From nothingness into eternity
A not-so-organized Thought on the Basic Lines on the Logic of Cessation and the Possibility of Being without Consequences

Jul 21, 2025
reading time: 9 min

 

      The lament “Nothing is as it used to be” is not nostalgic; it is ontologically naive. Nothing is as it once was; not because the world has changed, but because the human has ceased to hold it (within).

The realization of the own, constant, rotting and the nothingness lurking right behind that has frightened humans so much that they  turned away from experience and replaced being with an obsessive concept of constant becoming. Progress is the victim of the present. As Heidegger warned in Being and Time, modernity’s fixation on futurity reduces existence to a “thrown project,” where the present is perpetually mortgaged to an unrealized tomorrow. The human, once a dweller in the world, has become a fugitive from it.

This self-imposed exile is not accidental but cultivated. The human has highly educated themself and consequently (but fatally) became dependent on that very cultural knowledge that shaped them; like a plant that cannot live without light, they have fallen symbiotically down the rabbit hole of their own cognitive evolution. 

The human has mated with their concepts - with progress, with structure, with meaning. Like the bird whose beak has adapted to the narrow opening of a single flower that feeds it, the human has molded themself to the systems that nourish them - systems that they have bred; themselves engineered.

This dependency is not natural; it is a cultural fetishization, a mutual enslavement where the human desires the very chains that bind them. :
Nowhere is this more evident than in our relationship to time / as a social construct, a "cultural artifact burned into the flesh," as Byung-Chul Han observes in The Scent of Time. "We do not chase time because it flees; we chase it because we have weaponized it against ourselves.
Time is a concept.
Humans desire the direction of the concept. The concept lives from this dependence. Not as a law of nature, but as an artifact that has burned itself into the body of process. The human runs after it; not because it is fleeing, but because we have sent it off ourselves. And now we are desperately trying to catch up with it. 
The acceleration of life is not an external force but an internal compulsion. The human, exhausted by the myth of productivity, mistakes velocity for vitality. Pain is repressed, despair metabolized into efficiency, thinking supplanted by planning, feeling by function. Even pause has been commodified, repackaged as “self-care” or “mindfulness,” and like that it pit stops in the marathon of perpetual labor.
But time cannot be hoarded, traded, or conquered. It is not a currency but a void we insist on filling, lest we confront the abyss beneath the frenzy.

It is not time that is speeding up. It is the human who is exerting to keep up.
The human is not a concept and will therefore never be able to catch up, let alone keep pace. 

What was once pain has been repressed. Despair has been transformed into efficiency; thinking has been replaced by planning and feeling by function. Existence is all about self-exploitation. 

Even pausing has been made marketable - as regeneration for the next thing. 
Have you forgotten that time cannot be owned, saved or extended? 

It is not a commodity. Not an exchange value. Not a promise. It expires - without a quid pro quo.

 

All being begins not with action but with its absence. Consider the unwashed laundry: a minor rebellion you might assume.

This refusal is never autonomous; it exists in dialectical tension with the ought. Adorno notes, negation is always negation of something: a parasitic relation to the dominant order. The Non-doing (not washing the laundry) does not arise from itself; it is always preceded by something; it is a neglected motion of an originally intended doing (washing the laundry). It is a horizontal, never isolated sequence that can be compared to the persistence of time: linear, influence-bound.
The unwashed laundry is intelligible only because washing is normative, a "symbolic capital" (Bourdieu) that signals discipline, belonging, and social credit of permanent renewal. To abstain is not merely to skip a chore but to decouple from a ritual of participation. Whoever wears freshly washed clothes wears them like a seal and as a silent promise of social connectivity.

The laundry was not washed. 

This may have practical reasons: lack of time, lack of necessity, lack of focus. WHATEVER. Motivation remains a secondary detail of the philosophy of justification: the non-washing is only in the shadow. It is a code of accumulation: assumptions of self-discipline, of order, of participation in permanent renewal.

The stain on the shirt is not just dirt; it is a lacuna, a puncture in the fabric of performative normality. In a society that equates activity with virtue, inaction becomes suspect. The bourgeois ethic of cleanliness (once a bulwark against chaos) has metastasized into a mandate for constant self-renewal. To not wash is to reject the liturgy of productivity, to expose the "political sedimented in the banal" (Arendt). It is a withdrawal from what Marcuse called the "performance principle": the capitalist imperative to render every moment profitable.

The exact number of hairs that mark the threshold to baldness as well as the precise count of grains of sand from which one speaks of a desert, and so it is with repetitive laundry washing itself, which in the last century attained a new cult status without ever naming what is the frequency. And somehow people agreed to announce when they had not done the laundry and ran bold. This is no anecdote, it is as said, performative. 

It places the damaged symbol (the stain) into a narrative framework, renders it explainable, tameable. It preserves the continuity of structure and the subject within it.

Yet what does it mean that the unperformed act (the non-washing) demands more explanation than the act itself? In a cultural climate that codes activity as a sign of dignity, belonging, and normality, the absence of action is no neutral occurrence. Not washing is no banality. It is an act of decoupling, a silent revocation of the compulsion to circulate. It falls under suspicion. The stain on the shirt is not merely dirt / it is a statement. And the explanation that “the laundry just got dirty” functions not only as an excuse but as performative proof: “I am still part of the world of the active.” I am not one of those who stop. 

Freshness (as a cultural ideal) differs fundamentally from simple stain-freedom. The stain is exclusion; freshness is distinction. Between the two lies the invisible line that once separated bourgeois cleanliness from aristocratic elegance: the former fought against dirt, the latter was never near it.

Non-washing does not create a gap in the calendar; it demands an account within a system that understands doing as the only permissible form of existence.  

For the stain does not signify dirt alone, but absence; of participation refused, of investment withdrawn. And thereby: of the reproduction of order foregone. That this order is maintained through proofs of activity (through rhythm, consumption, cleanliness) reveals how deeply the political is sedimented in the banal.

I doubt that you have ever washed the hole in your pants, simply said: if you are in your right mind, you can only wash what is there in the first place.
The hole, that most subversive of negations. 

 

The hole in the fabric is not an accident.
It became an absence that no longer remembers what was there. The unwashed laundry is not negligence, of course not, it's something whose purpose has evaporated. And yet, we mend. We scrub. We don't choose to, we have forgotten how not to.

That made us actors.
But we have become theatric people who no longer know whom we perform for.

The stage is empty. The audience is a myth. The script is illegible, yet we mouth the lines with mechanical precision, as if the act of speaking alone could conjure meaning from the void. We patch holes whose origins we cannot name.
We work jobs that build nothing, consume goods that satisfy nothing, and perform identities that mean nothing: all while the machinery of the spectacle hums in approval.
This is not theater. This is hypernormalization: the slow erosion of reality until only the performance remains, convincing precisely because no one believes in it anymore.

But what happens when the actor forgets their lines? When the mender no longer remembers the hole, and the washer no longer recalls the stain?

The direction is invisible and the rules are concealed. A true actor knows they are acting, but we have lost even that awareness. Our labor is not more than a reflex, a twitch in the corpse of capital.
We are not players in a drama; we are ghosts haunting the ruins of a script that dissolved long ago.

 

Have you ever considered doing nothing?

Let the laundry rot. Leave the hole gaping and give it a name. To stand still until the performance collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

Withdrawal does not argue. It does not demand. It simply unmakes by no longer participating in the fiction. The emperor’s new clothes are invisible only to those who still believe in emperors. If we forget the throne, the robe, the very concept of royalty we are naked.
This is not sacrifice, you may eat what you have, drink what is there, exist as you are. Buy your bread the day before, or weeks before. It does not matter. The rule is simple: on this day, nothing new enters the world through you. No labor, no data. What we call attention is perhaps just a mirror that refuses to look back and it has been monetized in those systems that did not even register the whisper. Therefore the actors, so it looks like entertainment. The attention economy is not a market, but an empire. It has its own colonies, its border layers, its uprisings. It is not those who have something to say who are heard, but those who are heard who get something to say. 
       NO PRODUCTION
       NO TRANSACTION
       NO CONSUMPTION
       NO COMMUNICATION
One day is all it takes and the algorithms must be hungry, some days and it will starve.
The spectacle will gape into the void where your participation once was.

Attention is not a natural resource. Attention is finite. Untouchable. Full. Attention is a magnetic field, traversed by old names, filled, by voices that have learned to be loud and bodies that have been trained to be the center of attention. The stage has become round and the actors are there to cover it in entertainment. Every reaction is a form of consent. What circulates today is no longer content, not even surface / it is mobility. Acceleration. Closeness without connection. Visibility without touch. Attention is not a beam of light, but rather a collective nod without a face ever becoming visible.

The attention economy is not a market, but an empire. It has its own colonies, its border layers, its uprisings. It is not those who have something to say who are heard, but those who are heard who get something to say. 

Attention is not a horizon. There is no right to invisibility. There is only mistrust of those who evade it. Silence is not an absence of noise, but the moment when there is no longer a receiver. 

Closeness without connection. Visibility without touch. Attention is not a beam of light, but rather a collective nod without a face ever becoming visible.
Nothing can kill attention. Nothing can kill the acceleration. 

Neither protest nor negotiation, but have a thought on something far more subversive: a day of perfect absence.
Not a day of rest, not a day of reflection: but maybe spend it with love.
Make it a day, where nothing is asked of us, and we, in turn, ask nothing of the world.

Let it be a day without keystrokes committed, no labor sold, no ideas packaged for consumption. Let the machines stand idle, not as an act of defiance, but as a natural consequence of our forgetting. Let emails pile up like unwashed laundry, let meetings dissolve into empty chairs, let the great engine of commerce stutter and gasp when it finds no hands to turn its wheels.

Let it be a day without clicks, no swipes, no transactions. The system thrives on rhythm, on predictability, be erratic in abstinence, untraceable in refusal. Not a boycott, which still acknowledges the game, but a vanishing. Tomorrow is a new day.

Let it be a day without posts, no messages (send them the day before or after), go dark. Let the networks scan for you and find static. The greatest threat to the attention economy is erasure, even for one day.

And crucially: let it be a day without internet. Not as a cleanse, not as self-care, but as a surgical removal of the self from the digital panopticon. Disappear from the map.
Wear what's in your closet, exist as you are. Love. The point is not deprivation, but the refusal to generate. 
Do not announce your participation. Do not document your absence. The power is making a statement, in becoming unreadable.

The system can crush dissent, but it cannot parse perfect silence.
When the actor forgets their lines, the play collapses under its own weight.

For one day, let us all be that forgetful actor. Let the stage lights blaze onto empty space. Let the algorithms clutch at ghosts. And when the day ends, we may return—or not. The important thing is this: they will remember, if only for a moment, what it feels like when the audience walks out. 

NO INTERNET.

One day of nothing.

 

Nothingness is a noun (so, something that actually is), even though it signifies non-being. Language modulates it into a concept that can name emptiness without becoming specific; itself becomes its own form, made graspable through grammar, although appearing entirely abstinent of substance.
A hole is not an entity but an absence, a "disturbance in the real" (Lacan). It exists only in relation to what surrounds it, a void that undermines the integrity of the whole. Like the unwashed laundry, the hole is a site of refusal, a crack in the edifice of functionality. It whispers: Here, nothing need be filled.

Nothing is not a strike, not a protest, but a collective vanishing.
"I dream of one day, where we slip through the cracks of the machine."

 

(07/21/25 - 08:43am)