what really is nothing?

even a black hole, is something right?

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“Oh, it’s nothing? So it’s null? Void? Not worth mentioning at all? Should I feel bad for asking? Or is it the kind of ‘nothing’ that hides in plain sight — the silence between sentences, the space between train stops? I saw a clip of Penn Badgley share a hot take. His? That nothing doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing. And at first, I liked it. My favourite TV show, Seinfeld, is famously about nothing. We say, ‘Nothing happened.’ Like when you came home from school and your parents asked, ‘What did you learn today?’ and you say, ‘Nothing.’ But the truth is, a lot can happen in a day — not always in the “everything changed” kind of way, more in the shift-of-the-wind, new-face-on-the-train, blink-and-you-miss-it kind of way.

Lately I’ve been riding these little shifts like the train stops. Sometimes you don’t know who’s getting on or off, or where you’re going. They don’t feel monumental in the moment, but they’re like the surgeon’s smallest stitch — quiet, precise, holding together pieces of you that might otherwise drift apart. We think we’re unchanged, but by the end of the line, we’re not quite the same person who started the ride.

And then there are the flashes of novelty — the things we scroll past, pick up, set down, repeat. They arrive quickly, each promising to be different, each asking to be noticed. A toy, a phrase, a style, a taste. They feel weightless, but they accumulate. Little souvenirs of belonging, tokens of the moment.

We call them nothing, just distractions, just aesthetics. We use that word a lot, “aesthetic”, but it shapes us anyway, tugging at our choices, stitching us into patterns we didn’t plan. By the time the novelty fades, what’s left is the quiet proof that nothing was never really nothing at all.

And it’s not only objects. Sometimes the novelty is us — the way we pose for a photo, the angle we choose, the music we pretend to listen to. I wonder how much of what we do is really for ourselves, and how much is for the eyes we imagine watching. The gaze lingers, even when no one’s there. It teaches us to perform without a stage, to edit ourselves in real time.

I think a reason things feel so different now is that people have become almost unbearably aware of everything — hyper-conscious of power, performance, and consequence before they’ve even lived through the experience itself. For some, that awareness is paralyzing, making the world feel too layered, too fraught, too exhausting to risk putting yourself out there. For others, the ones who remain unaware, the same blindness keeps making things worse for everyone else. So the road just stretches longer and longer, no clear stop in sight.

Andrea Dworkin once wrote in Intercourse about how certain ideas become so deeply embedded that we stop noticing them altogether — the way language, imagery, even silence itself can work as scaffolding for power. That’s what unsettles me: how seamless the performance becomes, how invisible the stitching. We don’t call it oppression; we call it preference. We don’t call it performance; we call it personality.

Maybe that’s the deepest kind of nothing: the internalised scripts we recite without knowing we’ve memorised them. If nothing truly doesn’t exist, then every choice, every pose, every gesture carries weight. The question is whether it’s really ours — or whether we’ve just learned to wear it so well we can no longer tell the difference.

Because at the end of it, it’s not the novelty or the performance that stays with us. It’s the relationships, the intimacy, the companionship forged with those we can be open and vulnerable with. The ones who help us validate our emotions and share our experiences. Maybe that’s where “nothing” dissolves entirely — in the quiet proof that connection itself is everything. Cheers.