Inside Education and Health Sciences

By Jillian Poole '27

The deepest form of human connection is the ability to immerse yourself in someone else's world. This power of resonance has vast abilities, from bridging racial divides to simply relieving your friend of the heartbreak they carry. In our swirling world of modern technologies, we're losing this capacity to be present with others. We're bombarded with endless notifications, dragging us into an isolating spiral of diminishing attention spans. Drawing ideas from Johann Hari's narrative in Stolen Focus, it's increasingly evident that technology is negatively affecting our ability to feel true empathy for others by sucking us into a world of distractions and individualistic thinking. 

As a future teacher, I worry about what this means for my rapport with my students, and their relationships with each other.

The rise of media use in daily life has caused us to constantly feel a pull toward a device. Engrained through hours of working on laptops or mindlessly scrolling social media, checking notifications has become habitual. The average person checks their phone every twelve minutes, leaving us with little sense of sustained focus. 

I feel one of the most upsetting effects of this pattern is our inability to commit our undivided attention to people around us. Hari highlights the negative effects of this when he explains, "if you see the world through fragments, your empathy doesn't kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way." Our brains are being rewired to process the world in short bursts at a time, as platforms such as Instagram or TikTok are designed to flood users with new stimuli every second. This means our attention span is short-circuiting, and it's more than likely when we're talking with a friend, our mind is actively resisting the temptation to succumb to an online world. 

I've noticed this in my life: I'll often be sharing about my troubles to one of my roommates while they're scrolling through their phone. Even if we're conversing, their replies are often shortened to a "yeah" or "uh-huh" as the majority of their attention is fixated on the glowing screen in front of them. It deeply unsettles me as I realize this has become normal. The heart of empathy, which is the ability to understand and resonate with the feelings of others, is dwindling. It is nearly impossible to understand someone without intentionally listening, and it's disturbingly difficult to listen when we feel that pull to a screen. 

I think we need to treat this epidemic as a wake up call to reconnect with the people around us, starting with small intentional efforts of simply looking one another in the eye. If we perpetuate the spiral of giving into these mechanical distractions, it won't be long before we surrender to cruelty without a care of how it affects others. 

As a future teacher, I hold myself to a higher standard of accountability and plan to set intentional goals to counteract this negativity. I strive to curate a safe environment in my future classroom, where I incorporate social and emotional learning lessons and models of empathetic conversations into students' everyday life. Through little choices each day, I believe we all have the capacity to rewire this isolated behavior and reopen our hearts to those around us. For in Hari's words, "empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have, and the most precious." 

It's our duty to protect this sacred element of humanity, and it starts with simply looking up.