Dissociation
An essay on coldness, alienation, and the silencing of real life
It does not begin with hatred.
It begins with silence.
With the blue light of screens settling over faces at night faces that are still breathing, yet barely present. Bodies in standby mode. Hearts on pause. Feelings are postponed, scrolled away, deferred. Tenderness is stored in a cache while the real shrinks smaller than a thumbprint on glass.
The boundary between life and simulation has become porous. People stay lying down, lulled by the constant hum of series, streams, and images. Withdrawal becomes habit. Numbness becomes protection. Not out of indifference, but out of exhaustion. Those who have tried too often to feel in a world that shows everything and touches nothing eventually learn to disappear.
This is how coldness forms.
Not through aggression, but through distance.
Through the slow unlearning of attention, of empathy, of closeness.
This coldness finds its most intimate stage in pornography.
What is sold as sexual freedom is often alienation in high definition: permanently available, anonymous, algorithmically sorted. Desire is standardized. Bodies become functions. Intimacy turns into simulation. The more explicit the image, the more invisible the human being.
Pornography promises closeness without risk, arousal without relationship, control without responsibility. Every click delivers a calculated hit of dopamine and at the same time a quiet exchange: encounter traded for manageability. Depth traded for access.
Men learn early that desire means power.
That wanting means asserting.
That feeling is an obstacle.
Tenderness does not appear. Uncertainty is treated as weakness. Closeness is not shared it is taken. The body is used to maintain distance.
Women learn something different and yet closely related:
Visibility equals availability. To be desired means to abandon oneself. One’s no grows quieter until it is barely audible. The camera calls it erotic, but what it often shows is the clean separation of body and soul.
But men do not remain unscathed either.
A system that rewards hardness strips them of their softness. It sells control as strength and leaves them emotionally unarmed. Many fear closeness because they were never taught how to stay inside it. Many fear women because they expect judgment there. And many fear other men because, in them, they recognize a forbidden longing of their own.
The patriarchal does not only wound it hollows out.
It replaces relationship with power.
And power, where relationship should exist, suffocates everything that lives.
Perhaps the real pornography of our time is not sex, but numbness. The industrial production of masks. The digital anesthesia of the heart. The loss of trembling that quiet moment in which real closeness begins.
This is less about morality than about loss.
About people who have forgotten how to be touched.
About men who were never taught to be gentle.
About women who had to learn how to separate from themselves.
About a culture that simulates encounter and manufactures loneliness.
And yet, something remains.
Behind all the coldness, behind all the clicks and poses, there is a crack. A residue of hunger. A body that remembers. A sense that pain and love once came from the same heart and that real life begins where control ends.
Closeness is not a goal one reaches.
It is a decision one makes again and again
against simulation
and for the risk of truly being there.
Samu
This hit me hard. You captured the quiet ways distance and numbness creep in, how we learn to hide parts of ourselves before anyone even asks. I love how you name the cracks that remain the hunger, the memory of tenderness that still call us back to real connection. Powerful and necessary reminder.✨
This is a powerful, sobering reflection, and what stays with me most is how gently you trace the problem back to exhaustion rather than malice. The way you frame numbness as learned protection — not cruelty — gives the piece both moral clarity and compassion. Your distinction between simulation and encounter feels especially sharp, and the line about control suffocating what relationship should hold is devastatingly true.
I also appreciate that you don’t end in accusation, but in choice: closeness as something fragile, practiced, and risky. There’s grief here, but also responsibility — an invitation to remember how to feel, how to stay present, how to be human again. Thank you for writing something that refuses anesthesia and insists on attention.