Digital Wellbeing: Elevating Our Relationships with Wonder
A shorter form of this piece is featured as today’s guest post in Chip Conley’s daily “Wisdom Well” blog.
Last month I traveled to New Hampshire, north of Lake Winnipesaukee, on one of the many smaller crescents of lakes, to guide a group of leaders in a digital wellbeing retreat. Up in the Franconia notch area, the mountain ranges catch cool air in the folds, and mist rises off the water at sunrise. There’s a soft quality to the light, all golden. Loon calls skim the lake, coloring sunrise meditations with alluring, hollow melody.
The retreat experience was called “The Great Escape”– even the name captivated me. I found myself wondering where the word “Escape” comes from… all the words with “cape” and “scape” make me think of adventure. Landscapes and skyscapes with wide vistas, capers and cavorting, causing some mischief, raising a ruckus. Something beyond the standard, with an element of fun and often awe. Gazing at an expansive starscape, we find ourselves deeply moved, stretching beyond attachment to our individual selves.
The word “Escape” is complex though, and can also mean a push against something oppressive. There’s a heaviness there. What were we escaping from, in this ritual of retreat? What could it mean to have a digital wellbeing retreat that offered a new and different approach to building a new relationship with technology, and ultimately with ourselves?
On purpose, by design, we all had VR (virtual reality) headsets with us, we all had laptops, and we were deliberately focused on the integrative process of feeling out a quality of wellbeing that is not an either/or proposition of being for/against tech itself. To be non-binary, we had to start with our physical wellness, recognizing that the digital layer depends upon the physical. They are entwined. When left to our own devices, separate from the (often addictive) digital devices we carry around in our pockets and sometimes get sucked into, what would we choose to honor?
Many people choose to turn away from digital lives when seeking peace. We might go for a “digital detox” in order to pause the chatter, turn down the volume, find ourselves and our center. We seek coming back to wholeness in a digitally fractured world. This has been the story of our times, part of the zeitgeist and cultural narrative about our human relationships with technology. It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t need to villainize our technology and subsequently feel guilt, shame, or blame over our behaviors. We have agency and choice, and it’s not simply a choice to disconnect. Ideally, our full life is created with purpose, intention, and integrity. Just as we fashion our lives to enhance our creativity, expressive wholeness, and wellness, our consideration of technology can be in consonance with that.
This is a mission that can be all of ours: to reintegrate wholeness and invite better forms of connection, empowered by our human imaginations. I am also devoted to healing the loneliness epidemic, which is not simply about increasing noise and social chatter. There’s a more complex and beautiful dialogue to be had. I teach about wellbeing and technology at Stanford, and I have written a new book called Digital Wellbeing: Empowering Connection With Wonder and Imagination in the Age of AI to invite the conversation to deepen.
I treat each topic surrounding Digital Wellbeing as interrelated, like beads on a necklace, and each one is sovereign. The book addresses everything from spatial computing and our increasingly 3-dimensional tech world, to approaches to AI and business, to gaming and immersive experience design, to wearables, wellness, and physical movement. Along the way, I demystify terms and talk with colleagues, friends, researchers and leaders from a variety of backgrounds and industries. Each chapter closes with reflection questions for individuals and the teams they lead and collaborate with, because this book thrives in conversation. It lives in the questions and considerations. There are frameworks and methodologies introduced, and examples of how they play out in practices. It’s an “invitation over prescription” proposition, where your life context is also a guide.
In New Hampshire, much of our group and individual experiences rested on one of the core principles I hold sacred: when it comes to digital wellbeing, our intention meets attention. It’s our intention that informs our quality and direction of attention. Life can be measured by a series of attentional moments — in essence, that’s what mindfulness is, too. As Ellen Langer, the Harvard expert on mind-body connection, says, mindfulness is the process of actively noticing new things. Our attention can become a curiosity vehicle, a channel for awe, shining a light on our moment-by-moment experience, without judgment. Fully open to the unfolding life around us, ever-evolving and emergent. This is life’s inherent beauty — that it can be that astonishingly wonderful when we show up for it.
Approaches to digital technology can be liberating and in consonance with these core beliefs. My work with spatial technology shows me every day how it can invite lateral thinking, plasticity, curiosity, and wonder. I teach about these topics in workshops, and design experiences that empower connection through awe-rich technology. It’s an empathy engine, and when designed well, it’s a brief experience that leads us back to ourselves, integrated with our physical way of life in a way that enhances our presence. John O’Donohue talks about the power of the “threshold,” as a space of in-betweenness, as a new world is calling for us to enter. We are in that threshold space with wellbeing and wonder.
Our approaches to digital wellbeing need not be different from approaches to wellbeing in general: a soulful integration of self and science, incorporating technology in ways that are more mindful of our physical nature; our biological integrity. It’s an imperative for us to sort out a cadence for ourselves that makes sense, given the complexity of our daily lives and our aspirations as leaders.
We want and need to co-operate well, and this book has guiding points and reflections for us as leaders, as well as for the teams we serve and learn from. It’s highly collaborative and also playful, in the style of experiential educational computing pioneer Seymour Papert, paving the way for approaches to AI that are not only human-centered but highly humane for every living being on this planet.
While it all sounds delightful and fun — and it is! — there’s a lot at stake for us and planet Earth in this stage of history. I believe now is a time to rise as a collective. Thich Nhat Hanh said that the next Buddha would not be an individual but rather a Sangha, a community of practice. We can be guided by each other, feeling our mutual support, togetherness, and belonging, even and because of our diversity, the essence of our resilience. Digital Wellbeing addresses principles and proposes some new frames that can help us along the path.
Here we are, at the start of autumn, celebrating a change of season, perhaps also open to a change of heart about tech. It’s time to reframe that “digital detox” into “digital wonder.” I’m hopeful and motivated to elevate to a future where we celebrate daily forms of awe in physical and digital forms, recognizing the wildly creative and resplendent patterns and fractals that support our thriving. Digital Wellbeing can help with this, and can bring us back to ourselves in the process of expanding our ways of thinking. After all, now should be the time of “Great Scapes of Possibility,” shouldn’t it? That’s a retreat that’s advancing, by nature.
Find “Digital Wellbeing: Empowering Connection With Wonder and Imagination in the Age of AI” here. Celebrating launch week!
