Do We Know How to Be Seen?
This morning I read a piece by Alex McCann called “The Death of the Corporate Job.” His argument: a lot of us have stopped believing in the performance, but we keep performing anyway. Out of habit. Fear. Survival. What’s underneath is numbness.
I read it and immediately thought: we’re doing the exact same thing with intimacy.
Read McCann’s “The Death of the Corporate Job” here.
We’ve built an entire infrastructure of frictionless attention. Apps designed so you never have to sit in the awkwardness of not having anything to do, the discomfort of not knowing what to say, or the rawness of being genuinely *seen* by another person.
Social media didn’t invent this, but it weaponized it. We started using it to keep up with friends
, and ended up feeling close to people we’ve never met. We watch influencers daily but haven’t called our best friend in months. The intimacy feels real. It just doesn’t require anything from us.
Porn took that further. A person who exists only for your pleasure, no reciprocity required. AI girlfriend apps took it to the logical end: connection without any risk at all.
Each step removes a little more of the thing that makes intimacy actually work — the part where it could go wrong. Where you could disappoint someone. Where they could see you and decide to stay anyway.
But what’s happening underneath: We’re losing the ability to tolerate being looked at.
The Gaze Thing
There’s a specific vulnerability in being seen while seeing. It’s mutual. Uncontrolled. She notices you noticing her. And suddenly you can’t hide in the fantasy anymore, you have to feel the actual tension of that moment.
Porn flattens this. She’s performing for a camera, not for you. You’re alone. Safe. She can’t see you; you can’t disappoint her or bore her or trigger her judgment. The fantasy does all the labor.
But here’s the cost: you’re not practicing actual relational presence. You’re practicing the opposite.
What If It’s A Skill
What if real, reciprocal intimacy, is something that atrophies without practice?
I built an app called GAWK that is built on a weird premise: you’re not the voyeur. You’re the one being seen. She’s noticing. Assessing whether you can hold her gaze. Whether you’re numb or awake. Whether you’re capable of being present with another for longer than your scroll threshold allows.
It starts short. Because that’s where most people are now, unable to sit with unmediated eye contact for more than a few seconds. But something shifts as you practice. You start to notice the difference between numb-scroll time and actual connection time.
You unlock longer not because the app rewards you, but because you realize you want to. Because holding someone’s gaze and being held by theirs is a completely different experience than porn delivers.
And in between, in those moments where you’re assessing what you felt, there’s a card. A small interruption. Maybe it’s about desire without performance. Maybe it’s about what numbness actually costs you. Maybe it’s permission to notice that you’ve forgotten how to tolerate being genuinely seen.
The corporate job is dying because we all see through the performance. Real intimacy is dying for the opposite reason: we’re losing our tolerance for the uncontrolled version, the mutual vulnerability, the part where it could actually go somewhere. We don't know how to want something we can't control.
GAWK isn’t a peep show. It’s practice.