One of my favorite Black Mirror episodes is “White Christmas”, which features the handsome and talented Jon Hamm, seen above in the nirvanic ending to Mad Men. Like every Black Mirror episode, “White Christmas” explores the impact of technology on human relationships, how it changes us and our world in ways we never anticipated. What makes this particular episode interesting to me is how deeply it delves into the themes of social distancing and isolation as forms of punishment–even torture–in modern relationships gone awry.
I won’t spoil the plot(s) or the ending for people who haven’t seen it yet, but the characters in “White Christmas” have these embedded implants that allow them to block people from their lives whenever they see fit, and for however long they want. Once someone is blocked, neither the Blocker nor the Blockee can see or hear from the other person any longer. When I say “block,” I’m not just talking about blocking texts, calls or social media; you’re blocking the actual person, even while they’re in the same room with you. Once you block them, all you see is a fuzzy outline of their body, which looks like white noise from a television. Then, if they try to speak to you, the Blockee’s voice sounds like one of those off-screen parents in a Charlie Brown cartoon: “Wah-woah-wah-woah-woah-woah-wah.” The same is true for them. You’re both cut off from each other in every sensory way.
Here’s what it looks like:
As with our contemporary blocking, a Blockee in “White Christmas” has no control over the block, or how long they’ll be blocked. But unlike contemporary blocking, a Blockee is totally erased from the Blocker’s existence. Even old photos of them have them white noised out of the picture. A Blockee never sees the Blocker’s face again unless they end the block or they die first, in which case the block dies with them.
It’s really fucking dark, but that’s why we love Black Mirror, boys and girls.
I re-watched “White Christmas” for the fifth time a few nights ago after something happened that caused me to block someone for a few days. It turned out to be an unfortunate misunderstanding (I think, we’ll see). She contacted me through TikTok, where I hadn’t blocked her, to clarify our misunderstanding and re-establish our connection. This whole experience got me thinking about blocking, social punishment, and human isolation in this social media age of ours, which “White Christmas” depicts in the most stark and extreme way. Social punishment via blocking or other forms of shunning is often a logical decision, but it can also be an emotional one. Why do this? When is it appropriate, and for how long should we maintain it? And what impact does social punishment have on the Blocker and the Blockee? Is it always positive or necessary, or can it also be damaging and counterproductive? These are all interesting questions to me.
When I was young, when you ended a relationship, you really ended it. Whether it was a romantic relationship, a familial one, or a friendship, when you cut ties, it usually meant that you were done with that person forever because it was highly unlikely that your paths would ever cross again. Yes, you might find them in the Yellow Pages and you could call their number and leave a message on an answering machine, but they didn’t need to answer the phone and unlike a text, answering machine messages were easy to ignore or erase without listening. Just push a button. If that person ever moved or changed their phone number, it was incredibly hard to track them down because the technology to do so simply didn’t exist back then.
The arrival of cell phones and social media in the early 2000s changed all this. Now there are two versions of us, not just one. First, there’s the real person, our physical bodies, which exist in 3D in the real world, living and experiencing life: joy and adventure, pain and loss, jobs, moves, kids, travels, etc. Then there’s the 2D digital version of us that exists on social media, which is accessible through our cell phones, iPads, and computers. Unlike our 3D selves, our 2D selves can be found everywhere all at once, and they’re always on. All anyone needs to do to find us is pick up that handy supercomputer that never leaves their hand, go on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok, find our profile, and send a message. Or they can text, call, or email us. Today, it’s easy to reach anyone, anywhere in the world, and electronically tap them on the shoulder.
It wasn’t always like this. For example, thirty years ago, when I wanted to talk to my Nonna, or anyone in my family overseas, I had to call them from a wired phone, and my parents had to pony up $50-$100 for the privilege. Now, I can pick up my cellphone and do a video call on WhatsApp whenever the hell I want, and it’s totally free. Now I can see my relatives’ faces in real time on my phone instead of waiting 3-5 years and getting on an airplane. It can’t be overstated how incredible this is, how revolutionary it is for human connection. We take it for granted, but old fucks like me who still remember the Old World never stop marveling at what social media and telephony have brought us. They’ve enriched so many lives and ended social isolation for millions of people, especially the elderly.
Alas, there’s also a negative side to all this wonderment, because nothing in life is free. For when anyone is reachable at any time, it means that YOU are reachable at any time, and there’s no off switch. It’s all fine and dandy when you want to be accessible to someone, but when you don’t, eliminating this access requires work. If you really want to cut ties, you not only have to erase that person from your 3D world, but you also have to erase them from your 2D world, which is easier said than done. Most of our social interactions today happen on social media, not in real life, so severing ties requires building a private wall around one’s digital self, which is omnipresent, never sleeps, and is just a few 3:00 a.m. drunken fingertaps away from a person you thought you left behind (or vice-versa). In 2025, it’s our digital existence that’s typically the peace destroyer, not our physical one.
But what do I mean by “peace”, and what does it mean in this context? Why should we engage in this electronic exiling of people in the first place?
By “Peace,” I mean a mental peace. A mind free of excessive anxiety and rumination about someone else, or a situation or experience. By “Peace,” I mean a physical peace. A body free of triggered adrenaline and cortisol whenever you think about a particular person or situation. By “Peace” I mean establishing clarity about where you stand with another person in a relationship, and destroying any ambiguity or pining for that person or the emotional intimacy you used to share with them, which no longer exists.
Peace.
Speaking for myself, I know I’m prone to rumination and have a substantial (and hopefully declining) percentage of anxiety in my Attachment Style Portfolio, so any ambiguity in emotional attachment, trust, and the direction of a relationship generates major anxiety in me, which leads to even more rumination than my already too-high baseline. It also triggers adrenaline and cortisol in my physical body, an effect I’m unconsciously drawn to because it’s what my parents’ turbulent and dysfunctional relationship did to me as a kid. They say we’re unconsciously attracted to our childhood trauma until we bring it to our consciousness and face it head on. This is definitely true for me. Nothing has ever been more compelling to me in a romantic relationship than mixed messages, not knowing where I stand with someone, that mystery, that endless chase where I’m trying to prove my value and worth to someone else.
Fortunately, those days are over for me. Now it’s about preserving my Peace and aligning with the right people, not trigger monsters, or maintaining my Peace by myself, which is seriously underrated.
Sidenote: Perversely, I have found that the “right people” are often unconsciously “boring” to me at first because they feel too safe, too secure, too normal-paced, and thus, too non-triggering to my nervous system. How fucked up is this? In years past I would have passed those people by because they weren’t giving me enough butterfly tingles in my Special Place, but now, assuming enough physical attraction is there, I give them a chance because I’m able to see outside of my kneejerk self, as it were. I now understand that there are reasons I’m attracted to certain people, and not all of them are good for me. Now I’m looking for a different kind of person than before. At least I think am. All this shit is a work in progress.
Digital distancing and blocking are one way for me to take control of my relationships. Not just romantic relationships, I’m talking friendships, family, everything, in order to maintain my Peace. In the past, I used to keep my door open and allow anyone to walk through it, never thinking of how that person affected me, never listening to what my body was trying to tell me. I now realize that I can close that door whenever I need to, and be more intentional before I open it. I can even require people to give me a special password if they want to access my Love Shack, just like the old guy in the orgy scene from Eyes Wide Shut.
Woe unto those who do not know my password, for they shall be unmasked:
Okay, so this explains the Peace about which I speak, but what about the blocks themselves? Since I’m a Virgo attorney who loves categorizing shit, let’s break these blocks down into levels of severity and circumstance, because they’re not the same.
The Soft Block. I use the Soft Block the most because the social circumstances requiring it are the most prevalent in my life. This one technically isn’t a block at all because I don’t actually block the person. We’re both fully reachable and available to each other, but for various reasons, I’ve chosen to gradually disengage from that person in real life and on social media. The Soft Block requires very little effort, is barely perceptible, and it’s often mutual. It arises in many scenarios, but for me it occurs most with second-tier friends and acquaintances and distant family members. At some point, I come to the conclusion that a relationship doesn’t run deep enough and isn’t worth the effort of maintenance. This realization may be triggered by a disagreement over something, possibly political, the ending of a significant relationship (people always take sides), not hearing from the person regularly, or a final in-person get-together where something they said or did wakes me up to the fact that this supposed “friend” is actually a passive-aggressive phony who doesn’t like or care about me very much, doesn’t have my back, and possibly never did.
Since this category of person didn’t actually do anything “wrong” to me, and we were barely in contact in the first place, a Soft Block is the right approach to allow the connection to die on the vine. Like I said, this situation is often mutual. In fact, my awareness of a need for a Soft Block may be due to the fact that the other person is subjecting me to a Soft Block, and I’m just figuring it out. Ironic, yes?
The Soft Block is nice because no one gets upset, and it really takes care of itself.
The Half-Assed Block. The Half-Assed Block is a strange middle ground and usually temporary. Maybe I blocked someone based on a bad mood, a kneejerk response to something triggering, or because I misunderstood something they said or did. At some point I wake up to the fact that I blocked them based on the wrong motivation, or one that no longer applies, so I reverse myself. (I’m not a barbarian, people. I’m capable of reason.) This actually just happened with someone, which is what prompted this post. I blocked them over something they said that I deemed a deal-breaker, but it was an incomplete block, and thus, half-assed. To her credit, my Half-Assed Blockee found a way to reach me and fix our situation. That took effort, and I appreciate effort in any relationship.
I don’t use the Half-Assed Block often because the entire purpose of blocking is permanence and achieving clarity and thus, Peace, not generating ambiguity and confusion by reversing myself every ten minutes. But I’m human, and I make mistakes. There are people I will give multiple chances to if I like them enough, or if I think they value me enough and our connection holds promise. But if it turns out I was right in the first place, then I’ll be sure to close every loophole and proceed to…
The No Contact Block. The No Contact Block is the most severe block of them all–the Mother of All Blocks, if you will. It’s my favorite type of block because it’s so pure and clean, and you can cut the clarity of its necessity with a laser. It’s the closest thing we currently have to the extreme blocking found in “White Christmas.”
The No Contact Block is easiest to explain because it’s self-defining. It means ending all contact with someone cold turkey. No calls. No texts. No apps. It’s a total social media block everywhere. You completely sever that person from your physical and digital lives. You block their phone number and every social media app you’re on. You make yourself electronically unreachable. Most importantly, you stick to it afterwards. You never call or text them. Ever. They’re dead to you, and you’re dead to them.
Yeah, it’s fucking harsh, I know. And it hurts like hell too, for a really long time. In some ways, you end up missing the person more than you did when you were together.
The draconian nature of the No Contact Block is why I reserve it only for the most extreme situations. I don’t like it, and I honestly do everything I can to avoid it. Sometimes it’s a no-brainer, as with a former, decades-long friend who betrayed me a few years ago, to the point that I think the guy is a sociopath. That one was easy. He was already in a Soft Block and got upgraded to Business Class in record time when he fucked me at the drive-thru. Flushing him out of my life was easy peasy lemon squeezey.
Other times it feels like cutting off my right arm. I don’t want to do it, but I know that amputation is the only way to get me to a place where I can process my emotions, view the person and the relationship more objectively, break unhealthy patterns, restore my value, and just get over someone.
None of this would happen if I remained in contact with the person I blocked. Instead, I’d just keep running on an emotional hamster wheel for months or even years. I’d be chasing a ghost and pining for a connection that’s already dead. I’d never heal. I’d never grow and evolve. I’d never gain any perspective or understanding of the limitations of my relationship, my former partner, or myself. Instead I’d be living in a prison of perpetual abandonment, deprivation, and devaluation, a torture dungeon of my own making.
When I put it this way, it makes going no contact sound like a no-brainer, but because it’s such a “negative” and final act–you’re basically holding a funeral for your once-favorite person in the world, day after day until your pain subsides–lots of people refuse to use the No Contact Block and choose instead to keep the triggering person in their life and eat the crumbs off their table. It would be so much easier to just methadone that shit by keeping that person in your life and enjoying their breadcrumb Scooby Snacks when they simply want attention from you to make themselves feel good on any given day. Playing the long game and turning a former partner or friend into a memory instead of keeping them in your life on terms that they, not you, will always dictate, is one of the hardest things a person can do, but it’s the only way to go if you want to heal, grow, and move on. If you happen to be in this situation, I promise you that life on the other side of no contact is far better than the emotional and dead-end jail in which you’re trapping yourself by keeping a relationship zombie in your life. The No Contact Block is your friend, so use it if necessary, no matter how much it sucks at first. Nothing compares to living your life on your own terms with a wide open future full of new people and possibilities.
My Unblockable Loophole. The above said, there’s one thing in my life that’s unblockable for people who know about it, and it’s this blog of mine. I’m not deleting it, and this WordPress host site will be its home unless I find something better, which is unlikely. So once someone knows about this blog, they will continue to have some degree of access to me and my thoughts, which occasionally may include thoughts about them after we’ve ceased all contact with each other. Which begs the question: is it really still a No Contact Block if this blog continues to exist and anyone can access it? That’s a good question. I’d say yes and no, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
First, I would never assume that someone is still reading this blog years after I ended all contact with them. That would be silly and presumptuous. My assumption is they’ve moved on and are focused on other things in their life, not looking backwards and reading what I choose to pop off on twice a month. And even if they are still reading what I have to say, the long passage of time has numbed everything, so it’s fine and who cares?
Second, I’ve done what I can on this front. A person I was involved with was once a subscriber here–one of my first subscribers actually. A few months after our relationship ended, I removed her as a subscriber (one of a whole nine of them–you’d think I’d want to keep as many as possible since I can still count them on two hands). I didn’t do this out of anger or bitterness, believe it or not. I did it because I didn’t want to feel like I was emailing her directly every time I posted something new. If you’re a subscriber, every new post goes right to your in box as soon as I hit “Publish,” even though I sometimes revise these posts again to fix typos, change something I didn’t like, or remove a few obscenities that make me sound like an angry teenager. (Which is why, if you’re a subscriber, you should connect to this site itself after a day or two because there’s a good chance that what you were emailed is different than the updated post, i.e., a near-final draft.)
I decided that having her remain a subscriber when we were no longer in contact wasn’t serving me, or even her, honestly. Who wants an unexpected tap on the shoulder from an ex-boyfriend twice a month, especially if I say something she disagrees with, or that pisses her off? Why keep that going? It was unnecessary and in no one’s interest, so I removed her as a subscriber to prevent this from happening. There’s nothing more that I can do, and so much time has passed now that it’s honestly a moot issue.
Third, short of deleting this blog entirely and starting over, there’s nothing I can do about specific people continuing to access this blog when they’re no longer in my life. Again, I don’t assume this is even happening, but since this blog is unblockable, it’s a loophole I’ll have to live with if I want to continue writing and sharing in an authentic way, which I obviously do. Yes, it sucks a little because this blog is a perpetually one-sided kimono opening on my part. But I don’t spend much time concerning myself about this any more. The people I get close to in my life will see this blog eventually because in many ways, it’s a primer on who I am and how I think. Of course, I’ll want to share this with my future partner(s). And if a relationship ends, I suppose that continued access to this piece of me goes with the territory of trying to live my life in an authentic way, which is also a big part of maintaining my Peace, and something I’ll never block from anyone.
