Every Saturday, or Shabbat for me, I get the printed The New York Times. I take my cold brew (La Colombe, medium roast) and we have an intimate date. I wrap its gray pages in my arms and begin getting to know it. Often, I start with the Real Estate section where I wonder how I’ll buy my brownstone. Next might be Metropolitan where I’ll always glance to see who's featured in Sunday Routine. I’ll finally go to the magazine or Arts section where I feel my curiosity gets most renewed for the week.

A nice treat is when an opened tab in my browser is featured in print. I say it’s a nice treat because, like many of my opened tabs, it’s an article that’s gone unread. I’m enthused, seeing Kyle Chayka’s How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted, featured in the magazine. It’s a sweeping look at our current cultural moment. In it, he describes our present want for nothingness, to tear ourselves away from the always-on nature of our high octane life filled with weekly news crises, and to soothe ourselves with less. We look to our streaming content, social feeds, e-commerce purchases we’re assured will be the “best” to numb us from a world we feel a need to shut out. “The late-2010s panacea of CBD is like a mental moisturizer. It promises not the blissed THC haze of the stoner (too uncontrolled, too many thoughts) but the psychological equivalent of white noise, dampening anything negative”, writes Chayka.

With so much going on, we feel a need for remove, to uncomplicate our lives, and in many ways for Chayka, to distance ourselves from its weight of meaning because it’s all too much. “Climate change, technological upheaval, racism, inequality — the churn of history, which shows no signs of stopping — these all make it easy to instead slip into the welcoming void of the content stream. Numbness beckons when life is difficult, when problems seem insurmountable, when there is so much to mourn”, Chayka observes.

Later in the day, trying to malaise my own loneliness, I pick up When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chödrön. I turn to her chapter, “Six Kinds of Loneliness”. In it, she talks about strengthening the ability to sit with loneliness, to not see loneliness as an enemy, but to disarm it by just being in it, what Chödrön defines as ‘cool loneliness’. It’s opposite of how we usually see loneliness as “[…] hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company”. Cool loneliness is one where we relax into the discomfort rather than trying to soothe ourselves out of it.

As I read through the six kinds of cool loneliness, I see my own behavior in many of their opposites, much of the behavior enabled by my devices. One kind is described as “avoiding unnecessary activity”: “We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That’s called unnecessary activity. It’s a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don’t have to feel any pain”.

For me, these two pieces, Chayka’s and Chödrön’s, are in conversation with one another. We run to our devices to escape sudden pangs of loneliness we’d rather not feel. We search for an activity, wholly necessary in that moment of burning loneliness. We run to Grindr, dating apps, Instagram stories. Each of their infinite scrolls is like the soothing motion of a rocking chair—every rhythmic gliding of our thumbs lulls us further into a numbness. After a few seconds, a few gentle glides on a screen, we’re alone but feeling less lonely.

I’m wondering what it means to sit in this, to be in this moment without numbing it—whether my own “hot” emotions or the world it’s caught up in. My tools aren’t made for it. My quarantined world, wholly mediated by a crowded cupboard full of digital streams is made for my engagement with them rather than a deeper engagement with myself. What would it mean for my phone to help me find space to be with myself rather than with others?

Chayka, in his piece, quotes the famous Frederic Jameson line, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. In some ways, my phone seems like the same kind of imaginary black box. It’s hard to imagine it as something to turn to, to be awakened by. Its cultural capital is my numbed participation. And as a designer, that’s frustrating to sit with.