Tag: experience

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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A couple of months ago I went back to my alma mater in Colorado. They gave me a little temporary office, and as I went upstairs I thought, Oh, my God, I used to live here. The room next to the room they gave me was my bedroom from a fraught year in my college experience. It was the weirdest thing, because that guy that I was was so ambitious and stupid, so not in touch with how one went about having a writing life. But he was pretty earnest. There was something very wild about being almost 70 and standing there and going, OK, so what that kid wanted to do, you kind of did it. I can’t quite describe it. Also, I started late. The first book didn’t come out till I was 38, so I feel like I’m racing to do really good work in whatever time is left. But in that early time, one of the things that was so beautiful was that my stupid dreams of being a prodigy were obviously not going to happen. So for the first time it was like, All right, what if you don’t have any writing career? What if you’re just, hopefully, a good father and husband? And in that space I found that there was plenty to live for. I’d always secretly thought I was kind of shallow, that I was all ambition. And to find out that shorn of that, I still liked being alive and still felt a lot of happiness? That was very sweet.

— George Saunders, from “George Saunders is No Saint (Despite What You May Have Heard)” by David Marchese (NY Times, January 10, 2026)

Technology…the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it.

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“Technology…the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it.” — Max Frisch Homo Faber (1957)”

This is a book about the disappearance of experience…

Certain types of experience—some rooted deeply in our evolutionary history, such as face-to-face interaction and various forms of pleasure-seeking; others more recent and reflective of cultural norms, such as patience and our sense of public space and place—are fading from our lives. Many of these experiences are what, historically, have helped us form and nurture a shared reality as human beings.

Mediating technologies have been a significant force behind these changes. By “technology” I mean the devices such as computers, smartphones, smart speakers, wearable sensors, and, in our likely future, implantable objects, as well as the software, algorithms, and Internet platforms we rely on to translate the data these devices assemble about us. Technology also includes the virtual realities and augmented realities we experience through our use of these tools. Our integration of these tools into our daily lives has blurred the boundary between “virtual” things—things not grounded in physical reality that we encounter while online or via mediating technologies—and “real” things embedded in physical space.

These technologies mediate between us and our world. For now, we still have some choice in how much mediation we allow. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people lived lives of near-constant mediation out of necessity, as work, education, and social life migrated online. Culturally we were prepared for this shift, given how much time we were already spending using screens large and small to mediate our daily lives, and our evolving preference for such forms of interaction.

That preference encourages the embrace of new forms of mediated experience that do not necessarily improve our interactions as human beings, even as they also bring greater convenience. Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus. We are beginning to see hints of how these new ways of experiencing the world—more mediated, more personalized, more immediate yet less bounded by the realities of the physical world—have altered our understanding of reality.

— Christine Rosen, from the Introduction of “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World” (W. W. Norton & Company, September 10, 2024)

Book Reviews:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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As you get older, you live more life; you have more real experiences that you add to the emotional toolbox without realizing that you’re doing it. And so sometimes, as you get older, quite honestly, emotions are easier to access because they just simmer below the surface all the time — because there’s just so damn many of them.

— Kate Winslet, from “Kate Winslet Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge.” (NY Times, March 3, 2024)

How reassuring! How desperate!

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HiroharuMatsumoto_photography-02-alone-loneliness

I boarded a flight at Kennedy Airport in New York. There were HSBC ads in the jet bridge. I flew for 24 hours to the bottom of the world. There were HSBC ads in the jet bridge…

I left a country, the United States, in the midst of an election campaign. I arrived in a country, Australia, in the midst of an election campaign…

I had a cappuccino before I left. There was a cute heart shape traced in the foam. Next to the Sydney Opera House, familiar from photographs, I had a cappuccino. There was a cute heart shape traced in the foam…

From my window in Brooklyn Heights I watch joggers at water’s edge, some with dogs or infants in strollers…From my Sydney hotel window I gaze at an urban landscape similarly transformed. I watch joggers at water’s edge. They wear the same gear. They use the same devices. They are into wellness in the same way.

I lose myself in the silvery play of moonlight on water. Where on earth am I? I have traveled a long way through time zones over a vast ocean to find myself in the same place. My Twitter feed looks the same. My Facebook friends have not changed. My little universe with all its little excitements and aggravations is still at my fingertips. My bills are maddeningly accessible. Through an immense displacement nothing has been left behind. Even in another hemisphere I contemplate my life from the same angle. People argue about climate change and same-sex marriage and jobs and immigration, as if the world is now a place where everyone discusses the same thing…

In his great poem “The City,” C.P. Cavafy wrote that: “As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.” We never escape our own skins, nor our lives lived to this point, however far we go in search of escape. But today’s trap, fashioned through technology, is of a different nature. The homogenization of experience is also an insidious invitation to conform.

Experience, like journalism, withers without immersion in place. At some level, the truly lived moment involves the ability to get lost — lost in a conversation, or in the back alleys or Naples, or in silence, or in the scents and inflections of a new city. There is no greater thrill than being lost in this way because self is left behind, a form of liberation.

Yet a world is taking form that wants you never to be lost, never to feel displaced, never to be unanchored, never to be unable to photograph yourself, never to stand in awe before mystery, never to exit your safety zone (or only in managed fashion), never to leave your life behind: a world where you travel for 24 hours to your point of departure.

How reassuring! How desperate!…

So I am somewhere else after all. Surely I am. I wake at night, sleep by day, and find myself altogether lost in translation.

~ Roger Cohen, excerpts from Australia or Anywhere

Photo: Hiro Harumatsumoto via Ignant.de

Ho Ho Ho!

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christmas-tree-sales-chart
X-Mas Tree Sales Up. Mall Sales Not.

wsj.com: Will Christmas Trees Light Up Retail:

“The gap between Christmas-tree and store sales may be a sign that the shift in spending away from brick-and-mortar retailers and toward online shopping, and experiences over things, has intensified this year. Put simply, people would rather spend money at Amazon, or on meals and vacations, than on stuff at the store. That may explain why Christmas-tree sellers aren’t getting hurt by the changed environment.

For many people getting a tree, hauling it home and trimming it counts more as buying an experience more than it counts as buying a thing.”