Hello Lonny,
I would like to echo Chance's words of thanks for your illuminating posts. You've managed to put into words something I've merely intuited about the "digitalization" of our cultural life.
The following passage resonated especially strongly with me:
- "The problem with intellectualizing life, is that we try to imagine life after injury or death. As a result, we care less and less about the living structures that keep us alive - because what we mainly care about is our mental story, not this colony of cells (or planet) which has been our physical companion lifelong." (emphasis added).
As a developmental psychologist with a longstanding interest in the "narrative study of lives" (especially the McAdams tradition), it has taken me quite some time to realize that we need to be as concerned with the organic (and psychosocial) conditions of possibility for our stories as we are with the stories themselves. Further, it does well to remember that we can never "narrate" our way out of pain. Experienced pain is an absolute that cannot be negated by any act of cognition (even as we do what we can to "manage" it).
~ Steve Q.