We live in an age where movement feels like meaning, so that the faster we go, the more real we believe our lives to be, yet underneath the constant proof of progress something essential slips away. Heidegger describes this as the forgetfulness of Being: a historical condition in which existence itself is reduced to activity, and the question of Being disappears beneath the demand to do.
The Moment Everything Stopped
For me, Las Vegas has always felt like velocity itself: the lights, the speed, the spectacle, and the heat.
At one time in my life every day in Las Vegas was consumed by numbers and meetings, sales and leads; I was managing a door-to-door sales office, which meant I was training new reps, running the morning sales meetings, closing my own sales, arranging the solar installs, and handling every customer call when something fell apart.
My mind was constantly turning over the sales numbers and the leaderboard, and every new sales rep was not a person, but a way of meeting my own self-imposed deadlines.
Even driving itself had become an extension of work; it was the time to return phone calls and handle leads and listen to self-improvement audiobooks about becoming more by doing more.
I remember speeding down the freeway with the phone pressed between my shoulder and ear, arguing about an installation date with the owner of the sales office with my heart pounding from stress, while thinking that I feel so alive with all this relentless energy, and then I looked up.
The car ahead was motionless.
I slammed on the brakes, with my tires screeching on the hot August asphalt, everything snapping me into the here and now.
I was so consumed by doing that I forgot the most fundamental fact of life, that I was already here, in the ground of Being.
For one suspended moment the entire world returned, and with the noise of the call growing dim I could hear and fell the hum of the air conditioner, the afternoon light sharp against the windshield, the waves of heat visibly rising off the asphalt, and although my hands themselves were pulsating and trembling, something much deeper was finally utterly still.
In that profound sense of stillness I felt this overwhelming and overflowing gratitude that I was alive in the present moment in all it’s terror and beauty, and I saw that I had forgotten this most fundamental fact of life.
I was so consumed by the doing, and the massive machinery of performance that is driven by this idea that my worth was in direct proportion to my production, that I had completely forgotten that I was here in the ground of Being.
The Age of Acceleration
Martin Heidegger called this condition the forgetfulness of being.
It is not simply a distraction, but more like a sort of metaphysical or ontological amnesia, and modern life with all its speed and technology seems to no longer experience things as they are, but only as what they are, and by extension, how they can be used.
It seems we live in the register of function, where every moment is consumed by its next purpose, where even rest or meditation is optimized, so we might be able to produce more, and each day feels like it has began by already being behind; we live in a culture that worships constant motion and the constant proof that we are moving forward.
The forgetfulness of Being isn’t distraction; it’s the quiet catastrophe of confusing existence with performance.
Heidegger would say that I was living entirely in the ontic, where Being disappears beneath the noise of endless doing and measurable actions, as in the logic of productivity and metrics or the ceaseless “what” of success: what can I do or what can I get or what comes next?
In the ontic, the self becomes the one who manages and plans, achieves and competes, ever living inside of roles and results.
The self then becomes identified by the activity like I sell, I train, and I lead, and thus existence is defined by the performance.
However, the ontic isn’t wrong, much like his concept of the “they-self,” it is a facet of how we live our lives, and it is necessary because we must act and build and decide, we all can’t be asking after the questions of Being or nothing would ever get done, but when it becomes the whole horizon of our lives we lose the ability to be, which is the ground which makes any doing possible.
The Ontological Opening
When the car stopped and the world rushed back in, the ontological opened and I was thrown out of the ontic.
Heidegger uses this word ontological for the dimension of Being itself, that silent background that allows any being to appear and reveal itself to us, including ourselves.
When we consider Being itself in the ontological, we are driven not by questions of doing, but by the deeper and more fundamental questions like what does it mean that there is something rather than nothing, or what does it mean that it “is” at all?
In the car that day, these questions weren’t abstract, but visceral and lived.
The smell of the tires, the pulse of my heart, the trembling of my hands, and the hum of the air from the vents, each detail announced its own existence and yet nothing in the world at this time was serving a purpose, everything simply was, and the scene gave way to the deep wonder inherent in life itself.
The ontic asks what we can do next; the ontological asks what it means that anything is at all.
For an instant, the normal everyday hierarchy inverted and the doing no longer produced being, but Being itself grounded the doing, because the same tasks waited for me, all the calls I had to make and the sales meetings and the deadlines, only they had lost their dominance and tyranny of my life.
They no longer made up the substance of my existence, they were merely the surface of it, and beneath was this vast and wordless experience of Being, here and right now.
Modernity’s Forgetfulness
Heidegger believed that Western history itself had fallen into this ontic trance, feeling that from Plato until now we had forgotten what the question of Being itself was.
Later in his career as he turned his focus towards technology, he increasingly saw Being as something that was treated as stable and easy to define, thus reducing this fundamental expression of existence to a sort of inventory item, which allows us to view nature as something to be used for profit and humans as merely instruments to maximize this profit.
Doing no longer produced Being; Being itself grounded the doing.
That freeway moment revealed to me what this looks like from the inside, with the body in overdrive and the mind consumed by tasks, so that forgetfulness of being isn’t something that is merely passive, but the grinding momentum that leaves no possibility of remembrance.
Remembrance of being doesn’t require a retreat from the world, only attention; the instant I looked up and saw the car, attention shattered the trance I had been in, and although this is a dramatic moment of attention, it still brought what attention always brings, grounding, and with it, the ontological gratitude that Being is always already given before any sort of doing begins.
Hopefully you can see by now that Heidegger’s distinction is not merely some form of academic diagram, but a way of describing a shift in consciousness, and thus, a shift of comportment towards the world.
To live only in the ontic is to live in the what and the mechanism of how, it is to mistake the map for the territory in the Borgesian sense, and to see life as being defined by what I do, the job I have, and the roles I play, ultimately replacing meaning with a result or an outcome.
The Still Point Beneath Motion
Since that day on the freeway, but especially recently, I’ve been very mindful of how quickly I forget and return to the ontic.
It really comes forth when I am overly concerned with my own ambitions and my productivity, this almost foundational impulse inside to prove myself and my worth through activity and motion, as if I could just get enough achievements and results in life to finally fill this hole inside me.
That hole itself is created through this predominately ontic comportment, because when I drop into the ways of being in the ontological, and come into contact with the ground of Being itself, all there is is the wholeness of the moment itself.
This differing relation to life allows the true re-entry into the world because I still have the tasks I need to do in order to live, selling and building and creating, but they rest on a different foundation, and they flow out of this awareness of Being into the doing of the world, so that I become merely an actor in the world rather than the director of it.
Certainly every era has its own tempo and ours seems to be acceleration, but to remember the ontological is to resist this tempo by changing our mode of attention, rather than by slowing down the speed of the world around us.
We see in Heidegger’s philosophy the distinction and distance between doing and being, where existence is defined as performance rather than essence, and to engage in the ontological means to wake up to our own lives.
That moment on the freeway was terrifying and simple in its revelation, that the world of Being has always been here, I was the one who forgot.
To live only in the ontic is to mistake the map for the territory, to measure life by output instead of presence.
Have you ever had a moment when the machinery of doing broke open, and for an instant, you remembered that you were simply here? Let me know in the comments below.
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Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist who walked away from the academy to write at the edge; where poetry meets philosophy and transformation starts with ruin. At samuelgilpin.com, he explores the deep architecture of change, not with hacks or hype, but with language that sharpens and thought that lingers. He holds a PhD in English literature, but what he offers isn’t academic; it’s personal, raw, and precise. When he’s not writing, he’s reading Eliot for the hundredth time, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights. Download his free guide, Dangerous by Design, and start reading like your mind depends on it. Or sign up for his free course, The 5-Day Poetic Reset.