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In the age of social media, orbiting names the modern phenomenon of hovering around someone without ever making direct contact, suspended between digital voyeurism and the inability to bear the vulnerability of a genuine encounter.
Drawing from the evolving grammar of digital interfaces, we encounter the neologism orbiting. It describes the behavior of someone who cuts off all direct contact - no messages, no invitations, no meetings - yet continues to “circle around” you. They watch your stories, like your posts, track your digital movements, and occasionally publicly comment on what they refuse to address in private. The orbiter relinquishes dialogue but not performance. They turn you into a celestial body observed through a telescope, whose radiance they savor from afar without enduring the heat of an encounter.
Orbiting is an oblique presence that maintains visibility while sidestepping the vulnerability of speech. It is an ellipse that exposes a complex interplay of gaze, envy, and narcissism, organizing defenses against the anxiety of commitment and, more subtly, against the intrusion of the Other as uncontrollable alterity.
In everyday language, to say “they are orbiting me” means they no longer respond yet continue to monitor everything I post. They like, appear, disappear, and offer peripheral signs of life. The orbiter watches your stories, comments with neutral detachment, and may even use multiple accounts to observe you without being detected.
S. Freud identified within the sexual drive a series of partial drives, with the scopophilic drive - looking and being looked at - at its core. In orbiting, pleasure resides in spying on the other, absorbing their images, and positioning oneself as a privileged voyeur of a laid-bare daily life. The orbiter delights in looking without reciprocity, sustaining a contained excitement. Every story becomes a visual offering consumed without giving anything in return. A secondary narcissistic gain emerges: “I confirm myself as the center because I control when and how I see you, and I remain unscathed, for the gaze spares me the risk of confronting reality.” In this stance, the orbiter reenacts an older pattern, observing the environment to anticipate pleasure or harm, convinced they can preempt disappointment by foreseeing it.
Orbiting exerts control over the temporality of desire, preventing speech from prompting action. The orbiter can be said to refuse symbolic castration, for as long as they remain uncommitted, they need not confront the lack within themselves. They avoid misunderstandings, disappointment, and miscommunication. Orbiting becomes the quintessential technique of anti-encounter: the other is consumed as image but never received as subject. The other becomes a digital plush toy, stroked with likes or fed a steady stream of stories. In this way, the orbiter avoids both the anxiety of separation and the demands of emotional maturity.
D. Winnicott theorized the false self, a defensive structure that protects the true self but can also suffocate it. The orbiter often wears the smooth mask of the false self, carefully managing public appearances, engaging in light social exchanges, and offering agreeable responses, all while concealing a deep fear of exposure, disappointment, or rejection. The false self orbits with flawless precision, while the true self remains coagulated and voiceless.
S. Ferenczi exposed the “confusion of tongues” between the tender language of the child and the passionate language of the adult. Applied to orbiting, this confusion lies in the fact that platform language, including views, reactions, and glimpses, presents itself as presence while failing to bear the weight of genuine address. For the person subjected to orbiting, every sign may be read as a promise, only to reveal itself as mere background noise. This generates a cycle of frustrations: hope rekindled but unfulfilled, speech deferred, and the wound of being seen without being chosen.
For Lacan, the gaze is one form of object a, those “small objects” that spark desire while remaining unassimilable. The orbiter, as the subject of the gaze, positions themselves precisely where they capture the object a in the other - their imaged presence and staged performance - without ever offering their own lack to the symbolic. They remain within the imaginary, in the realm of circulating images, where the other is perceived as surface, silhouette, or fantasy.
In orbiting, time is stretched. It is never concluded, never committed. The elliptical form prevents temporality from unfolding into beginning, middle, and end. Yet desire feeds on the aftereffect. It longs to be narratable. A story of anxious views, impulsive likes, and empty comments produces a perpetual present. The subject, trapped in the instant, attains neither mourning, if loss is required, nor encounter, if it is to occur.
By watching the other live, the orbiter assumes the role of director: who is in frame, who remains offscreen, and who is being addressed on that terrace? Orbiting awakens primordial jealousies, including parental, fraternal, or sororal. The other betrays them simply by living, loving, and enjoying without them. The more they watch, the more they hallucinate intrigue, and the more they do, the less they speak.
Our era has monetized the gaze, tracking views, impressions, and engagement rates. Orbiting turns relationships into metrics, measuring the persistence of presence through view counters. The other becomes a specter in the algorithm of our lives, haunting the top of the viewing list. Their presence is felt through their proximity in the viewers’ list. No words are exchanged, only a score.
Orbiting exposes the modern difficulty of moving from image to language, from signal to speech, from the imaginary stage to the symbolic pact. It reveals the struggle to consent to symbolic castration, to relinquish countless possibilities for the reality of a singular encounter. It evokes the hypnotic allure of a world reduced to observation, where accumulating views offers the illusion of easing absence and lack.
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