures of Romanticism (whether or not they accepted the label), warned against this. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand regretted the role his novel René (1802) had played in fostering what he saw as a culture of posturing and self-pity: ‘if René did not already exist, I would no longer choose to write it … There is not a single puppy leaving college who has not dreamed himself the most unfortunate of men.’ Musset too, in the Confession, cautions against dwelling too comfortably in one’s own sadness, over-introspecting to the point of paralysis, and ultimately surrendering to cynicism and apathy.
But it would be a mistake to dismiss Romantic sensitivity as mere navel-gazing. In Musset’s time, many used their discomfort with modernity not simply as an excuse to retreat inward, but as a call to action. Hugo, who found a strange pleasure in sadness, also spent much of his life campaigning against the death penalty, as well as against poverty, and for women’s rights. Sand, too, repeatedly chose to confront, rather than retreat from, the suffering of her age. Her novels defied restrictive social norms, and she played an active role in politics, founding newspapers and supporting workers and women. In his other writings, Musset often used humour and satire to criticise the moral bankruptcy and superficiality of the governments of his day. Beyond political activism, the literary sublimation of melancholy was a Romantic response to the colder and more mechanised aspects of modernity. For all their introspection and escapism, the enfants du siècle were able to look outward and detect the signs of a generational malaise, articulating what was wrong or lacking in their world. Their ideas and attitudes were so resonant, contagious even, because they tapped into something prevalent waiting to be acknowledged.
Perhaps we can learn from them. In a world that encourages us to numb ourselves to its horrors through scrolling, consuming, overwork and other diversions, there is a lot of power in embracing our fear, anger, sadness and grief as normal responses to an unjust system rather than as personal failings. This should not absolve us of all responsibility nor trap us in introspection but keep us aware of the fact that anxiety and sadness so prevalent and widespread are the result of how our world is organised. Apathy and self-indulgence are tempting refuges for those who are all too aware that things could and should be better than they are, but if Octave’s story can teach us anything, it is that there is no relief to be found in escape. We should instead aim to be more like George Sand, and act on our emotions.
Emily Herring is a writer based in Paris, France. She is the author of Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024), and her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.
Most of your opinions aren’t yours — and a philosopher has a name for it
Why we shouldn't necessarily outsource our thinking to dead people.
by Jonny Thomson
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that we are all just quotations of our ancestors. The institutions we operate under were made hundreds or thousands of years ago. The values we hold were passed down from ancient philosophers and holy books. The way we think, talk, and behave toward one another is the way our long-dead forebears liked to do it. We inherit ways of seeing the world.
A lot is being written about how AI risks dumbing us down. We outsource thinking to ChatGPT and trust an LLM’s output or understanding more than our own. But there is a more ancient outsourcing going on — one in which we think the thoughts our ancestors thought. Someone with authority tells us it’s right, so we say it’s right. Everyone’s always done it this way, so I’ll carry on doing it this way.
The good news is that we can notice this and take steps to challenge it. The bad news is that most of the time, we don’t.
Closing the world
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Hilary Lawson about HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival. And during our conversation, Lawson argued that we all operate under what he called the “dead closures of previous folk.”
A closure, for Lawson, is a way of seeing the world and using the world. An artist “closes” a pencil for drawing, a writer “closes” it for writing, and an angry child might “close” it as a weapon to stab the wall. Sometimes these closures can be humdrum and practical like this, but they can also be far more widespread.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger, for example, argued that modernity has learned to see nature as a “standing reserve.” We see trees in terms of lumber, water in terms of sewage, and animals in terms of food. This is a “closure.” It’s one way to see and use the world, but, as Heidegger and Lawson both argue, it’s not the only one.
Obviously a lunatic
A dead closure, then, is some line we parrot off because we’ve heard someone else say it before. It’s the quotation of our ancestors. For example, as Lawson put it, when someone just assumes their opponent is “obviously a lunatic,” they’re often not thinking; they’re inheriting a closure.
The problem with a dead closure is that it often means we hand over our thinking to dead people. And so, we often find ourselves fumbling around using tools designed to operate in a very different world from the one we have today. We use ideas framed by other ideas that we no longer use. For example, there is a lot of discussion at the moment about “cultural Christianity.” Some scholars have argued that the values that many modern liberal democracies work under — human rights, the separation of church and state, the inviolable sanctity of life — were born in a highly Christian culture. If you take away the religiosity, you are left only with the ideas. And it’s a subject of much contemporary debate as to what that actually leaves us with.
Slip outside the eye of your mind
So, a dead closure can be a bad thing, but not necessarily. The “appeal to tradition” is an informal fallacy, but so too is the “appeal to novelty.” The answer, for Lawson, is not to go along nor to mindlessly throw out, but to adopt a philosophical position.
The role of a philosopher — and this can be anyone, anywhere, anytime — is to try to step out of your context and appraise it. As Lawson put it, you need to “be able to situate and place your thought so you can see the choices that you’re making by adopting that point of view, and you can see the strengths and weaknesses of it.”
The important point is how your closures determine your actions. So many people shuffle along to university, get married, and settle down to have kids, all to the choreographed step of a dead closure. The wise thing is to occasionally pause and ask, “What ways of seeing the world are determining this?” If you find yourself calling political rivals lunatics, evil, or stupid, then ask: What is motivating that behavior? It might be that we marry, have kids, and still go on to call that politician a lunatic, but the point is that we’ve readjusted our perception once to see whether it was a good one.
None of us can step fully outside our inheritance. But we can, now and again, turn around and look at the walls we’ve been bumping into. It’s up to us to then work out if we want to escape those walls or settle in for just a bit longer.
Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
Seher Hone Ko Hai
