What are we becoming together?

The Ecology of Affect
What grows in our presence and the worlds we create together

I defended my PhD “Affect Matters” in 2015.  It was delayed by 9 months after a misplaced intervention by the Head of the Dutch Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA). I had raised a complaint about one of their partners and instead of investigating the partner, they got very angry with me, the whistleblower. The university President unfortunately showed neither stamina nor backbone and imposed new criteria and a new team member for my defence committee, which had already approved my PhD. I turned the delay into an the opportunity to write a new chapter on the incident and was awarded a PhD in the December instead of the March.

When you write a PhD you hope that it will change something somewhere for the better.  I wrote mine in order to try to understand humans who work with vulnerable and marginalised people, specifically refugees and asylum seekers. I wrote about affect.

I am starting to understand that although this topic has always been significant,  in the context in which it was wrote, it was before its time.  Nowadays I am developing my work into the concept of an ecology of affect.

If you spend ten minutes on social media, you will begin to notice something curious. Certain emotional atmospheres seem to gather around particular posts. Joy attracts joy. Outrage attracts outrage. Anxiety attracts anxiety. Vulnerability attracts vulnerability.

Yesterday a woman I ‘know’ on Facebook wrote that she is overwhelmed by life, paralysed by trauma and exhausted by the demands of everyday living. From a successful life as a lawyer, she is now working independently as a ‘shaman’. She wrote that she barely cleans her living space and hasn’t had a shower in days because she is overloaded with sensory stimuli and can therefore barely crawl out of bed. Hundreds of people responded, "I feel exactly the same," or “I know exactly what you’re talking about” or “this happens to me often”.

This is not simply empathy. It is something more.

It is affective contagion. Unlike emotion, which we often think of as something we possess, affect exists between us. It moves. It gathers. It spreads. It shapes the environments we inhabit together.

The cultural theorists Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth describe affect as an embodied, contagious force of perpetual becoming. Bruno Latour goes even further, suggesting that to have a body is to learn to be affected—to be moved by other people, places and things. Life itself depends upon this capacity.

Affect is ordinary.

And affect is very much contagious.

This means that we are constantly participating in emotional ecologies. Families have them. Organisations have them. Churches have them. Refugee systems have them. Social media has them.

The question is not whether we are affected. We always are.

The question is: what are we becoming together? Which affective ecologies are we cultivating together?

During my PhD research into the Dutch asylum and refugee system, I came to realise that institutions are not emotionally neutral. Bureaucracies do not simply administer policies; they develop affective climates. Fear, indifference, compassion, suspicion, hope and even cruelty become part of the atmosphere that people breathe.

The same is true online.

Today, especially on social media, vulnerability often attracts more engagement. Brené Brown's work helped normalise vulnerability as courage, which has had positive effects. People feel less ashamed to talk about depression, trauma, ADHD or grief.

But social media changes the equation. Algorithms reward posts that provoke strong affective and emotional identification. The platform amplifies shared feeling more than thoughtful analysis.

As we have become more psychologically literate, terms like trauma,  attachment, coercion and narcissism have entered everyday language. This has helped many people understand experiences that were previously dismissed. At the same time, psychological language can become the primary, or only way people understand themselves. Identity becomes organised around diagnosis or woundedness rather than around vocation, character or purpose. This is a reductionist way of looking at a life.

Sociologically, many people feel profoundly disconnected—from extended family, religious communities and neighbourhoods. If you don't have stable communities where your ordinary, everyday struggles are held, social media becomes the place where you seek recognition. Comments on a post contribute to a sense of belonging.

Historically, many cultures admired virtues such as courage, perseverance, wisdom, loyalty and self-restraint. Increasingly, western culture places a high moral value on having suffered. Suffering deserves compassion—it always has. But suffering can become a source of moral authority. If someone has experienced trauma, criticism can feel like a denial of their pain, even when you're questioning an interpretation rather than the reality of their suffering.

If many people repeatedly gather around narratives of outrage, despair or helplessness, those affects begin to reinforce one another. As I said, this is not to deny the reality of suffering. Nor is it to suggest that vulnerability should be hidden. Naming pain and shame can be healing.

But an ecology is shaped not simply by what it contains, but by what it cultivates. An affective ecology is not defined simply by the emotions and affective intensities it contains, but by the kinds of relationships and ways of being it makes possible.

Does an affective environment increase our capacity for connection, courage and responsibility?

Or does it leave us feeling more anxious, more fearful and more convinced that we are powerless? Longing for pity?

An ecology of affect invites us to ask different questions. Not simply, How do I feel? but What am I contributing to the affective atmosphere around me? What grows in my presence? What spreads through my words? What kind of world becomes more possible because I have been part of it?

Am I moving myself and others towards greater truth and honesty, building resilience and capacity, or am I unintentionally reinforcing avoidance, fragility and fear?

Truth is not the opposite of compassion. Real compassion requires the courage to remain present to reality as it is, rather than only affirming what feels comfortable. Sometimes the most loving response is not simply to validate a feeling, but to create the conditions in which a person can encounter a fuller truth — with dignity, patience and hope.

The question goes beyond the desire to be compassionate or kind. The question is whether the affective ecologies we inhabit and create open a path towards truth and freedom, or whether they leave us and others trapped within a one-dimensional and reductionist affective landscape.