Loss of Care

In the early stages of my grief after my husband died, I was grateful for texting because answering any question, especially about how I was doing meant falling apart. The distance and detachment of texting allowed me to communicate without losing control of my emotions. But the level to which this detachment now pervades modern consciousness worries me. Connecting to my last post about the condition of modern attention, I was struck while recently in Ireland, by a column by Joe Humphreys in the Irish Times focusing on the same direction. Referring to the work of an Irish based study group, Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment, who draw on the work of Simone Weil and her philosophy of attention, Humphreys asks, “What, after all is the smartphone but a mechanism for drawing your attention away from the physical reality surrounding you?” It’s an important question. What we notice is what we care about, good and bad. With the lack of attention to our environment, the concern that should be generated by what’s being eroded isn’t there. Our image of our world is being blinkered by one small device. The loss of care, of feeling for our surroundings is a casualty of the phone-based lifestyle. The detachment I appreciated when grieving has become a pervasive default state, the full range of emotions flattened by the same inexpressive text. I think to myself of what I wrote about a friend’s piece last month and how deeply expressive each of the fonts of each of the layers of words were, adding a tone of voice and emotional attitude. What she’d done with the style of each font felt like a master orator’s persuasive tones in a monologue. The option to illustrate, in that piece, an open-mouthed reptile near the bottom added anxiety to the whole. It's not the words that are the problem. There is privacy in writing by hand as well as a level of intimacy that is hard to achieve with technology. Sometimes a letter arrives, and I know instantly who it is from, handwritten, hand drawn and collaged, the appearance says more than the words themselves. It’s a multidimensional depth of expression which is why letters are kept for life, expansive personal messages that say they care in every part. We don’t realize how much is lost when we only email and text, all content regimented, made uniform by the mechanism. We make more of ourselves visible when we write by hand. Taking time to look, to notice the world around us, seeing the needs of others and the condition of the environment build care for them. Thinking about how we express ourselves to others offers a choice of how much care we want to give.