Leslie and I love a restaurant in Toronto called Rasa. They just celebrated being open for ten years—a huge restaurant feat!— and since day one they’ve always had this striking poster on the back wall of the cubicles in their bathrooms. There’s no mention of it anywhere! But I looked it up and it’s actually excerpted from Sherry Turkle’s NYT piece 'The Documented Life.' See if it makes you pause like it does me!
Neil
L II F E ON PAUSE
By Sherry Turkle
A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment. In this, it shares something with all the other ways we break up our day, when we text during class, in meetings, at the theatre, at dinners with friends. And yes, at funerals, but also more regularly at church and synagogue services. We text when we are in bed with our partners and spouses. We watch our political representatives text during sessions.
Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us "on pause" in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations "on pause". When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.
We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore. But they make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything.
These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they reach for a device. In a movie theatre, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts.
A 14-year-old boy said to me: "Don’t people know that sometimes you can just look out the window of a car and see the world go by and it is wonderful. You can think. People don’t know that."
This was about the beauty of pausing. If it speaks to you, you might also like Canada Is Awesome—a book I wrote full of the things that make us pause, smile, and remember why we love this place. It’s available everywhere, and you can check it out here.