Do I exist?
by Steve Xoh

I was recently in a remote part of Cornwall without a phone signal. I had wifi at the place I was staying but when I went out to walk and explore I was totally disconnected. I’m generally OK with this. I like having the choice of using my phone removed as it feels like an invitation to re-tune my attention to my surroundings. But the thing I found hard on this trip was not being able to share my “live” experience with anyone. I’m not one for sharing everything all of the time, but remote Cornwall was indulging many of my interests (the sea, nature, adventure, creatures) and I felt a strange pang of sadness that I was unable to send photos or stories of what I was encountering to those I knew would be similarly enchanted by them. I pondered this for a while and concluded that this sense of unease wasn’t simply because I’ve developed a habit of sharing stuff with others but was maybe something much deeper.

The poet Mary Oliver has a poem entitled “Sometimes” in which she has a short section that goes, “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” I’ve heard those lines many times. In fact, they inspired a What the February?! challenge back in 2021. But they took on a different meaning for me when I found myself unable to digitally share my experience on the Cornish coast. I had some lazy, generic theories that maybe I simply wanted to show people that I am OK and am thinking of them. And, even though I am pretty sure that I don’t share stuff on social media to curate some sort of life image, maybe a tiny part of me wanted to do that. But the interesting question I ended up pondering as I walked along an utterly deserted coastal path for six to seven hours a day was, “If I do not share my experience with anyone, has it actually happened? If I am not witnessed - do I actually exist?”

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott suggested that a baby’s developing sense of self is intimately connected with what is reflected back in the mother’s face. He summarised this idea as, “When I look I am seen, so I exist”, meaning that when the baby looks at the mother it is having an experience of seeing itself. So maybe, when I spotted a cormorant on the cliffs and couldn’t send it immediately to somebody who I know would appreciate it, it broke the familiar loop of their reaction reflecting my experience back to me in a way that sort of confirmed that I existed.

In his book Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre explores his observation that we are simultaneously subjects who experience the world and objects that exist within other people’s worlds. So, for example, if I am walking down an empty coastal path, immersed in my surroundings, I am experiencing myself as the subject, the invisible centre from which my world is being experienced. But then, if another person passes me by and looks at me, I also become aware that I now exist as an object inside their world. This is what Sartre named le regard, or the look.

He suggests a scenario to explain this further: Imagine you are peering through a keyhole, completely absorbed in what you are observing on the other side of the door. In that moment, you are the subject and centre of your own reality. Then, all of a sudden, you hear a noise behind you and the prospect of being observed enters your awareness. Your mode of being shifts from being absorbed in peering through the keyhole to suddenly becoming aware that “I am a person who is peering through a keyhole.” The important point here is that you don’t actually need to be observed for this shift in awareness to happen, simply that the prospect of being observed causes you to suddenly experience yourself differently as an object in a wider reality. In Sartre’s example of the keyhole, this realisation may bring with it senses of shame, embarrassment or panic.

My Cornwall experience was somewhat the opposite of this. I was immersed in nature, my senses bringing me into a deep state of flow and connection with my surroundings in which I witnessed the cormorant. In that moment I was very much the subject of my experience: I was seeing the bird, hearing the sea and experiencing the landscape around me. Then the prospect of sharing a photo of the experience came to mind, immediately followed by realising that I couldn’t. Normally I would take a photo, send it to the person who loves cormorants and, in doing so, place myself and my experience into their world. But without a phone signal, that little transformation from subject to object couldn’t happen in a simple way. Unlike Sartre’s person at the keyhole, I wasn’t suddenly confronted with the possibility of being witnessed, but with the possibility of not being witnessed at all, at least not by another human.

Solipsism is a philosophical position which suggests that the only thing one can be certain of is one’s own mind. At its most extreme, solipsists believe that their own mind is the only thing that exists and that everything else is simply a construction of their imagination. But whilst I know that I can only ever experience my own subjective reality, I’d never consider myself a solipsist as it seems to me that there is some sort of world “out there” even if it is distorted by my unique perception of it. But in that moment of paying attention, being astonished but then not having anyone to tell about it, I felt a very deep and existential aloneness.

This makes me wonder what it would be like to live in total isolation where my daily experiences were never witnessed by another human. I’ve wracked my brain to try and think of a time that I have come close to experiencing this and realise that I haven’t. Even when I lived alone on Ocracoke Island in the depths of winter I was witnessed by the handful of locals who had remained on the island and I had Instagram and WhatsApp to keep me connected to others. I imagine that if I had to live indefinitely with no human contact, I would go through a painful process of readjusting and learning to re-experience this existential aloneness as simply being a different configuration of the same flow of experience I have been having since I was born. I imagine it would re-calibrate my experience of myself and the natural surroundings I found myself in. And, even though I really value my alone time, I realise I do need some form of human connection to provide some sort of external reassurance that I am OK. But I digress somewhat from my lack of phone signal on the Cornish coast!

Social media is heavily criticised for being a place where people curate an artificial self-image for other people to witness and react to (be that with praise, envy or a lack of self-worth). And whilst I agree with this criticism and recognise its negative effects on society, I also wonder if the habit of sharing our experience actually serves a deeper purpose in facilitating us becoming both subject and object in a way that reassures us, very briefly, that we do exist. Maybe that is a much deeper factor in our addiction to our phones - they become the mother whose face reflects back who we are and our importance in the world. I like this theory, although I also find it very troubling that these little existential comfort blankets and the apps contained within them are ultimately the profit making tools of wealthy billionaires.

I share, therefore I am. Communico, ergo sum.