A Pocket of Astonishment and Shame
I keep my phone in my pocket like a small, obedient animal. It is beautiful and absurdly capable. Maps that know the street names I forgot, cameras that catch the way light sits on a cup, an encyclopedia folded into my palm. Sometimes I watch friends navigate the tech world through their devices, eyes flicking and expressions changing with the rhythm of a feed, and I feel both pride and a private little shame. Pride because the tools are astonishing; shame because the people using them so often look like they’re only skimming the surface of what those tools might be for.
Handling vs Using in the Tech World
There’s a difference, I’ve been thinking, between being able to use something and being able to handle it. Use is the obvious part: knowing where the settings are and how to make a group chat. Handle is more so a moral-and-practical competence. It’s the ability to decide when not to use, to set up the tool in a way that honors not only its capacities but the person you want to remain. We are surrounded by technologies worthy of stewardship (algorithms, biotech etc) and yet most of our communal energy goes into minor virtuosity; how to get more followers, how to stage an image, how to optimize for a moment’s engagement. That virtuosity is not unskilled; it requires craft. But it’s not the craft I wish we were developing.
When the Feed Becomes the Mirror
I don’t mean to moralize. I use the same platforms I write about; I am guilty of the same impulses, the quick scroll in the waiting room, the reflexive photograph. But the more I watch my own habits, and those of people I care about, the more it feels like a mismatch has settled between our tools and our habits. We have built instruments that can hold entire libraries of texts, connect a stranger across continents, simulate weather systems, model pandemics, and then we mostly turn them into stages for selfhood to perform. The average Joe scrolling through social platforms, seeing his life reflected back as content, is a symptom of a cultural pivot where the “life” of a person is increasingly curated for an audience rather than cultivated internally.
Curating isn’t new. People put on their best for neighbors and colleagues as long as there have been neighbors and colleagues, but the scale and speed are new. Our feeds present us a continuous, edited mirror. It is a mirror that tells you which surface gets attention, then rewards your mimicry with a small hit of validation. Over time, mimicry becomes habit. Habits harden into default behaviors. The self becomes less an inner place where questions are held and more a profile to be refreshed. The curious, uneasy thing is not only that we do this. It’s that our tools make this easy and satisfying enough that fewer people feel the need to practice the hard work of interiority. That one only comes with patience, reflective boredom, long attention spans, and the uncomfortable labor of being alone with doubt.
From Rituals to Feedback Loops
We used to have rituals that gave shape to the day, such as mealtime conversations or weekly prayers or community gatherings. Those rituals held attention in certain directions; toward family, craft, neighborhood, or simply the quiet of a task well done. Technology has made many of the old rituals optional, and it has offered, in their place, a frame where attention can be endlessly redirected and commodified. We become shoppers of sensation, sampling meaning like a passerby tastes free samples at a market stall. The thing we are hungry for, connection that runs deeper than a comment thread, can so easily be impersonated by a stream of sympathetic emojis.
That impersonation matters. When a feedback loop starts to stand in for intimacy, people learn to trust the loop more than they trust themselves. We listen to what gets likes and let that calibrate our desires. We learn to translate distress into a format that is shareable, because care that is polished into content is care that can be witnessed. In such a landscape, vulnerability sometimes becomes a performance strategy. You can’t entirely blame the platform; it only responds to the signals we offer. Still, I wonder about the long-term effect of training people to expect external recognition as a thermometer for their inner weather. What happens to longing when every ache can be made visible and then measured by someone else’s attention?
Apprenticeship and Small Practices (an Invitation)
Perhaps the most surprising part, at least to me, is how little of this conversation is about skill. We tend to talk about tech in binary ways; access versus no access, innovation versus stagnation. Those are important debates. But the more overlooked failure lies in the scarcity of what I’d call digital stewardship, the habits and virtues required to manage and live with powerfully enabling tools without letting them remake the soul. Stewardship includes things like the discipline to disconnect, the capacity for long-form reading, the humility to recognize algorithmic persuasion, the civic sense to demand platforms serve public goods and not just private engagement metrics.
Let’s say two people have identical phones. One uses it to read slowly, to keep a grocery list, to call a friend, to photograph small delights, and to occasionally watch a video that teaches a new skill. The other does many of those same things but adds a layer of performance; every meal is photographed, every thought is framed as content. Both are “users,” but only one is a handler in the sense I mean, someone who orients their life toward ends beyond constant notice. Handling requires a vocabulary and a grammar for living with tools, a language for saying no, a map for how to distribute attention, a sense of modesty about what technology can and cannot give.
I think of older crafts when I try to describe this. A master potter doesn’t just know how to shape clay; she knows how to listen to the wheel, when to let the piece rest, how to repair a crack. Those are tacit, bodily knowledges honed over years. The digital craftsman, in contrast, is often judged by metrics that reward speed and gloss. We have a surplus of tools for broadcasting; we have a shortage of practices for listening. You might argue that crafts always change with new materials and that’s true. But the current shift is more radical because the tools not only extend our capacity but alter the economy of attention itself. They shape what it feels like to be seen, known, and loved.
And then there’s scale. Technology magnifies what you feed it. A misaligned habit that would have been private in the past can be amplified into a social norm now. If the most visible people are those who broadcast themselves loudly, the rest learn to emulate them. That feedback loop affects young people profoundly because identity forms in relation to whatever is most present. I have small, half-formed theories—admissions, really—about how many of our collective anxieties are a byproduct of this new ecology of visibility. Anxiety about status, about authenticity, about having enough; these are not purely economic or psychological problems. They have at their root a new mechanism for measuring ourselves; the feed.
I don’t want to overstate it. Feeds are not destiny. They can also host learning, and community. I have found consolation in the same places I have found annoyance. I have met people who, through online spaces, found encouragement to start creative projects, to organize for justice, to connect after isolation. The technology itself is morally neutral, if I can lean on that old phrase. But moral neutrality doesn’t mean consequences don’t exist. When technology becomes the primary arena where identity is formed, and when most people receive their sense of reality through algorithmic curation, you have a social condition that favors spectacle and emotional immediacy over depth and slow formation.
The loss shows up in how we remember. There is something odd about outsourcing memory to devices. On the one hand, it’s miraculous because photographs and messages that would have been lost can be preserved. On the other hand, when everything is saved somewhere outside us, the pressure to internalize patterns, to cultivate wisdom softens. We can stop learning routes because maps direct us, stop cultivating recall because search will surface it. Some of that is mercy—cognitive labor offloaded so we can do other things—but some of it erodes capacities that used to structure a person’s inner life. Memory is not merely storage; it is a teacher. The act of remembering stitches experience into narrative, and narrative is one of the ways we find meaning.
I have a friend who used to be a pianist. He told me once that the music lived partly in his hands and partly in the way he learned to bear silence. He had to learn to sit with passages he wasn’t yet good at, to practice them slowly until the right muscle memory developed. To handle something well you often need someone to show you how to bear the discomfort of learning it, to point out the hidden pitfalls and the rewards that only patience reveals. Where are the apprenticeships for the attention economy? Where are the elders teaching people how to inhabit silence or how to develop the habit of learning to wait for better information?
We could frame this as a civic problem. Democracies depend on citizens who can deliberate and who can sustain attention to complex problems. But more than that, it’s a human problem about what makes life feel like it matters. You can be entirely online and yet deeply concerned for your neighbor; you can be offline and shallow. Still, when collective attention is organized in ways that privilege spectacle, the space for patient moral imagination shrinks. The average Joe scrolling is learning a grammar of existence that prizes performance. If that grammar becomes dominant, our shared languages for trust, for mercy, might atrophy.
I keep thinking about wonder. The first time I saw high-resolution images of the Earth from space, I felt a curious mixture of smallness and connectedness. Technology had made the world legible in a new way, and that legibility invited reverence. But wonder is a fragile thing; it requires slowness and attention. If our gaze is constantly ricocheting, if every new image is already an opportunity for a comparison metric, wonder flattens into habit. People can still feel awe, of course, but the pathways are fewer. We are more likely to find awe engineered for us—an influencer’s staged sunrise, a curated travel reel—than to stumble upon the unmediated.
This is why I keep coming back to the word “shame.” It’s not the moralistic shame that says you are bad for using your phone. It’s the sorrow of potential unfulfilled. We have made tools that could support lives of remarkable thought, community, and care, and instead we often orient them toward accruing attention. That loss feels like a waste because the tech is so capable of so much else. I am not nostalgic for a mythical past where everything was better. I am aware that every era produces its own misuses and that novelty has always been met with folly. But there’s a particular sting now because the scale of what’s at stake feels vast. The tools are not only shaping private habits; they are remapping public life. The fact that so many people have not been taught—or have not had the space to learn—how to handle this power feels like a societal failing.
Sometimes I try simple experiments on myself. I’ll set a phone to grayscale to make the feed less seductive. I’ll choose a day to not post anything and see what surfaces in its place. Those small acts feel like pressing my hand against a machine to test its weight. More interesting are the conversations that emerge when people intentionally report on their attention practices; confessing to a social fast, sharing a method for keeping work separate from leisure. These practices are modest, but they are the beginnings of a craft. Maybe the greatest failure isn’t that people don’t know how to handle tech; maybe it’s that we have collectively decided those practices aren’t worth the effort. We have outsourced moral formation to platforms that prioritize engagement. That’s a decision, not an inevitability.
If this feels like the kind of space you want more of, you’re welcome here.
I want to be careful here not to prescribe a one-size-fits-all remedy. Some people’s livelihoods depend on the means of visibility; for artists, activists, small business owners, the attention economy offers real and sometimes indispensable goods. My point is not to condemn every use of platformed attention. It is to ask whether we might cultivate a parallel grammar for living with technology; a language that helps people steward their attention and the attention of others, that treats visibility as a responsibility as much as an opportunity.
There’s a role for institutions, certainly—schools, religious communities, workplaces could teach attention as a civic skill—but the change I hope for is less programmatic and more organic. It begins with stories and habits. It grows in households where being present is modeled, in friendships where silence is permissible and not punishable by a notification. It grows where elders are not mocked but listened to, where apprenticeships in humility and craft are available and respected.
The ability to handle powerful tools is itself a kind of virtue. It is not only intellectual or technical; it is moral and spiritual. It requires the courage to be ordinary, to forgo a certain size of audience for the sake of a truer life. That courage can be cultivated. It is taught not by an algorithm but by small practices repeated over time.
Stewardship of attention. It sounds a little quaint and a little grand at the same time. But when I say it, I mean something simple; that attention is not merely a private resource to be optimized for influence, or profit. It is a finite faculty that, directed well, can make space for friendship, thought, justice, and care. What if we took seriously the idea that how we distribute our attention is a moral decision with consequences for the shape of our souls and the health of our common life?
I don’t have neat solutions. I have small practices and questions. I wonder whether we can learn to be people who, even when surrounded by astonishing tools, are not defined by our usage metrics. I wonder whether communities can cultivate rites of presence; shared practices that protect attention so that people can grapple with big, slow questions. I wonder whether the language of stewardship can enter our conversations in a way that isn’t moralizing but invitational. And I wonder what it would mean if, instead of measuring success by followers, we measured it by capacity; capacity for sustained attention, for love that prefers the face to the feed.
The longing that drives us to amplify ourselves might also be the same longing that once drove people to gather in cathedrals, and around kitchen tables. There is a hunger for a nameable presence beyond the self. Technology can point to that presence—the image of Earth from space is an example—and it can also become a poor substitute for it when used as a mirror rather than a window. Perhaps some people will find the holy in a perfectly framed sunset posted online; perhaps others will find it in a slow, unshared silence. Both are possible, and both are partial.
This essay is not a call to abandon the tools—how could it be? They have saved lives, connected kin. It’s an invitation to notice the mismatch between the magnitude of the tools and the scarcity of the handling skills in our cultural repertoire. That mismatch matters because it shapes how we live together. It leans us either toward a civic imagination capable of holding complexity, or toward a spectacle economy that rewards the shallow. It nudges us toward practices that sustain interior life or away from them.
I am left with the sense that the question is less “what do we do about technology?” and more “what kind of people do we want to become while using it?” It doesn’t yield to quick fixes. It requires patient remaking; a reweaving of habits, institutions, and stories that teach us to carry power lightly.
So I’ll end with a question and not an answer, because that feels truer to the situation. If we have made tools that could help us flourish and instead often use them to flatten and spectacle-ize our inner lives, what does that say about the work we need to do now; not only in policy rooms and engineering labs, but in kitchens and small talk? Who will teach the art of handling, and what will those lessons look like? Perhaps the matter should be of concern to everyone, not only technologists. After all, what these devices shape is us; our capacity to be to wonder, to love. Is that not worth thinking about?