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...
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... 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. MORE
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