To preserve depth and freshness in our lives, we need privacy

A guest post from Esha Rana

Navigating the passages between books and being

Dear friends,

Esha Rana is a writer and editor originally from India and now living in Toronto. After pursuing undergraduate studies in computer science and engineering, Esha realized that writing was her true love. She has worked as a copywriter, content writer, and journalist. Additionally, she received a nomination for a Canadian Online Publishing Award. When she is not writing she loves to go for walks, visit the library, chat with her sister, and discover music she can organize into highly curated playlists.

Esha feels that Substack is a communal place that is intellectually exciting, motivates her to work on her craft, and provides the opportunity to work with other writers in an editorial capacity. Her big reading goal is to find 97 books that she loves ardently enough to keep returning to throughout her life.

Sunlight in the Living Room, Carl Vilhelm Holsøe

The flower is always in the almond.

— L’Antiquiaire, Henri Bosco

i.

In The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, Lowry Pressly argues for a more life-affirming understanding of privacy: that it is not about controlling the flow of information through check boxes, cookies, and toggle buttons on our screen; rather, privacy is a condition that is necessary for life to feel alive and meaningful. There is a dimension of our lives that cannot be articulated or fully known, giving us the sense that there is more to us and to life than what can be grasped. But if we are pressed up against information all the time—taking in text, images, data, &c., and trying to make ourselves legible through the same means—this dimension of oblivion is compromised, and our capacity for depth and surprise begins to dim. Privacy is how we preserve this capacity and the oblivion that produces it.

How to cultivate privacy? The most common ways involve putting up physical and epistemic barriers. Our homes give us a refuge where we can be unaccountable to the world and at our most natural and spontaneous. If people inquire about any aspect of our lives, we can say ‘that’s private’ or ‘I’m not comfortable sharing that.’ And at other times, we don’t volunteer any information, so people don’t know whether there is anything to know in the first place.

But these ways of defining and creating privacy seem insufficient in the context of a digital-heavy life. I might be private physically and in how others relate to me, but, within myself, how much privacy am I feeling and experiencing?

ii.

When I was young, I lived in a residential complex in a small city in India. A lot of other families lived in the complex, too, and so there were all these other kids—some younger, a few older, most of them the same age as me—to mingle and play with. Since the complex was fairly big with lots of nooks and space to move about, we would all gather on Sunday afternoons and play hide-and-seek.

Oh, the thrill and terror of hiding! I remember crouching in the space under one of the stairs, my nerves loaded with the anticipation of remaining hidden for as long as possible. My attention would be trained outwards—where was the seeker? Did she catch someone? Did the friend I shoo away reveal my location?! Meanwhile, my ankles would begin to hurt, I would bump my head trying to get into a comfortable position, and ugh, of course, my hand had to land in a dusty spot on the ground. But, whatever. Where was the seeker?

This frame of mind of the hider, according to Pressly, is very similar to how we operate in relation to our devices as well:

The dark side of the connected life bears a striking resemblance to the phenomenology of hiding. The hider’s sense that she could be discovered at any moment is repeated in the experience of “waiting to be interrupted” and “always on call.” Her compulsion to peek through a crack in the wall or a hole in the log mirrors the compulsion I feel to check my phone or email to see if anyone is trying to find me. [...] insofar as the tethered self is “at the mercy” of the media to which it is oriented, its condition closely approximates that of hiding than of privacy.

In the hide-and-seek games I played, I was at the mercy of only one seeker. Once I was discovered by them, the game was over for me. I lost my status as the hider, and with it, the tether that connected me to them. But online, there are n number of seekers who can find me, and because I know this, the game feels thrillingly, and terrifyingly, never-ending.

But there is something else, too. This sense of being tethered persists, not only because I am waiting to be found, but also because I am waiting and wanting to find something myself—an interesting essay by a new writer, an engrossing Reddit discussion, the names of skincare products I could try one day if my present ones stop working; and oh, new books and poems and pithy, poignant lines I could use in my writing one day!

And this is another reason why Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle does not apply to me: I can tell you to what degree I am hiding and seeking at any moment—and I am, irrefutably, doing both at the same time.

Pressly again:

Whatever else it involves, the experience of privacy must lack the psychological orientation of being tethered to those “outside” of one’s condition who would seek to destroy or pierce it. [...] to the extent one has this orientation, one is in a condition more like hiding than privacy, independent of a seeker’s existence. Since we must understand the tether connecting hider and seeker as a general tendency or inclination to have this particular sort of attentional orientation to the outside world, we can conclude that one aspect of privacy is the exclusion of this tendency or frame as a general matter.

Achieving a truer, more complete privacy, then, involves more than physical and epistemic barriers: it also requires a state of mind, a way of being, that is unhooked and not too fixated on the world beyond a certain natural interior.

iii.

In 2024, my long-term relationship ended and I was laid off, both in the same month. The breakup and its timing were mutually decided, but the ending of my employment was not. Alas. If it had been, I would have pitched a more suitable date later in the year.

And there I was—no place I had to be present at, no special relationship to tend to, no work I was obligated to do. My time and attention were entirely my own. For a couple of months, however, they were completely absorbed in digital hide-and-seek, and so ultimately, I decided to deactivate Instagram and exile my phone to the kitchen.

The spaciousness was delicious: there was time to do almost everything that brought meaning to my days. Because my attention wasn’t exhausted from updates about people I wasn’t close to, I had the energy—the excitement, really!—to check in with my friends and hear what was going on with them; the intentional and regular one-on-one connection felt so much more satisfying. After lunch and dinner, I read books for dessert. And every morning, I sat myself in the chair to write for at least an hour. There was also yoga, job hunting, afternoon walks to the library or grocery store, and French classes.

By all counts, my world had gotten smaller, but it also acquired a cocoony loveliness.

There was also, however, the grief.

I tried, I really tried, putting into words what it felt like to mourn and lose six years of intimacy and adoration. But no matter my efforts, the grief could not be structured into sentences; the essence of it kept slipping away. The closest I could get to satisfactory expression was singular words whose meanings I noted down and kept returning to: heartache, anguish, sorrow, yearning, wounded. It felt perversely good to repeat them. But whatever grief was beyond these words, it remained in flux and unknown even to me.

This was my first contact with oblivion, “a form of unknown that,” Pressly writes, “unlike what is secret or hidden, is essentially resistant to articulation and discovery: its limits do not concern who knows what, but instead what can be known.” Where oblivion begins, knowledge ends—as does the ability to create fixed, concrete information.

If I hadn’t been as psychologically private, would I have hit upon this oblivion through my grief? I suspect not. With my attention fragmented by and tethered to information intake and creation, I wouldn’t have been able to process the grief properly, let alone have space for the unknowable.

Thankfully, grief isn’t the only door through which oblivion can be sensed. Art is one, nature is another, love is one more. I glimpsed it every time I listened to You Would Have to Lose Your Mind or read Wuthering Heights. It was there whenever I looked at The Monk and the Sea, even though, ironically, I do it on a screen. And yes, it was there every time I told my ex I loved him, yet still felt there was so much I could not access and put into words.

iv.

Oblivion, this dimension of experience that cannot be turned into information, is what gives life a sense of depth, or rather—as Gaston Bachelard put it in The Poetics of Space—an ‘immediate immensity’:

One feels that there is something else to be expressed besides what is offered for objective expression. What should be expressed is hidden grandeur, depth. And so far from indulging in prolixity of expression, or losing oneself in the detail of light and shade, one feels that one is in the presence of an “essential” impression seeking expression.

When it first washes upon me, this immediate immensity feels like life itself is alight in my heart like a lamp. A sudden richness colors the day, and life feels fresh again, thrumming with possibilities.

But eventually, always, the immensity diffuses. To borrow from Keats, the “irritable reaching after facts and reason” returns; I am lured in by the temporal shine of information, and the world intrudes, remains.

This is where I was last week, caught up as I was with work. But then I woke up one morning to find it was snowing. It was the first snow of the year! My favourite! I put on my jacket and boots and nearly ran to greet the whiteness that was still collecting.

Outside, the volume of the world had been turned down. The hiss of the tires as cars went by was muted and lovely. There was something soft mixing and building with the sharp of the cold air. Only the snow? I breathed in deeply, almost hungrily, and looked up at the sky. It remained a still, open grey.

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Special thanks to Henrik Karlsson, whose feedback helped bring this essay to its final, satisfactory form.

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Here’s to the books that take us beyond the shelf and into deeper waters,

Matthew Long is a writer and retired sailor living in rural western Tennessee.

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