The need to disconnect
Disconnecting from machines to better connect with oneself
We may think that machines are serving us, saving us effort and energy, increasing our comfort and expanding our powers. However, close observation has often revealed that it is us serving the machines and not vice versa.
Long before the time of smart digital devices, when film cameras were the gadgets of choice, German philosopher Erich Fromm argued that cameras were changing the nature of traveling, and not in a positive way. He observed:
“[T]here had at first been people who traveled to learn and thus expand their knowledge, then tourists who took cameras with them, now we have only cameras that travel accompanied by tourists to service them."1
Fromm’s remark is a rhetorical exaggeration, it exaggerates reality to make it more visible. The remark points our attention to how cameras often manipulate our choices and actions. It is as if travelers no longer freely and independently choose where to go and what to do, the urge to take a good picture chooses for them, drags them from location to location just to “service” their cameras, point them at a good view and capture a snapshot of it. And the outcome of the traveler’s trips is no longer an experience, but “a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which he could have had, but did not have."2
Fromm’s analysis is generalizable well beyond his times and well beyond travelers and cameras, it illustrates how technology conditions us to spend less of our time experiencing life and more of our time recording it. Today, in the age of social media technology, the drive to record life has reached unprecedented power. We think of an idea; we post about it. We engage in an interesting activity; we post about it. We unexpectedly see a beautiful view; we rush to capture it on camera, then post about it. We continuously “service” social media platforms with data that gets used to train the platforms' artificially intelligent algorithms and bring them profits. And through our data, the platforms' algorithms get more effective at creating content that keep us glued to our devices, mindlessly scrolling and clicking, constantly manufacturing data for them.
According to philosopher Erich Fromm, the dream of endless technological development has led to a depletion of natural resources and the destruction of nature.
This is not a manifesto against technology, it is not a call to completely remove technology from our lives. Technology empowers us, it enables us to connect with others and to create communities that span distant geographies: the internet, video call technologies, Instant Messaging (IM) applications, social media platforms, they all help us connect. However, this has come at a cost. The same technologies that connect us to others have been disconnecting us from ourselves and our surroundings. Emails have allowed us to send and receive messages, yet they instilled in us the drive to continuously check our inbox, a drive that has become an ever-present intruder into our mental space, interrupting the flow of our thinking and distracting us from our surroundings. Social media platforms have allowed us to share thoughts, deliberate together, form groups and communities, yet the platforms have instilled in us the urge to incessantly record our moments and share them rather than fully experience them.
Technology is instilling in us urges and passions that overcrowd our minds. Beneath the urges to check notifications and post impressions, beneath the passions to gain more followers on social media and get more exposure and “likes,” there is a rich mental world, with infinite universes and landscapes, waiting to be explored. And to explore our rich mental world and fully experience it, we need to temporarily disconnect from technology and de-clutter our mind of its distractions. When disconnected, we get the opportunity to connect with our self. We observe our mind at work, we pay attention to the impulses and thoughts and judgments it generates, we experience the sensations that the material world inscribes into our mental world, from the air we breathe to the ground we stand on, to every organ of our continuously changing, aging body.
Yet, as we disconnect from every machine around us to fully attend to our experiences, we often realize that many of the distractions that interrupt and disrupt our attention originate from within us. Sometimes we are the machine. Sometimes, we are the barrier that prevents the mind from fully attending to its mental and material environments. We mechanically follow routines and mindlessly pursue one task after the other, on auto-pilot mode, with little awareness and almost no mental presence. We slip into a mechanical thoughtless state. To illustrate how easily one can slip into such a state, mindfulness practitioner Mobi Ho narrates an incident he experienced under the apprenticeship of Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh:
There was the time I was cooking furiously and could not find a spoon I’d set down amid a scattered pile of pans and ingredients. As I searched here and there, Thay3 entered the kitchen and smiled. He asked, “What is Mobi looking for?” Of course, I answered, “The spoon! I’m looking for a spoon!” Thay answered, again with a smile, “No, Mobi is looking for Mobi."4
Thích Nhất Hạnh’s insight is simple and profound. Sometimes we are too absorbed looking for a lost object that we end up losing touch with our self in the process. Sometimes we are too ambitious pursuing a goal that we end up reaching the goal yet losing our self-awareness in the process. It is not only machines that we need to disconnect from, but we also need to disconnect from our rigid routines and habits, the machines within ourselves.
In one of his illustrative literary descriptions of the machine of habit at work, Marcel Proust describes a jealous lover who, despite losing interest in the woman he once loved, was still obsessively trying to investigate whether she cheated on him:
Curiosity itself had disappeared, without, however, his abandoning his investigations. He continued the attempt to discover what no longer interested him, because his old ego, though it had shrivelled to the extreme of decrepitude, still acted mechanically, following the course of preoccupations so utterly abandoned5
Proust’s protagonist was no longer interested in knowing whether his lover cheated on him, yet he continued his attempt to find out. He continued his attempts because his old self still acted mechanically and still controlled his actions. The old self, through its mechanical habits, has alienated him from his present self.
Like Fromm’s insight about cameras, Proust’s insight about habits is also generalizable well beyond its context, well beyond romantic relationships and jealousy. Proust’s insight reminds us of our tendency to remain stuck in the past, living lives that we do not necessarily want to live, lives that do not match our current visions and values. When the passions that animated us in the past have long been extinguished, the habits they instilled in us may continue to mechanically direct our existence. They turn us into copy machines, reproducing the past again and again, and ignoring the present.
Self-awareness is necessary for a free existence. Without self-awareness, without attending to what we value and believe now, to the passions that animate us now, it is very easy for us to slip into a mindless existence. We become dominated by urges that are alien to us, instilled in us by technologies, by mechanical habits inherited from the past, and by myriads of social and cultural forces intruding into our mental lives.
There is a profound idea behind Descartes' axiom “I think therefore I am.” – “I think” means I create my mental world, my thoughts, my values, my intentions. When my mental world gets overcrowded with impulses that I did not produce, then I am not. When my mental world is intruded by urges that do not originate from me, then I am not. The “I” gets reduced to an object, lacking a free will, dragged around by forces external to it. Yet, there will always be within us a free will waiting to resurface, waiting for us to attend to it and reorient our mental powers towards it.
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Louai Rahal on Daily Philosophy:
References
Fromm, E. (1956). The sane society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Goldmann, L. (1965). Socialism and humanism. In E. Fromm (Ed.), Socialist humanism: An international symposium (pp. 247–260). Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Nhất Hạnh, T. (1999). The miracle of mindfulness: An introduction to the practice of meditation (M. Ho, Trans.; Introduction by Mobi Ho). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1975)
Proust, M. (1918/2020). Within a budding grove (C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Trans.). Project Gutenberg Link.
