Kenopsia: The Quiet Eeriness of Empty Places
The unsettling air of a once vibrant space, now empty and devoid of activity. Have you felt it before? How the echoes of empty halls reverberate the stillness of isolation which is usually hidden by the steady noise of human behavior.
There’s something odd about these moments, something about the atmosphere which clings to us and reminds us of what will be and what has been before. Our brain can’t resist comparing the scenes, like a spot the difference book where the difference is a lack of human life. Sometimes the impression is wistful and nostalgic, an appreciation for what had happened there and hope for what might happen again. At other times it’s a creeping eeriness, a reminder that all things big and small go through changes, and that we may find ourselves uncomfortably alone in ways we never expected.
If you’ve had this feeling, you’re not alone. But you might not have known that there’s a word for it: kenopsia. The word comes to us from the dictionary of obscure sorrows, a project dedicated to doing exactly what its name implies; giving us language to communicate those feelings which most of us have experienced at one time or another, but which we haven’t had specific words to express.
To be more specific, this is the definition of kenopsia straight from the dictionary of obscure sorrows: n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
There’s something in us that doesn’t like the awareness that a place that we remember as being filled with activity is now empty, the people now gone. It leaves us pondering implications of why it may be. Thinking in an evolutionary sense, this feeling of unease might have had its benefits. Maybe we find this place abandoned because of something horrible that happened, something that killed the inhabitants or caused them to flee - something like a fire or a plague, or an attack from a rival group. Maybe it’s empty because the group has moved to other places without us, raising social feelings of isolation, abandonment, and the inability to be accepted in our society.
But I think there’s a stronger implication that we may or may not consciously be aware of, especially when it comes to architecture and man-made structures. The empty skeleton of the structures we build remind us that these foundations are here to serve us, and that we are the actual life found within them, but that they may one day stand empty, having outlived us and their purpose.
In this sense, one of my favorite examples of kenopsia in modern media is the exploration of nearly abandoned retail structures. The Dead Malls series by the YouTube channel “This is Dan Bell” is a great introduction to this type of video. The explorations of technically open but almost entirely abandoned structures exemplifies this feeling of emptiness, the ghosts of human activity linger in the atmosphere. All the signs of life such as lighting and background music are still present, yet without seeing people around you can almost begin to imagine you’ve stepped into a world where everything was opened up for business before people just mysteriously vanished.
Of course, this haunting empty feeling of abandonment is used to great effect to elicit a response in fiction media as well. For example, think of the scene in 28 Days Later where the main character first steps out onto the streets of London to find them fully devoid of life. Or Will Smith populating his city with mannequins in I Am Legend, being the last surviving human in the area. It’s also a popular theme for exploration in video games including the Last of Us. Or Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture, where the primary gameplay experience is exploring a town where all of the people have recently disappeared and following the echoes of the people who used to live there to uncover the mystery.
If we step outside of fiction for a minute, we are in the perfect position to take a look at a very real example of kenopsia. When Covid-19 hit the world and began spreading from nation to nation, many governments moved to mandated lockdowns and cessation of almost all shopping activity. Much of the world watched with held breath as shopping malls, town squares, restaurants, grocery stores - in fact nearly all of the marks of human life - sat empty and settled with an eerie quiet. Of course, there was no guessing at the implication then - people suffered and died from an illness we didn’t know enough about, while exhausted and overworked healthcare professionals did their best to handle an unprecedented surge in patients. So in many places we abandoned the social centers of humanity, let them stand quietly disused, to try to stem the spread and buy people time.
I want these discussions to be both informative and educational. I struggled to decide whether I should include the last bit about Covid and its impact on the world, as I would never want to use the suffering of many millions of people as a novelty to attract views and reactions. But as long as we are discussing a word which gives context to a range of poignant emotions that may not have words for proper expression, it only feels natural to point out an example which has played out on a global scale.
Have you experienced this feeling of kenopsia? An eerie atmosphere settling onto your shoulders when you encountered a place of social activity, empty and quiet before you?
