Techsperience vs. Reality
How briefly getting out of my head and off my phone was memorable
It’s easy to forget where you are when you get lost in the story in your head. Then suddenly something snaps you back to the present and you wonder what thought had started it all. Or you might look up from your screen hours later realizing you’d fallen down a YouTube black hole or binge-scrolled social media. Modern suggestion algorithms mimic that not-so-random unconscious mental path we take from one thought to another, so we lose track of what we watch, just like we lose track of our thoughts.
Have you ever tried to reverse your thought process back the genesis thought at the beginning of the session? Perhaps when you were lying awake in bed one day, alone, in the darkness, in your mind? It’s not easy.
On the flip side, we’ve all had that moment, be it a moment shared around a campfire, eating chocolate and listening to someone play guitar as you stare upwards at the night sky and breath the cold air. Or maybe it’s the luscious sip of coffee on a leisurely sunny morning, or a spontaneous romantic moment when your eyes meet. These moments are so real, so visceral and tangible, and yet often fleeting. They’re similar, and yet the opposite of the tech binge or mind trip. Both are enjoyed in a way, but one is protracted, while the other is distilled.
This was really brought home to me recently on a short trip.
What you’re actually doing with technology
Technology allows you to sort of be everywhere at once, and yet nowhere at the same time. There’s no denying what an incredible resource it can be, what an efficient educational and entertainment tool, and that real enjoyment can be derived from its use. But let’s separate ourselves from this situation for a moment and observe what’s happening:
- You are sitting or lying quite still for extended periods of time engrossed in something being presented to you on a screen.
- You are not actively participating in or experiencing what is being presented to you. You are viewing a recording or recreating an image from writing and dabbling in the experience in your mind.
- You are just watching pixels and listening to digital recreations of sound waves while being completely removed from the events.
- Other than your mental recreations, sight and sound, none of your other senses are involved.
- Dopamine may be at work in your head, fuelling a desire to keep consuming.
So often digital content is also curated, so you are seeing the best edit or final draft of something. It’s appealing mentally while also conveniently removed from the discomfort of reality, which likely contributes to the ease with which we can spend hours and hours in front of technology and not even notice.
When I was recently walking around Uluru in Australia’s red centre, I really felt the hours and hours I spent doing it. That time was not lost on me. My mind and curiosity could have sustained marathon sessions of interesting stories about its creation, and gratuitous sunset photos resplendent in all its glory, but no way could my feet or physical stamina service that curiosity. I was tired!
Strangely enough, somewhere between swiping at the incessant flies and lamenting the pebble in my right shoe— all very real, just not in a fun way — this contrast between technology vs reality…well, it became real. I was experiencing the second of two contrasting experiences on this trip. So now to the first…
A novel experience
The pilot was telling me how they landed on unpaved runways on large stations throughout most of the Northern Territory. He was pointing to a rectangular patch of red dirt up ahead which I could make out easily through the cockpit window. We were going to land on the dirt, which felt a little bit unsettling.
“But they are well maintained because they need us. It is a matter of life or death.”
- RFDS pilot
By ‘us’ he was talking about the Royal Flying Doctor Service, an aerial medical service which covers millions of square kilometres of Australia’s vast interior, offering a medical lifeline to the sparsely populated outback.
As you might have guessed, I wasn’t actually in the plane. I was in fact sitting in a museum in Alice Springs with a VR headset on. It was cool and it seemed quite real, and yet it wasn’t real. There was no smell, and no vibration.
Back to reality
There was no flying, but there were flies. They were very real, and very annoying. I was standing in the intense sunlight blinking at the monolith in front of me as it majestically dominated the landscape, unaffected by the flies or the bright sun in much the same way as it had for millions of years. Uluru is imposingly massive and oddly uniform in its composition. It’s quite a sight to behold from all its various angles.
Apart from the novelty of a great geological phenomena like Uluru, for a brief moment I was aware of a huge open sun-soaked sky and a wide red expanse of ground stretching into the distance with a little bit of vegetation sandwiched in between. Then there was me, taking it all in. The moment was significant even though I felt insignificant. A pleasantly cool breeze was blowing from the north east and I could hear it sighing through the desert oaks, like how wind sounds through pine trees.
Later that day I had another moment when the sun was setting. The mood had changed as the colours shifted imperceptibly in an infinite gradient from orange to purple, to blue, to black while a cool wind blew through the low heather and grass of the wide open plains. What was once soaked in sunlight was suddenly just a black silhouette under a cold, yet brilliantly stark array of stars overhead. Once again, I felt insignificant.
I was aware of a huge open sun-soaked sky and a wide red expanse of ground stretching into the distance with a little bit of vegetation sandwiched in between. Then there was me, taking it all in.
I had just experienced the pure essence of daytime and an almost distilled essence of night time and they were both so acutely real that they were memorable, despite happening every day. In those moments, I was briefly, totally not in my mind.
Standing there, realising that despite the explosion in technology and its increasing role in our lives, it can’t be real in the way my surrounding currently was, nor could any story I told myself. I had walked 10km around the rock and more besides feeling the wind in my face and the sun on my back. For dramatic effect I even knelt and clasped a chunk of dry red earth in my hand, squeezing it to break up the clumps and letting it fall to the ground between my fingers. I was making a point to myself: it was all very real.
The virtual reality experience was very good. Technology is improving. Gazing around at the different sights happening in front of and around me, I was mightily impressed. While the definition was notably less than real life, the experience was certainly better than watching a flat image. But it couldn’t compare with the sensory feast of simple daytime at the rock, or the evocative cold night beneath the stars. While the VR experience was cool, reality was so sumptuously rich and satisfying that it was far and away more memorable. They were but brief moments of pure awareness that left a real impression rather than hours in a mental or digital haze that I cannot account for.
With technology developing apace, I wonder if in the future we won’t miss such vivid reality and look back nostalgically at the early 21st century when traveling meant feeling the earth between your fingers and the smell of the cold air as you look out at a landscape blanketed in darkness with only the slim silhouette of the horizon set against the fiery gradients of the setting sun.
They were but brief moments of pure awareness that left a real impression rather than hours in a mental or digital haze that I cannot account for.
Months in lockdowns with the COVID-19 pandemic gave us a glimpse at what a lack of human interaction and a sense of connection with anything can do. To anyone who has had a long distance relationship for any reasonable amount of time, relying on technology to stay in touch, we know it is a poor substitute for the real thing, being a stopgap measure at best.
I don’t hate technology, far from it, but as its influence extends into more of our life, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we are also physical beings, and that even brief moments of connection with the world around us can be invigorating and memorable, and possibly essential.
