Negative space is what we get when we inverse something, but can’t get a vacuum. Anti-form, structural absence, the lack of it still imposes structure.
For most things, there isn’t a real state of non-existence. Vacuums exist for light, sound and air but not a human concept like culture. There is no cultural vacuum.
There is no non-existence of culture, if you are fighting it, you are replacing it. There’s no human cloud with which it has dead-space, only the negative space of something else.
Culture, identity, even insecurity: their “absences” are not empty, but a structured void, shaped by the very thing they resist or lack.
Psychologists remark that it’s not what a champion athlete has that makes them more obsessed than others, it is typically that they Lack something that most other people have. An off switch.1
It is common metaphor within humans to say we have a ‘hole’ inside us which cannot be filled in the soul. This is negative space. An insecure person doesn’t simply lack confidence—they are contoured by its absence. They don’t act with a non-existence of it, but from a structured void of what should be there. Driving them to overcompensate in different adaptive strategies. Someone acting to “fill the hole” may build a skill or do something incredibly grand in trying to do so. Overcompensation
GPT assist: This is akin to Sartre’s concept of nothingness—that the absence of a thing is itself a kind of presence
Reference
Self Perhaps “Jungian Shadow” psychoanalysis?
Footnotes
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Attribution for this idea seems a bit murky, though I know for sure I heard it from Hormozi. He likely got it from a sports psychologist. ↩