Much is said about the need for agency, power, responsibility. Call to action. Take control. Grab the reins. Do what’s within your reach.
All because we must have “impact” — a word much repeated that continues to circulate without notable critical resistance. I’ve grown uncomfortable when I hear it. Sometimes because I don’t understand what the speaker means. Other times because I understand too well: it seems deliberately vague — useful cover for whoever can’t or won’t be specific.
“I want to have an impact. I want my life to have impact. I want to contribute to the impact economy.”
I stop.
The word comes from Latin impactus, past participle of impingere — to drive in, to spike, to hurl against, to strike.1 Not encounter; violence directed. The verb impactar only entered Portuguese in the twentieth century, by way of English, and migrated from technical vocabulary into managerial discourse with remarkable speed. We use daily, with aspirational tones, a word whose root means to drive a spike into. The new register hasn’t quite scrubbed the violence off it. Brace for impact, one hears in films when some ship is about to crash. The impact of two vehicles in a collision. The impact of a bomb on a building full of civilians. The impact of an asteroid on the lunar surface.
It would be easy to argue that the impact so many want to have on the lives of others is fuelled by the conviction that there are structures, injustices, and other ills that need to be destroyed. That is a coherent position. It is another way to exercise power: cause impact. Is it the best way — or even, in most cases, an honest one.
What if one of the great human problems is, precisely, our relationship with power? What if excess of power — real or imagined — has trained us as a species to believe we have what it takes to change the world, ourselves, and whatever else might cross our path? It’s an old tradition, this arrogance of ours.
In psychoanalytic terms, this is omnipotence wearing vocational clothes. The wish to have impact, examined without hurry, often turns out to be a wish to be impactful — to leave a mark large enough to feel real. It is a defence against impotence, against finitude, against the harder admission that most of what we do leaves smaller traces than we’d like. The corporate-philanthropic-self-help complex has built an entire economy on this defence, selling us instruments to amplify our marks. We pay, willingly. The alternative — accepting that we are mostly negligible — is, for many, intolerable.
So we shout louder. We optimise. We pivot. We disrupt. We brace for impact, and then administer it. None of this counts as paying attention to what is actually in front of us.2
And what if the solution is to disconnect from the power we believe we have? What if the solution is to stop, in order to look more and to look better?
Bion called this kind of attention without memory, without desire, without understanding. It’s not emptiness, but a quality of presence that refuses to pre-decide what’s there.3 One can’t have impact and pay this kind of attention at the same time. The first requires moving fast and marking hard. The second requires staying still long enough for something to arrive.
Maybe we don’t need more impact. We need less.
- Impacto derives from Latin impactus, -a, -um, past participle of impingo, -ere: to spike, drive in, bury, plant, hurl, strike against. The Portuguese verb impactar is a twentieth-century borrowing from English, and the violence has never quite left its etymology. See Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa and the Priberam dictionary entries. ↩︎
- This is essentially the same point I made in Self-help and aerobics: a pseudo-scientific method for detecting snake oil, where I argued that we confuse movement with progress and agitation with action. The vocabulary of “impact” is the corporate-philanthropic version of the gym instructor’s “no pain, no gain”: both fail the aerobics test for the same reason. ↩︎
- Wilfred Bion, in Attention and Interpretation (1970), described the analytic stance as one of suspending memory, desire, and understanding in order to let what is actually present emerge. I discussed this at greater length in Interlude: before understanding. ↩︎