Something That Matters to Me

If there were no one left to disappoint, impress, or answer to, would I still want to keep living?

The question came from feeling how much of my life belongs to other people’s expectations. I have a mask I wear to meet the world: someone who can work, respond, take responsibility. It is part of me. But behind it is someone less composed, with doubts, intrusive thoughts, sexual fantasies, and a tendency to follow a question far beyond anything useful.

I want more time with that person.

Even my spare attention feels spoken for. I open social media and find an endless supply of things to watch, increasingly easy to generate with AI. Some entertain me. Too often, I leave feeling that someone has benefited from my attention while I have very little to take away. Time has passed, and I still haven’t heard myself think.

So I imagined removing the whole outside world. No expectations, no audience, no feed. Also no company. Would my own mind be enough to make me want another moment?

The observer

Imagine a woman who has lost all contact with the world. No light, no sound, no new sensations. She retains her memories and her ability to think and feel. For this experiment, I let her consciousness continue; I am interested in what she might do with it.

She remembers someone laughing across a table. Tries to recall what they said. Gets it wrong, starts again, becomes distracted by another memory.

Already, something is happening.

She has not decided what justifies her existence. Her attention has simply caught on something. I recognise that: a question can occupy me long before I know why it matters.

Eventually, remembering becomes inventing. She puts a door in a room she remembers, where there never was a door. It opens onto a staircase suspended over a sea of stars. Pale light catches the edges of the steps; below them, constellations drift slowly apart. She wonders where the staircase ends. As she imagines taking the first step, one of the stars goes dark. Now she wants to know why.

The scene is hers, but she hasn’t worked out everything that follows from it. She can surprise herself by pursuing it. She can dislike what she finds and begin again.

Now she has something unfinished.

This is where the experiment starts to interest me. She wants to return to that room. She cares what happens next. Making it gives her a reason to continue, without first requiring an answer to the question of why she exists.

I can imagine self-love beginning there too: affection for the mind that can still do this, and a wish to look after it. Her experience matters to her, even with nobody else there to witness it.

Then I imagine her growing tired of the room.

What disappears with the world

There is no promise that she will always find another story worth telling herself. The memory of laughter could become painful. A thought could repeat until she longs for something to interrupt it.

I know enough of my own mind to hesitate here. I have worries I would gladly put down. Privacy does not make every thought welcome. Sometimes another person is what helps me stop going round in circles.

And the observer has never really left everyone behind. That laugh belonged to someone. The room, the door, even the stars she rearranges came from a world she once shared. She is making things with what it gave her.

When I removed other people’s expectations, I also removed the possibility that someone might say something I could never have thought of. Nobody can knock on her imagined door unless she makes them. Nobody can surprise her with their own life.

I began with the relief of having nothing demanded of me. Following it far enough, I found things I would miss.

That changes what I want to ask of my actual life. How much room can I give my inner world while staying open to people who have worlds of their own? Can I care about something without waiting for it to become useful, impressive, or worth sharing?

There is an awkwardness in writing this as a blog post. I am making public a wish to keep some of my attention for myself. But I can share this question and still leave other things unwritten. I want thoughts I can pursue without turning them into content, things I can learn without defending their usefulness, and time whose value I don’t have to prove afterwards.

I don’t know whether I would want the observer’s existence. I doubt I could make her solitude comfortable simply by giving her enough imagination. But I can imagine moments in which she wants to stay with what she is doing. That seems worth taking seriously.

She may not know what she exists for and still have something she cares about doing.