Digital Detox: Reclaiming Empathy ?n the Swipe-Right Era

Written by Carin-Isabel Knoop, Daven Morrison, MD, and Antonio Sadaric, Ph.D.

This is a short excerpt from the originally published article on Artificial Empathy, Digital Dependency and Loneliness @ Medium on August 13, 2023 by Carin-Isabel Knoop, available here.

When things go wrong, we can turn to Tik Tok, where we can easily outsource and crowdsource empathy and compassion with and from strangers.

Our virtual interactions simulate a sense of belonging and togetherness, although effectively leaving us feeling empty after the fact.

“To feel for others, you need to feel your feelings,” a GenZer told us, “but we are used to numbing them. TikTok and other apps only further the detachment, and we don’t know how to interact. Plus, none of us took the time to grieve the pandemic; we moved on to the next rush. Apps allow a mirage of connection, but life passes us by.”

What we will return to as we chase Artificial Empathy is an appreciation of the human exchange. We know in our viscera. It is something unique to us to experience an internal resonance with someone else.

Like a piano string that spontaneously vibrates to the sound waves it encounters, we will never stop requiring it.

Technology can attract and sometimes retain our attention, but it cannot sustain us.

Here are 4 ways of exercising our empathy muscle and adjusting our mindset:

+Exercise 1: Control your closet egomaniac.

Question: Might being constantly catered to by technology make you more self-centered and impatient?

A core requirement for being empathetic is to contain our ego and resist the temptation to feel superior to someone not handling things as you would.

Our ego is not the only one in the room. It is essential to stay curious about this person but also about life.

Some things are unique about this person and their life circumstances that may be shaping their behavior in this situation and feelings about it. Recognize what might be reasonable to the other and be open and creative. Employees and managers often feel they must be at odds as interests diverge. What about this experience makes sense to you, and what do I need to know?

In addition, we need to curtail our tendency to know better about how things should be going.

Life does not follow a script, neither in our hearts nor at home or work. We must embrace our humility and remain polite and kind even when we might not feel like it and even if the employee is disengaged, angry, or agitated. This requires patience in times of high stress.

We seek closure and don’t have time, so we rush to find solutions.

Action idea: Next time you find yourself in a challenging situation, pause to reflect on what got everyone there. Humans do not have up and down votes or emoticons attached to their hearts and minds. Machines are taking over our hearts and minds. When do you feel that they are guiding yours?

+Exercise 2: Do try to look up more.

Question: How often do you turn to your phone to avoid strangers but also your friends, family, and colleagues?

Phones, just as packs of cigarettes, or now vapes, can both be sources of comfort but also an addiction that enables us to escape ourselves for just a little bit. They assuage our need to hold something in our hands when we are bored or feel awkward in public.

They fit neatly in our pockets, where we can touch them for reassurance. Both smoking and checking our phones can be sources of dopamine.

And while cigarettes affect our physical health, mobile phones are increasingly blamed for impairing our mental health and have moved way beyond their original purpose, the old-fashioned phone call.

They help us create our own little world where we feel good for a moment.

Phones are an interface to our imaginary worlds, where we can extend how we interact with people we know, people we didn’t, and more recent “people” created by machines.

For decades, we have progressively disconnected from people nearby and our surroundings. Unlike the cigarette ritual where one “bums a smoke” or offers “light” to a fellow smoker in need, our phones exclude us from this human interaction.

Unlike the cigarette ritual that brings us closer, phones make us lean back emotionally.

They make us lean forward physically, arching our backs like elders who cannot loop up anymore, backs rounded on the way to kyphosis.

Action idea: Catch yourself next time when you reach for the escape hatch and drug in your pocket. Examine why you are doing it — to avoid boredom, hide social awkwardness, kill time, or bridge insomnia. Then spend the time you might have spent scrolling “feeling those feelings,” sousing out potential origins, and thinking about alternative “solutions.”

+Exercise 3: Perform your own dependency audit.

Question: What fraction of your world is mediated by technology?

As we wrote above, more and more of our lives are now online. Like the frog tethered to the mainframe, we feel that we cannot escape us.

Employers are even using phones to track who is at the office when because we are never without them, even in the bathroom.

During hurricane Sandy some families spent hours without power and realized they had lost the ability to talk and entertain themselves and others.

Action idea: List everything you have outsourced to technology, social media platforms, and apps. To what extent would your life be impacted if electricity were to fail tomorrow?

Exercise 4: Shed your avatar's skin.

Question: What fraction of your presentation is a life of pretense?

Over the past few years, we have increasingly outsourced love, support, and empathy.

Dating apps are projected to grow nearly 8% from 2023 to 2030. Smartphones, connectivity, and accessibility drive this nearly $800 million industry and its peers.

A new language around dating points to the behaviors it enables and perhaps encourages: disappearing suddenly out of conversation or relationships without explanation nor closure (ghosting or caspering, for a nicer version); presenting differently than reality (catfishing with photos and now with Gen AI generated chat content); or stringing someone for the power-trip or as potential backups (bread-crumbing and bench-warming).

At showtime, individuals must pretend to be the person they presented as online, often resulting in brief encounters and disappointment.

No problem, modern relationships are like modern technology — easily replaceable. Instead of investing time in relationship development, people turn to the abundance of users on dating apps in search of an alternate ideal.

Action idea: Whether or not you are using these apps, observe if they might be shaping you or your employees and colleagues. If we are trained to unilaterally end conversations online, we might find it harder to have difficult conversations in person. If we break up with people online, we might get fired by text message.

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Read the rest of our article here.