Is Our Society Suffering From Ambiguous Loss?
And Are Our Children the Guinea Pigs?
I spent some time in a children’s hospital emergency waiting room last week, and what I witnessed there has me pretty depressed: a room full of parents on their smartphones. I watched a mother sit down with her two kids, and when she pulled out her smartphone, her children followed suit. It’s an instinct that I see amongst adults and feel often myself. When someone I’m with pulls out their smartphone, they are signaling that their attention is elsewhere. Although I may be sitting next to them, I am suddenly alone. And so, I combat this feeling of loneliness by pulling out my loneliness-busting machine: the smartphone.
I recently listened to a great interview with the psychotherapist and marriage counselor, Esther Perel. One concept that she kept circling back to is the idea of ambiguous loss. I’d heard of this concept before and have experienced it strongly in my relationship to my father, who suffered from dementia in the last years of his life. Although he was physically with me, he was not emotionally or mentally present, giving me a strange sense of loss for someone that I could see and hold. Esther Perel talks about ambiguous loss in modern day couples; although your partner may be physically present beside you in bed, they might be mentally elsewhere as all of their attention is directed towards their phone.
I thought of ambiguous loss as I watched parents lose themselves in their phones while their sick child sat beside them in the emergency waiting room. The parents may be physically present for the child, but the child is nearly invisible as the parents’ focus is elsewhere. I’m not a sociologist, but when I look around and witness this phenomenon happening all around me, I wonder what kind of social experiment we are doing to our children. This generation of children are being raised by parents who, very often, have addictive relationships with their phones. Today’s children are growing up with a tiny computer in their hands, and are being taught by those around them to turn to this gadget anytime they feel loneliness, sadness, boredom, or any other feeling of discomfort.
I know it’s impossible--and unhealthy--for parents to pay constant obsessive attention to their children. But it’s not only that parents are basically ignoring their children to scroll through Instagram; it’s the habit that they’re teaching their offspring by doing so. Never before in our history have we had a cultural phenomenon as impactful as the smartphone, and our children are the guinea pigs.
I’m not a parent, but I was raised by two wonderful parents. Most of my childhood was spent in the care of my father, who picked my sister and I up from school and took us to work with him. Luckily for us, his work was on a sailboat.
Since his passing two weeks ago, I’ve spent a lot of time delving into old photographs and reminiscing about a backlog of memories from childhood. What I remember most is the attention – the quality of attention – that my father paid to my sister and I. He asked us questions, challenged our answers, and encouraged critical thinking. When we were done with our homework, he put us to work: sanding, polishing, varnishing, cleaning every corner of that sailboat with a toothbrush. A handyman who knew how to do everything from sewing to building computers, my father despised mindlessness. Television was not allowed in our home, and if we were ever caught watching the tiny set in my mother’s bedroom, we were forced to write lines: “I will not watch television.” He was convinced that watching TV rots the brain, and I’m convinced that he was right – especially for a young brain that’s still developing!
His focus was singular and razor-sharp: on his daughters and on his work. He knew what homework we had missed and what project was due soon. Due to this attention and intention, we never questioned whether or not our father loved us. His care was evident in all that he did. As a result, when my father passed, I could be grateful for the fact that I truly knew my father, and had been known by him. The time we had spent together had been quality time; even if our relationship was not perfect, ours was a deep and meaningful connection. In our increasingly isolated culture, I think about how rare that kind of connection is, even between parents and children, or between loving partners. How many people are unconsciously mourning the loss of the parent or partner who is sitting beside them, engrossed in another world?
Tip of the Week
Switch smartphones with your partner or a friend for the weekend. You'll find that you're less inclined to reach for it constantly since it won't have your fave apps and group chats.
Digital Health Around the Web
Facebook's CEO is catching heat for their decision not to fact-check political ads, including from Hillary Clinton who says Zuckerberg should pay a price for the damage he's doing to democracy.
A throwback to this great piece by Nicholas Carr that poses the important question: Is Google making us stupid?
The president's Twitter-happy persona has led his followers out of their "wallflower" shells, especially when being re-tweeted by him can lead to a brush with cybercelebrity.
Your digital footprint is being used to calculate a secret consumer score.
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