Defend the sensory world

In our rush to accelerate virtual life, we have taken leave of our senses—literally.

Taste is depleted: We eat ultra-processed foodstuffs as quickly as possible so we can get back to our devices. Sight and sound are confined to moving, singing images on gross little phones. We touch screens and hardly anyone else. A mostly odorless, mostly digital life spools out in front of us.

Most storytelling is moving in this direction, too. We get blips of a narrative through the blue light, but we’ve lost the real world.

In her book The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen says:

“We need to defend the sensory world and remind ourselves of the crucial importance of the physical body, the integrity of physical space, and the need for people to cultivate inner lives. From these flow things that can’t be made by machines: serendipity, intuition, community, spontaneity, and empathy. As the Trappist monk and theologian Thomas Merton observed, ‘It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it.’”

When we live too much online, we lose our beautifully human capacity to delight in serendipity and hone intuition. Living online, we suspect spontaneity and shirk empathy. We spend so much time watching other people’s lives that we fail to cultivate our own.

Stories that come from this sensory void won’t ultimately satisfy our longings. So much new media, especially of the entertainment variety, feels thin and fake, detached from what we can taste, smell, hear, see, and touch. It seems increasingly worthwhile to defend—and rejoin—the sensory world with our physical bodies in physical space.