The Tangible Way: My Weekend Awakening

One thing I find that helps me do inner exploration is to engage with my journal, a hardcover notebook with nice heavyweight paper. With that journal I like to use one of my favorite pens, a blue metallic fountain pen with a nice heft and a cool sensation. Since it’s a fountain pen, I get to choose what color ink to fill it with, and on this day the pen was loaded with a blue-black ink, producing one of my favorite very dark blues.

I like to reflect on my porch bed swing, which provides comfort and a gentle sway as I take in the sensations of being outdoors. I sit where I can look at the large oak tree that overlooks my yard. It's an old tree that is way older than me, an arborist assuring me she will still be here long after I’m gone.

As I began to take time to reflect on the problematic place I had found myself in, naming that “my headspace is very muddled lately,” and “I feel far removed from myself,” and “I feel uninspired, irritable, angry,” some clarity began to emerge.

I recognized that I had gotten into an unhealthy pattern of scrolling on various social media sites late into the night. Part of what I considered was behind this was great distress about the rapidly changing state of the world, and a strong sense of helplessness and powerlessness about it. There is a distracting and anesthetizing quality that can happen with incessant scrolling, and perhaps that was what was happening with me.

However, as I further explored this pattern, I recognized how when I’m online I’m under the influence of an algorithm that will continually feed me more content that I’m highly likely to engage with. Everyone is under the intentional influence of the algorithm, and as such, we very truly inhabit different worlds when we’re online. We are essentially being victimized by a very purposeful force to keep us tethered to our devices, our attention being stolen and our brains being corrupted for power and profit.

That sounds hyperbolic perhaps, but I stand by this assertion. Whistleblowers from these very companies we have given all of our personal information to have let it be known that this is the way. Psychological studies are strongly suggesting that social media use, particularly regular consumption of short-form, quickly-changing content, is shortening attention spans and negatively impacting the executive functioning part of the brain. When that’s impaired, we’re more easily distracted, more impulsive, more irritable, and have difficulty sticking with tasks that require sustained focus. Does that sound familiar?

I’ve typically tried to more intentionally engage with social media, taking care to not allow it to rule my psyche. But as I reflected further I realized that lately it had been overtaking me. I was seeking the distracting and numbing, which I call “dumbing,” because of my sense of hopelessness. Yet as I continued to reflect, I recognized that it was the scrolling itself that was making me feel helpless and hopeless, being flooded with content designed to keep me there, lighting up the same parts of my brain that illicit drugs do.

As I continued to journal, I realized reality doesn’t exist on a screen, noting, “Reality exists right here right now on this swing, lightly moving with the breeze, as the leaves shimmy and the birds sing, and NaniGirl (my dog) lies quietly on the chair next to me.” As I contemplated, I could hear neighbors out doing chores in their yard or visiting with loved ones on their own porches. I observed, “There is no aggression, no vitriol. We coexist without knowing how we vote. The deep divisions exist online.”

It was then that I declared I must get back to living a more analog life, live more amongst the tangibles, engaging more with realness. Like many of us in these modern times, my phone is almost always with me, making it so much easier to take a hit. It’s like going through life with a pipe and a steady supply of crack.

I’m a member of Generation X, so I remember when a phone was just a phone tethered to the wall, and if you went somewhere you surely didn’t take it with you. What a wonderful thing it was to not have to be reachable all the time, and to not feel a need to know what was going on all the time. I remember also when “breaking news” was actually breaking news. When the networks interrupted regularly scheduled programming, you knew something monumental had occurred. Breaking news is everything now, a constant barrage of content activating a chronic state of fight or flight, depleting us of internal resources and keeping us from seeing the big picture.

So I lived that weekend as though my phone was that old school corded device located in one area of my house. I noticed the urges that would arise to engage with it, and also noticed that if I didn’t engage with it the urges would dissipate. I leaned into engagement with the tangible things in my life.

I noticed a hummingbird trying to get needed sustenance from a bright red begonia, which doesn’t offer it. I remembered my fancy hummingbird feeders that were put away many months ago and forgotten. The process of locating the feeders, mixing up the sugar water, filling the feeders, and hanging them up, actually took only a matter of minutes. A task I had put off because it felt too onerous, took only minutes. It’s interesting how I found more spaciousness of time being off-screen.

As I had a very analog weekend, I felt as though I had been set free. Truly, my mind had indeed been set free, and I was under the influence of no one but me. I felt awakened. I found great pleasure in the tangible things in my life. I even started reading and enjoying a real book, a skill I feared maybe I had lost since it had been so long.

I’m not a luddite. I appreciate technology. In fact, I used to be an early adopter, though I’ve long been passed by now with the rapid advancements. But I know there are so many amazing things we can access and do now that would have taken so long to accomplish, if it had even been possible at all, back in the day. I recognize social media has the potential of fostering connections, but I think we have to bring wisdom and intention to the experience, knowing full well that we’re being influenced and that a lot of what we’re exposed to isn’t even real.

I’m also one who cares about what is happening in the world. I don’t intend to live with my head in the sand and I want to be able to be a part of making things better. But I know I can’t do that from a place of overwhelm with constant information or with the “dumbing” that happens with incessant scrolling. I can only do that from a grounded and balanced place, regularly touching base with the tangibles.

Barring a cataclysmic event, technology is here to stay and will keep evolving quicker and invade more and more of our lives. For perspective, consider that the iPhone was only first introduced in 2007. Think about how ubiquitous it and other smartphones quickly became, so that now they and other smart devices go everywhere with us. AI is advancing rapidly and already permeating so much of our lives, and will do so more and more.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be offering a series of writings exploring the challenges of the pervasiveness and influence of technology on us humans, and examining ways to balance this fact with more intentional interaction with real things that can engage the senses, what I’m calling the tangible way.