The awe of being alive

 

Existential therapy explores the darkest corners and craggy edges of the many-sided self. The result is true transformation

Over the past 60 years, I’ve had the privilege to witness many poignant transformations. As a practising psychologist, I’ve witnessed them in state hospitals, in psychiatric emergency clinics, in drug and alcohol agencies, and in private practice; and as a youth I experienced them in my own intensive psychotherapies. There is little ‘pretty’ about these ordeals, but when they succeed they are profoundly gratifying: life-changing.

Poignant transformations emerge from the depths of despair, but they result, if one is fortunate, in the heights of renewal. Certainly this was true for me, and many of the people I’ve known or worked with. What could be more precious than the gift of liberation from crippling despair, of being freed to pursue what deeply matters? What could be more critical than participating in – really grappling with – the rescue of one’s soul?

Yet what I’m seeing today throughout our culture is an increasing tendency to skip over this grappling part of the equation and to shift abruptly to the transformational part. Not that there’s anything untoward about desiring to be rapidly transformed, it’s perfectly natural. When one is in distress, one seeks an instant remedy. I do that, my friends do that, and it’s a good bet that you do that also; it’s instinct. However, there are solid reasons to question instinct at times. For example, most people don’t punch someone just because they feel slighted. Similarly, most people don’t just blurt out whatever they feel just because they feel it. To the contrary, there is much to consider from the people you might hurt, to your conscience, to the setting and circumstances of the event. I’ve seen many clients who initially want to assault someone who assaulted them; however, they rarely do. This is because through the course of therapy, these clients recognise that their assailant is often someone they can relate to – or perhaps even love – and they don’t, in the end, want their fellow human being to suffer as they themselves have suffered. There are many times when delay is much preferred to reacting, especially when it comes to emotions.

Emotions are wonderful signals – they alert us to danger and they mobilise us when action is called for. But they are also highly complex, variegated. For example, many people feel contemptible or unwanted at times, yet they don’t resort to suicide or drugs. They see that, despite their dark mood, they have a right to live and grow, just as others live and grow, and that they can become something more than the stereotyped messages about themselves, such as that of being a failure. These are messages, by the way, that too often come from others who themselves feel contemptible and unwanted and who project those devaluations onto their unwitting victims. But such realisations, particularly if they are to endure, often take time, they take struggle, and they take encounters with larger parts of ourselves that go beyond our internalised oppression to a kind of conciliation. In the end, depth and existential therapy promote a hard-won coexistence between rivalling parts of ourselves, parts that sometimes agonise yet in the long run shed light on the experience of being fully human: of being deeply and richly alive. Put more formally, existential therapy emphasises three major themes: freedom to explore what deeply matters to oneself; experiential or whole-bodied reflection on what deeply matters; and responsibility or the ability to respond to, act on, and apply what deeply matters.

Yet today it is all too easy to bypass such freedom, experiential reflection, and response-ability – such grappling with who we are and who we are willing to be. For today we are seduced by an avalanche of devices, formulations and machine-meditated transactions making it all too tempting to let others, including mechanical others, do the job. Whether it is psychiatric medication, psychotherapy apps, 12-session clinic appointments or the distraction of net-surfing, there are innumerable ways to surmise that our pain has been dissolved, that we have been transformed, and that life proceeds apace.

But the looming and overarching question is: at what cost? At what cost is an externally or even cerebrally normalised life, a life of routine and regulation, elevated over a life that flops and flutters but also throbs? At what price is a life that sails over the many-sided intricacies of emotion and the ripples of discontent? Too often the price is death, both literal and figurative, and the statistics bear that out. Consider rising rates of depression and addiction, and the sense of isolation often linked to smartphones.

My earliest memory is a gauzy image of my parents weeping on the living room couch. That was when I was two and a half years old, and my seven-year-old brother Kelly had just passed away. It was 1959, and the combination of chicken pox and pneumonia proved too much for an otherwise radiant and vigorous child. The explosion of this event in the collective psyche of our family cannot be lucidly grasped. The most I can say is that the parents I knew before the event were dimly recognisable in its crushing aftermath. The warm and playful sibling I knew – the smiling leader – was vanquished, and in his place yawned an unrelenting void, a pit of rage, sorrow and terror.

By three years old, I was imploding. My defences were all but expired. I had night terrors and I had tantrums. I was panicked and I was lost – floundering, tailspinning into a helpless and paranoid world.

Given that ordeal, I’m fairly certain that if I had the same experience today that I’d had in 1959, I would be hastily pacified by drugs. Instead, my parents sat with me back then. They did all they could to talk me through my battles and, eventually, at age five, they referred me to a psychoanalyst. This psychoanalyst helped to turn my life around; for although I continued to have profound fears and outbursts, he helped me to work through rather than mask over these potentially restorative maladies. Greatest of all, he was a rock-solid presence who enabled me to say or feel anything. I was hanging on by a thread, but he remained a pillar, steadfast and supportive, until I passed through the storm.

Yet today, how many children are encouraged to work through their torment – or even to supplement their medication with an emotionally supportive encounter? How many are granted the time and money to do so? Few, I would venture. But what most are encouraged to do is to ingest antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds and a variety of mood-stabilisers. While these remedies can at times be lifesaving, too often they are pushed by pharmaceutical companies and insurers more concerned with profit margins than the enduring care of people and people’s own resources to live the life they seek.

I wonder how I would have turned out if I had been treated by today’s standard. I wonder if I would have experienced the rigours of being alone, or being challenged, as I was by my analyst, to develop inner resources such as my creativity, curiosity and imagination. He encouraged me to reflect on the bases for my fears and to move at my own pace. He respected me and my capacities, which in turn spurred me to create drawings, stories and thoughts about life’s puzzlements; or to venture out into uncertain terrains, relationships and ideas, which I eventually did after much tussling and even further therapy.

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The chief problem with many contemporary interventions is that they are one-dimensional. For example, psychotropic medications aim at making people feel calmer if they’re anxious, or more energised if they’re depressed. Cognitive therapies aspire to change so-called irrational thoughts (such as fear of flying or a sense of worthlessness) into rational, evidence-based thoughts. Behavioural therapies aim at reinforcing adaptive habits to replace maladaptive habits, and so on. However, the problem with these strategies is that they work on a limited basis. If one wishes to live more efficiently along clear and culturally approved lines, then one is notably helped by such techniques. If one wishes to live a comparatively regimented and low-risk life, these remedies are appropriate. However, if one is among the sizeable and perhaps growing population that seeks more dimensionality in life – more meaning, more vitality, more personal and interpersonal richness – then something more challenging might be called for.

After a lifetime of research, the existential psychologist Rollo May concluded that many of the most vital and creative people through history were strongest at precisely their most vulnerable points. In The Psychology of Existence (1995), a book I co-wrote with May, he included a chapter called ‘The Wounded Healer’, about what makes a good therapist. There, May gave the example of the renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow who was lonely and unhappy as a child but who formulated theories about optimal living and peak experiences. May went on to describe a host of well-known and lesser-known people who faced and integrated the sides of themselves they feared and, through that process, fostered creative and productive lives.

May’s thesis is backed by a host of distinguished investigators, including Carl Jung, Silvano Arieti, Frank Barron, and Maslow himself, who described the self-actualiser – the optimal personality fulfilling his potential and life’s true dreams. ‘One observation that I made has puzzled me for many years but it begins to fall into place now,’ Maslow wrote in Toward a Psychology of Being (1962). ‘It was what I described as the resolution of dichotomies in self-actualising people … These most mature of all people were also strongly childlike. These same people, the strongest egos ever described and the most definitely individual, were also precisely the ones who could be the most easily egoless, self-transcending, and problem-centred.’

The clinical psychologist and researcher Kay Jamison – the author of seminal studies on bipolar disorder and the book Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993) – agrees. Bipolar herself, Jamison described dozens of artistic luminaries throughout history who appeared to fall on the bipolar spectrum, yet went on to forge exemplary contributions to society.

Now, granted, many of these luminaries lived very trying lives, and some even committed suicide, but many also had rich and invigorating lives with deeply gratifying results. Hence one of the chief questions for our age is what happens if we remove such life struggles, if we flatten the biology, if we remove the rough edges through technology and drugs? What happens if we bypass the need for people to confront their demons, their discomforts and their tears? Would the artistic creation that results be the emotional equivalent of one that was inspired by the pathos, perplexity and toil of the human artist?

The most popular treatments today, such as medication and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), are often short-term and have a mixed record with regard to effectiveness. The emerging view is that they are helpful for relief of symptoms such as negative thoughts, poor appetite and phobias, but questionable when it comes to complex life issues, such as the search for meaning and purpose, and the struggle with love.

Is the experience of a therapist or device enacting an empathic response the same as actually empathising?

Other new remedies include the development of virtual reality (VR) exposure-based therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, the use of neurofeedback from fMRI data to guide therapeutic practice, and apps for everything from anxiety, to depression, to irritable bowel syndrome. The research on these devices is still very much evolving, but I have the creeping feeling that we are entering a brave new age where statistical and mechanical manipulation is replacing personal discovery and risk.

Is the virtual encounter with one’s anxiety – or desire, for that matter – the same as the actual encounter? Is an app the same as a human healer (let alone a wounded healer)? Is the experience of one’s therapist or device enacting an empathic response the same as him or her actually empathising? Is this performance of a relationship, based on manuals and statistics, the same as a personal evolving relationship, with all its angst and vulnerabilities, its challenges and surprises?

I doubt it, and mounting studies uphold the value of person-to-person, genuine therapeutic relationships as well. Now, there can be much value to short-term ‘mechanised’ relationships. They can reach people where few human professionals live, or they can help anyone with disability who has difficulty travelling, or they can relate to young people schooled on hand-held devices. But are they the ‘be all and end all’ that so many in our society are embracing?

It seems to me that we are moving headlong into the engineering quagmire that so many humanistic therapists have feared. This is an approach where the emphasis is on the device, technique or algorithm and not on the patient’s inbred capacities for revitalisation. It is a model that stresses standards of normalcy, regulation and calmness that are imposed from without as distinct from within the subjective and interactive energies of persons. Finally, it is a model that can rob many of us of the virtues – not just the anguish – of our many-sidedness.

Here is a list of sensibilities that I probably would have been ‘spared’ had I been drugged and plugged into devices as a child:

• the trial of being alone;
• the angst of great sorrow;
• the inertia of great despair;
• the shudder of great fear;
• the terror of fragility;
• the distress of uncertainty;
• the bitterness of rage;
• the panic of feeling lost.

But here now is a list of sensibilities that I likely would not have developed had I been ‘drugged’ and ‘plugged’:

• the creativity of being alone;
• the sensitivity of experiencing sorrow;
• the mobilisation spurred by despair;
• the defiance sparked by fear;
• the humility generated by fragility;
• the possibilities opened by uncertainty;
• the strength aroused by rage;
• the curiosities prompted by disarray;
• the self-exploration, depth therapy and enquiry inspired by my entire ordeal.

It seems to me that one overarching property distinguishes human from mechanical existence. It is not consciousness, because artificial intelligence is already showing that mechanical entities can achieve a kind of signal detection that simulates awareness – consider robots that register temperature changes in the environment. It is not reflexive consciousness, which is the ability of consciousness to have some level of awareness of itself, because scientists are already working on machines that can readjust their calculations based on incoming data; and it is not even the capacity to experience emotions, because there are neural chips in development that will someday be able to replicate the biochemical processes that comprise, say, sadness or elation. (In crude form, this is possible today with psychotropic drugs.)

By contrast, the biggest if not insurmountable hurdle for artificial intelligence is a much more complicated problem – it is the experience of life’s paradoxes. As with the testimony of my childhood ordeal, it is the experience not of a single image, thought or emotion, but of the sublimely interwoven image, thought and emotion; each of which can both dovetail and clash with one another.

Such paradoxes include the sliver of fear in a loving relationship, or the hint of sorrow in a moment of glee, or the taste of envy in the most admiring friendships; and it is many more delicately nuanced combinations that lend life its zest, its pathos and its intensity: its awe.

Consider how each of these so-called negative emotions echo awesome ranges of awareness:

Sadness comprises sorrow and despondency, the profound sense of bereavement and loss. But post-traumatic growth studies also indicate that sadness alerts us to the fleeting nature of life, the preciousness of the moment, and the need to have empathy for others’ woes. Conversely, it serves as a point of comparison with – and therefore can help to intensify – contrasting feelings such as unbarred joy, elation and delight. Finally, sadness can ‘go through the centre’ of ourselves, as Rainer Maria Rilke put it in Letters to a Young Poet (1929); it can bring something new, something life-altering. ‘Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches,’ he wrote, ‘perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown.’

Without anger, tenderness might be thin, the poignancy of kindness unnoticed

While fear diminishes and confines us, it also highlights that which towers over us. Certainly, fear can humiliate, but research suggests that it can also sober us about what can and cannot be achieved. Fear acts as a backdrop for courage. For, without fear, courage would mean little, and likely impact little in the course of our lives. Would we even seek to be courageous if we had no fear? Would we seek new fields and fresh thoughts, sensations or innovations without encountering some degree of fear? These questions are rarely asked by enthusiasts of so-called transhuman technologies.

Anger arouses danger, explosiveness and domination. It is a fiery blast, and an expansion that threatens decimation of others. But informed studies also show that anger is a way of standing up for oneself as in righteous indignation; it is an impetus to courage and rejuvenation of spirit. Invigorating revolutions have upwelled from anger, and so have personal liberations. Without anger, tenderness might be thin, the poignancy of kindness unnoticed.

Coveting the qualities of another is the seedling of envy; obsessing over and fantasising about possessing those qualities is how envy blossoms. Envy arouses desperation to be something other than what one is; it is a maddening torment. But my experience as a therapist, and as a client too, has shown me that envy is also an aspiration, a prospect and a potentially life-changing breakthrough. We see the glimmers of our desires in those we envy, and thereby have some capacity to nurture those desires in ourselves. Envy contrasts with contentment and, by way of contrast, lends contentment its restorative depth.

Guilt alerts us to words or deeds we regret. It is a hammer in the depths of conscience, and it pummels all forms of complacency. Guilt dims our acceptability and dashes our esteem. At the same time, as studies of psychopathy have shown, guilt – and its social counterpart, shame – jars us to improve, apprises us of our potentiality to do better, and moves us to heal others’ wounds. It’s hard to inspire change if we fail to encounter guilt.

The key to my own therapy, and indeed to depth-existential therapy as a whole, is that it supports the coexistence of emotional and intellectual contraries. I loved and I hated at the same time; I was terrified of death, and yet I was intrigued by its mystery, by the mystery of life. I was jarred by scary movies, and yet they opened me to alternative approaches to life, future possibilities and my own imagination.

By emphasising presence, depth-existential therapists make every effort to ‘hold’ the contradictions that naturally arise in the course of their relationships with clients, as well as within the clients themselves. In this way, depth-existential therapy becomes a staging ground for the humility and wonder, sense of adventure and awe for living that are the hallmarks of what we call a ‘whole-bodied’ transformation.

As a client in therapy myself, I have moved from positions of abject terror, to gradual intrigue, to wonder about my life circumstances. For example, I have shifted from paralysis before the unpredictability of fate, to incremental trust, curiosity and fascination with what might be discovered. Through their abiding presence, my therapists supported me to feel safe enough to face my inner battle. They ‘held a mirror’ for me to see ‘close up’ both how I was currently living as well as how I could live, should I gradually step out of my cramped yet familiar world. Back and forth I swung between terror and wonder, and wonder back to terror; from quailing apprehension and incremental intrigue toward that which horrified; from social withdrawal to growing risks with my therapists and the world at large.

The result was that, after several years of therapy, I was able to experience the fuller ranges of my thoughts, feelings and sensations. I, like many of the people I have worked with, was freed to attain goals but also a greater presence to my life and to life itself. The result was that I became less identified with the old and crippling parts of life, and more identified with the new and evolving parts – the parts that deeply mattered.

Any decision emerging from the therapy is energised by the whole body and that patient’s visceral core

Personally, I practise what I call ‘existential-integrative’ (EI) therapy, which coordinates a range of useful modalities under the existential approach. As a therapist, I am available to work with the patient at the most immediate, affective, kinaesthetic and profound level of contact possible.

For example, when I work with a patient, I see myself more as a fellow traveller, as the existential analyst Irv Yalom put it, rather than the formal ‘doctor’ serving up a remedy. I attempt to be available as a person rather than an engineer; I attune to the needs of my human patient, not to a bundle of electrochemical processes or a diagnostic label. That doesn’t mean I won’t try to support that patient in whatever way might be helpful at the given time, for example, with a medical referral or a problem-solving strategy, but I will strive to be available to that patient to address the feelings, body sensations and images behind the words and explanations.

All this involves attention to process, not just content. The approach supports a ‘whole-bodied’ awareness of both what the patient desires, as well as what blocks him or her from what is desired, on the deepest of levels, often beyond words. In this way, any decision emerging from the therapy is energised by the whole body and that patient’s visceral core.

Not every patient can or wants to work at that level, explaining my integrative offering; but for those who can and do, the approach provides the chance for a life-changing shift. This shift bolsters one’s capacity to experience the fuller ranges of one’s thoughts, feelings and sensations – one’s whole-bodily encounter with life. Based on that foundation, it’s possible to make bold, concrete, meaningful changes in one’s life. Put another way, such clients are able to cultivate a deep and abiding presence to themselves and the world, and through that presence, to experience humility, wonder and a sense of adventure toward living. This sense, for those who can really live it, fosters meaning, poignancy and awe.

The reason we need such therapy today is precisely because the awe-based is too often left out of our programmatic, medicalised approaches to life. We assist people to change, but increasingly the impetus for that change is expedience: regulating our emotions, stopping negative thoughts, sleeping better at night, becoming more efficient, living more rationally and so on. And while these therapeutic ends are by no means trifling, they are but ‘footholds’ for many people along a broader and deeper path – the zest, meaning and awe of being alive.

Parts of this essay were adapted from ‘The Spirituality of Awe: Challenges to the Robotic Revolution’ (revised edition, 2019), published by Colorado Springs, CO: University Professors Press.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.

Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making.

Privacy is power

 

Don’t just give away your privacy to the likes of Google and Facebook – protect it, or you disempower us all.

Imagine having a master key for your life. A key or password that gives access to the front door to your home, your bedroom, your diary, your computer, your phone, your car, your safe deposit, your health records. Would you go around making copies of that key and giving them out to strangers? Probably not the wisest idea – it would be only a matter of time before someone abused it, right? So why are you willing to give up your personal data to pretty much anyone who asks for it?

Privacy is the key that unlocks the aspects of yourself that are most intimate and personal, that make you most you, and most vulnerable. Your naked body. Your sexual history and fantasies. Your past, present and possible future diseases. Your fears, your losses, your failures. The worst thing you have ever done, said, and thought. Your inadequacies, your mistakes, your traumas. The moment in which you have felt most ashamed. That family relation you wish you didn’t have. Your most drunken night.

When you give that key, your privacy, to someone who loves you, it will allow you to enjoy closeness, and they will use it to benefit you. Part of what it means to be close to someone is sharing what makes you vulnerable, giving them the power to hurt you, and trusting that person never to take advantage of the privileged position granted by intimacy. People who love you might use your date of birth to organise a surprise birthday party for you; they’ll make a note of your tastes to find you the perfect gift; they’ll take into account your darkest fears to keep you safe from the things that scare you. Not everyone will use access to your personal life in your interest, however. Fraudsters might use your date of birth to impersonate you while they commit a crime; companies might use your tastes to lure you into a bad deal; enemies might use your darkest fears to threaten and extort you. People who don’t have your best interest at heart will exploit your data to further their own agenda. Privacy matters because the lack of it gives others power over you.

You might think you have nothing to hide, nothing to fear. You are wrong – unless you are an exhibitionist with masochistic desires of suffering identity theft, discrimination, joblessness, public humiliation and totalitarianism, among other misfortunes. You have plenty to hide, plenty to fear, and the fact that you don’t go around publishing your passwords or giving copies of your home keys to strangers attests to that.

You might think your privacy is safe because you are a nobody – nothing special, interesting or important to see here. Don’t shortchange yourself. If you weren’t that important, businesses and governments wouldn’t be going to so much trouble to spy on you.

You have your attention, your presence of mind – everyone is fighting for it. They want to know more about you so they can know how best to distract you, even if that means luring you away from quality time with your loved ones or basic human needs such as sleep. You have money, even if it is not a lot – companies want you to spend your money on them. Hackers are eager to get hold of sensitive information or images so they can blackmail you. Insurance companies want your money too, as long as you are not too much of a risk, and they need your data to assess that. You can probably work; businesses want to know everything about whom they are hiring – including whether you might be someone who will want to fight for your rights. You have a body – public and private institutions would love to know more about it, perhaps experiment with it, and learn more about other bodies like yours. You have an identity – criminals can use it to commit crimes in your name and let you pay for the bill. You have personal connections. You are a node in a network. You are someone’s offspring, someone’s neighbour, someone’s teacher or lawyer or barber. Through you, they can get to other people. That’s why apps ask you for access to your contacts. You have a voice – all sorts of agents would like to use you as their mouthpiece on social media and beyond. You have a vote – foreign and national forces want you to vote for the candidate that will defend their interests.

As you can see, you are a very important person. You are a source of power.

By now, most people are aware that their data is worth money. But your data is not valuable only because it can be sold. Facebook does not technically sell your data, for instance. Nor does Google. They sell the power to influence you. They sell the power to show you ads, and the power to predict your behaviour. Google and Facebook are not really in the business of data – they are in the business of power. Even more than monetary gain, personal data bestows power on those who collect and analyse it, and that is what makes it so coveted.Bottom of Form

There are two aspects to power. The first aspect is what the German philosopher Rainer Forst in 2014 defined as ‘the capacity of A to motivate B to think or do something that B would otherwise not have thought or done’. The means through which the powerful enact their influence are varied. They include motivational speeches, recommendations, ideological descriptions of the world, seduction and credible threats. Forst argues that brute force or violence is not an exercise of power, for subjected people don’t ‘do’ anything; rather, something is done to them. But clearly brute force is an instance of power. It is counterintuitive to think of someone as powerless who is subjecting us through violence. Think of an army dominating a population, or a thug strangling you. In Economy and Society (1978), the German political economist Max Weber describes this second aspect of power as the ability for people and institutions to ‘carry out [their] own will despite resistance’.

In short, then, powerful people and institutions make us act and think in ways in which we would not act and think were it not for their influence. If they fail to influence us into acting and thinking in the way that they want us to, powerful people and institutions can exercise force upon us – they can do unto us what we will not do ourselves.

There are different types of power: economic, political and so on. But power can be thought of as being like energy: it can take many different forms, and these can change. A wealthy company can often use its money to influence politics through lobbying, for instance, or to shape public opinion through paying for ads.

Power over others’ privacy is the quintessential kind of power in the digital age

That tech giants such as Facebook and Google are powerful is hardly news. But exploring the relationship between privacy and power can help us to better understand how institutions amass, wield and transform power in the digital age, which in turn can give us tools and ideas to resist the kind of domination that survives on violations of the right to privacy. However, to grasp how institutions accumulate and exercise power in the digital age, first we have to look at the relationship between power, knowledge and privacy.

There is a tight connection between knowledge and power. At the very least, knowledge is an instrument of power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault goes even further, and argues that knowledge in itself is a form of power. There is power in knowing. By protecting our privacy, we prevent others from being empowered with knowledge about us that can be used against our interests.

The more that someone knows about us, the more they can anticipate our every move, as well as influence us. One of the most important contributions of Foucault to our understanding of power is the insight that power does not only act upon human beings – it constructs human subjects (even so, we can still resist power and construct ourselves). Power generates certain mentalities, it transforms sensitivities, it brings about ways of being in the world. In that vein, the British political theorist Steven Lukes argues in his book Power (1974) that power can bring about a system that produces wants in people that work against their own interests. People’s desires can themselves be a result of power, and the more invisible the means of power, the more powerful they are. Examples of power shaping preferences today include when tech uses research about how dopamine works to make you addicted to an app, or when you are shown political ads based on personal information that makes a business think you are a particular kind of person (a ‘persuadable’, as the data-research company Cambridge Analytica put it, or someone who might be nudged into not voting, for instance).

The power that comes about as a result of knowing personal details about someone is a very particular kind of power. Like economic power and political power, privacy power is a distinct type of power, but it also allows those who hold it the possibility of transforming it into economic, political and other kinds of power. Power over others’ privacy is the quintessential kind of power in the digital age.

Two years after it was funded and despite its popularity, Google still hadn’t developed a sustainable business model. In that sense, it was just another unprofitable internet startup. Then, in 2000, Google launched AdWords, thereby starting the data economy. Now called Google Ads, it exploited the data produced by Google’s interactions with its users to sell ads. In less than four years, the company achieved a 3,590 per cent increase in revenue.

That same year, the Federal Trade Commission had recommended to US Congress that online privacy be regulated. However, after the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the Twin Towers in New York, concern about security took precedence over privacy, and plans for regulation were dropped. The digital economy was able to take off and reach the magnitude it enjoys today because governments had an interest in having access to people’s data in order to control them. From the outset, digital surveillance has been sustained through a joint effort between private and public institutions.

The mass collection and analysis of personal data has empowered governments and prying companies. Governments now know more about their citizens than ever before. The Stasi (the security service of the German Democratic Republic), for instance, managed to have files only on about a third of the population, even if it aspired to have complete information on all citizens. Intelligence agencies today hold much more information on all of the population. To take just one important example, a significant proportion of people volunteer private information in social networks. As the US filmmaker Laura Poitras put it in an interview with The Washington Post in 2014: ‘Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies.’ Among other possibilities, that kind of information gives governments the ability to anticipate protests, and even pre-emptively arrest people who plan to take part. Having the power to know about organised resistance before it happens, and being able to squash it in time, is a tyrant’s dream.

Tech companies’ power is constituted, on the one hand, by having exclusive control of data and, on the other, by the ability to anticipate our every move, which in turn gives them opportunities to influence our behaviour, and sell that influence to others. Companies that earn most of their revenues through advertising have used our data as a moat – a competitive advantage that has made it impossible for alternative businesses to challenge tech titans. Google’s search engine, for example, is as good as it is partly because its algorithm has much more data to learn from than any of its competitors. In addition to keeping the company safe from competitors and allowing it to train its algorithm better, our data also allows tech companies to predict and influence our behaviour. With the amount of data it has access to, Google can know what keeps you up at night, what you desire the most, what you are planning to do next. It then whispers this information to other busybodies who want to target you for ads.

Tech wants you to think that the innovations it brings into the market are inevitable

Companies might also share your data with ‘data brokers’ who will create a file on you based on everything they know about you (or, rather, everything they think they know), and then sell it to pretty much whoever is willing to buy it – insurers, governments, prospective employers, even fraudsters.

Data vultures are incredibly savvy at using both the aspects of power discussed above: they make us give up our data, more or less voluntarily, and they also snatch it away from us, even when we try to resist. Loyalty cards are an example of power making us do certain things that we would otherwise not do. When you are offered a discount for loyalty at your local supermarket, what you are being offered is for that company to conduct surveillance on you, and then influence your behaviour through nudges (discounts that will encourage you to buy certain products). An example of power doing things to us that we don’t want it to do is when Google records your location on your Android smartphone, even when you tell it not to.

Both types of power can also be seen at work at a more general level in the digital age. Tech constantly seduces us into doing things we would not otherwise do, from getting lost down a rabbit hole of videos on YouTube, to playing mindless games, or checking our phone hundreds of times a day. The digital age has brought about new ways of being in the world that don’t always make our lives better. Less visibly, the data economy has also succeeded in normalising certain ways of thinking. Tech companies want you to think that, if you have done nothing wrong, you have no reason to object to their holding your data. They also want you to think that treating your data as a commodity is necessary for digital tech, and that digital tech is progress – even when it might sometimes look worryingly similar to social or political regress. More importantly, tech wants you to think that the innovations it brings into the market are inevitable. That’s what progress looks like, and progress cannot be stopped.

That narrative is complacent and misleading. As the Danish economic geographer Bent Flyvbjerg points out in Rationality and Power (1998), power produces the knowledge, narratives and rationality that are conducive to building the reality it wants. But technology that perpetuates sexist and racist trends and worsens inequality is not progress. Inventions are far from unavoidable. Treating data as a commodity is a way for companies to earn money, and has nothing to do with building good products. Hoarding data is a way of accumulating power. Instead of focusing only on their bottom line, tech companies can and should do better to design the online world in a way that contributes to people’s wellbeing. And we have many reasons to object to institutions collecting and using our data in the way that they do.

Among those reasons is institutions not respecting our autonomy, our right to self-govern. Here is where the harder side of power plays a role. The digital age thus far has been characterised by institutions doing whatever they want with our data, unscrupulously bypassing our consent whenever they think they can get away with it. In the offline world, that kind of behaviour would be called matter-of-factly ‘theft’ or ‘coercion’. That it is not called this in the online world is yet another testament to tech’s power over narratives.

It’s not all bad news, though. Yes, institutions in the digital age have hoarded privacy power, but we can reclaim the data that sustains it, and we can limit their collecting new data. Foucault argued that, even if power constructs human subjects, we have the possibility to resist power and construct ourselves. The power of big tech looks and feels very solid. But tech’s house of cards is partly built on lies and theft. The data economy can be disrupted. The tech powers that be are nothing without our data. A small piece of regulation, a bit of resistance from citizens, a few businesses starting to offer privacy as a competitive advantage, and it can all evaporate.

No one is more conscious of their vulnerability than tech companies themselves. That is why they are trying to convince us that they do care about privacy after all (despite what their lawyers say in court). That is why they spend millions of dollars on lobbying. If they were so certain about the value of their products for the good of users and society, they would not need to lobby so hard. Tech companies have abused their power, and it is time to resist them.

In the digital age, resistance inspired by the abuse of power has been dubbed a techlash. Abuses of power remind us that power needs to be curtailed for it to be a positive influence in society. Even if you happen to be a tech enthusiast, even if you think that there is nothing wrong with what tech companies and governments are doing with our data, you should still want power to be limited, because you never know who will be in power next. Your new prime minister might be more authoritarian than the old one; the next CEO of the next big tech company might not be as benevolent as those we’ve seen thus far. Tech companies have helped totalitarian regimes in the past, and there is no clear distinction between government and corporate surveillance. Businesses share data with governments, and public institutions share data with companies.

When you expose your privacy, you put us all at risk

Do not give in to the data economy without at least some resistance. Refraining from using tech altogether is unrealistic for most people, but there is much more you can do short of that. Respect other people’s privacy. Don’t expose ordinary citizens online. Don’t film or photograph people without their consent, and certainly don’t share such images online. Try to limit the data you surrender to institutions that don’t have a claim to it. Imagine someone asks for your number in a bar and won’t take a ‘No, thank you’ for an answer. If that person were to continue to harass you for your number, what would you do? Perhaps you would be tempted to give them a fake number. That is the essence of obfuscation, as outlined by the media scholars Finn Bruton and Helen Nissenbaum in the 2015 book of that name. If a clothing company asks for your name to sell you clothes, give them a different name – say, Dr Private Information, so that they get the message. Don’t give these institutions evidence they can use to claim that we are consenting to our data being taken away from us. Make it clear that your consent is not being given freely.

When downloading apps and buying products, choose products that are better for privacy. Use privacy extensions on your browsers. Turn your phone’s wi-fi, Bluetooth and locations services off when you don’t need them. Use the legal tools at your disposal to ask companies for the data they have on you, and ask them to delete that data. Change your settings to protect your privacy. Refrain from using one of those DNA home testing kits – they are not worth it. Forget about ‘smart’ doorbells that violate your privacy and that of others. Write to your representatives sharing your concerns about privacy. Tweet about it. Take opportunities as they come along to inform business, governments and other people that you care about privacy, that what they are doing is not okay.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are safe from privacy harms, maybe because you are young, male, white, heterosexual and healthy. You might think that your data can work only for you, and never against you, if you’ve been lucky so far. But you might not be as healthy as you think you are, and you will not be young forever. The democracy you are taking for granted might morph into an authoritarian regime that might not favour the likes of you.

Furthermore, privacy is not only about you. Privacy is both personal and collective. When you expose your privacy, you put us all at risk. Privacy power is necessary for democracy – for people to vote according to their beliefs and without undue pressure, for citizens to protest anonymously without fear of repercussions, for individuals to have freedom to associate, speak their minds, read what they are curious about. If we are going to live in a democracy, the bulk of power needs to be with the people. If most of the power lies with companies, we will have a plutocracy. If most of the power lies with the state, we will have some kind of authoritarianism. Democracy is not a given. It is something we have to fight for every day. And if we stop building the conditions in which it thrives, democracy will be no more. Privacy is important because it gives power to the people. Protect it.

 (An Aeon article)

WHAT THE ANCESTORS WANT by Alfred K LaMotte

 The ancestors want you to know,

you are not required to carry their pain.

Your mother did not spin the web that nets you,
you wove it from your own desire.

Yesterday’s rain won’t nourish this flower;
the new sun drank last night’s tears.

Your grandmothers are singing for you
to birth your own unbearable happiness.

Your grandfathers’ bones are praying for you
to hunt the sweetness in your own marrow.

You think you must stand like a warrior
in the withering crossfire of your father’s blood.

But what wounds you is the wavering blade
of your mind, slashing the past and future.

If you insist on making reparations, plant
a wild pine; let it be a tree of Presence.

You cannot pay them for the privilege of breathing,
for awakening this solitude of beauty.

They need no libation, they thirst for no offering.
They are not hungry ghosts,

But earthworms who luxuriate in loam,
shards of sunlight lodged in magnolia blossoms.

Do not carry them; they do not carry you.
They bear their own grief and laughter.

The past is vanishing smoke, the flame is now.
Be christened with this breath; name yourself.

You sleep alone in the chamber of your ribs.
No one else enters and leaves your lungs.

A mother kissed you, a father held you;
you owe them nothing for this.

They did it for themselves; now let them
be about the business of their next childhood.

Father your heart, Mother your body.
Hold and kiss new sparkling babies.

Give them your grandmother’s name if you must,
but not as a weight, not as a brand on the hip;

But as a prayer, a promise of astonishment
for what has not yet been conceived.

Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons

 Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.

He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine.

When the wild god arrives at the door,
You will probably fear him.
He reminds you of something dark
That you might have dreamt,
Or the secret you do not wish to be shared.

He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.

You do not want to let him in.
You are very busy.
It is late, or early, and besides…
You cannot look at him straight
Because he makes you want to cry.

The dog barks.
The wild god smiles,
Holds out his hand.
The dog licks his wounds
And leads him inside.

The wild god stands in your kitchen.
Ivy is taking over your sideboard;
Mistletoe has moved into the lampshades
And wrens have begun to sing
An old song in the mouth of your kettle.

‘I haven’t much,’ you say
And give him the worst of your food.
He sits at the table, bleeding.
He coughs up foxes.
There are otters in his eyes.

When your wife calls down,
You close the door and
Tell her it’s fine.
You will not let her see
The strange guest at your table.

The wild god asks for whiskey
And you pour a glass for him,
Then a glass for yourself.
Three snakes are beginning to nest
In your voicebox. You cough.

Oh, limitless space.
Oh, eternal mystery.
Oh, endless cycles of death and birth.
Oh, miracle of life.
Oh, the wondrous dance of it all.

You cough again,
Expectorate the snakes and
Water down the whiskey,
Wondering how you got so old
And where your passion went.

The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing.

The fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exults and weeps at once.

The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.

In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and pain.

In the middle of the dance,
The house takes off from the ground.
Clouds climb through the windows;
Lightning pounds its fists on the table.
The moon leans in through the window.

The wild god points to your side.
You are bleeding heavily.
You have been bleeding for a long time,
Possibly since you were born.
There is a bear in the wound.

‘Why did you leave me to die?’
Asks the wild god and you say:
‘I was busy surviving.
The shops were all closed;
I didn’t know how. I’m sorry.’

Listen to them:

The fox in your neck and
The snakes in your arms and
The wren and the sparrow and the deer…
The great un-nameable beasts
In your liver and your kidneys and your heart…

There is a symphony of howling.
A cacophony of dissent.
The wild god nods his head and
You wake on the floor holding a knife,
A bottle and a handful of black fur.

Your dog is asleep on the table.
Your wife is stirring, far above.
Your cheeks are wet with tears;
Your mouth aches from laughter or shouting.
A black bear is sitting by the fire.

Sometimes a wild god comes to the table.
He is awkward and does not know the ways
Of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.
His voice makes vinegar from wine
And brings the dead to life.

The Roots of Loneliness

 

It remains unhelpfully hard to be able to admit that one is lonely. Unless one has recently been widowed or just moved to a new city, there are no respectable-sounding explanations for why someone would find themselves without a sufficient number of friends. The supposition quickly forms that a person’s loneliness must be explained by something diseased and troubling within their character. If they are lonely, it is because there are things in their nature that merit for them to be left alone.

 

Yet in reality, what makes someone feel lonely isn’t usually that they have no one they can be with, but that they don’t know a sufficient number of people who could understand the more sincere and quirk-filled parts of themselves. A warm body with whom to have a meal isn’t hard to find; there is always someone with whom one might discuss meteorological matters. But true loneliness doesn’t end the moment one is chatting with someone, it ends when a companion is able to follow us closely and honestly in the revelation of the intimate ailments and vulnerabilities of being human.

 

We stop feeling lonely when, at last, someone is there to acknowledge with frankness how perplexing sex remains, how frightening death is, how much envy one feels, how many supposedly small things spark anxiety, how much one sometimes hates oneself, how weepy one can be, how much regret one has, how self-conscious one feels, how complex one’s relationship to one’s parents is, how much misery one harbours, how much unexplored potential one has, how odd one is about different parts of one’s body and how emotionally immature one remains. It’s the capacity to be honest about these potentially embarrassing and little-spoken of sides of human nature that connects us to others and finally brings our isolation to an end.

 

It’s often said that we have built a lonely modern world. If this is so, it has nothing to do with our busy working schedules or gargantuan cities. It has to do with the fiction we tell ourselves about what we’re like. We trade in brutally simplified caricatures, which leave out so much of our real natures – so much of the pain, confusion, wildness and extremity. We’re lonely because we can’t easily admit to other people what we know is true in ourselves – and see no evidence for our peculiarities in public discourse. We tell stories about what we’ve been up to lately or how we feel at the moment that capture almost nothing of the truth of who we are, not because we are liars, but because we are ashamed of the gap between what we sense in ourselves and what is generally spoken of. We’re encouraged to present a cheerful, one-dimensional facade in which everything awkward but essential has been planed off. Without a hold on our true selves and energy to divulge our core, we have no chance of ever genuinely ‘meeting’ anyone else – however many so-called friends we might lay claim to.

 

A first step towards ending loneliness would be to encourage ourselves to investigate our own characters with greater depth – and then reassure us that our discoveries will have analogies with those of other people, even if they are as yet keeping quiet about what these might be. We should be prompted to open the more secret doors of our minds and step into the sad, angry, envious or self-hating rooms – turn on the lights and examine the contents without prudishness or denial, shame or guilt. When we are then next with someone else, we should risk shedding the usual superficial perfectionist expectations and comparing our mutual eccentricity and fear.

 

The heightened loneliness of some melancholy souls can be explained because they are unusually closely in touch with the less public, more candid parts of themselves. They are dissatisfied with their relationships with people around them because they have made friends with so many of the lesser known rooms in their own minds. They haven’t shied away from uncomfortable and surprising ideas and feelings – and hunger to discuss these in unsuperficial dialogue with equally forthright others.  

 

We are lonely because we have collectively been slow to accept that there are delightfully strange and unhinged people who lose little by confessing as much to those we meet. We should allow ourselves to reveal more of who we really are to those with the imagination and sense of adventure to listen, and to bring their own weirdness to the table in turn. Friendship begins when our unwarranted shame can finally be dismissed.

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-roots-of-loneliness/?utm_source=The+School+of+Life&utm_campaign=5c063701ef-TBOL_ENEWS_05062020&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_717e06d46b-5c063701ef-23062509&mc_cid=5c063701ef&mc_eid=d09ca15531

 

How to discover if something is important by Paulo Coelho

 The master was strolling through a field of wheat when a disciple came up to him: “I can’t tell which is the true path. What’s the secret?”

“What does that ring on your right hand mean?” asked the master.

“My father gave it to me before dying.”

“Well, give it to me.”

The disciple obeyed, and the master tossed the ring into the middle of the field of wheat.

“Now what?” shouted the disciple.

“Now I have to stop doing everything I was doing to look for the ring! It’s important to me!”

“When you find it, remember this: you yourself answered the question you asked me. That is how you tell the true path: it is more important than all the rest.”