In a well-known parable, a group of blind men encounters an elephant. Each man touches a different part of the elephant and receives very different tactile feedback. Their later descriptions of the elephant to each other disagree, though each individual’s description is accurate and captures one portion of the elephant: a tusk, a leg, an ear. Humans often have only partial information and struggle to understand the feelings and observations of others about the same problem or situation, even though those feelings and observations may be absolutely accurate and valid in that person’s context.
Our relationships with technology are similar: Each of us relates to technology in a unique, highly personal way. We lose or cede control, stability, and fulfillment in a million different ways. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in the novel Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In the same vein, the road back from unhappiness, the path to taking control over technology, and, by extension, the path to regaining freedom of choice takes a multitude of steps that are different for each of us. The steps nonetheless carry some common characteristics that we can all use as a basis for rediscovering and reentering real life.
Excerpted from Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
The refrain we commonly hear is that we need to unplug and disconnect. Conceptually, this recommendation may feel good as a way to take back total control and to put technology back in its place as a subservient, optional tool. But using technology is no longer a matter of...