Shame is the capacity to suffer under the gaze of the other. The other can be anyone, even oneself; we’re perfectly able to feel wounded by our own perceptions. There’s also a certain pride in shame—as proof of moral rectitude, of earnestness, or of competence. A patient learns that he will eventually go blind; it takes a year for him to confess this news to his family. He feels ashamed, and at the same time, he feels proud to suffer in silence. Shared emotion brings relief to the afflicted, yet it propagates his suffering; and by what right do I pass on my pain to my loved ones?

I think about this on a park bench, with a bottle of pineapple juice on one hand and no intention of calling my family. Not wanting to propagate my suffering is an excuse; if I die, my family’s pain will be far greater.

It’s the loser’s shame, then. If I pass out, I lose. Who am I if I can’t keep my blood sugar under control? You shouldn’t have eaten that bowl of ramen. It’s your responsibility. There’s this dog lying on a patch of grass in front of me, and he’s still yawning, and I desperately want to pet it. I want to tend to a garden. I haven’t been able to get out of the city yet; I’d love to go for a hike, to lose myself on some trail, to be part of a nature-driven epiphany that makes me understand how the world works and calms me down and makes me accepting of my illness, turns me into a placid, kind-eyed monk.

But I’m sitting on this bench and I can’t feel my legs, I’m sweating and panting and I can barely see. How am I supposed to play cool independent adventurer in the woods? I hear there are bears. I picture a bear yawning, and I hoist my two-liter bottle of juice to take another swig.

An illness is also a healing balm, an unguent—especially if it is socially accepted. It serves as fertile ground; it mothers your identity; it bears fruit and takes root. One benefits immensely from one’s illness; indeed, some are so eager to have one that they craft their own. They build slowly, with care. They decorate. They perform. To be ill is to be a victim, and that notion proves delightfully relaxing. Guilt is drawn out of you and replaced by a certain calmness that feels as protective as it feels alienating.

My diabetes is my greatest, most beloved excuse. It never fails. My diabetes removes me from the equation, cancels me out. My diabetes drops me inside a limbo, a liminal space. Why do I call it mine? It punishes and rewards me. It’s my biggest bet against shame; whenever the dreaded feeling bubbles up, I can use my glucose levels to run and hide, to defend myself, to set up a smokescreen.

It’s part of the intricate fabric of my body-mind, perhaps even of my soul. Yet there was a time, nebulous and distant, when I was not diabetic. I barely remember it. Was that truly me back then? Have I been two different people? I’d feel naked without my glucose monitor and my insulin pump. Every shift within my mind, every movement of my body, every lighting up of every neuron affects my illness, and my illness, in turn, influences every cell that thinks and feels. I cannot exist separately from my hypoglycemia.

Even worse so: will I ever be able to exist without shame? Shame precedes even my autoimmunity; shame has always been there. If everything’s interconnected, then I’m forced to admit that shame played a defining role in the development of my illness. It’s also playing a role in my losing consciousness; it gives and takes away.

I drink and stare at the dog. I think I’d like him to be the last thing I see. It’s a good final image. But then… what if I’m exaggerating? Maybe this is nothing and I’m making a complete fool of myself for believing I’m about to drop dead and miss out on all the beauty of life—oh, the tragedy!—and maybe this yawning dog is just a dog and not my last impression of the world and the epitome of tender simplicity.

Those who are ashamed are very good at being victims, but they will also try their best to be caregivers. Helping another wounded soul proves I’m not quite so miserable myself. Service to others is a weapon I can wield; to fight against the meaninglessness of my existence and to show I have a right to be here. My diabetes grants me the people’s pity, and unlocks a new perspective, that of the chronically ill: a vantage point to which the majority have no access. Illness touches us all, just as life does; yet autoimmunity and degenerative ailments, inevitable and relentless, are not, fortunately, a shared experience for our species. This means that there are certain things, certain feelings or ways of coping, that only us, the permanently sick, can understand. Cold comfort, I know. But to carry the bodily wisdom of a chronic ailment, to feel it, deeply and daily, carving and scarring, should also make me capable of great empathy, of great compassion.

It does not. I’d be a wonderful caregiver if I wasn’t wholly corrupted by the urge, the desperate desire to exist solely within the gaze of others. The image in their minds is more powerful than the present moment in which I live, and stronger than the reality I could build for myself. Shame is the guiding factor in all this; it turns real people into members of an audience, and one cannot fail in front of an audience. One cannot show oneself, one needs to win approval. To really care for someone includes, necessarily, that you be vulnerable and open, genuine and honest. If what I want is for others to perceive me as a caregiver, then I’ll never actually become one.

Once again, the problem lies in my inability to step outside myself.

Web image by Riley Revell 

Narrative

Isles

José Luis Marín Aznárez 05.11.26

Illness, emotion, story, and the interconnectedness of it all; a meditation on a park bench, on the verge of death

“I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

In winter 2024, Sop had a severe relapse of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), leaving them housebound in South East London.

That summer, in the days leading up to a friend’s birthday celebration, the artist rested carefully so they would be able to attend. The night before, they started taking what was touted as a “magic” pill for insomnia. They didn’t sleep at all and had to miss the party. But in a sleep-deprived haze, they wrote, as they described in a recent interview [1], “a solidarity rant, a kind of letter to other disabled people stuck indoors.” 

When Shape Arts, a UK disability arts organization, approached Sop with a commission, they decided to adapt the essay into a script for We Year, a mixed-media love letter to others living with energy-limiting conditions. The short film premieres at RestFest—a film festival and virtual space by and for the disability community—as part of a program co-organized by The Remote Body, Resting Up Collective, and Ort Gallery. 

With a poetic voiceover and ethereal soundscape, We Year immerses viewers in a chronic illness flare during a sweltering summer, blending decades-old archival footage from when Sop was well enough to move outside freely with recent phone footage shot at home. Shifting between past and present and between interior and exterior, the experience is at once isolating and unifying, claustrophobic and liberating. 

We Year also features 16mm direct animation, a technique that involves drawing and scratching moving images directly onto film stock rather than recording with a camera. Here, Sop used ink to overlay the orange stress bars from their Garmin watch across the entire film—a constant representation of their body that acts as a symbolic barrier between them and the audience. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did you begin to think of yourself as an artist? 

I always wanted to be an artist. Even as a kid, when I was asked, “What do you want to be?”, I was like, “An artist!” I honestly have never thought about doing anything else. I grew up in the deep countryside, and there wasn’t much access to contemporary culture, although I was obsessed with music and music magazines. There was this teen music magazine called Smash Hits that I loved, and I made collages and scrapbooks of pop stars. When I was 13, I went to a big retrospective of the massive British artist David Hockney, who just died, and it was the first time that I’d seen contemporary art. It blew my mind, and that’s the first time I remember thinking, “Oh, this is something serious that I want to do.” 

What questions or themes does your art usually explore? 

I find it hard to make work that isn’t about my life and the things that I’m dealing with. What I do always ends up being ultra-personal. That’s not something that a lot of people do, necessarily. The act of living as a chronically ill person means that you have to live in the world in a very different way from people who are not chronically ill. Chronic illness is a fertile area for ideas. You’re living the life and thinking about the life at the same time. If you’re an artist or someone who thinks about things in conceptual ways, you can’t help but try and interpret your life into art-making, projects, or ideas. Everything’s interesting. It’s like living life wonky.

As a chronically ill person,  I can’t do a 9 to 5. I can’t necessarily keep to plans, and I can’t always do basic things, like sometimes even look after myself in a normal  way. The agency that I have is to interrogate what this life means and the challenges that it poses and what is interesting about that. What can I say that’s beyond how I would perhaps describe being sick to a stranger? Like, what’s within that? All of the work that I make—even if it looks not about that—is going to be about that.   

And then the other part of it is that I grew up in the field and was a tomboy covered in mud. My understanding of the world was through nature, and now I’m in a flat without a garden. I can see some trees in the park just over there, but quite often, I’m not well enough to go and hang out in the park. I am pretty obsessed with nature and the fact that I can’t get to it. I can’t really have that life currently.  

In your bio, you describe yourself as “a torn and crooked leaf, a root embedded in the dirt, a shoot reaching to the sky.” Would you please elaborate on what this means? 

When I wrote that bio, I was making work about my body being the same as the microbiome in the soil. “A torn and crooked leaf” is being chronically ill. “A root embedded in the dirt” is really what it sounds like, within the context of that specific work. And the “shoot reaching to the sky”—my work deals with pretty hefty emotions, but there’s always hope. My life is not a miserable life; it is hopeful, and I do believe there’s something so crucial in being chronically ill that you absolutely have to keep hope alive. It takes a lot of work to do that and to get there. It’s not easy, but it’s super important. If you have this restricted life, you absolutely have to shoot for the sky. Because time just goes on.  

What does working in crip time [2] look like for you? What are your long-term goals as an artist? 

If you’re truly working in crip time, it’s fairly impossible to have long-term goals. You haven’t really got a choice when you work. You can do your very best to carve out time or space. Currently, I have about a couple of hours in the early morning when I can manage to do something. My afternoons and evenings—I simply can’t make work then. If you have such a limited time to make work, the amount of work you make is going to be low. It will have to meet your capacity, and that doesn’t fit well with current art market production timelines or expectations. Sometimes, you can’t make something for a year because the thing that you should be working on—and the thing that is your work—is your health. That’s your full-time job.  

I deeply believe that making in crip time actually is truthful to the world. We would probably all be better off if we did. Really, it means making work to your capacity, and that can mean a lot of things. You don’t need to be ill to make to your capacity. 

It’s a more authentic timeline of meeting yourself where you’re at, rather than forcing yourself to meet arbitrary or toxic timelines. 

You haven’t chosen to have chronic illness—you’re forced into doing that. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. Asking what would I like to do for my long-term goals—I find it very hard to answer because, first of all, I live, like, day to day and, second, when I think about what my long-term goals would be, it’s from the perspective of someone without a disability because I currently cannot see how I would be able to do more than what I’m doing unless I had an enormous amount of more support. 

How did you decide which media to work with for this project? 

Films and writing have always been the two mediums I mostly turn to, and actually they’re the most accessible things for me to do now, being housebound. When I was asked to make the film, I just didn’t have it at all in my means to film new work or leave the house, so I had to kind of figure out how to make a new work out of what I had, which was this personal essay I wrote about being stuck inside in the summer. I made the film throughout another summer of being stuck inside. A lot of chronically ill people turn their camera or phone or whatever onto their surroundings, so I had bits and bobs that I filmed. When I started making films, I would just film tons of different stuff. I had my little Hi8 video camera around the whole time, so I had lots of little clips that I hadn’t used, and I didn’t actually think that I was ever going to use them for anything. But that obviously wasn’t enough, and I didn’t really want to make a film which was just a film inside my house—there’s plenty of films like that. I had a whole bunch of old footage from the 90s. I digitized all of these tapes a few years ago, and they looked so great. A lot of that stuff was filmed out of the house, and then there were funny effects that I filmed which made it into the films. There’s a lot of blobs of color, which are actually motorway lights and ended up being this really nice kind of texture, which floated over and broke up some of the images.  

Hi8 and MiniDVs are the two cameras I was using in the past, so I have footage from both of those. And then there was 16mm direct animation. Each section of the film has a different animation running over it, but the animation is quite transparent, so it’s always there. It’s textural and has multiple meanings. And then I commissioned my friend to make the soundtrack. 

Would you elaborate on the meaning of the title of the film? 

The thing that’s turned me on most about this film is the fact that I can try and get “to year” and “yearing” adopted as a new way of describing spending all this time being sick. I think the word “year” is long enough for people to imagine, “Whoa, you are sick for a whole year. That’s a really long, unbearable time.” But then you make it into “yearing,” and then it could be even less than a year, but it’s probably closer to a year or multiple years. Then I was interested in what would happen if the years were then broken up with periods of being well, with relapses included as well.  

I find it really tiresome to have to explain the last five years of my life. So to not have to say, “Well, I was sick for a couple of years, housebound and bedbound, and then I got well again, and then I had a relapse”—it’s just like, “I was yearing.” I would love for it to become part of the lexicon of chronic illness.  

What does it mean to have “We Year” screened at RestFest? 

There’s this informal network of crip friends who work with each other. Not everyone works together, but we all know each other and there’s really close friendships within this group. They’re all small, crip-led organizations that have been made pretty much for the same purpose, which is remote events, screenings, and workshops. I was just really keen to connect and uplift all of these organizations. We created this program together, and I’m really proud of it. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s really nice making things with your friends. The access intimacy side of it all is real. Creating or programming with your friends is a very accessible way of making because we all understand each other and our capacities. I’ve said capacities a million times. 

You need to coin a new term for that as well. 

Okay, I’ll get on that for next time. 

We Year, through July 12 (if you start watching on June 28); RestFest Film Festival. “I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

[1] “Interview with artist-filmmaker Sop + a Special Screening of their New Film.” RestFest, 2026,
https://restfest.substack.com/p/interview-with-artist-filmmaker-sop. 
[2] In her 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, disability scholar Alison Kafer writes, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” 

The short story follows a woman who has been sent by her physician to a colonial mansion in the country as treatment for postpartum depression. The woman, who remains nameless, is constantly dismissed and belittled by her husband, who is also a physician. He speaks to her patronizingly and ignores her protestations that the “treatment” she is being given is making her worse instead of better. She is told not to think, and not to write, and her husband believes that since he sees no reason for her suffering, it does not exist. She is kept upstairs in the mansion’s nursery, isolated behind bars and gates that she believes to be there for children’s safety, when in actuality they function to keep her imprisoned. As time passes, the woman believes that she perceives something in the wallpaper and becomes convinced that it is a trapped woman. She believes the woman is confined behind bars within the wallpaper, which mirrors the trapped feelings that she herself is experiencing living day in and day out inside the confines of the nursery. Her desire to help the woman escape, which mounts to a frenzy, is reflective of her own desire to be free from the nursery and the rest cure.

Throughout the story, the titular wallpaper functions almost as another character as it’s brought to life in the narrator’s mind. She contrasts the vitality of the wallpaper with the “dead paper” upon which she is writing the journal entries that make up the narrative. Her fascination, and disgust, with the wallpaper drive the story as she investigates its pattern and condition, and then ultimately determines that there is someone living within it. The narrator’s disdain for the paper is obvious in her descriptions; for instance, in her first mention of the wallpaper, she writes “I never saw a worse paper in my life” (p. 793). She later writes that the print was “One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (p. 793). On the topic of its hue, she writes that “The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow…a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (p. 793). For all of her disgust with the wallpaper, and its damaged and torn condition, she still finds herself fascinated by it, and this fascination turns into obsession, which later turns into madness.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” works so effectively because it allows the reader to step into the mind of a woman as she is driven to madness. The structure of the story, which is told in an epistolary format, adds to the reader’s affiliation with the narrator as there is an intimacy in reading her journal entries and being in on the secret that she is writing against her husband’s orders. This affiliation helps to build empathy between the reader and the narrator, which contributed to the concern that I felt for the woman when she slowly lost her mind. If the story helped to save people, as Gilman hoped, it did so because it made them see the human being at the center of the “illness” and “treatment,” forcing them to understand what truly happens when you isolate someone and take away their ability to do what brings them joy. We bear witness as the woman loses her mind, leaving us with an intimate picture of what the rest “cure” could truly do to someone’s psyche. Instead of viewing postpartum depression solely as a condition to be treated, “The Yellow Wallpaper” makes readers realize that there is a person at the center whose needs and voice deserve attention.

In a patriarchal era in which women’s voices and lived experiences were ignored in favor of what the men around them deemed to be “best,” “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers an important and valuable perspective – that of the woman herself. By placing the female patient’s voice at the forefront of her story, Gilman gives her narrator the agency that had previously been stripped from her, to tell the story of her postpartum depression and how the prescribed treatment drove her to madness instead of restoring her health. It is a reminder to each of us that the voice of the patient is of paramount importance in any instance in which an embodied condition is being treated. When we ignore the patient, and what they need, they are lost, pushed to the background, and left to disappear into their own metaphorical wallpapers.

Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, pp. 804.

Originally published by The New England Magazine, Boston, 1892

Image Credits
Illustration for ”The Yellow Wall-paper” by Joseph Henry Hatfield, 1892 from Wiki Commons
Book cover by Small, Maynard & Company, 1901 from Wiki Commons
Web image from Medhum

Film ReviewVideo

Obsession and “The Yellow Wallpaper” 

Rudy Malcom May 29, 2026

The film highlights the peril of love that demands possession.

First published in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a postpartum woman whose husband, a physician, prescribes a rest cure for her so-called “nervous depression,” confining her to a nursery. The narrator’s increasing fixation on the room’s titular wallpaper reflects her descent into psychosis, culminating in her belief that a woman is trapped behind the wallpaper—and, ultimately, that she herself is that woman. 

What if the short story were told from the man’s point of view? Obsession—the micro-budget horror film that has quickly become one of the year’s biggest box-office successes—feels, in some ways, like an answer to that question. 

Directed by Curry Barker, Obsession follows Bear (played by Michael Johnston), who acquires a supernatural toy that grants his wish for his co-worker and childhood friend, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), to love him more than anyone else in the world. Nikki’s mind and body are thereby effectively hijacked, echoing the woman’s loss of agency in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Unlike Gilman’s short story, however, Obsession places us in the perspective of the controlling figure, forcing us to confront not only the horror of victimization but that of possessive desire itself. 

Bear is initially presented sympathetically: as a lonely, shy, awkward music store employee with an unrequited crush. We might relate to his desperation for connection; after all, he seems as gentle as, well, a teddy bear. While bears are also predators, the character does not see himself as a villain—and because we spend time inside his mindset, neither do we. Even as Nikki begins to behave erratically, we believe that Bear deserves a chance at romance and that he can control the situation. More troubling, we believe that he can control Nikki. 

Unlike “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which we inhabit the woman’s mental breakdown, Obsession mostly foregrounds Bear’s fear and guilt, obscuring Nikki’s pain and suffering—at first. Hoping to alter his wish, he calls the toy’s customer support line and hears Nikki screaming in agony on the other end. He returns home to find her frozen in place, covered in excrement and vomit; later, she mutilates her own face with a broken bottle. Eventually, while she sleeps, the voice of her former self briefly resurfaces and begs him to kill her. But Bear refuses, asking, “What’s so bad about being with me?” His desire to be loved has become inseparable from his willingness to erase Nikki’s freedom. (Her surname, “Freeman,” feels heavy-handed.) The realization that we have centered Bear’s distress over the damage he has inflicted is powerfully uncomfortable.  

Gilman’s short story concludes with the protagonist rubbing against the wallpaper and declaring, “I’ve got out at last… in spite of you,” causing her husband to faint as she continues circling the room, liberated through madness. By the end of Obsession, Bear is similarly inert, but Nikki is lucid and seemingly still trapped—that is, left to grapple with the carnage unleashed by the obsessive version of herself that Bear created. 

Medicine is no longer the locus of patriarchal control it was when Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but it still carries traces of gendered authority. Barker’s Obsession critiques the insidious logic of modern “nice guy” entitlement; believing he deserves Nikki’s love, Bear prescribes not a rest cure but a “love cure” that reveals how ordinary longing and self-pity can become coercive.  

By aligning our sympathies with the perpetrator before exposing the full cost of his desire, the film tests our complicity and highlights the peril of love that demands possession. 

Web image from Capstone Pictures.

The house sits at the foot of a spring-green mountain, painted over with long cascading strokes of darker green, giving the impression of a verdant and peaceful setting. Contrast this to the brown ridge where the figure is sitting, huddled in a long sleeve jacket, hands tucked into pockets. The ridge is barren except for a single tree that is mostly bare branches with sparse pale-pink leaves.

Matthew Wong was a rising young painter who died of suicide on October 2, 2019. In a moving obituary by the New York Times, his mother explained that Mr. Wong “was on the autism spectrum, had Tourette’s syndrome and had grappled with depression since childhood.” This helps to explain the sense of isolation and longing in the painting, depicted by the solitary figure on a barren ridge, looking back at a house in lush green surroundings. The figure also appears to be physically cold, wrapped in long sleeve coat, hands tucked in pockets, with no skin showing, but is sadly separated from shelter by an icy white distance. This dynamic, amidst a landscape of majestic mountain rising into star-crowded sky, gives a sense of melancholy beauty and loneliness.

The title of the painting, “See you on the Other Side,” can be interpreted in numerous ways. Mr. Wong is known for incorporating mythical elements into his work, so is this the beginning of the hero’s journey? If the tree in the foreground is interpreted as being laden with pale pink flower buds, there is a sense of hope and promise that the figure is leaving home and will return triumphant on the other side. But the tree can also be seen as a representation of fall transitioning into winter, hanging onto a few withered leaves, as the last bright red autumnal leaf blows away. Is the figure heading away from the verdant house and mountain into winter, the season that classically symbolizes death? Does the other side refer to an afterlife? A third interpretation to consider is that the figure is not leaving the house, but actually trying to get there. In this case, on the other side would refer to crossing the vast white expanse where no path is marked and no help is in sight.

View the painting at Museum of Fine Arts Boston ➔

Matthew Wong’s Biography: www.matthewwongfoundation.org/biography
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image from www.matthewwongfoundation.org/

At one point Ragin accidentally visits Ward #6, the mental ward, where he encounters Ivan Gromov, a brilliant patient, and strikes up a conversation with him.  Gromov, who carries a diagnosis of paranoia, loves life passionately.  His passion attracts Ragin, whose sensibilities are blunted by the emotional numbness from which many physicians suffer.  Ragin is attracted to Gromov like a moth to a candle. He begins to visit Ward 6 daily to debate with Gromov. Since the other doctors never visit Ward 6, this behavior is considered very peculiar. 

Ragin yearns to feel something, anything, even to experience suffering, rather than to remain suspended in his emotionless cocoon.  He develops an obsession that only suffering can redeem him.  This obsession makes him even more dysfunctional, a situation which allows a junior doctor to have him fired as hospital director and, ultimately, admitted to Ward #6 as mentally ill.  Once Ragin has become a patient, a “nobody,” the ward orderly hits him, thereby giving him the opportunity to suffer.  Shortly thereafter, he has a stroke and dies.

Enormous demands and poor working conditions contribute to Ragin’s predicament, but Chekhov suggests that Ragin’s character is also deficient.  Something is missing.  He experiences a sense of futility and numbness.  Is this an inevitable consequence of medical practice?  Or is he particularly vulnerable to burnout?  The deeper theme in “Ward No. 6” is Ragin’s failure to live an authentic life, to discover a sense of wholeness and meaning in his existence.  It is possible that Ragin’s early enthusiasm for hospital practice disguised the fact that he never came to terms with his own needs and values.  

Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov
David Magarshack (Ed.)
London, Penguin Books, 1964.

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

Reviews of Chekhov’s Stories

Cold Eye, Warm Heart: Medicine and Anton Chekhov  

Jack CoulehanAug 6, 2025

An Awkward Business by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanJun 11, 2025

The Grasshopper by Anton Chekhov

Jack CoulehanMay 11, 2025

Ionych by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanMar 11, 2025

A Doctor’s Visit  by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanMar 11, 2025

Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov

Jack CoulehanMar 11, 2025

A Nervous Breakdown by Anton Chekhov 

Jack CoulehanFeb 11, 2025

Enemies by Anton Chekhov

Jack CoulehanJan 11, 2025

These changes have not all been for the better. Perhaps you have noticed such unsettling changes yourself. A child in a restaurant is glued to a tablet screen, probably the last resort of a weary parent trying to enjoy their first peaceful meal in days. A group of tourists in Paris marvels at the Eiffel Tower, not as it is, but as it appears through their phone camera and on their phone screen. Neighborhoods have become quieter and less lively, as children have retreated from the streets and hunkered down at home with their phones. 

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, elaborates upon these ideas in his book The Anxious Generation. In this book, he describes the dual trends of increasing smartphone/screen-based engagement, driven by perverse economic incentives of technology companies, and decreasing real-world, human-to-human play, driven by over-protection from modern parents. The collision of these forces has defined Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, as the most anxious and depressed generation of our time. 

In the book, Haidt notes that the tactics of technology companies to drive increased user engagement have been well documented by activists such as Tristan Harris. Much like tobacco companies in the mid to late 20^th century, modern technology companies prey on young users (e.g. children) as a source of future/recurring revenue, and fight off consumer protections through aggressive lobbying campaigns at the government level. As a result, children are spending record numbers of hours on smartphones, increasingly isolated from the real world and irritable when deprived of their digital drugs. Haidt also observes that the technology problems of girls and boys are unique. For example, girls are significantly more prone to social media addiction and the associated psychological disturbances such as distorted body image and self-worth. On the other hand, boys are much more avid users of video games and pornography, which reduce their desire for real-world play and romantic relationships. 

Haidt also notes that over a longer but overlapping time period, children have been overly protected from real-world responsibilities and real-world play. He attributes these new attitudes to the changing media landscape and how crimes are portrayed in the news, as well as legal challenges which have incentivized parental overprotection. In one example, he describes a pitiful incident in which an eight-year-old child was seen walking the streets alone, and a concerned passerby called the police to report an “abandoned child.” In this case and many others, parents have been held responsible for this absurd new “crime”, a sight which would have been entirely commonplace 30 years ago. Haidt highlights the irony of how the real-world, full of rich experiences, appropriate risk-taking, and character-building responsibilities has been overly regulated by our society, whereas the digital world, rife with dangers for growing adolescent minds, has been almost entirely unchecked, unregulated, and ignored.  

Bringing people out of the digital world and into the real world is a formidable task. One strategy that Haidt found success with was to encourage people to reconnect with a sense of awe in the world. Awe is a vague concept, but can be defined as a feeling of wonder inspired by the sacred or sublime. The real world is full of such awe-inspiring moments, if only we could stop to notice them. In a comically simple exercise, Haidt encouraged students in his university course to take a walk through Manhattan without their phones or headphones, and then to write about their experience on this “awe walk.” The written reflections were so beautiful that he included excerpts of his students’ work in the book to illustrate how such simple measures could have such a profound impact. One such excerpt is reproduced below: 

For children who have no choice but to grow up in the digital era, Haidt attempts to boil his recommendations down into four rules for a healthier childhood:  

1. No smartphones until high school. 

2. No social media before the age of 16. 

3. No phones in schools. 

4. More independence, play, and responsibility in the real world. 

He recognizes that while these solutions are simple, their implementation is anything but. As a society, we face a daunting collective action problem as it pertains to technology and real-world experiences. Such problems require collective solutions, and Haidt encourages parents to get together, organize, and raise their children together in a real-world oriented manner. While broader changes in school policy may seem out of reach, Haidt encourages struggling schools to get inspired by the numerous case studies of schools that went phone-free and experienced positive changes by almost every metric, within a matter of two to three years. 

Some may say that our society is too far gone to reverse these negative changes, but this is certainly not the case. In fact, people are more skeptical now than ever of the negative role of technology in our lives, and collective action on this problem may be easier now than it ever has been before. As we sit perched on the precipice of a new technological revolution in artificial intelligence, this sentiment has already garnered potent opposition to unchecked technological advance and implementation. Will we learn from our past mistakes? Unfortunately, our track record is not encouraging. Only time will tell how far we go before we decide we need a detox. 

The Anxious Generation 
Jonathan Haidt 
Penguin Press, New York City, March 26, 2024, 400 pages
Web Photo by Joel Fulgencio 

Four years after the Covid pandemic began, as daily life has returned in large measure to its pre-pandemic shape, assessments and reflections about how the pandemic was able to wreak such havoc and how it could be prevented from occurring again are coming forth. Many are technocratic in nature and assume our aims and pursuits will remain the same as before. Micheal O’Siadhail (pronounced mee-hawl o’sheel), in his new book of poems, Desire, says that in addition to technocratic responses to the pandemic (and other threats to civilization covered in the book), we should give serious thought to what we desire. We talk to O’Siadhail about this idea and he reads selected poems from the book that characterize many aspects of what the pandemic put people through collectively and individually. He also talks about how the forms of his poetry convey his thoughts just as his words do, and how poetry, through syntax, sound, meter, and intensity, can add clarity and effectiveness to prosaic prose communicating complex concepts.

Citation:
Micheal O’Siadhail. Desire. Waco, Tx; Baylor University Press, 2023.

Links:
Micheal O’Siadhail’s website.

Russell Teagarden’s relevant blog pieces in According to the Arts:
—  Desire
— One Crimson Thread

Previous podcast episode with Micheal O’Siadhail featuring his poems recounting his late wife’s final years with Parkinson’s disease.

Thanks to Micheal O’Siadhail for bringing his enlightened perspectives on what we experienced with Covid through the piercing poetry in his book, Desire.

The Clinic & The Person is a podcast developed by our editor Russell Teagarden to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide.

Feature photo by S&B Vonlanthen