A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, “There you go again; let’s call this to a halt. You can do something different.” Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.
To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.
If you’re having a conversation with someone in speech, and it’s not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it’s not like that. On the Internet it’s almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can’t say, “I changed my mind.
The philosopher Heinrich von Kleist calls this “the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking.” Von Kleist quotes the French proverb that “appetite comes from eating” and observes that it is equally the case that “ideas come from speaking.” The best thoughts, in his view, can be almost unintelligible as they emerge; what matters most is risky, thrilling conversation as a crucible for discovery.
When you depend on the computer to remember your past, you focused on whatever past is kept on the computer.
Real people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with after one has spent a stretch in simulation.
Sometimes a citizenry should not simply “be good”. You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.
In all of these cases, we use technology to “dial down” human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people – and sometimes with a lot of people – who are emotionally kept at bay. It’s another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It’s part of the move from conversation to mere connection.
To reclaim solitude we have to learn to experience a moment of boredom as a reason to turn inward, to defer going “elsewhere” at least some of the time.
Texting is more direct. You don’t have to use conversation filler.
A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: “it’s like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.
It helps to distinguish between what psychologists call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical reel and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, use the materials of online life to confront the conflict of the real and search for new resolutions.
Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences.
Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.
As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.
But who said that a life without conflict, without being reminded of past mistakes, past pain, or one where you can avoid rubbing shoulders with troublesome people, is good? Was it the same person who said that life shouldn’t have boring bits? In this case, if technology gives us the feeling that we can communicate with total control, life’s contingencies become a problem. Just because technology can help us solve a “problem” doesn’t mean it was a problem in the first place.
In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online?
It is easier to face an emergency than to have those difficult conversations. When we go into crisis mode, we give ourselves permission to defer the kinds of conversations that politics requires. And right now, our politics requires conversations, too long deferred, about being a self and a citizen in the world of big data.
In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one’s own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and “slowness.
We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. Yet.