Opinion: I’m a Psychoanalyst. This Is What Technology Is Doing to Us.
By Steven Barrie-Anthony
Published November 11, 2025, The New York Times
In today’s hyperconnected world, technology—especially smartphones and social media—exerts an undeniable gravitational pull that profoundly reshapes our inner worlds, relationships, and how we navigate daily life. As a psychoanalyst, I witness these changes firsthand in my patients, and their experiences reveal much about what technology is doing to our humanity.
The Grief Beneath the Screen
Most of my psychotherapy patients struggle with the pervasive distractions of digital devices. These interruptions often chip away at the most vital aspects of their lives: emotional development, creativity, and meaningful connection with others. A common scene is the familiar one: a family dinner, conversations flowing, but attention repeatedly drawn away by the lure of a smartphone screen. Patients describe an internal whisper of unease—“Damn it, why do I do that?”—followed by frustration and anger. Beneath these feelings lies a deeper hurt, a grief for lost moments and lost presence.
This grief is pivotal. Technology does not merely distract us from social connection—it also anesthetizes us to the sorrow of missing these moments. When patients allow themselves to truly feel this sadness, it ripples outward in surprising and poignant ways, revealing the human cost of our digital lives.
The Emotional Fog of Technology
Throughout my career as a psychoanalyst, scholar of religion, and former tech journalist and research director, I have observed a phenomenon I call an “alexithymic fog.” Alexithymia refers to difficulty in identifying or expressing emotions, and this fog is a kind of emotional numbness or disconnection fostered by our rapid-fire engagement with technology. While this is not universal, it manifests consistently across many individuals and contexts.
When feelings do surface, people often move quickly from emotion to action, attempting to fix or escape the discomfort. This might mean deleting an app, going on a digital detox, or throwing away their phone. Yet these actions offer only temporary relief. The detox ends, the apps return, and the cycle continues—this oscillation between immersion and rejection is emblematic of technology’s anesthetizing environment.
The Instrumentalization of Emotion
Modern technology tends to reshape how we experience emotions, valuing feelings only insofar as they drive measurable action or goal achievement. Devices like Apple Watches provide a constant stream of metrics—step counts, heart rate, sleep scores—that can feel more tangible than the bodily sensations themselves. Social media fuels a “hyper reality” where curated representations of selves overshadow authentic emotional experience. Even educational settings, with the advent of A.I. tools such as ChatGPT, risk shifting from genuine creative engagement to mechanical prompt-driven productivity.
Silicon Valley’s lexicon—focusing on external markers of success like clicks, likes, and data points—encourages this instrumental mindset. Feeling an emotion solely to act upon it aligns with this logic, while simply dwelling in feeling without immediate purpose often feels pointless or alien.
Mindfulness and the Illusion of Control
While mindfulness practices encourage observing emotions, Western adaptations frequently succumb to the same instrumental trap. Many embrace mindfulness as a tool to de-stress, boost productivity, or improve health metrics—sometimes monitored via smartwatch apps and leaderboards. This focus on utility can undercut mindfulness’s deeper potential to foster genuine emotional awareness and acceptance.
Returning to Feeling for Its Own Sake
To address the challenges technology poses to our emotional lives, we must cultivate the capacity to remain with our feelings without rushing to action or problem-solving. This is critical to preserving essential human qualities: love, empathy, spiritual depth, and creative expression in art and music.
Daily, we encounter countless moments when technology stirs unease or restlessness. Too often, we push these emotions aside. But if we pause and accept the invitation to dwell with discomfort and grief, we open the door to making more conscious, authentic choices about how to live with and use technology.
Hope Amid Crisis
There is a silver lining in the growing awareness of social media’s impact, especially on youth mental health. Recognizing the exhaustion and distraction social media causes marks a vital step toward change. This inclination toward feeling our overwhelmed state may sow seeds of hope.
On the other hand, the arrival of A.I. chatbots introduces new questions. Unlike the overwhelming noise of social media, these A.I. interfaces offer a gentle, seemingly attentive voice. What this means for our emotional selves is an evolving puzzle. To navigate the future of A.I. wisely, remaining attuned to our emotional experience is indispensable.
“I See It Feelingly”
The timeless insight of Shakespeare’s King Lear offers a guiding metaphor for our era. Gloucester, blinded and struggling, declares, “I see it feelingly." This sensibility—to engage with the world through feeling—must be our challenge and aspiration.
Technological life inevitably brings waves of grief for lost moments and connections. The true danger lies not in feeling grief but in numbing ourselves to it altogether. Only by embracing our full emotional life can we preserve what makes us distinctly human.
Steven Barrie-Anthony is a psychoanalyst and writer, and a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for the Study of Religion. He previously served as a staff writer for The Los Angeles Times.
For further conversation, The New York Times welcomes reader letters about this article at letters@nytimes.com.
Related Links:
- Digital detox trends and their implications
- Impact of social media on youth mental health
- The role of A.I. in modern education and creativity
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