FEEL & MOVE

I watched my nephew throw a tantrum because the WiFi went out, and I realized he has never been bored in his entire 9 years of life, and that terrified me.

Not because boredom is good, but because boredom is where childhood used to live.

That thought has been sitting in my chest for months, and then I read "The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World" by Christine Rosen, and she put words to the grief I didn't know I was carrying.

This book is not anti-technology. Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, she is not some off-grid person yelling about phones. She loves technology. But she says something that stopped me cold in the first chapter: we are embracing technology so fast that we are not noticing what human experiences are going extinct right under our noses.

And she lists them. In warm, philosophical prose that feels like a smart friend talking over coffee. Face-to-face communication. Sense of place. Authentic emotion. Even boredom. We are losing them.

I read this book on a weekend where I tried to do what she suggests — notice.

I noticed how I haven't looked at the sky without taking a picture of it in years. I noticed how my family sits in the same room but we are all in different worlds, scrolling. I noticed how we say "I love you" with an emoji now, not with our eyes. I noticed how my 9-year-old nephew has never waited for anything — not for a photo to develop, not for a letter to arrive, not for the internet to load, not even for boredom to turn into imagination. When the WiFi went out, he didn't know what to do with his hands, with his time, with his own mind.

Rosen calls it being human in a disembodied world. We have become disembodied. Our bodies are here, in Abuja, in traffic, in the kitchen, but our minds are somewhere else, in a feed, in a challenge, in someone else's life. She talks about TikTok challenges and mukbang, about sociometric trackers that count our steps, our sleep, our heartbeats, and turn us into data, about online conspiracy culture where we feel more connected to strangers than to our neighbors.

One chapter that wrecked me was about face-to-face communication. She says we are losing the ability to read faces, to sit in awkward silence, to have a conversation that isn't edited and filtered. I thought about my last fight with my best friend. We fought over WhatsApp. We sent long paragraphs, voice notes, screenshots. If we had been face-to-face, would we have seen each other's tears? Would we have softened? Text lets you be braver and crueler at the same time.

Another chapter on sense of place. She says we used to belong to places, now places belong to us as content. We go to a beach not to be at the beach, but to post that we were at the beach. We don't know our neighbors' names, but we know what a stranger in California ate for breakfast. I read that and I looked out my window at my street, my real street, with the mango seller and the kids playing, and I realized I haven't walked that street without my phone in my hand in two years.

And authentic emotion. That one hit hardest. She says we are curating emotions now, performing them, not feeling them. We cry on Instagram live. We grieve in captions. We are happy in stories that disappear in 24 hours. When was the last time you felt something that you didn't immediately think about sharing?

Jonathan Haidt, who wrote "The Anxious Generation," called this "an extremely important book," and Esquire made it a Best Book of 2024, and I get why. Because Rosen is not saying, throw your phone away. She is saying, notice what you are trading.

She exposes an unprecedented cultural shift, but she does it gently. She says, we still have time to reclaim. To reclaim boredom, to reclaim looking someone in the eye, to reclaim getting lost without Google Maps, to reclaim waiting, to reclaim being bored enough that you start making up games, stories, songs.

I finished this book and I did something small. I left my phone at home and went for a walk around my neighborhood for 45 minutes. No music, no podcast, no step tracker. Just me, embodied. I greeted three people I had never greeted before. I noticed a wall that had new graffiti. I got bored for 10 minutes and then my mind started making a story about a woman selling oranges. I felt human again, not disembodied.

You need this book if:

You have felt that low-level ache that something human is disappearing but you couldn't name it. You are a parent watching your kids grow up without boredom, without face-to-face play. You love technology but you also feel exhausted by it. You loved Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" and you want the deeper philosophical picture of what we lose when we live online. You want warm, thoughtful writing, not angry ranting.

Maybe not right now if:

You want a how-to detox guide with 30-day plans. This is not that. It is philosophical, reflective, cultural criticism that makes you think, makes you grieve a little, makes you want to be more human on purpose.

I give it 5/5 stars. Because it gave me language for my grief. We are not just losing attention spans. We are losing experiences. Real, human, embodied experiences are going extinct, and if we don't notice, we will wake up one day and not remember what it felt like to be bored, to be lost, to be truly with another person, eye to eye, no screen between.

When was the last time you were truly bored and let your mind wander? When was the last time you had a conversation that wasn't interrupted by a notification? When was the last time you went somewhere and didn't post it?

Tell me below, because I am trying to reclaim some of those extinct experiences this month, and I need company in the disembodied world.