While walking through Paris one summer afternoon, I noticed an abundance of stickers plastered all over the city with the phrase J’Existe. It was amusing to me, and interesting, when one considers the times in which we live. This was before the pandemic era, naturally. What it made me think of is how one can feel invisible and anonymous while living in a large city such as Paris — or New York or any other large city for that matter. The same sense of ‘invisibility’ exists, as if lost in the massive swarm of humanity. Big cities can often be a lonely place, despite being surrounded my millions of people, the kind of place where you can notice someone one day and never see them again for the rest of your life, despite sharing the same geographical space.
This feeling of invisibility can also work to our advantage. It’s nice to be anonymous sometimes, to be able to simply blend into the fabric of life and be left alone, unencumbered. Other times it isn’t so nice, those moments when one feels utterly alone and lost, not even a blip on anyone’s radar. I think we feel most alone when we are surrounded by those who simply don’t, or won’t, understand us, or take the time to get to know who we are, or those times when you feel you merely exist as an extra in someone else’s story.
J’Existe is an ironic and artistic way of proclaiming your presence in a world where we’re all increasingly anonymous, faceless, statistical, and screaming into the void on social media where no one is actually paying attention. It’s a declaration that you count for something, that you’re important, that you’re real in the face of such utter indifference it’s not surprising one feels alienated and alone.
The irony was the sticker itself is uncredited, anonymous, and that wasn’t lost on me. It only reenforced the point. However someone did notice it, had thoughts about it, and tried to understand it. This anonymous New York man on the streets of Paris, invisible to nearly everyone around him. One person did hear this cry into the void. Sometimes that’s all one needs.