The Extinction of Experience, Chapter 1
Are we living in the world, or just in our thoughts about how we experience the world?
Apart from turning backwards to the classics, I’m also looking at contemporary writing on attention and technology in 2025, starting with the book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen.
Though Rosen’s arguments are by and large conceptual, in many places the author offers dynamic (and very sobering) reflections on our intense relationship with technology and our growing emotional distance from flesh-and-blood experience. In this series of reviews, I’ll make connections between this book and my Buddhist practice.
Chapter 1: You Had to Be There
“This book is a warning about the perils of some of our technological choices,” states Christine Rosen in the first chapter of her book. “It is a plea to pause and consider what we are losing, as well as gaining….We need to defend the sensory world and remind ourselves of the crucial importance of the physical body, the integrity of physical space, and the need for people to cultivate inner lives.”
The title of this book, The Extinction of Experience, immediately grabbed my attention. At first I was convinced it was a book about the Dharma. After finishing it, I can say that it did not explicitly tackle meditation or religion.1
But I’m still not convinced it wasn’t about these topics. The book presents a problem (ubiquitous mediation of the senses) and diagnoses its causes (devices and our abdication of our minds to mediated experiences). It has less to say about what to do about it on a personal level, on the day-to-day.
In a very selfish way, I want to redigest this book to put its ideas into practice. In this series, I’m going to go chapter by chapter and explore how we as readers might put find actionable methods to push against some of the harms that Rosen reveals.
The five senses as the totality of our world
At least in my Dharma practice, the word “experience” runs throughout instructions for meditation methods and principles of doctrine. My meditation teacher uses the word as a verb very often (“experiencing”) to gesture at how we should engage with sensory objects.
The way we’re used to engaging with the world is generally through our thoughts and narrative. How we feel about a thing, a person, a feeling. Whereas our experiencing of a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch, does not need us to think about it first. To experience, is to perceive something with the five senses without our minds slapping a label on it or babbling about it.
The more I meditate, I even perceive feelings and emotions this way. All emotions start as a sensation somewhere in the body. Almost instantaneously my mind starts to interpret where the sensation came from, what caused it, and how I should react. My stomach is clenched and a little sour. My shoulders are tight. There’s pressure in my head. I feel nervous.
Translating sensory input into words and language is what our brain does everyday to cope with the world. (Thanks, brain!) We’re so used to it doing this since childhood that without slowing down (a lot), we don’t notice how thoughts mediate the experience of the five senses.
Instead, we grow to experience the thoughts about our senses rather than the senses themselves. The forms, sounds, scents, flavors, and physical sensations that made up our entire world fade into our mental narration about those experiences.
In the Pāli sutta titled “The World,” the Buddha describes the origin of our world. The world arises through the contact between those five senses and their corresponding sense objects (forms, sounds, scents, flavors, and physical sensations). The senses create the entirety of our world. There is nothing else to find.2
Personally, my meditation practice in large part tries to short-circuit this process. (Spoiler alert: old habits die hard.) So when this book talked about our “disembodied” lives, I immediately made connections to my own mental habits, to my own practice of meditation methods, and to my own relationship with my senses.
Mediation of experience through technology vs. direct experience of reality
“In the developed world,” Rosen writes, “we choose to mediate nearly every experience we have with the physical world, with the possible exception of performing basic bodily functions—no one else can take a bath for you, at least not yet, though many people now bring their devices with them into the bathroom as company. In pursuing these kinds of mediated experience so zealously, we undermine our own humanity.”
Honestly, yes, I have brought my phone or a screen into the bathroom countless times.3 But the author is talking about more than just a device coming along for the ride as we move through the world. She’s actually describing how we live vicariously through recordings, descriptions, and narration, by our devices, of our sensory experiences.
Think: posting a picture of something we saw on Instagram, tracking our sleep quality through an smart watch, or opening an app to analyze which bird sang a particular song we hear. How much of the experience is a felt, sensory experience? How much is our thinking and interpretation of what’s going on?
I constantly chide my mother for waking up and feeling like she slept badly, only to abruptly change her mind when her smart watch rates her sleep quality high. Yes, the placebo effect is real. And yes, it’s probably nicer to go about your day feeling like you slept well. But how many times have I ignored my sensory experience of a thing to focus on my thoughts about my sensory experience of the thing?
I felt quite uncomfortable when I read this sentence in the book:
“We have created technologies that so effectively extend our senses that we have started mistrusting the signals our own physical bodies give us.”
What’s worse, I probably didn’t stop to feel the tactile sensation of discomfort in the moment…becoming yet another data point in support of the author’s argument.
Our experience of things through technology is just an experience of technology
“More and more, we prefer the simulated to the real.”
Rosen’s first example, which gives this first chapter its name, is the phrase “you had to be there.” Since the 1960s, Google Ngram data shows that people widely said this to express the feeling of going somewhere and seeing something that defies easy explanation. But in 2012, the use of the phrase plummeted.
Rosen attributes the drop to device use: “the year 2012 also saw the fastest year-over-year increase in Americans’ smartphone use, which rose from 31 percent to 44 percent in just twelve months.”
After all, once you have a phone, “you” don’t have to “be there.” We can watch someone else’s experience and feel like we got it too.
Except, we didn’t get it. Our eyes saw a phone screen, not the object itself. To say nothing of the noise, the smells, the heat, the touch of the ground under our feet.
What is the role of senses in this so-called “experience”? If we pay attention to the felt experience of seeing an image on a screen, what exactly is that experience? What, precisely, are we experiencing? Where does the experience occur, and what does it do to us?
Are we already living the “poverty of experience”?
Just as the first chapter of Rosen’s book is an intro, this post is also an introduction. As I go through the rest of the chapters, I plan to explore some of the techniques I use (or want to use) to put Rosen’s observations into practice. For now, I’ll finish with two quotes.
The first takes us back in time a century, when,
“writing in the 1930s, critic Walter Benjamin wondered what would happen to a culture divorced from experience, one in which experiences were largely simulated. He worried that a ‘poverty of experience’ would drive people to a strange kind of despair, and that they would seek relief in an existence where ‘everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way.’”
Moving back to the present, Rosen wonders if we haven’t already reached this kind of poverty:
“Isn’t something wrong when 53 percent of sixteen- to twenty-two-year-olds around the world say they would rather lose their sense of smell than their favorite personal technology?”
Take a moment and digest that 53% figure. How does it make you feel? How does your body react? And where, exactly, are those feelings being experienced?
As I review the next chapters of The Extinction of Experience, we’ll explore the effects of devices and AI on our experience of life, and get to know the remedies that Chan Buddhism can offer in response. See you then.
The book reads more like a culture-theory polemic on The Evil Tech Companies eating our brains and our childrens’ brains. Which, to be clear, I’m here for. But the Luddite crusade isn’t going to be the focus of my writing.
Bhikku Sujato’s translation of this sutta can be found here. This sutta is kinda technical and requires a good foundation in Buddhist doctrine to interpret. The paragraph in the text above summarizes the takeaway, but for those interested, the sutta actually explains in very terse and precise language how to short-circuit our emotional reactions and attachments to situations in everyday life. In short: regular people experience the world by grabbing on to sensory experiences which causes us to suffer. However, it is possible to break that cycle directly after the sensory experience and thereby put an end to suffering. In layman’s terms, you see/hear/smell/taste/touch all the things but they don’t hold you back or hurt you. (Also, note that the Buddha here and everywhere else talks about six senses including mind, not just the regular five. But that’s enough doctrine for one footnote.)
Even into the bath once or twice, despite visions of cartoonish death by electrocution dancing through my head.
This makes me think of the verb and noun forms of experience - to engage in an event/moment and the accumulation of engagement over time. Without having read Rosen’s book (just checked it out of the library), this double-reading both fascinates and scares me. I need to chew on that.