A Physical Person in a Digital World
A Manifesto for Kindred Souls
I’ve written before that we’re still living through the “growing pains,” phase of the digital revolution. It’s no secret that the internet and smartphones (and even social media) have improved lives around the world. For myself, I publish, grow my audience, reach readers, learn, connect with other writers and editors, and perform research via the internet.
But digital technology has its downsides and its risks. We can easily become passive consumers,1 in sway to the algorithms and the steady streams of dopamine hits. We overwhelm our stimuli and senses, while encasing ourselves in cocoons of pleasure and comfort and virtuality, walling ourselves off from the unsafe world outside.
We can exist like that, but we can’t truly live that way. And so, today I want to begin making a case for a better way of living in the digital world – as physical persons.
A Physical Person:
One of our mottos here at Hardihood Books is “Mens sana in corpore sano,” or “a sound mind in a sound body.” Barring unfortunate accident or circumstance of birth, all of us are capable of developing both. Moreover, it isn’t clear we can truly separate mind from body (or vice versa). The two work in partnership with one another. If we starve our brains of physical sleep, nutritious food, water, sunlight, and physical movement, we think less clearly (and we predispose ourselves to cognitive decline). And without our minds, our bodies would be little more than automatons.
Many writers say that they do their best ideation while walking, doing physical chores, or running. Some will say that they need physical activity in order to be creative. I certainly find that to be the case. Running doesn’t always result in the best ideas. But it helps me work through my muddled thoughts and throw out some of the garbage.
Foot-travel has long been popular among philosophers. Nietzsche wrote that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” Aristotle founded the peripatetic school. And a major facet of Nassim Taleb’s philosopher-flaneur lifestyle includes long, slow walks through the city, either lost in thought or deep in conversation about ideas.
I know that not everyone is persuaded by evolutionary arguments, but I find that evolution offers a convenient framework for understanding the human body and mind. Evolutionarily, we are the same human beings as our ancestors who explored the world – living off the land, hunting and gathering food, and sleeping under the stars. It is a fallacy to assume that we are smarter, wiser, or more advanced (or even better educated, in some cases) than people who lived in the past, simply because we have watches that can tell us our heart rate and bags of chips that come with lots of air.2
All of this is to say that our minds evolved in conjunction with our bodies. They are part of the body and they direct the body’s action, but they can also grow unhealthy as the body grows unhealthy. We didn’t evolve to sit for twelve hours a day, indoors, staring at a screen, consuming content. We evolved to move, to be outdoors, to use our bodies, to manipulate our environments. We are physical humans. If we don’t login to the metaverse, we might miss out on what our friends are doing. But without physical food, physical sleep, and physical water, we die.
This isn’t a materialist argument. To my Christian friends (including anyone not persuaded by the theory of evolution), I’ll make a Christian argument. First, we are told to love God with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength. This indicates that our souls are not the same as our minds, and that both body (strength) and mind have a role in our service of the Lord.
Second, we are called to live physically in the world (even as we aren’t called to be of this world). Rejection of the physical and denial of the body leads to the heresy of Gnosticism.
Finally, Revelations tells us that in the Resurrection, we will be resurrected in body and soul, and our souls will be reunited with our physical bodies.
The point of all of this is that digital life can never be life. We can engage our minds with screens, but we can’t engage our bodies – not fully. Virtual reality may feel like something we can go inside. But we aren’t really there, because the metaverse can never completely exist as a real place. Heck, even in Ready Player One, all the characters had to eat and sleep in the real world.
But what’s wrong with the way we currently interact with the digital world? What are the growing pains?
The Digital World:
There may not be demons in the machines, and maybe our attention spans weren’t literally stolen by corporate oligarchs, but many of the various critics of digital technology (in its current forms) have valid points. I’m not sure Jonathan Haidt is correct that Twitter’s retweet feature is incompatible with democracy.[8] But it’s worth taking seriously his argument that platforms like Twitter are challenging institutions built in a world before the internet.
There are those who say that any criticism of technology is overwrought, bordering on Luddism. That a person can’t develop a “real” addiction to porn or social media or a smartphone. But it’s absurd to restrict “real addiction” so narrowly as to crowd out many of the activities and substances upon which people have real dependencies. Sure, you can’t be physically addicted to digital devices,3 or even marijuana. But you can definitely develop a psychological dependency on them.
People have tried to argue that Jean Twenge (and all those who came after her) was wrong about social media contributing to depression and anxiety among teens, especially girls. But I have yet to find a persuasive argument that disproved her thesis. It’s one thing to criticize the science, quite another to jump to the conclusion that the opposite of the thesis must be true. In other words, does anyone think that social media has improved teen mental health? If so, where is the evidence for that? It’s hard to deny that technology is having an effect on children and teens, not always for the better.
We can’t simply enjoy the benefits of digital technology without grappling with its dark side. If every moment is captured, then we both perform for the cameras and we watch others perform, becoming simultaneously narcissists and voyeurs. When all that is private becomes public, our interior life becomes shallow, our relationships grow hollower, and we become more fake and less real. Our real lives become more virtual.
At the same time, as much as some of us would like to retreat to a simpler age, we can’t go back. We can’t wall ourselves off or withdraw from the digital world (at least most of us).4 We’ve “burned our boats,” so we must move forward with this technology. Every new development has brought growing pains. And every generation that lived through such pains has had to come up with solutions that they would pass on to their children and grandchildren.
For smartphones and the internet, that growing-pain generation is us.5 It is our job to come up with the solutions, to learn new ways to interact with our devices, to improve and “do better.”
Technology to Augment Our Lives, Not to Replace Them:
Despite the hype from futurists, we’ll probably never achieve “The Singularity” – the moment when self-improving artificial superintelligence makes human civilization obsolete. Typically, hypotheses about a singularity include the idea that we’ll achieve immortality by uploading our minds into machines. But the mythical merger of man and machine almost certainly requires the death of the physical body. To my mind, the dream of the singularity is a form of secular Gnosticism.
Imagine you’re sitting there, about to have your consciousness downloaded (or uploaded) into a computer. Doubt begins to plague you. When you press the button, your physical body will collapse and will cease to live. The computer will immediately assume your personality, with all of your memories, thoughts, desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and loves. But will it be you? Or a perfect simulation of you? A Stepford Wives-style replacement that can fool all of your friends and family, but without actually being you?
Let’s say it is you. Let’s say you do survive and you’re actually in the machine. Will you think you made a mistake? How will you know? This is a classic “vampire problem” – you can’t understand what it’s like to be a vampire until you’ve become one and once you’re a vampire you can’t go back.
If we ever achieve this vision of transhumanism it will almost undoubtedly require bodily death. You couldn’t have two copies of yourself running around, one in the machine and one in flesh and blood. Once your experiences diverged, which one would be you?
But I think it wouldn’t simply be physical death, but spiritual death. Even if you do not believe in immortal souls, or human beings created in the image of a benevolent creator, you must admit that one of the most fundamental things about being human is the fact that we die. Part of what makes us human beings is that we are trapped on this Earth, limited by the flaws of our physical bodies. Technology can help us to overcome those flaws. But it can’t remove the things about us that make us human beings, without altering beyond repair who we are.
Other misguided souls have posited a “Simulation,” or a virtual reality (a metaverse) so perfect we would never be able to prove that it wasn’t real. The Matrix offered us a glimpse of what such a thing might look like. The more benign version is Robert Nozick’s “experience machine.” You go inside of it, press a button, and you’ll be able to have any fake experience you want: win an Olympic gold medal, earn a trillion dollars, set foot on the Moon, make love to some celebrity, become the president, etc.
Now, this holds some attraction for some people (and not just for kinky reasons). The premise of Ready Player One is that real life may become so horrible that most people spend their existences plugged into a virtual reality where they can live as video game heroes and forget their troubles. In Hyperion, there are stories of cyberpunks who went so deep into the metaverse they forgot to eat, sleep, drink, and go to the bathroom in the real world. They were eventually found dead in their homes. Sadly, this isn’t just science fiction, it's already happened to gamers in the real world.
If the Singularity is an attempt to replace human nature with computer code, the Simulation is an attempt to replace reality with a shallow, transparent copy. But that copy can never be more than a pale imitation. You can’t live in the metaverse, no matter how hard you try to fool yourself. You can only ever exist in it.
Both the Singularity, and the Simulation are attempts to use technology not to enhance our lives but to replace them. The utopian quest that drives attempts at their creation also lies behind an approach many people have towards digital technology. An approach I think wrongheaded at best, and an abomination at worst. This approach sees digital technology (and technology more broadly) as a way to liberate mankind from our estate – a way to create paradise here on Earth. There is nothing wrong with wanting to use technology to ameliorate human suffering – that is noble and good. What is wrong is the idolatrous worship of technology, the desire to immanentize the eschaton through transhumanism.
If we are to reimagine our relationships with digital technology in order to use them more effectively and more healthily, we need to return to a different understanding of the goal of technology: that the purpose of every device – from the Apple Watch to the combine harvester – is to augment and improve human life, not to replace it.
Where human beings go wrong is when we attempt to transcend our existence using our devices, rather than using those devices to alleviate the worst aspects of existence. Transhumanism attempts to do away with the reality that makes living, well, living. When we treat our smartphones as the beginning of either the perfect simulation or the “inevitable” singularity, we begin to lose touch with what smartphones were designed to do in the first place.
Technology is Neither Good nor Bad:
Any technology, including the smartphone, social media, and the nuclear bomb, is only as good or bad as the people using it. Of course, there are limits to that statement: certain technologies have features that increase temptation to vice or improve the power of vice to do harm, while others relieve suffering and confer beneficial effects on users. There are cases of obviously “good” technologies, without any downsides, which have only ever improved human life (certain medicines, for instance). But there are few (if any) cases of inherently “evil” technologies: not social media, not smartphones, not electric light, not the nuclear bomb, nor the AR-15.6
Pure technological determinism is a fallacy, because tech isn’t an agent. It has no life of its own. The crossbow didn’t force feudalism to fall apart. It didn’t inevitably lead to the rise of individual rights, even if it leveled the playing field between knights and peasants.
At the same time, it’s undeniable that technology can have significant effects. I think it’s safe to say that a piece of technology can create some small deterministic force pushing in a particular direction, even if strong individuals and institutions can successfully ignore or overcome that force.
So, there’s something to the notion that the algorithms used by “Big Tech” can create addiction and dependency in certain users. But that’s only possible because the temptation was already there. “Big Tech” didn’t invent the flaws in human nature, even if it’s perhaps possible that some companies tried to exploit those flaws.
But we aren’t pawns. We aren’t automatons pushed around by big scary impersonal forces of technological progress. We’re agents. In fact, we have more deterministic force than any single piece of technology, should we choose to exercise our agency.
Which leads us to the conclusion that if we want a better relationship with our devices, we had better start exerting our own power over them.
If most inventions are neither good nor bad, then they have the potential both to enhance human life and detract from it. In the case of digital technology, we have seen that it can distract us from our real lives. It can entertain us to the point at which we become nothing more than passive vessels for consumption, shells of our former selves. In other words, it can take away some of our power, some of our control over our own lives.
But we can also use our devices in a way that gives us more power. A way that enhances and augments our power. A way that helps us to achieve our goals, that removes our obstacles, and that allows us to make a greater mark upon the world, rather than a lesser mark. If we are simply content consumers, we are marked upon. But if we take an active role in our relationships with digital technology – in other words, if we live as physical people in a digital world, people who leave an impact upon that world – we can redefine those relationships in ways that leave us in the driver’s seat, not the passenger seat.
You can’t sit shotgun to your own life. Too many people use the digital world as a distraction. As an avoidance from real life. Sadly, Eric Schmidt was right when he said that people “want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” But “liberation” from decision-making isn’t freedom. It’s slavery.
You can order touchless delivery online and receive a notification on your phone when your food or groceries are outside, allowing you to eat without ever having to leave your apartment or interact with another person. You can roll over at eight, pick up your screen, start scrolling, work from your phone until twelve, get out of bed, grab a bite while checking Reddit, grab your laptop, get back in bed, work until seven, eat dinner while watching Netflix, get back in bed, watch Netflix until two, plug in your phone and laptop and go to sleep.
But this is a mistake. We weren’t meant to live this way. If we want to be the ones defining our technological lives, we need to be the ones taking action and we need to refuse the convenience and stimulation that get in the way of that.
Okay. But How?
First, obviously, if you struggle to control your unhealthy obsession with social media or your binge-watching habit (or a porn addiction), you need to get that in order. I have many thoughts about how to do that, but those are beyond the scope of this essay. Perhaps at some point I’ll write more about it. If you do consider yourself “far gone,” you’ll probably need help from someone close to you. At a minimum, there are apps like Freedom that can help you regulate your own usage.
Next, for everyone else, take breaks. Real breaks. Long breaks. Every day. I mean distinct pauses in your consumption, definite periods of time in which you do not look at, or use, a single device: laptop, smartwatch (although dumb watches are fine), smartphone, or even a CD player (for those who remember them). Preferably, you’d either do something with other people (i.e., eating a meal, having a conversation in which neither of you pulls out a phone, going for a walk), or do something outdoors without any artificial stimulation or sensory input (just you and the cars and the birds and the lawn mowers). You could also do both (i.e., going on a run with your friends).
There are two keys here: physicality, and relationships (interacting with people in the real world). I’ll address the second first. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff (in The Coddling of the American Mind) and Jean Twenge (in iGen), note that teen girls who spent the most time engaging in relationships with other people in the physical world were relatively immune to the harmful effects Instagram seemed to have on the mental health of their peers. Conversely, girls who did not have many “IRL” (in real life) friends, and who spent far more time online than they did with people in the real world, were most susceptible to anxiety and depression. Notably, more time spent physically interacting with friends appeared to give girls greater tolerance (i.e., it increased the amount of time they could safely spend on social media without experiencing the same negative mental health effects as some of their peers).
This suggests that real-world relationships are an antidote to the ills of social media. And that if you use social media as a way to complement, rather than replace, your real relationships, you’ll be able to avoid the negative externalities of those platforms. This seems to me to be the proper way to use social media: as a tool to add to your social life, rather than as a source of social life. Facebook and Twitter can connect us with new people, help us to keep in touch with distant friends and relatives, and aid in organizing in-person events – from college reunions to bar trivia. But all of us need real-world friends.
We also all need to move. Physical activity is an important component of human health, but it is also fundamental to our nature. Similarly, spending time outdoors is important for health and is part of what it means to be human. Over 99% of human beings who have ever lived spent almost their entire lives in the outdoors, physically hunting and gathering and farming and breeding their food.
I don’t think everyone needs to go for a run every day. But I do think that everyone should go outside every day (even for five minutes) and physically exercise every day (even for five minutes). You don’t have to do either if you don’t want to. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. But I think that if you choose not to engage in physical activity, and not to spend time outdoors, you are missing out on a fundamental part of human life.
I emphasize human physicality because that is the dimension of human life most neglected by digital technology. Physical contact and presence with other human beings. Physical activity and the physical sensations that can only come from being outside.
As virtual reality technology (haptic sensors, etc.) improves, I’m sure it will come to incorporate more movement and even to stimulate various nerves to create physical sensations. And yet, the best VR – even VR that is “indistinguishable” from reality – will only be a simulation of reality. It can never be reality. The difference between playing football and playing a VR simulation of football that “feels” indistinguishable from the real thing is that the second is a facsimile, a pale copy, a passing imitation of real life.
It is important, therefore, for us to stay in charge of our own use of digital and VR technology. We must be the ones to define our relationships with our devices. Which means that sometimes we will need to refuse – whether that means letting a text or call go unanswered while we’re at the dinner table with a friend, ignoring a tweet that annoys us, turning off our devices, ending our session instead of playing “just one more” game, or standing in boredom at the DMV rather than pulling out our phones.
While digital technology may not be physically addictive and physically intoxicating,7 it certainly seems to have addictive and intoxicating effects. But just as an adult can drink alcohol responsibly, an adult can use his or her device responsibly, can use social media responsibly, can teach his or her children how to use digital technology responsibly (including placing age limits and other restrictions on their usage).
Furthermore, just as we need to take complete pauses from digital technology, we also need to take pauses in digital consumption. Or rather, if we are to be agents who use technology as a tool, we need to rebalance our consumption with our production. Production can take many forms, and doesn’t simply include what we do for work. While producing a tweet technically counts, we ought to focus our energy more on worthwhile forms of production, which are often labor-intensive and require some skill – for instance, writing. After all, digital technology has given us many great tools for writing. I’ve never been one of those who thought that using a word processor as opposed to a typewriter made the writing less pure.8 In a similar vein, we can also produce music, podcasts, artwork, websites, spreadsheets, computer programs, videos, and mathematical models (among other things) with digital technology.
Furthermore, not all productive uses of technology involve production. One of the greatest benefits of the digital era is that we have access to the greatest wealth of human knowledge in history. We can use our devices to learn. Thousands of the greatest works of history, literature, and philosophy are available online for free or for a nominal sum. The explosion of podcasting has given everyone access to college-level seminars, engaging lectures, conversations and debates between great minds in science and mathematics and philosophy and politics and economics, as well as interviews with interesting people from all walks of life. And when it comes to manual skills or physical techniques (including in athletics) or handyman tasks – dozens of online videos will walk a novice through exactly how to become proficient.
What does it mean to be a physical person in a digital world? It means this: being intentional about your usage of digital tools – the amount, the timing, the frequency, the type of usage, etc. It really comes down to using devices less, being present in the world more, and – when you do use digital technology – using it to enhance your life, to communicate (rather than as a substitute for social life), to learn (rather than to distract), and to produce (whether in work or leisure).
That doesn’t sound so hard. For all of history, human beings have adapted to our environments and have adapted our environments to us. We are the creatures who take what we find around us and use it to serve our own ends and improve our lives. If our ancestors could run barefoot for a hundred miles in the desert summer, survive for months with very little food, and build gigantic stone structures using nothing more than hand-tools, we can put our phones down every once in a while.
But are we really capable of delaying gratification, resisting temptation, disobeying our incentives, and ignoring the algorithmic forces in our lives?
Of course, we are.
Not that consumption is per se bad. Overconsumption can be, but living requires consuming resources and information. The problem is only in excess, in this case excessive consumption, to the exclusion of other activities.
Which isn’t in the bag to make consumers think there are more chips inside than there really are. The air protects the chips when they’re transported to the store.
Although, there are physical changes in people’s brains, which are detectable using current instruments.
Not that there’s anything wrong with withdrawing for those few who choose it. Nobody has a duty to engage in the digital world.
In this case, I am not referring to Millennials or Gen X or Gen Z or Boomers, but simply to all of us who are alive today and interact with the internet.
Sure, some people think those last two are evil. I think they’re wrong, because I don’t believe in endowing physical objects with properties inanimate objects can’t have.
Although, I find it interesting that some of the same people arguing that physicality is overrated are also the ones arguing that since social media doesn’t cause the same physical withdrawal symptoms as crystal meth, nobody can be addicted to social media.
Wendell Berry supposedly wrote that word processing couldn’t be all that great because nobody had ever produced anything as good as Dante’s Inferno using a word processor – a statement that commits a serious logical fallacy. It isn’t a relevant comparison, in the same way that we wouldn’t decide after one year of working that the 22-year-old computer programmer was never going to be as good as the 52-year-old programmer since he hadn’t yet produced any software as good as the 52-year-old.