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Data Does Not Feel, Don’t Give Your Whole Life To It

It’s not selfish to do selfies, but we do lose the real world by focusing too much on the virtual one

Christyl Rivers, Phd.
4 min readMay 9, 2024
Photo by Julián Gentilezza on Unsplash

You are not being served

Let’s be clear. There is plenty of room for using technology for positive things. However, we are changing our culture, and quickly, by spending far too much time on being in service to data input and output.

Most of us suffer these days from digital distraction. It takes real effort to fight it, to stay engaged enough to own your own life. This 24/7 distraction is intentional, but in service to non-feeling companies, not in service to the individual.

At the store, for example, people are looking up information. Walking in the park, people are not seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, breathing, or noticing things our senses evolved for us to notice.

Even when being “attended” to, these days your server, your physical therapist, your painter, your stylist,or even your doctor, is often taking attention away from YOU in order to either input data, or look it up.

People are not making as much eye contact. They are not touching, examining, using intuition, or many other of our very neglected senses.

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Christyl Rivers, Phd.
Christyl Rivers, Phd.

Written by Christyl Rivers, Phd.

Ecopsychologist, Writer, Farmer, Defender of reality, and Cat Castle Custodian.

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