
The Future Is Feeling (part one)
It’s time to bring your body online.
I believe the future is feeling. Not feelings as in emotions — feeling as a state of ongoing awareness of the sensations within our bodies. For our rational, cognitive-obsessed society, the popularization of mindfulness has been a strong influence to pull us out of idolization of our thoughts. Come to find out; thoughts aren’t the beacons of truth we’d like to believe. Where mindfulness directs you to witness your thoughts like clouds passing in an endless big sky mind, I believe we’re collectively ready to investigate what exists below the sky: the topography of shifting sensations throughout the body. The trembly, tender, tense, light, numb, twitchy, thick, clenched, airy, floating sensations — all the bits of information that we often miss or outright ignore. This is the next frontier of the Information Age and ground zero for the impending Experience Age.

According to a 2016 report, the emotion detection and recognition market is estimated to grow from USD 6.72 Billion in 2016 to USD 36.07 Billion by 2021, with the bio-sensor technology segment expected to grow at the highest rate. The beginning of biometric data mining has been straightforward things like fingerprint identification and basic motion analysis for step-counts (with monetization opportunities right there to urge you toward your goals). But, companies with eyes on the digital harvesting of bodily data see a bright, revenue-generating frontier of any and all possible metrics, from minute facial changes (including pupil dilation) to body heat levels and brainwaves. Facts about you and your online behavior (clicks) will give way to a new trove of information via your intimate, physiological reactions to what you see, do, and experience.
But what about the keepers of those bodies and experiences? Before we get to the future, how are we all doing today?
- 86 percent of Americans say they constantly or often check their emails, texts and social media accounts in a typical day.
- 65 percent of Americans believe that periodically “unplugging” or taking a “digital detox” is important for their mental health.
- One-in-five adults in the U.S. experience a mental health condition in a given year.
- Mood disorders are the third most common cause of hospitalization in the U.S. for both youth and adults aged 18–44.
- One-half of all chronic mental illness begins by age fourteen. Three-quarters by age 24.
- Economists found that spending just one hour a day on social networks reduces the probability of a child being completely happy with his or her life overall by around 14 percent, three times as high as the estimated adverse effect on well-being of being in a single-parent household.
- Almost half of Millennials (45 percent) report that because of technology, even when their family is together they feel disconnected from them.
- Rates of teen depression jumped 37 percent from 2005 to 2014.
- 43 percent of North Americans take mood altering prescriptions regularly.
- 20.2 Million adults in the U.S. experience a substance use disorder.
- 18.1 percent of adults in the U.S. live with an anxiety disorder.
- 70 percent of Americans have trouble falling asleep at least one night per week.
- Anxiety disorders cost the U.S. more than $42 billion a year, almost one-third of the $148 billion total mental health bill for the U.S.
- Mood disorders are estimated to cost more than $50 billion per year in lost productivity and result in 321.2 million lost workdays.
- 1 million U.S. employees miss work each day due to workplace stress.
- 36 percent of workers suffer from work-related stress that costs U.S. businesses $30 billion a year in lost workdays.
- 80 percent of workers feel stress on the job, and nearly half say they need help in learning how to manage stress. And 42% say their coworkers need such help.
- 70 percent of adults in the U.S. have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives. Up to 20 percent of these people go on to develop PTSD, which equates to approximately 44.7 million people who are struggling with PTSD (in the U.S. alone).
Couple the above statistics with the unprecedented stress in America over the state of the world, and it is clear that there is a growing divide between the gilded promised land of our tech-centered future and our human ability to live there.

Within Mac OS X, there is a spinning, rainbow-colored, circular system indicator that Apple calls the Spinning Wait Cursor. Seeing this means that your Mac cannot handle all the tasks given to it at a given moment. While it usually only lasts a few seconds, most people know all-too-well how it can get stuck in an endless loop that signals the system has frozen and become unresponsive. At this point, it is affectionately referred to by many names: the Spinning Pinwheel of Death, the Spinning Rainbow Wheel of Death, the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, or simply the Spinning Wheel of Death. (I’m partial to the Spinning Pinwheel of Death, or SPOD)
Like our Macs, our modern world has us all-too-often feeling overwhelmed and stuck. Imagine the bullets in the list of statistics above each being replaced by SPODs and the metaphor becomes clear. Where is our Human OS For Dummies book?
Daily, we chug along, doing our best to keep up with the litany of information, requests, tasks, connections, content, and future ambitions we are expected to address, not quite aware of the hardware (our bodies) or the operating (nervous) system we’re working through. And, how slowly they are to upgrade — there’s certainly no new model or version to anticipate being released each year. Yet, the allure of exponentially improving persists. For all our optimizing of this, that or the other, we struggle to see that, unlike the technology we deify, Moore’s law doesn’t apply to us. Statistics indicate that rather than collectively improving, or simply keeping up, we’re breaking down.

If your Mac encounters an error, it’s likely you’ll see an option to send a Problem Report. Imagine the computer is you. If you think back to a time when you procrastinated and missed a deadline, ghosted someone, burnt out, got sick, shut down, gossiped, skipped your workout, went on a bender, lost your temper — the list goes on and on — what diagnostic information would be in your report? What level of detail would you have to share? Perhaps, like most people, you could offer a thoroughly narrated, play-by-play of what happened on the surface but would have little insight into the goings on underneath the hood. Were you breathing? Was your jaw clenched? Had you been running on too little sleep or too much coffee? Was your gaze tight and pushed forward? Were you resisting what was happening? Or, going along with things too easily — maybe silently disagreeing? Were you aware of what mattered most to you at the moment? Could you feel your feet?
And, more than what is in your report, who would you like to receive this information? Shouldn’t it be you?
As we speed forward on our path of digitized progress, connecting and relating beyond borders, being serviced with single-clicks, ingesting terabytes worth of content, and (especially) mixing our physical reality with virtual ones, we will continue to struggle and breakdown without clear methods for showing up in and processing our future realities . They must work with our bodies rather than against, and place humanity’s wellness above profiteering.
I’ve started Somatic Capital because we live in a time of great convergence, where interesting conversations are happening that investigate the influences on how we live and work, sustainability, business and leadership, technology, neuroscience, trauma, psychology, spirituality, and popular culture. However, within the majority of these conversations, something vital is missing. Growing research and insights into the role that our entire human body — not just the brain — plays in the unfolding of our individual and collective stories are not widely available or understood. While mindfulness has reached a substantial saturation point, somatic-based fields of practice and healing are unknown or labeled too woo-woo to be taken seriously.
I find myself wondering how I might contribute to helping shape the conversation, drawn to the cause for deeply personal, meaningful reasons that I’ll share in a second part to this post. There is much more to why I believe the future is feeling. For now, I invite anyone with an interest in how we might survive the modern world we’re creating to follow along.

