A Modern Anxiety

The contents of this blog are my opinions and are not the opinions of any current or former colleagues. This is not to be construed as mental health or medical advice and does not constitute a relationship with a professional therapist.

Somewhere in the state of Wisconsin, driving, I notice on the phone projection display that my phone is low on battery…

The (An) Anxiety: why the hell is my phone out of battery?

Computer Brain: I slept in a different room last night; it didn’t charge all of the way before I moved.

The Blogger: I should write a blog post about this. I haven’t updated that thing in forever.

I become excited and discuss the concept of this blog with my spouse.

The Actual Spouse: I don’t understand why you don’t have a phone charger in your car.

The (An) Anxiety: shit, we are going to be gone all day long.

The Narrative Therapist: How has your relationship with technology introduced anxieties into your life which were not previously present?

[ANSWER]

The Narrative Therapist: Has that relationship also introduced any gifts with which you were not previously aware?

[ANSWER]

Another phenomenon I have observed, within myself, over the last several years, relates to social media and Spotify, a popular music streaming service. It is worth noting I have not had an active Facebook account since a few days after New Year’s Day in 2021 (if my guess is correct, the first New Year after the COVID-19 pandemic began, almost six whole years ago.) Each year, Spotify listeners are presented with a “Wrapped”, an end-of-year set of listening metrics. On Facebook, it was fun to share, compare musical tastes, coolness, make fun of each other and ourselves, etc. I’ve noticed in the years since, parts of me have listened to music with that in mind, despite the absence of any platform on which to share my Wrapped list. I’ve described this inwardly and on occasion with others as “programming.” It’s one way that the internet has continued to gaze back at me during moments I am logged off. What would someone think if they knew I was listening to Kanye West?[i] Will this week’s playlist compile into a selection of tastes more elite than my contemporaries? Has my relationship with the internet forever changed my relationship with music in unanticipated ways?

Over the last 2.5 months, I listened to the audiobook of Infinite Jest, which is David Foster Wallace’s[ii] magnum opus about addiction and the things we worship. Honestly, the experience was life-changing. Infinite Jest speaks to various ways we find ourselves entrapped in what he describes as “the cage”.[iii] I’ve worked with scores (a score being 20) of clients in the last six years who experience what I describe as “hypervigilance directed inwards.” Stephen Madigan, a well-known narrative therapist, describes this phenomenon in various ways: “self-surveillance” and “an internalized audience”; both feel like apt descriptions that speak to a similar phenomenon. Madigan later notes: “Throughout my years of therapy practice, I have found that the number one reason why persons seek therapy is due to a lack of connection.”

The Narrative Therapist: Is your current relationship with technology the one you intended to have? If you could wave a magic wand, what would your ideal relationship look like? Does your relationship with technology contribute to a greater sense of connection, isolation, or something else entirely?

References:

Madigan, Stephen. (2003). “Counterviewing Injurious Speech Acts: Destabilising Eight Conversational Habits of Highly Effective Problems.” International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, Issue 1.

McCaffery, Larry. (1993). “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer 1993).

[i] I am aware that both Kanye West and David Foster Wallace are/were complicated men with very damaging parts of their histories and reputations. A narrative therapist might suggest here that our lives are multistoried.

[ii] There is a delightful irony in imagining a therapeutic conversation with Stephen Madigan (a postmodern therapist) and David Foster Wallace (a post- or post-postmodern writer.) Sigmund Freud would roll over in his grave if he considered the implications.

[iii] Narrative therapists are historically interested in Foucault’s analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon”, a jail in which participants may be under constant surveillance without actually knowing if that is the case.