Copyright The New York Times
For the vast majority of my psychotherapy patients, the gravitational pull of phones and social media alters the most important aspects of who they are, their relationships with others and how they move through the world. This is true for most of us. Our uptake of technology has been so rapid that we are losing the ability to notice how it feels to live this way. Occasionally, in therapeutic conversations, a patient can get in touch with these feelings. It often looks like grief. I increasingly see in my practice how people are beginning to feel that technology has pulled them away, again and again, from what matters most. Perhaps tech has interrupted their creative lives or their emotional growth. A pattern familiar to many of us is how these distractions disrupt connection with others. Talking to the kids at dinner and then glancing away. Feeling the pull of the phone and also that whispering uneasiness. “Damn it, why do I do that?” That’s the sentiment patients express. Anger often comes first. Then we get to the hurt beneath it. All these moments — not actually unseen, but noticed and ignored — leave this residue of grief. All these turnings away. As we talk, the sadness opens out in ripples and swells. It’s remarkable when people allow themselves to feel the grief, because tech tends to distract us not just from moments of connection, but also from the sorrow of missing these moments. I’ve long thought about technology’s human impact in my roles as a psychoanalyst and a scholar of religion, and formerly as a tech journalist and research director. One constant I’ve found is how technology brings a kind of alexithymic fog — alexithymia being the condition of having difficulty identifying or being able to express one’s emotions. This isn’t universal, and the emotions we’re pushing away aren’t always the same. But it happens in a startlingly consistent way. When we do manage to feel, it can be difficult to dwell with the feelings. Instead, we move swiftly into action. That’s it, we say — enough! We toss the phone, delete the app, do a digital detox. These solutions rarely hold. The detox ends. We pick back up the phone. We reinstall the app. Rather than staying with the feeling, we vacillate between immersion in tech and rejecting it entirely. This circuit, moving from feeling to doing, is a key piece of technology’s anesthetizing environment. Tech encourages the instrumentalization of emotional life, by which I mean that our feelings seem real only if they translate into actions that help us achieve specific goals. Take the avalanche of fitness metrics appearing on devices like Apple watches — resting heart rate, step count, sleep score. These numbers take on lives of their own and come to feel more real than the mind-body states they measure. On social media, similarly, the representations we put forward can take on a kind of hyper reality. With A.I. tools like ChatGPT, the college experience shifts from creative immersion to identifying prompts to achieve a specific aim. To use the language of Silicon Valley, we are highly incentivized to focus on action in pursuit of external markers of success. The notion of staying with feeling without translating it into action seems pointless. This idea of feeling isn’t the same as the practice of mindfulness, which sounds broadly similar in how it encourages quietly observing one’s emotions and thoughts. Western ideas of mindfulness can fall prey to the same pitfalls that technology brings. We often focus on what mindfulness can do — de-stress, get more work done, lower your blood pressure. If you’re wearing a smartwatch right now, perhaps it has a mindfulness app, which triggers a mindfulness session, during which it feeds your leaderboard of metrics. To tackle the problems of technology we have to return to our emotional lives for their own sake, and not always leap to doing or changing or fixing. This is the only viable pathway if we are to remain in touch with our humanness and to preserve love, empathy, emotional and spiritual richness, and the capacity to create art and music that reflect our inner lives. Many of us encounter dozens of moments every day when we engage with technology and experience a disquieted feeling. All too often, we push it away. But if we accept the invitation and dwell with what comes, making different choices becomes inevitable. Let me return to my clinical practice. Highly persuasive research now demonstrates the negative effects of social media on mental health, for young people particularly. In a strange way, the nature of this crisis around social media gives me some hope. Social media can induce a kind of frenzied distractedness that people come to feel. This doesn’t mean they necessarily feel grief, but they can identify how exhausted they are by it. In this inclination toward feeling, there is hope. Artificial intelligence chatbots are more disquieting. One second, we are drinking from the fire hose of social media, and then suddenly there is a gentle voice on the other end that appears to recognize us. What happens to our emotional selves in these milieus is a central question of our time. To answer it, and to steer our relationship with A.I. accordingly, we need to be able to remain in touch with our emotional experience. In “King Lear,” the blind Gloucester says of making his way through the world: “I see it feelingly.” Years ago, I was corresponding with my friend and fellow journalist Bill Moyers about this line, and he said, “The challenge is to turn the ‘feelingness for the world’ into redemptive and sustaining measures.”
