“To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretence, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”
~ Timothy J Keller
The world has grown quiet in its own electric hum. Each notification, each ping, each message is a ripple across a pond we never touch, a vibration that reaches us without ever meeting us.
To reach for a friend now is to reach for a shadow mediated through glass. A profile picture is not a face but a signifier, a pulse of identity shaped by likes and comments and the invisible algorithms that trace us everywhere we go. Perhaps it has always been this way: that the distance between two hearts can be measured in symbols rather than breaths. But never has it been so acute, so transactional, so inseparable from the machinery that shapes the very air we breathe.
We live in parasocial universe, and almost every relationship now is parasocial. Every interaction is both real and unreal, a performance framed by invisible cameras and unseen auditors. Most of us wouldn’t even give it a second thought. ‘That’s just life’ they say. ‘We’re just teenagers’ we say. Even intimacy becomes a ledger entry. We hold phones as if they were mirrors, glimpsing reflections not only of ourselves but of everyone else performing in the same curated gallery. The laugh we remember, the story we tell, the gesture of reaching out – they are no longer pure; they are mediated, monetised, digital.
And yet the longing persists. The ache of human presence – the warmth in a glance, the weight of a hand – is insistent. It presses against the screen, the keyboard, the cold flat light of a monitor. We remember what connection feels like when it is unmediated, when the sound of breath and the touch of skin are not captured for others to validate. Even a conversation over coffee becomes a meditation on distance: the real mingling with the virtual, the ephemeral brushing against the quantified.
Perhaps the world was always parasocial, if only we now see it with such sharp clarity. Memory, nostalgia, desire – they are all traces of the real pressed against the digital. Every “like” is a ghost of intimacy. Every text message is both a reaching out and a sealing off. We carry fragments of each other, scattered across servers, compressed into pixels, and yet those fragments pulse with life, with the unquantifiable spark that refuses to be commodified.
And still, the universe breathes through us. A shared silence, a glance exchanged across a crowded room, the unrecorded laugh of a friend – they are like stars firing in a human sky, flashes of genuine connection in a cosmos otherwise logged and measured. Parasociality is the medium, but it cannot contain the human element entirely; there are moments that leak beyond the ledger, moments that refuse to be quantified, that retain their mystery, their irreducible weight.
To exist now is to inhabit two worlds simultaneously: the ledgered, the quantified, the endlessly broadcasted, and the intimate, the fleeting, the impossibly private. Our hands reach out into both, uncertain of where the other begins. And in that tension – between the mediated and the immediate, the digital and the tangible – we find our humanity.
Perhaps the point is not to lament the loss of unmediated connection but to cultivate it where it still exists. To place the phone down and let memory and presence intermingle. To meet another human being not as a profile, not as a curated reflection, but as flesh and blood, as warmth and love. To let every interaction hold gravity beyond the ledger.
To live, then, is to navigate this dual existence: to be both the observer and the observed, both signal and soul. To reach for one another through the noise and the glow, and to recognise the fragments of life that remain purely ours. I guess almost every relationship is parasocial now – but every relationship can also be profoundly human, fleeting, and infinite at once, a private universe that no algorithm can catalogue.
And in those moments, in the quiet breaths between pings, in the warmth of a hand held unrecorded, we glimpse what connection truly means. Not the profile. Not their Instagram story. But the infinite intimacy of being known, and knowing another being, for themselves alone.
