The end of experience
February 5, 2025

The worst culture shock I ever experienced wasn’t over chopsticks in Beijing or about the suffocating heat of Bangkok. It happened when we moved home to Vancouver after living abroad for many years. Canada was supposed to be familiar to me. Yet, I felt completely out of synch with everything around me, including my own life.
My ‘re-entry shock’ was so discombobulating that I wrote an entire book about it, “Homeward Bound: A Spouse’s Guide to Repatriation”. One of the biggest takeaways from my book was how reverse culture shock made me feel.
“Re-entry shock feels like you are wearing contact lenses in the wrong eyes. Everything looks almost right.”
I was recently reminded of my own words while reading “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World” by Christine Rosen. “Real experiences and their digital equivalents are like the distinction between eyesight and vision,” writes Rosen, an American commentator on the social and cultural impact of technology.
“Eyesight refers to how well our eyes capture what we see. Vision allows us to use our eyesight intelligently by directing our perception. Our technologies…are moving more rapidly into the vision business which is really the business of interpreting experience and not merely increasing our access to it.”
The author points out that technology allows people to feel, falsely, as if they too, are ‘there’ in the moment with the people they see on their screens. The result is experience plagiarism. (I love that term.) “We now spend as much time consuming the experiences of others as we do having experiences of our own,” writes Rosen.
Like others writing about the darker side of devices, “The Extinction of Experience” warns about the perils—and potential losses—resulting from digital choices.
“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. From these flow things that can’t be made by machines; serendipity, intuition, community, spontaneity, and empathy.”
The author lost me when she raises the complicity of the tech companies in our current mess. I don’t think the tech bros are saints but there’s still the matter of taking some personal responsibility for one’s digital behavior and to quit looking elsewhere to assign blame.
(Full disclosure before I continue: I haven’t been that great lately at curbing my own digital addiction to the news. It’s true I could easily blame the tech industry for that, or Trump for infuriating me, but I alone know how to turn my phone or tablet off.)
Interestingly, Rosen’s book also made me grateful and appreciative that my time spent living overseas didn’t have a digital component. True, I might have coped a lot better with expat life if the Internet had been invented. It would have given me access to movies, books and newspapers as well as the ability to stay in touch with family and friends.
Without it, though, I was forced to step out my front door into the local culture. I directly experienced so much more than if I had been tethered inside to a device. You can’t smell the fish sauce coming from those delicious noodles being cooked in the food cart in the street with your phone.
The book’s title is credited to the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle. In a 1990s speech about the environment, it was Pyle who lamented the ‘extinction of experience’. He worried that younger generations suffer ‘nature deficit disorder’ and were “being raised without the hands-on experience of mucking around outdoors. They would grow up disaffected from nature and unlikely to embrace the role of environmental stewards as adults.”
Thankfully, that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about here in Costa Rica. I watch my grandchildren start their day tramping among the trees and wildlife of Finca Cántaros with their parents and so far, at least, living off-screen lives. I’m comforted that their own first hand experiences are only beginning without any threat of extinction.
And I’m hopeful they will grow up to become adults ready to embrace their responsibility to preserve the real, not virtual world, they have come to know so well.