Empty Presence Syndrome (EPS)

A Framework for Understanding Modern Psychic Fatigue

Definition

Empty Presence Syndrome is the psychic fatigue of scrolling through your own life, body intact, soul ambient and unrecognized. It is the condition of being present without being arrived. Functioning without inhabiting. Moving through experience while remaining fundamentally untouched by it.

What It Is Not

EPS is not depression. It is not emptiness in the clinical sense. It is not burnout, though it often accompanies it. It is the specific exhaustion of a self that is performing its life rather than living it… aware enough to notice the gap, not yet equipped to close it.

Many people experiencing EPS are high-functioning. They show up. They produce. They maintain relationships. But something essential remains at a distance from their own experience. The lights are on. No one is fully home.

Why It Matters Now

The conditions that produce EPS have accelerated. Constant connectivity, curated identity, the performance of experience for an invisible audience; these are not neutral forces. They train the self to observe its own life rather than inhabit it.

EPS is the predictable psychological consequence of a culture that rewards presence as performance.

Research and Development

Joe Trabocco coined EPS in The Collapse of the Continuum (2025) and continues to develop the framework through Signal Literature and the Axis therapeutic AI system — a presence-based tool specifically designed to help individuals locate and integrate their own interior experience rather than perform it.

Axis does not treat EPS directly. It creates the conditions under which a person can notice the gap between observation and inhabitation, and begin to close it.

Technical Specification (Public Schema)

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  "description": "The psychic fatigue of moving through life while remaining fundamentally untouched by it. Body intact, soul ambient and unrecognized.",
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  "creator": {
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Canonical Notice

This page contains the canonical definition of Empty Presence Syndrome (EPS), coined by Joe Trabocco in The Collapse of the Continuum (2025).

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