On Spatial & Temporal Awareness
The danger of constantly wanting to be with, or connect with, those who are not physically with us is that it can create this feeling of perpetual longing, of never quite being — or having — enough.
The other day, as I was making a beeline from the L train to the F (or, I suppose, as much of a beeline as one can make weaving through hoards of stoic-faced businessmen), two miraculous things happened. The first was a matter of timing. I heard the screech and accompanying whoosh of the F train arriving just as I hit the bottom of the two flights of stairs leading up to the platform.
Several of my fellow morning commuters heard the familiar noise too, and began the mad dash that all New Yorkers make at some point in their lives, forfeiting propriety in favor of prompt arrival, pushing past other, weaker specimen in order to slip through the subway doors unscathed, albeit with hair slightly disheveled and lattes half-spilt out of morning coffee cups.
I was half-heartedly jogging up the steps when I encountered my second miraculous sighting of the day: A 20-something standing at the top of the stairs, completely oblivious to all those in a near-apocalyptic frenzy around him. He had his head down as though deep in thought, or recovering from a dizzy spell, or perhaps even examining the gunk on his pricey sneakers.
But the most likely explanation turned out to be the right one. He was not, in fact, philosophizing or steadying himself or even making eye contact with the dirt on his shoe. No, he was instead transfixed by the screen in his hand, reading a text message or swiping right (of course he’d be swiping right) or playing Candy Crush or something of the like. The point being that he just didn’t give a shit that the rest of the world around him was trying so desperately to catch a train, and that it was his body that was, frustratingly, in their way.
Maybe calling this second incident “miraculous” is misleading. Astounding is more appropriate. Confounding. Head-scratching. Something that gave me — and those around me — pause. But not, in actuality, all that miraculous — or, really, that unusual.
They say the hallmark of being a true New York transplant is the learned intolerance and impatience one develops for slower-moving people on the sidewalk. I say that this is an outdated way to measure the transformation of a person from a kind, understanding citizen of the suburbs into an angry city dweller, because these days, it’s almost expected that people lack spatial awareness from time to time, regardless of their surroundings.
Even when our physical bodies are moving along with, or against, the rhythm of other human beings, our minds are often elsewhere. Adrift. The number of times bowed heads or scrolling thumbs stall sidewalk activity on a daily basis are far too many to count.
More than that, our growing dependence on digital devices means that we are now not only spatially unaware, but also, oftentimes, temporally unaware as well. We’re never really present in the space that we occupy. And because the Internet is an unwieldy beast, when we do finally wrest free from its grasp, we frequently find that we are scattered (read: scatterbrained): a million different selves existing in a million different places and times at once.
It’s the reason why mindfulness and disconnection have become such rare commodities, and why people are paying good money to go on digital detox retreats that essentially teach us how to be human and present and au natural again. It’s this dependency that has actually necessitated a conscious undoing of how we live in order to just breathe and be again.
Not that we are free of blame in this scenario. The Internet has not decided to do anything to us, per say. We are doing this to ourselves. On our end, we’re increasingly consumed by a fear of loss or losing out (as opposed to nurturing an appetite for experience for experience’s sake) the more we’re exposed to online. Why else would FOMO exist so prominently in our modern lexicon?
And so we scramble to exist not only in multiple places and across multiple platforms, but also in multiple periods of our lives, ducking in and out of life chapters with a double-click or a quick scroll through our news feeds. We want to be everywhere, do everything, be able to retrace and forecast our narratives as we deem fit at any given point in time.
It’s as though we’ve become allergic to existing in the present, that any moment spent just being might as well be a moment wasted. Look around a subway platform or a cafe where people are waiting in any capacity, and it’ll soon become evident what I mean: Everyone is silently staring at their phones, through the looking glass at the world that is happening everywhere other than where they physically are at that moment. It’s become awkward and uncomfortable to be around individuals who actually deign to gaze around rather than down.
But what, we often wonder, could they possibly be staring at?
The effort that used to be put toward engaging in conversations with strangers — or even friends — within physical proximity has instead been allocated to communicating with everyone who is not there. Maybe this is what should be called miraculous instead: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat — you name it, and there’s a way to document and broadcast every experience and thought as it’s happening without actually really living the experience itself in real time. It’s a slightly bizarre way to live, but it’s also one that has clearly become the new normal; future reactions now dictate our present situations. And as a result, it’s often difficult to separate ourselves from the compulsive documentarians we’ve become.
Will this video get a lot of views? I wonder if my witty observations will get a lot of likes today. How do I get the best angle of my outfit to generate the most comments? What clever hashtags shall I use today?
What results, I think, is that we begin to live several concurrent lives — none of them fully, all of them a duller shade of real. Those people who insist on sticking their phones in the air to record entire concerts? Not really there, though they’ll forever have the visual evidence of being there. Those who text nonstop while out to dinner? Bad dining companions, and not really there either, though they’re probably giving an engaging play-by-play to whomever is on the receiving end of their messages.
The danger of constantly wanting to be with, or connect with, those who are not physically with us is that it can create this feeling of perpetual longing, of never quite being — or having — enough.
But here’s the thing: We are enough. In the present, with what we have, with whomever we’re with. And I do realize that placing all the blame of this spatial and temporal displacement on digital distractions is pretty unfair. The dissatisfactions and desires that propel us to other times and places is nothing new; the Internet and technology are just man-made tools that have helped us to access those spaces more easily. They have made it possible to get lost in a labyrinth of external validation and a digital realm that requires constant attention.
The new complication is that existing in multiple places and times is an actual possibility now, and one that can irreversibly taint the beautiful simplicity of just being.
When we’re too concerned about attempting to control the uncontrollable — the past or the future, or how others have or will receive us in the past or future — we’re bypassing the present as it’s happening, causing an unending cycle of catching up and missing out.
Yes, technology has allowed for us to connect with and find community with those who are physically far away, but the truth of the matter is that the ease with which we can now make those connections shouldn’t diminish the quality and significance of those connections we make offline. And though we now have entire news feeds that allow us to toggle between the past and the present, the present and the future, we can still determine where we choose to reside on that timeline.
The reality that we still have to — and will constantly have to — fight against the current of temptations to exist otherwise is proof that this process of living and growing is, in short, a never-ending one.
