We Are Just Not Here Anymore

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them.

We Are Just Not Here Anymore by Linton Weeks. At weddings, guests tweet real time photos of the festivities to friends far away. At sporting events, fans follow scores of games in other cities. In classrooms, students text with friends in other classes and parents out in the world. At funerals, mourners send out selfies to pals in other places.

Everyone, it seems, is interacting with more people who are elsewhere and less people around them. As technology seeps through society, dampening every dry aspect of our lives, something is happening to the idea of being present, the desire to be in the moment, and the notion of living right here and right now. Whenever we go anywhere, we are, and we want to be, somewhere else simultaneously. For years now, folks have been mulling over the side effects of the fragmented self and raising questions such as, how can we ever feel comfortable with others when we don't even feel comfortable with ourselves? Kenneth Gergen, a professor at Swarthmore College, has written of the idea of the, quote, absent presence.

In his 2002 essay, cell phone technology and the challenge of absent presence, he observed people who were sitting in groups yet were engaged in individual pursuits, and how such a situation affects our feelings. We are present, but simultaneously rendered absent, he writes. We have been erased by an absent presence. And in a recent New York Times essay about our incessant need to document our lives, Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT and author of the 2011 book Alone Together, wrote, these days, when people are alone or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device, in a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket, and, yes, at a memorial service. Reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts.

It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves. Sherry may as well be talking about focusing on who and what is around us at a given moment. If the people you are with or the event you are attending are not important enough to command your attention, then why are you there? It's more complicated than that, of course.

Students are forced to sit through classes. Business people are required to show up at certain meetings. We all wind up at times in involuntary situations. And after all, being in touch with people we care about is a deep down desire of the human species, which explains the phenomenal success of connective technology. But there is an increasing sense that many people, regardless of surroundings, do not really want to be where they are.

They want to be connected to someone else who is somewhere else doing something else. David Levy believes that our dazzling new digital tools can be used in more thoughtful and contemplative ways. In his course Information and Contemplation, David teaches students the virtues of old fashioned focus and discipline, and even meditation, in the midst of all our newfangled devices. As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Levy students play back videos of themselves multitasking, and they work to develop new ways to act and interact more effectively and efficiently. They do one task, such as email maintenance, at a time and resist all distractions.

A good deal of my focus in recent years has been exploring how to use our digital tools differently, he says, to connect us to one another and to sources of information in deeper and healthier ways. And that, in the end, may be the next great frontier. Perhaps the great minds and moguls and motivators will invent newer, shinier tools to propel us away from apathy and alienation and toward true connectedness and community and more meaningful coexistence. Don't worry. This isn't gonna be one of those all phones are bad all the time, and you should never even have a smartphone kind of things.

What I do wanna advocate for is a little bit more of a thoughtful approach of how we deal with our phones and primarily social media. So before I start bashing, let's talk about some of the good things. We currently live in a time where you have in your pocket access to what is functionally the sum of human knowledge. You can do more with a tiny little computer in your pocket than most people ever dreamed possible. You can learn.

You can create. You can connect. You can simply entertain yourself. There are a lot of good things you can do. There are a lot of things you can learn.

So I don't want the prevailing notion to be, oh, that person is on their phone. They must be looking at Twitter and wasting all their time. So in presenting a kind of balanced argument, that's the good side. The bad side is that we have some of the smartest people in the world trying to figure out more and more effective ways to sell your attention. We have some of the smartest people in the world who are literally selling distraction.

Think about it. How does Facebook make money? They sell your attention. Don't they? They sell ads and hope that you click on them.

How does Google make money? They sell ads and hope that you click on them. How does Twitter make money? Trick question. They don't make very much money, but they do sell ads.

And this is great for us because we get some really awesome services without having to pay cash. But here's the bad news. You don't stand a chance. Every day, you're going up against 1,000 and 1,000 of the smartest people in the world working at the the top companies in the world, and you're going against their very, very best systems to distract you. And I bet you don't even have a system to not be distracted.

So who do you think is gonna win? Thousands of engineers with all their data and their best ideas to distract you or you with no plan to not be distracted? And so it's no wonder that we're not here anymore. It's no wonder that when we're out with friends, we're looking at our phones trying to be distracted because we're fighting a losing battle. We're fighting a battle against people that literally want us to be addicted to their products, and we don't even realize it.

And it and it's working. It's so ingrained in our heads now that when we're out with friends, we pull up Facebook to see what other friends are doing, which is crazy. The author talks about this deep desire to connect. We all have this desire to be connected to other people, and I think we think social media gives us a shortcut. It gives us a shortcut to connection where we don't have to do the actual work or put in the time or be present.

So we get on social media and see these little red notifications and think, ah, connection. People love me. And it feels good for a second, but then it goes away, and you gotta wait for the next little bubble to pop up. But the real work of connecting is not that easy. You don't get to just pop in and pop out.

If you want to feel connected to someone, it takes some time. It takes some effort, but it's so much better to actually connect with people. So what's the solution here? I don't know, but I do have some ideas. Let me ask you this.

What's the best way to stop eating cookies late at night? It's not to have more willpower or more discipline. It's to stop buying cookies at the grocery store. The same is true for these social media apps. Cut off your access.

Take them off your phone. I have a browser extension on my desktop that blocks Facebook's news feed. So if I go to facebook.com, I don't see a news feed. It's just empty. So I can't spend hours just scrolling through to see what's going on.

I don't have Facebook on my phone. And it's not because I'm noble, it's because I was addicted to it. And I've also heard of some families that have a phone basket where they put their phones when it's dinner time or at a even at certain hours of the night. They just put their phones in there and are not allowed to use them. I've seen friends stack all their phones in the center of the dinner table when they go out to eat so that nobody's tempted to just wander off into the Internet.

These are all great ideas. Whatever you need to do to break your addiction. Because if you're addicted to cookies and you have easy, unlimited 247 access to cookies, you're gonna eat a lot of cookies. But you don't have to have the app on your phone. You don't have to let the cookies into the house.

The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode, take your life back. How many times have you told yourself that you were going to find a new job? How many times have you actually seriously looked? You can subscribe in iTunes by searching for music makers or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm.

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