Hello,

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a cafe near Union Square, sending emails, writing into a machine about things a machine can't do. One of the things that I love about my work at the NY Zen Center for Contemplative Care is the fact that we cultivate ways of engaging with one another that are based on deeply human experience, irreplaceable and unknowable by machines.

Suddenly, I heard someone at the counter ordering a coffee and the voice made me look up. It was an odd, delayed moment of placing a voice out of context, when you can't tell whether you know someone or just think you should. It turned out to be my old friend Adriana, whom I hadn't seen in probably fifteen years. She’d been a resident at Eyebeam back in the day. She teaches media arts now, at the School of Visual Arts, though she, too, has been drifting away from technology-driven practice.

She told me about an essay she'd recently published, My kid is 12 and has never used an iPad. He's never talked to a chatbot, either. I read it that afternoon and kept circling around a thought: we work so hard to guard children from that technology, and then, as adults, we hand it our attention all day long. It’s almost as if we believe it could no longer reach us, as if our worlds were finished being built and nothing could get in.

But for adults, it’s well know that the more we compulsively peer into our digital gazing balls, out sense of shared connectivity frays. Game-ification of our inner lives is an unambiguous outcome of decades of research aiming to mass monetize our attention through addictive technologies.

So what are some ways to disconnect from the grid? Here are a few things I am trying, your mileage may vary.

• No internet for at least one hour after waking. There is pressure every morning to make sure nothing is on fire. However, 99.8% of the time, there isn’t. And the 0.2% that there is, chances are that it would not be improved with your immediate engagement. Also, our susceptibility is high when we are in a semi-conscious state, that’s not a good time to check your feed because it influences your starting point for the day.

• Know what is happening in your head. This may sound odd, but before starting meditation regularly, only some of my own thoughts were visible to me. This may have to do with my general hard-headedness. But, either way, meditation has helped me see my thoughts more clearly. Now, my compulsion to engage the screen stands out vividly, not as a decision but a habitual urge.

• Trust yourself. Digital media is destabilizing: we use it to confirm memories, find answers we forgot, and chart a direct path from A to B. This cumulative structural damage to our confidence yanks our conceptual feet out from under us. So, maybe, go for a drive without knowing the exact route; if you don’t remember, you are more likely to next time. Assert something without verifying, that may lead to a more interesting conversation anyway. Embellish a detail from imagination rather than evidence; misremembering may open space for deeper meaning.

• Nurture intuition. Intuition is not prized much in our time, and the word doesn’t really do the notion justice. But in practice, it interweaves various types of knowing, not solely from our immediate senses. Occasionally this is recognized, even in science. Barbara McClintock, the geneticist, won a Nobel Prize for seeing something in corn plants that her colleagues, looking at the same fields with the same instruments, completely missed. Her biographer called it a feeling for the organism: a patient, almost tender attention that the instruments couldn't detect. To me, this is intuition in practice.

These are some things that I am trying to remember for myself, some days are more successful than others. And while I do believe it is very important to protect kids from the “attention merchants” (as coined by author Tim Wu), we have to protect ourselves as well. And as the adage in advertising goes, those who think that they are not affected by ads are often the most influenced, I believe the same is true in our relatively young digital world. We all have to live here, but there are things we can do to maintain our own innate agency as we navigate through it all.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, drop me a line if you have tips for how we can protect our adult minds and I’ll include them in a future newsletter.

Until next time,

Roddy