Thoughts from reading Robert Jay Lifton’s book, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. Post 3

Thoughts from reading Robert Jay Lifton’s book, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. Post 3

My phone is acting weird. It is stuck, frozen, in the act of trying to answer a FaceTime call. I cannot access anything else on it – not google, or maps, or settings. I looked up the nearest Apple Store on my computer and learned there was one in Asheville, a half hour drive away. Since I could not use maps on my phone, I brought my computer with me. Alas, once away from home it no longer had the satellite link. Thankfully the instructions were still shown on the screen, and I made my way to the destination, only to find out there was no store there. The Internet was wrong. Now, trying to map my way home, with no internet access, I had neither phone nor computer to guide me. Thankfully I had memorized the highway numbers and was able to use my memory to guide me home. Oh, wow. This is how I grew up. I read maps, memorized the route and took off, trusting my memory to guide me. Lifton says in Chapter 2 that “…the phenomenon of worldwide media saturation is both new and crucial to the late-twentieth-century self. While that self invokes defenses of withdrawal and numbing, it remains continuously bombarded by ideas and images and is in some measure recast by them, made more fluid in response to the surrounding fluidity.” (pg. 21)

I recognize that I have been recast into relying on technology for my physical orientation in the world, i.e., knowing where I am and how to get home. I see myself numbing and withdrawing from the bombardment of media news from around the world at all times of the day. It is more than one human can process and respond to, not only to political events in our own country, but also to the myriad of events all around the world. Before mass media and computers, people’s attention was necessarily confined to their immediate surroundings, their family and towns. We have collectively been reshaped into both more awareness and more withdrawal/numbing.

And yet we also are adapting to this new reality, this new way of being in the world. And being the adaptable creatures that we are, we can re-connect with skills that have been overshadowed, such as figuring out how to get home without electronic assistance.

Do you feel that your world has been recast and are struggling to “find your way home”? Remember that your core self is strong and wise, and that you have the ability to adapt and thrive.