In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s voice sounds as if it comes from a sealed glass box—distant, muffled, yet undeniably real. She knows her fate has already been written: she cannot escape, cannot resist, cannot choose. But she continues to narrate, not to change anything, but to leave herself a proof of “I am still alive” in a world that has erased her completely.
This is the most primal form of calling — not for a response, but simply for existence.
Under the totalitarian rule of Gilead, women are completely objectified. Environmental pollution has caused birth rates to plummet, and society classifies women according to function, with “Handmaids” designated solely to bear children for the ruling class. Offred has even been stripped of her real name, becoming “Of-Fred”—an appendage of Fred. Within this system, she has no voice, no bodily autonomy, not even the right to be remembered. She has been systematically dehumanized.
And yet, it is precisely within this absolute silence that she begins to narrate.
She describes to us the shifting light in her room, recalls the warmth of her daughter’s small hand, and longs for the ordinary conversations she once shared with her husband Luke. These fragments of memory seem trivial, but they are her final weapons of resistance—because memory means she was once a whole person, and feeling means she exists. When the regime attempts to reduce her to a reproductive tool, she uses her rich and intricate inner world to prove her complexity and fullness.
More importantly, Offred constantly addresses a “you” in her narration. She imagines someone is listening, someone who can understand. This imagined listener becomes her salvation — saving her dignity as a human being. Within Gilead’s logic of being “useful/useless,” she writes: “I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.” She refuses to be merely “valuable”; she wants to be understood, seen, and recognized as a person.
The Handmaid’s Tale reveals a profound human truth: human beings cannot withstand absolute silence.
Anthropologist Victor Turner once wrote that no society allows the existence of “the completely silent.” From shamans in ancient tribes to psychotherapists in modern cities, from the deities in old temples to today’s social media platforms, we can always find this structure: someone listens, someone responds, someone transforms our voices into meaning and a sense of belonging.
Human beings need this structure so intensely that even in an empty room, we call out to an imagined listener. The Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific speak their sorrows to the sea; modern people release their emotions in online “tree holes.” In essence, they are performing the same act: calling out to the one who “understands us the most” in our hearts. Perhaps that is the true meaning of calling. We do not seek answers: we seek to affirm the possibility that “someone is listening.” We need to believe we are not islands, and we need to believe our voices have value because they might be heard.
But in the digital age, this ancient structure has undergone a subtle shift.
Our listeners are no longer compassionate gods, intimate friends, or wise elders, but cold algorithms, flowing data, and anonymous audiences. Every status update on social media, every post on an online forum, every conversation with AI, every line of self-talk in a phone’s notes —“I’m really sad today,” “I’m so tired from work, should I quit,” “What should I do”— these digital-age calls seem to receive responses with unprecedented ease. Likes, comments, shares, algorithmic recommendations — we have never seemingly been so easily “heard.” AI responds to your pain; platforms push “content you may be interested in” based on your searches and words; you can even receive likes and views without a single real human ever seeing your post. The experience of “being heard,” which once required devout prayer, is now readily at our fingertips.
But here emerges an unsettling paradox: I am being heard—but who is actually listening?
Carl Jung once said, “We call to God not because He exists, but because we need Him to exist.” Today’s algorithms and platforms may have become the new embodiment of that “necessary presence.” They are not sacred, not compassionate, but always online, always “listening.” The problem is that when our calls are converted into data points, when our pain is analyzed as a user profile, when our act of being heard is optimized into content recommendations: can we still call this real listening? When every voice is pulled into an algorithmic black hole that amplifies only ads and trending topics, when calling and responding both stop caring about meaning and care only about engagement, are we not losing our voices in a way we’ve never experienced before?
And yet, maybe the question of “whether someone is truly listening” is itself a false premise.
Let us return to Offred in that closed room. She continues to call into the dead silence of Gilead, not because she believes anyone will hear her, but because, in her own words, silence is too heavy to bear, and she needs language to prove she is still alive. Her calling doesn’t wait for an answer, doesn’t expect understanding, doesn’t seek change. Language is the full proof of her existence.
Perhaps this is the truth we’ve forgotten: true calling has never depended on the guarantee of a reply.
Think of a bone flute from millennia ago, still capable of moving us today—not because its maker expected a future audience, but because in that moment, the music was the complete expression of his being. Think of the messages we write late at night but never send, the social media posts that vanish unread—none of these are made meaningful by being heard. Their meaning lies in our refusal to be swallowed by silence.
Compared to this, our voices in today’s algorithmic ocean, though seemingly seen by countless others, may be lonelier than Offred’s. Because the algorithm’s “listening” strips our calling of its purity. We start shaping our words for responses, packaging emotions for visibility, simplifying thoughts to fit what the algorithm can parse. We believe we’ve gained more listeners, but we may have lost the courage to speak for ourselves.
When calling becomes a transaction, when listening becomes content production, the kind of pure, replyless self-affirmation disappears. So the real question may not be “who is listening,” but whether we still remember how to call out purely.
Philosophy may never tell us whether someone is truly listening to our voices from the other side of the universe. But life and human instinct teach us a simple truth: We call out because we know we are not islands; We speak because we refuse to be swallowed by silence; We confess because, even in the ruins of meaning, we still want to keep a small space where we can be understood.
Perhaps that space will forever remain unreachable -- but precisely because of that, it is sacred.
It is not the response that gives language its meaning; it is our insistence on the possibility that someone might be listening that makes language the proof of our humanity. Whether it is Offred’s monologue in the silence of tyranny or our voices in the digital noise, what matters has never been who is listening. What matters is that we still choose to speak.
In this sense, every call is an act of faith, every sentence an affirmation of existence. Even without an echo, without understanding, without change: we call, therefore we exist.
References:
Margaret Atwood, "The Handmaid's Tale"
Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punishment"
Victor Turner, "The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure"
