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Apps can give you a number; only people can provide a narrative. Technology can expose mechanism; people have to find meaning.
Social media can also inhibit inner dialogue, shifting our focus from reflection to self-presentation.
Facebook wasn’t designed to stall self-reflection. But it often does.
One of my fears is being left out or missing something.” Facebook assuages that fear.
I have found that when people use the aspirational self as an object for self-reflection, it can make them feel curiously envious—of themselves.
When people construct an avatar, they often give it qualities that allow them to express aspects of themselves they would like to explore. This means that a game world can become a place to experiment with identity.
surprisingly, using avatars to experiment with identity can be more straightforward than using a Facebook profile for this purpose.
In the case of the avatar, you begin with clarity that you are “playing” a character that is someone other than you. That’s the game. On Facebook, you are, ostensibly, representing yourself and talking about your own life.
In theory, you know the difference between yourself and your Facebook self. But lines blur and it can be hard to keep them straight. It’s like telling very small lies over time. You forget the truth because it is so close to the lies.
Self-reflection makes us vulnerable. That’s why its traditions so often include ways of protecting one’s privacy
the definition of self-reflection has narrowed: It means control over your connections. We’ve seen this before, solitude defined as time with a managed crowd.
When you stare at a screen, you feel completely alone. That sense of being alone with the person to whom you are writing—as though you were the only two people in the world—often as not blocks out what you know to be true. Email can be seen; it will be stored; and then it can be seen again.
The seeming ephemerality of what is on the screen masks the truth: What you write is indelible.
The wise begin to say such things as, “Only say online what you wouldn’t mind having posted on a company bulletin board.” But then, the wise go on Facebook and Instagram and don’t follow their own rules.
It is never bad to have a new evocative object. What matters is how we use
when we use devices that track our physical state to provide clues for self-understanding, we work with another constraint: We try to find a narrative that fits our numbers.
More and more of our lives—body and soul—can be captured as data and fed back to us, analyzed by algorithm. And in the process, we are usually asked to treat ourselves and the algorithm as a black box.
Does taking our emotional pulse and giving it a number keep us on the feeling or does it distract us because, once categorized, we have done something “constructive” with the feeling and don’t have to attend to it anymore?
Numbers are an element in a narrative process, but they are not just an element. When we have a number, it tends to take on special importance even as it leaves to us all the heavy lifting of narrative construction. Yet it constrains that construction because the story we tell has to justify the number.
We talk about the “output” from our tracking programs as “results.” But they are not results. They are first steps. But too often, they are first steps that don’t suggest second steps.
“To the extent that these technologies have an impact, it is because they spark conversations along the way.”
talk therapy
A first strategy is not to take words literally but to have patience with them. Wait and see where words lead you if you let them take you anywhere.
A second strategy is to pay special attention to how the legacy of past relationships persist in the present.
In the safety of talk therapy you learn that you tell yourself small, unconscious lies—to large effect. And you learn to stop, reflect, and correct.
you learn to recognize moments when you accuse an intimate of the qualities that you most dislike in yourself.
Talk therapy slows things down so that they can be opened out.
The sensibility of psychodynamic therapy—its focus on meaning, its commitment to patience and developing a working therapeutic relationship, its belief that following an associative thread of ideas, even if they seem unrelated, will ultimately have a big payoff—has a lot to offer digital culture.
Talk therapy encourages reflection when we are seized by the need to “fix” something—and now! The psychoanalytic tradition suggests that action before self-understanding is rarely a good way to improve one’s situation.
If you act out, you create change and perhaps crisis. All of the new noise you make can drown out the feelings you were originally trying to understand. Nevertheless, it is often what people try first.
Central to the method in talk therapy is learning what you think by listening to yourself in conversation.
By the end of a successful treatment, the patient leaves with the voice of the therapist “brought within.” Patients have learned to be their own dialogue partner. One learns to take first reactions and give them a second look. One learns to ask, “Who is really speaking here? Where are my feelings coming from? Before I accuse the world of neglecting me, am I neglecting the world?”
The psychoanalytic tradition deepens the culture of conversation because it demonstrates how much we can get out of it.
psychoanalysis is more than a treatment; it contributes a vocabulary that suggests a set of core values: patience, meaning, the centrality of narrative.
Our quantitative selves leave data trails that are the beginning of our stories, not the results, not the conclusions.
children, from the earliest ages, complain about having to compete with smartphones for their parents’ attention.
The other night I went out to dinner with my dad. And we were just having this conversation and I didn’t know the answer to something, like the director of a movie we had seen. And he automatically wanted to look it up on his phone. And I was like, “Daddy, stop Googling. I want to talk to you. I don’t care what the right answer is! I just want to talk to you.”
Families tell me they like to have their arguments through text, email, and Gchat—that this helps them express themselves more precisely.
To join in conversation is to imagine another mind, to empathize, and to enjoy gesture, humor, and irony in the medium of talk.
When adults listen during conversations, they show children how listening works. In family conversation, children learn that it is comforting and pleasurable to be heard and understood.
Family conversation is where children first learn to see other people as different from themselves and worthy of understanding. It is where children learn to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, often the shoes of a sibling. If your child is angry at a classmate, you can suggest that it might help to try to understand the other child’s point of view. It is in family conversations that children have the greatest chance of learning that what other people are saying (and how they are saying it) is the key to what they are feeling. And that this matters.
Upset feelings don’t have to be hidden or denied. What matters is what you do with them.
Family conversation is a place to learn that you can talk things out rather than act on your feelings, however strong. In this way, family conversation can work
Family conversation also teaches that some things take time to sort through—quite a bit of time. And that it is possible to find this time because there are people who will take the time.
When you have a protected space, you don’t need to watch every word.
Parents wonder if cell phone use leads to Asperger’s syndrome. It is not necessary to settle this debate to state the obvious. If we don’t look at our children and engage them in conversation, it is not surprising if they grow up awkward and withdrawn. And anxious about talk.
social media is set up to teach different lessons. Instead of promoting the value of authenticity, it encourages performance. Instead of teaching the rewards of vulnerability, it suggests that you put on your best face. And instead of learning how to listen, you learn what goes into an effective broadcast.
“Someday, someday soon, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”
“We become, neurologically, what we think.” If you don’t use certain parts of the brain, they will fail to develop, or be connected more weakly. By extension, if young children do not use
To get children back to conversation—and learning the empathic skills that come from conversation—the first, crucial step is to talk with children.
