As I write this, my cellphone sits to the side of my desk, just barely within view. Outside, the rain is pouring — it’s a beautifully foggy morning, the trees swaying. The kids have left for school and now it’s just me, a cup of coffee, our sleeping dog, the quiet house, the rain. The perfect place and time to write this little dispatch to my fellow New York Times readers about my Opinion guest essay, to sink into my thoughts and feelings and see what words come. The phone pulls at me. My notifications are turned off, but it pulls. Not now, I think. But the pull intensifies. I give in and pick up the phone. I check my email. There is nothing I need to read right now. The gesture feels empty. I put the phone back down, this time fully out of view. Back to you and these words. But that first delicious moment of sitting down at my desk — the way the rain held me and my inner life opened up, and the thoughts I wanted to convey began rising to consciousness — all this was lost a little bit, or altered. Now, sitting here afterward, I feel an uneasiness come. Most of us go through this circuit many times every day. Phones and social media suffuse our lives. We tend to be intellectually aware of tech pulling us away from what matters most: our emotional lives, creative lives, sweet moments with the people we love. We come up with all sorts of strategies to moderate the pull, often moving between embracing tech and hiding our phones or deleting apps. Back and forth we go. What we do far less is allow ourselves to notice what it actually feels like to live this way. In my work as a psychoanalyst, my patients often bring up their relationships with technology. Occasionally, as we sit together in moments that move me, they allow themselves to get in touch with their emotional experience of this. It often looks like grief. As I write in my essay, allowing ourselves to feel our way through tech is the only viable pathway if we are to remain in touch with our humanness and all that follows from it — the richness of our emotional, creative, spiritual and relational lives.
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