In 1954, Walker Percy published a short philosophical essay called “The Loss of the Creature,” arguing that modern man had given up sovereignty over his own existence. Advertisements, magazine articles, and television all offered up ersatz experiences to a passive and compliant public. That public in turn increasingly found direct, unmediated experience disappointing and anticlimactic. If only he could see us now!

Percy illustrated this thesis by recounting a typical tourist’s experience of the American Grand Canyon. By the 1950s, the Grand Canyon had been photographed in technicolor, broadcast in vivid detail to Americans, and reproduced in countless travel brochures. But a strange thing had happened. Instead of feeling jubilant at seeing the site, many visitors felt strangely deflated and disappointed. The Grand Canyon lost its sense of authenticity for travelers because it had “already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words ‘Grand Canyon.’” And therefore, “the source of the sightseer’s pleasure [underwent] a shift” and often disappeared altogether. Reality could not live up to the promised experience.

Christine Rosen’s brilliant new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, is essentially an extended meditation on this insight. We are now seventy years on from Percy’s essay, and the mediation of daily experience has become exponentially greater. Most of us spend our days looking at the world through screens—televisions in waiting rooms and restaurants, computers at work, and the rectangles of doom that are our phones—during any interval of the day that feels boring or slow. We use these devices for shopping, for entertainment, and occasionally to talk to other people. We have come to see this as normal. The idea of making one’s way through the world without a smartphone now seems increasingly difficult, not to say impossible. Yet every screen “mediates” reality and detaches us from the flesh and blood interactions that used to be routine. These screens deliver experience to us, encouraging us to leave a review or take advantage of a simple return policy if we are not satisfied.

I can imagine someone replying: well, why would we want to live without technology? This is precisely the question that Rosen’s book answers. In a succinct and damning seven chapters, she shows what has been lost over the past quarter-century. We have lost our ability to wait patiently, to pay attention to other people, and to take personal risks in real-life conversations. We are obsessed with tracking and quantifying ourselves and everything else that interests us. We have lost our ability to delay gratification, since anything we want is quickly (or immediately) available through Amazon. We prize unlimited choice and convenience. We are narcissistic and civilly disengaged. We hate to be bored, and we desire efficiency in everything from dating to education. Serendipity has been eliminated in favor of ruthless intentionality. Our lives are a kind of self-display, and we do not hesitate to commodify our most intimate moments and parade ourselves in front of strangers. 

The picture of contemporary Americans that emerges from the book is remarkably unflattering. It is tempting, I must admit, to imagine that other people may be subject to these problems but that we have managed to escape the depredations of technology. Perhaps, we reason, it is just our children’s generation—the “digital natives”—who are really slaves to their screens. But many aspects of Rosen’s diagnosis hit uncomfortably close to home. Who among us has not found it easier and less entangling to send a quick text than to call someone? Or to check messages while waiting in a long line at the grocery store? Even the few Luddite holdouts I used to know now have phones, “for emergencies.” This is how it always starts. 

Each chapter of the book is illuminating and critical. Rosen’s style is elegant, sometimes humorous, and mostly devoid of what the younger generation calls “judginess.” It is not just another jeremiad against Big Tech. Certain vignettes are especially engaging, as when Rosen describes a young man who has a nervous, physical reaction to meeting a girl he likes in person; or when Rosen recounts her own childhood experience of learning to play the bassoon. For all its grace, though, the book really does call us out for the way we live now. 

Rosen wants to convey a vision of what it means to exist as an “embodied” person. True, our mediated experiences allow us to escape some of the little discomforts of the human condition: the awkwardness that sometimes accompanies small talk, a blush when we are embarrassed, the powerlessness of not knowing where we are in a new city. But in all our pointing, clicking, and typing we are losing some of the most basic skills that in the past were taken for granted. 

Writing by hand offers a good example of this. The “embodied cognition” of taking notes with a pen or pencil is qualitatively different from acting as a stenographer or court reporter. Students who use their laptops to transcribe lectures do not focus on the meaning of what is being said, and therefore are not really learning. And a letter from a friend “in his own hand” always seems more personal and intimate than something typed on a screen. The piece of paper is a reminder that our friend exists in real time and physical space. We learn from seeing someone’s handwriting: it is a form of self-disclosure. 

Likewise, the act of making something—a chair or a soufflé—requires that we engage with more than thoughts, words, numbers, and other abstractions. In working with wood or eggs we quickly discover that we cannot wish these substances into the forms that we desire. We must adapt ourselves to their properties and learn how things “push back” against us. How much more is this necessary in building a bridge or an airplane! In all these endeavors we confront the real, material world and remember that we are real and material too.

In a chapter entitled “Mediated Pleasures,” Rosen considers how even the most physical human activities—eating and sex—can now be relegated to screens. The problem of pornography as a substitute for real sexual activity is well-documented, especially in Japan, where large numbers of young men and women are simply not interested in or even “despise” intimacy. Food offers just as strange a case study: people order restaurant food for delivery by GrubHub and Doordash while watching celebrity chefs assembling exquisite meals on television. Some people even prefer the odd practice of substituting a generic food product (Soylent) for actual meals, as if the effort of cooking or thinking about one’s personal sustenance were itself a problem of efficiency to be “solved.” It reminds me of a bachelor friend of mine who used to eat a cheese sandwich for every meal. Practices like these certainly offer a way of addressing our most persistent human needs, but I think most people will see the obvious problems of outsourcing or ignoring food or sex. 

One other important aspect of embodiedness is the concept of place. Although Zoom, Teams, and other such online meeting technologies have their virtues, they are no substitute for the in-person interactions that happen in an office, school, or neighborhood. From Jane Jacobs’ work on city planning to the design of residential houses, people have long recognized that the way we live is structured by the places where we live. An “open concept” house facilitates human interactions different from those that occur in a house with many doors and separate rooms. An office where one sees colleagues every day fosters the serendipity of chance encounters and quick but meaningful exchanges. This is lost when every meeting must be scheduled in advance. And, of course, education is deeply place-dependent. Many of us will remember what it felt like to learn in a particular building or college classroom—what the place smelled like, how cold it was in the winter, or how uncomfortable the chairs were. 

We will perhaps even remember the professor or our fellow students. And this points to one of the most important aspects of embodiment: that what we prize about other people often has little to do with what can be conveyed through technology. The things that make a person charming or wonderful to us (or irritating and intolerable) are the intangibles of style and manner. “What any person says or does is one thing,” observes essayist William Hazlitt, “the mode in which he says or does it is another.” Manner, Hazlitt observes, “is the involuntary or incidental expression given to our thoughts and sentiments by looks, tones, and gestures.” It is the way someone expresses himself, the way he sits, walks, and laughs. It is the uniqueness of a self.

To return at last to Walker Percy’s insight: our real problem is not just the dominance of digital technology over the past quarter century, though that has certainly made things worse. The problem is endemic to human experience in the contemporary world. Percy describes it as the loss of sovereignty over our own lives. We are all too willing to think of ourselves as, and to be, mere consumers of experiences delivered to us by experts or algorithms. We desperately want to live meaningful lives and to do things that feel “authentic.” But we lack the confidence to seize life for ourselves. Instead, we defer to influencers and celebrities who tell us what to value and how to live. 

Even when we do something obviously significant—attend a graduation or wedding, travel to a foreign place—we often do not really experience it but instead photograph or record it for the future. Therefore we do not really attend to the thing itself; we are watching ourselves and wondering how others will see us later. Perhaps we imagine that we will watch and rewatch the moment again in the future. But we usually don’t, and thus, the hope of authentic experience is doubly lost. We weren’t there in the moment and will not be there in the future, either.

The strangeness of all this is evident in the new phenomenon of “proposal photos.” Does it not take away from the unexpectedness of a marriage proposal to drag along a photographer, who will capture the happy couple in a moment of delighted surprise, which is really no surprise at all? Here, as in so many other domains, contemporary life takes on a compulsively performative character. We cannot pay attention to what is happening in the present. As Percy observed in 1954, for the unhappy tourist at the Grand Canyon “there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and to the future.”

And yet: while I don’t disagree with anything in Rosen’s analysis, I’m compelled to make a few small qualifications to the extreme tech-skeptic position. Even as I lament my own enslavement to my phone and computer, I am reminded daily of real goods that have also accompanied the digital revolution. Who could fail to be grateful for the invention of “Google Maps,” which has dramatically improved—and possibly saved—the marriages of countless couples across the world? Or for the vast, scholarly riches that are available to a scholar who researches any subject at all? Just a few decades ago, students of the ancient and medieval world had to page through the Patrologia Latina by hand, if their libraries even owned it. Now the University of Chicago publishes PL in a searchable database that is available for free, to the entire world. On a personal note, two of the most meaningful adult friendships I have made in recent years would have been impossible absent digital technology. I am in Texas; my friends are in Massachusetts and California. Yet we are in touch easily, and at any time we choose.

Surely, therefore, the situation is more complicated than Rosen leads her readers to believe. But perhaps such qualifications were not her aim in this book. Most of us are all too willing to accept not the tech-skeptical position, but instead an extreme and unquestioning tech-friendliness. Christine Rosen’s valuable book reminds us that we cannot escape our embodied, timebound human condition, nor should we want to. This condition has its downsides: we get older, we lose our physical powers and whatever beauty we may have had, and ultimately we die. Technology promises a partial escape from some of these indignities, though our bodies will have the last word. But technology also diverts our attention in ways that may cause us to reach the end of life and feel, like Percy’s tourist, that we have missed all the fun. As poet Mary Oliver writes, “How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly, looking at everything.” Rosen’s book is a masterfully executed reminder of this insight.