Finding Permanence in a Pixelated World

Last week, I went to Friday night services at synagogue. Immediately following, and all week in fact, I have been aware of feeling profoundly human, grounded and well -- a part of something much larger than just myself. As is customary, the evening included singing, meditation and a talk by the rabbi. The topic of the talk changes weekly, but what remains constant is the nature of the theme. The conversation is always about something universal and what it means to be human. This week's talk was about our relationship with obstacles, fear, and limitation. The rabbi spoke of the fear of both pain and joy, addressing specifically our desire to run from that which scares us. He counseled us to lean into fear and to work with and within our limitations -- not against them. Wise words.

The rituals that this rabbi and countless religious and spiritual leaders offer each week in their in-house services are important not only because of the content of the messages they deliver, but because of their power to make us feel connected to the profundity of the human experience, and something more vast than just our ever-changing personal experience. They provide a narrative for our lives, mark the stages and passages of a life, place us in a larger human context, and address the infinite shared aspects of this mortal journey. Services provide bones for the body of life. These rituals point us to the big picture and remind us that our personal story is part of a larger story: humanity... existence. We come to understand that we are living something profoundly real -- life -- and that it is deserving of our most serious attention.

Given the fact that we as a society, and particularly our younger generations, are spending far less time engaged in brick and mortar religious and spiritual services and far more time engaged in social media, I am wondering how this shift in our habits will impact us. What I see in my psychotherapy practice is that people feel increasingly disconnected from a sense of context, meaning and the larger human narrative. They speak of being un-tethered, and not knowing what their life is supposed to be about or when it is going to begin. The teen years disappear into the 20s and then the 30s and 40s and onward, all while they wait to feel connected to some purpose, permanence -- something bigger and more lasting than their momentary dramas. There is a growing sense of ungrounded or placeless-ness in people's experience, as if the larger narrative within which their lives could be understood and once made sense is slipping away. We are floating in a world that is changing by the nanosecond, but at the same time, has no ground.

Social media is about immediacy. Before you can finish a thought, there is a new one to replace it. We are living in a Disneyworld for the monkey mind, celebrating every opinion, like, dislike, emotion, and sensation that passes through our awareness. "I am drinking a latte." "I like this movie." "I hated this steak." "I disagree with this decision." The thoughts stream by unceasingly, beckoning seductively as their 140 characters evaporate into the ether.

Tweets, Facebook musings, and even blogs (this one included) find form for a split second and then splinter into the vacuum that is social media. The speed, impermanence and shallowness of the conversation causes us to feel disconnected and disintegrated. Instant and irrelevant. The opposite of brick and mortar services, social media leaves us feeling ungrounded and without a larger context in which to place our human story. In this immediately-consumed and discarded culture, there is no longer any weight to be found and only banter to anchor us. Our own journey, indeed our own being, feels as transitory and meaningless as the latest tweet.

It is important to come together, shoulder to shoulder, to contemplate life -- to consider where we fit into the larger human story, and what meaning our collective and individual journeys hold. It is important that we give weight to this thing called existence. This contemplative process not only keeps us feeling well, but also helps us develop and evolve as people. We mature through the examination of our place and purpose on earth. We develop wisdom and substance. By acknowledging and addressing our shared experience as human beings, we grow more connected to others, the world and ourselves. We deepen personally and collectively as we honor that which is not whimsical and ephemeral.

My hope is that as we disappear farther into the world of social media, we do not forget these rituals that create a structure and narrative for our human story. I hope too, that in our love affair with the instantaneous, we do not lose touch with the disciplines that allow us to feel the roots beneath our feet and all that has come before us, and will come after our personal "I"s and momentary musings have disappeared from the twitter-feed. We cannot maintain a sense of meaning or wholeness in an entirely pixelated world. We become pixels ourselves -- without a sense of where we are or even if we are. It is crucial that we stay grounded in some kind of permanence, not a personal permanence, but the permanence of the human journey. Ultimately, in order to stay anchored, we need more than just hashtags.

Why We Are Addicted to Checking Email... And How to Stop

I check email more often than I should, and more often than I enjoy. I am not alone in this. I have clients and friends who check their email up to 100 times per day. Some, even more. Given the amount of pleasure that email actually delivers, it seems that the urge to check it is disproportionally high and out of sync with reality and well-being (and possibly sanity). Most of the emails I receive are junk and go straight into the trash. Some are reminders of tasks that I need to address or events/opportunities that I should know about (and buy tickets for) but don't really want to know about. And the smallest percentage, a few here and there, are notes from friends, family, or colleagues that I am actually happy to receive. Because of the glaring disconnect between the experience of email and our relentless desire to check it, I started asking the following questions, "Why do we check email so often?" and "What are we really hoping to find in these little electronic Post-its?"

Email triggers a part of the brain that I call "lottery brain." It is the part of the brain that produces the thought/hope/belief that miracles can happen, and specifically, to us -- personally. To some degree, "lottery brain" is an adaptive part of us, as it inspires hope and a sense of possibility, as long as that hope is also supported by proactive agency in our behavior. When I asked people what they were secretly hoping to find in their email, what the lottery email would be, I was told everything from:

"An old sweetheart, the one who got away, saying that he/she needed to see me."
"A family member/friend finally apologizing to me for what he/she did to me."
"News that a windfall of money is owed to me."
"A perfect job/professional offer from someone who happened to discover me."
"An acknowledgment of a piece of work or good deed that I did."
"A note expressing my importance in someone's life."
"A love letter from my husband."
"A note of gratitude/expression of love from a child."

There were others, but most fell into one of these general categories. Regardless of the answer, just asking the questions, "Who would we really want to hear from? What would we really hope for?" is a wonderful exercise and can help us understand ourselves better.

Lottery brain is susceptible to addictions. The fact that it doesn't make sense -- our checking something every 15 minutes that has never or rarely provided the result that we are hoping for -- is irrelevant. It doesn't need to make sense. In fact, its non-sense-making nature is part of its seduction. Miracles don't make sense, and still they happen. Don't they? Email is also addictive because it contains what I see as the four features of highly habitual/addictive behaviors:

1. Attention, specifically, attention is focused, but mindful presence is NOT necessary.

2. Distraction is readily offered. We are successfully pulled away from whatever we were (or were not) doing.

3. Hands. We use our hands in executing the task (which I surmise is related to the evolutionary importance of hands as a tool).

4. Delight is possible through the behavior (lottery mind). Its acronym makes for an ironic ADHD (which bears no relationship to attention deficit hyperactive disorder). Behaviors with these four features have a great capacity to hook us and hypnotize us into paying a lot of attention to something that doesn't justify the time and energy invested.

If we were rats in a cage whose food only slid down the chute when we opened an email that made us feel better, would we keep checking, or move on to another task that delivered food more efficiently? Probably we would move on and start banging our paws or flitting our whiskers on some other surface. We keep at it because (in many cases) we are addicted, which means that we are not making wise or thoughtful decisions but rather are following a kind of primal urge, which has trumped the part of the mind that can choose whether to check or not to check.

In the grand scheme, does checking email really matter? Is email (or text) addiction even important enough to understand or try to tackle? I believe that the answer is an emphatic yes, and no less worthy of our attention than drug, alcohol, food, sex or any other addiction. Every addiction, no matter its lure, pulls us out of our lives and out of the present moment. Knowing that we can always check, we become more distracted and more dependent upon something external to escape whatever we don't want to feel or do. We can't or don't stop doing something that no longer nourishes us, and that we don't want to keep doing. Slowly, we start to lose or abandon other important parts of our life in order to be able to engage more fully in our addiction.

The first step in breaking any addiction is awareness. We can start by simply noticing the impulse to check when it arises, pausing before checking, and asking ourselves, "Why do we want to check in this moment?" "Is there an email we are expecting, needing or hoping for?" "Is there something we are feeling or doing that we want to get away from?" "Are we bored and looking for a place to put our attention?" Getting to know the beast is the first step in taming the beast. I know that I personally feel significantly better when I check less -- less distracted, anxious and agitated, more grounded and present, with far more interesting ideas (that I can actually finish). And so, regardless of whether you feel yourself to be addicted to checking email (or text messages for that matter), I offer this inquiry as a step in the direction of feeling well. Investigating our impulses, whatever they might be and however often they might arise, is a path to becoming more self-aware, which is always a worthy pursuit, and the natural antidote to all addiction.