Forgotten Bodies In A Headspace World
Reclaiming aliveness in a disembodied age
Look at you…
No, I mean, actually look at yourself and notice that….you have a body!
It seems odd, but in today’s headspace world, it’s good to sometimes consciously remind ourselves that we are not just a mind or a brain but also flesh, muscles, bones, organs, veins, limbs, and all that. Bodies!
The truth is we’re increasingly disconnected from our bodies. We’re living disembodied in a headspace world.
Technological progress has made life so convenient (read: sedentary) that we can now do almost anything without moving our bodies: getting groceries, cooking, (Xmas) shopping, dating, entertainment, working, socializing,….it’s all just a few clicks away.
This world also encourages us to move our bodies less and less. Sitting at a desk in front of a laptop signals productivity. Scrolling endlessly through social media generates a lot of advertising dollars for tech giants. Then, buying, or rather ordering, what’s shown in those ads on Amazon ultimately adds to GDP growth (and ideally creates jobs).
“The quantified self, meanwhile, turns our sensations into data, measurable signals. We know the heart beats, but we no longer feel it.” – Marie Dollé
Our bodies have become a mere bystander in our lives. Physical activity has become a sort of hobby, an artificial additive, the exception to the rule, the “don’t forget to…” notification, and a reluctant remedy to the normal: a sedentary, mind-focused life.
“I like to use that word now, soul. I prefer using soul to mind, not that they’re the same concept at all. “Mind” automatically seems to evoke “versus body” in the minds of everyone, including myself, no matter how hard we try, no matter how many times we’ve noticed that the brain is an organ of the body and that the human mind emerges from the brain.” – Timothy Morton
Of course, we all know that mind and body are deeply connected, that there is no mental without the physical, and vice versa. But all that makes it even more astonishing to see how we’ve created a disembodied, headspace world that favors a mind-focused approach to living life.
How can we change that?
Well, in classic Creative Destruction fashion, I went down the rabbit hole(s) and looked at the framings that lead us to design systems that are predominantly mind-focused. Below is a handpicked collection of some particularly thought-provoking perspectives and reframings that’ll be useful to anyone…who has a body 😉…and who wants to build more embodied systems.
See, we’ve been…
…building tech interfaces for the mind instead of interfaces for an embodied being
…designing work structures and definitions that ignore that humans even have a body or are biological
…developing information, news, content, and entertainment systems that numb our senses and “overheat” the mind, requiring our bodies to shut down
…and ultimately cultivating an identity drawn more to machines than other animals.
Before we get into each of the above-mentioned domains, here is a useful foundational framing to help you think about this:
The headspace world is the mind-focused, body-ignoring, digital-first world we’ve increasingly shifted towards. In contrast, meatspace is a long-forgotten world in which the physical, the body, and the offline dominate.
I want this piece to help you reframe our mind-fixated world and build a future that’s neither dominated by headspace nor by meatspace: an embodied, mind-body interconnected future that I call fullspace!
Let’s dive in:
📱 Headspace Interfaces
We’ve always been developing technology that fits our unique embodied capabilities. If you’ve ever held a slightly more expensive cooking knife or a great hammer or axt, you’ll know what I’m talking about. But, somehow, when it comes to digital technology, we’ve fixated ourselves on a very disembodied or body-limited interface design: a flat screen, a cold, clean glass surface, and a very non-natural human gesture, the sliding finger.
“Take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit. What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?
I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade. […]
Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.” – Bret Vicor
