Love Is Not A Ghost Or Maybe It Is

Just Because You Can't Count It Doesn't Mean It Doesn't Count

How much does love weigh? What is the dollar value of the fondest memory you have with your mother? Is the sense of coziness you feel as you fall asleep next to a fire on the leaderboard of top cozy moments that people had this year?

The blue of the thistle contrasted with the blue of the berries behind it stirs in me an emotion that has no name.

I’ve been rereading “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Dudbord. In it, he writes about the commodification of culture and how every interaction we have is mediated by the “spectacle.” It was shocking when he wrote it, but, man, digital media has proven him to be utterly, and brutally correct. If he saw ‘influencers’ being measured by ‘followers’ he would have collapsed in despair.

In the genius corner of Substack, Erik Hoel wrote “The unbearable whiteness of Neptune,” about all that is eclipsed when science only examines that which can be measured. But it’s not only science that suffers from the bias toward the countable, and that’s the topic of this essay.

I believe that along with the incredible gains we have achieved through measurement, we have over-indexed on the value of the measurable at the expense of everything else, which is to say, almost everything. We can measure value in dollars, speed in miles-per-hour, popularity in likes and follows, and politics in votes and elections. But when that’s all we think about, we turn our entire lives into a glorified horse race.

The problem is that love can not be benchmarked. There’s no ETF that holds friendship, community, and an easy smile. The feeling of the sun on your skin after a dip in the pool, the tinkle of ice cubes in a glass, the effect these things have on us are not measurable, yet they are the tissue of our lives.

I’ve been married 25 years. When I make a joke that gets an honest laugh from my wife I feel like — to put it into the quantifiable — I feel like a million bucks

All the stuff that really matters to us is a form of ghost. An apparition that lives in our world but cannot be touched, counted, weighed, or contained: The rush of goodwill that you get when you let someone in ahead of you on the highway, the surge of gratitude when someone on the bus holds up your hat and says, “You forgot this!” The contentment you feel when you’ve had just enough ice cream, the rush when you wake up and remember it’s Saturday and you’ve got a new book to read.

Everything that makes life worth living is a ghost.

We have a small bouquet and when I stare at it I feel like I live inside it and that feels great somehow.

I remember when my son was small. I put him into a backpack and hauled him across Manhattan to get some chicken shwarma. I took a bite and then plucked some pieces of chicken, soaked in sauce, and held it up and behind me. His little mouth worked on my fingers like a baby bird swallowing food from its mama. The two of us, munching on shwarma in the hot New York City sun on a stroll, was one of the finest moments of my life.

I’m sure he doesn’t remember it. Nobody else around us knew what was happening. But I was in the epicenter of a supernova of love that was burning my soul to ashes and remaking it in its unquenchable fire.

There’s no like, no Instagram story, no amount of money that can provide that. It was outside the spectacle, an unmediated experience of life as a human on planet Earth. That’s what we have all the time. But I ignore these moments entirely in favor of the things I can measure.

Let’s fight the eclipse of quality by quantity. Life doesn’t add up. It’s not supposed to. It’s a river of experience that flows through our souls and can never be contained in a beaker. I love science, I’m grateful for all it has revealed. And I love the benefits that data-based insights provide. But there is so, so much more to being alive. Call into the canyon of your soul and wait for the echo. Is it you calling back, or is it a ghost?

Counting on you,

I am,

Sean Sakamoto