This is an audio version of an essay on my substack, Process This. In it, I explore the tension between contemplation and fascination in the digital age, particularly regarding smartphone use. Inspired by my son's school essay on phone-free schools, I took up a Lenten social media fast. Learning how deeply our digital habits have affected our capacity for genuine connection has been revelatory. Inspired by recent conversations with philosophers Kevin Hart and Norman Wirzba, I develop a distinction between contemplation and fascination. Through their attention-fragmenting design, smartphones ultimately create hollow connections that diminish our ability to be present with others and ourselves. Rather than advocating for complete technological rejection, I think about intentionally cultivating contemplative practices as a counterbalance to digital habituation, suggesting that creating space for more profound attention may be essential to human freedom in our increasingly digitized world.

I hope you enjoy it and consider supporting my work by joining 80k+ other people on Process This. If you want to read or watch the essay, you will find it here on SubStack.

Related Resources

Norman Wirzba

• Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis (Book)
• This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World (Book)
• “Attention and Responsibility: The Work of Prayer” in The Phenomenology of Prayer (Article)
• Farm to Table Theology (HBC Podcast)
• The Way of Love (HBC Podcast)

Kevin Hart

• Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul (Book)
• Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (Book)

Hartmut Rosa

• Being at Home in the World (Podcast)
• Resonance In An Accelerated Age (Podcast)
• Related books by Rosa:The Uncontrollability of the World , Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, and his newest book, Democracy Needs Religion.

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