The Examined Life

Flourishing in a Digital Age

• Kenneth Primrose

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We explore what human flourishing means beyond quick hits of happiness and how attention, character, and community shape a life with depth. We offer practical ways to set tech boundaries, recover presence, and build habits that support meaning and stronger relationships.

• defining flourishing as purpose, virtue, health, relationships, and stability
• attention as a moral act that shapes identity
• flow states, boredom, and the role of friction in mastery
• how persuasive tech erodes agency and presence
• resilience, emotion regulation, and numbing versus feeling
• presence and awe as markers of a meaningful life
• community ties, shared rituals, and mutual flourishing
• practical boundaries for phones and persuasive design
• replacing screen time with calls, walks, craft, and rest

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- For More information about the Digital Detox Club, click here - Home | The Digital Detox Club

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Kenny Primrose:

Hello and welcome to the Examined Life podcast with me, Kenny Pumrose. Today I'm offering a slightly unusual conversation in that it's me being interviewed. I was interviewed a few weeks ago by Nicola from the Digital Detox Club, an organization which helps people to live well with technology, to flourish in the digital age. Part of the reason that I've included this podcast in the series is because a lot of the answers that I've come up with to Nicola's questions have come from previous conversations I've done, where we've spoken about technology with Dacker Keltner or Anna Lemke or Elm Sakassis or Tom Chatfield. There's been a lot of talk on how we live well with tech, and their wisdom and insights have shaped the way that I've come to think about technology. So I hope you enjoy it. I hope you find it helpful. If you do, then do please send it on to somebody else who you think might enjoy it. I'd love it if you could subscribe, if you could leave a review or a comment. That really helps other people to find the podcast. Thank you very much for tuning in. I hope you enjoy this conversation with me and Nicola. All links are in the show notes if you want to have a look at either the Examined Life previous episodes or at Digital Detox Club and the fantastic work that they are doing.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome everybody. As part of our 30-day tech reset program, we have got a really useful interview with Kenny Primrose, school leader, writer, and speaker. He helps people and organizations see clearly and live wisely in a distracted age. He also posts a podcast called The Examine Life, where he interviews really inspiring people to get tips on how to live life, flourish as a human. So we're delighted to have him today. And we've got some wonderful questions for him. How are you doing today, Kenny?

Kenny Primrose:

I'm very well. Thank you, Nicola. It's a joy to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me on to Digital Detox.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for taking your time out for this. We wanted to start by asking you about human flourishing a bit more. When you talk about human flourishing, how is that different from happiness or success or well-being as we usually understand it?

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, thank you. It's a really good question. It's a word that's used a lot. I think it actually has a relatively specific meaning. So we might, the ancient Greeks, I don't want to go into ancient philosophy much, but this is actually helpful. They made a distinction between hedonic happiness, which is like feeling good, kind of positive emotion. It's important, like an important part of life to have that, and eudaimonic well-being, which is much closer to the idea of flourishing. Hedonic happiness is like, how do I feel? You know, we we talk about hedonism. Eudaimonic happiness is more about is is the life I'm living a good one? Does it have value, purpose, meaning? Is it rich and pointing in a direction that I'm happy with? So I think flourishing is a is a fairly deep concept and it has different facets to it. There's been a lot of work at the Harvard Human Flourishing Project, which is well worth looking into, and they divide flourishing into a number of different capacities: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, close social relationships, financial and material stability and character and virtue. These they found are all ends in themselves. So you don't pursue them to get to the end of them in a sense. You pursue them and keep on pursuing them. There's no one who's arrived and finished flourishing, but there are some lives that are more flourishing than other lives. And those would be the ones that have a good balance of these things. I think that that there's enough attention paid to the different facets of life. Does that make sense, Nicola?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, thank you. That's interesting. Do you think the core ingredients? So I wrote down before we have this running attention, character, relationships, and purpose. But I feel I've just missed some out.

Kenny Primrose:

You listed some more. No, no, I mean I think there's a number of ways to divide this. Okay. What did you say? Attention, character. Relationships and purpose. That covers a lot. Absolutely. What would I put in there? I think there's something about embodiment, feeling embodied and physical. If my body is kind of failing or under slept or addicted to a drug or whatever, that's definitely going to hamper my flourishing. And the reverse, of course, is true.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I like I really like the word embodiment because I'm a mindfulness coach. So we're always trying to connect more with the body when we run practices. And it's very human. Talking in this digital age and part of this tech reset is about really connecting with the body because it's human. I particularly like that one. And attention based on mindfulness and what we do with focusing our attention. The character side of things, I'm not too familiar with that. Could you maybe explain a bit more about character?

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, so character, I think you might make a distinction between personality and character. So personality, introverted, extroverted, there's this constellation of things. They describe them with the acronym OSHAN. OSHA, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Those are the character traits that psychologists tend to think relatively fixed throughout your lifespan. But character, I think we're talking about the virtues that you have. So you might say someone is an honest person. And what we mean by that is they've cultivated the virtue of honesty that it comes naturally to them. It's a habit. This is maybe David Brooks, the New York Times writer, made a helpful distinction. He said, we focus often on our CV virtues or resume virtues, but actually our eulogy virtues are the really important ones that we need to spend more time on. So what would someone say about you at your funeral? They might say you're kind or generous, you're thoughtful, you're courageous, those kinds of things. What we're talking about when we're talking about character is really those constellations of virtues that you can be quite deliberate about exercising. So having a character, I think, that you are content with the virtues you're developing. And these, the Harvard study would say, lead to flourishing. People are more at peace with themselves, they do more good in the world, they end up being better friends, better fathers, better wives or mothers or whatever when they have cultivated these virtues. So they're directed towards some idea of the good. You know, what is the good life or what is a good person? It is someone who has developed these virtues. So not you know, not everyone agrees that we can say this is a good person and this is a bad person. I personally would say there is such a thing as living a good life and cultivating some virtues that are pointed towards the good and the true and the beautiful, and developing your character helps you do that. We can pay attention to it, right? We can we can think about the way that we're being formed by the influences and the people and the environment that we're in.

SPEAKER_01:

Really interesting. And from a tech reset point of view, how do you feel that the acceleration of the digital age is impacting character these days? It could be positive or negative. We're interested to hear your point of view.

Kenny Primrose:

So many ways, because it's affected everything, hasn't it? We're very screen saturated. So the question is, how has the acceleration of technology affected our character? So one of the things I think we're going to come on to anyway is attention. And the fact that I am constantly distracted by social media or my phone or whatever, weakens my ability to pay attention to what matters and actually distracts me from realizing what I care about or having some agency, having some sense of choice in how I spend my time and my attention. So I think there's some sense that we are pushed and pulled by algorithms and lose a sense of agency in the process. It's also got many of us addicted in a kind of dopamine feedback loop to our screens. And this means that we're we're not looking at each other, we're often more sedentary than we should be. We're made to be embodied creatures and actually we want to be present to one another. How many times have you looked in a restaurant and seen families and friends and everyone's on their phone? At the top of a mountain, the main thing is people are getting something for the gram or taking a photo of themselves. People are just looking 10 inches from their face at this screen. It's a disaster for being present to the world, for showing up to one another, to kind of the natural world as well. So lots of things have atrophied because of technology. There are, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to say there are no good things about it. In some ways, efficiency has made life much easier. It is it is much easier if you're housebound, like we all were basically during the COVID lockdowns, to connect with other people. This can be a really good thing. But I think it needs limits. One of the problems is that it doesn't really seem to have any. It's gamified and built with persuasive design to keep you hooked on it by people that are far cleverer than any of us, right? It's this army of people in Silicon Valley who are trained on trying to get your attention and keep you hooked on your phone. If you watch the The Social Dilemma or read anything from ex-tech insiders, they will say, Yeah, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to keep you on your phone. They say there are two groups of people who call their clients' users drug dealers and software engineers. They're trying to keep you hooked. So I don't think that was a very clear and structured answer, sorry. Um but yeah, I do think there's implications for our character, for my character. I can definitely say that personally. When I'm more attentive to my phone, I am less attentive to my children, less attentive to my physical being, to nature and to my friends and things like that. And so and it's in relationship we develop a lot of these virtues.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, definitely. And I I think you you've basically just helped to almost summarize what our tech reset is about. So thank you for this is why we decided to create this tech reset for families and individuals, because we feel it's just so important that we reclaim what it means to be human in various ways. If we move on to another question, we'll talk more about attention. In the reset, we highlight the importance of becoming more conscious of where you're placing your attention. But you often describe attention as a moral and philosophical issue and not just a productivity one. Why is attention so central to flourishing?

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, great question. I think the philosopher Simone Vey said attention is the purest form of love. Attention is the contact that the mind makes with the world. When it's sufficiently attenuated and thinned out, then our capacity to love, to care, all that is kind of thinned out as well. So, what's attention got to do with flourishing? Where I direct my attention determines the kind of person I'm essentially becoming. It is really hard to overstate the importance of where we put our attention because that ultimately trains us to direct our lives in certain ways. If I am, for example, forever on TikTok or Instagram chasing likes, and that's where I put my attention, my whole life, or you know, the cracks between the things I have to do in life become consumed by showing up for the gram or whatever and trying to get uh you know, organize my life around it. And it's an absolute disaster. What we pay attention to ultimately shapes us and forms us and determines the kind of world that we live in and we experience and how other people experience us. We talk about the attention economy, that attention is capitalism's greatest asset. I think it's Shoshana Zuboth that said something like that. If our attention is always being pulled by big multinational companies who really just do not care about you at all, you are there to make the money, then of course this is going to have a detrimental impact on your life because your attention is there. Yeah, your attention is there for other people, I think. Yeah. Your attention is there to be to be kind of given as a gift like Simone Vase, adapt to the purest form of love, and it's formational in how it shapes us.

SPEAKER_01:

Definitely. Thank you. What happens to meaning, depth, and purpose when attention is always fragmented.

Kenny Primrose:

One place I might go to is the idea in psychology of getting into a flow state. A flow state would be when you're totally absorbed by something. You can spend hours, like rock climber, painting, playing the piano, doing some maths or chess or something. You know, something is deeply engaging and absorbing. And we get a sense of mastery from that. It's closely correlated with feelings of well-being and meaning. I think if you're constantly distracted, if you're trying to get into something but you're being pulled away by notifications or the sense that you want to check your phone, you don't even have to have notifications on. If our phones are on and they're in the room, we know this from um from experiments. They're going to distract you when people have them in a different room off or whatever, their their attention is far better. We sacrifice the ability to get into flow states, and I think that's huge in terms of meaning and depth. And what was the other word you used, Nicola? Um purpose. Purpose. Yeah. You develop a sense of purpose, I think, through a lot of these kind of flow states. I'm not when life goes quiet and you have those moments of idling or boredom or whatever, a lot of creativity develops out of that. But you also realize, I think, what you value. And your values are often opaque in a world where you're constantly distracted. And so one of the things I think that's a helpful exercise is to have retreats from screen, maybe a Sabbath day a week where you turn it off and let those values kind of bubble up. What's actually important to you? I I sometimes ask students in school how long they've been on their devices every day, and they're five, six, seven hours. And they don't know where that time's gone. It's just disappeared from them. And if you want any kind of purchase on life, any sense of richness and depth and meaning, I don't think you're going to get it from scrolling videos. I think you're just going to scroll your life away. And so going offline and realizing what there is that we can engage. That will engage us and feel meaningful and purposeful and give some depth, whether there is creative, moral, relational good, then I think it's very closely related to having I know it's not to say that we can't find some of this stuff through digital technology. Gamers go into deep flow states and things like that. It is there. I just think it is also beset with some dangers that don't exist in the offline world.

SPEAKER_01:

So that's yeah, I thought the flow state comments really interesting because it makes me think of Ed Sheeran and he hasn't had a smartphone for years. Really? Yeah, because he says that he felt this pressure to always reply, but also there's a sense of he feels the creativity comes from the flow state. He's talking about not being disrupted all the time. So he can actually, I think he's indirectly saying, get into his flow state and actually come up with new songs.

Kenny Primrose:

For yourself to be bored, absolutely. It's such an important thing to know how to entertain yourself, I think. And it's something that childhood is largely deprived of now, and this inability to, you know, Pascal, the philosopher, said most of man's problems come from his inability to sit still in a room for a while. I think there's a bit of wisdom in that. One of the things that I think is worth mentioning from a that tech kind of can deprive us of, if we outsource a lot of human functions to technology, we are deprived of the sense of mastery you get. So you know the IKEA effects that you are you're more proud of a you know a cabinet or a set of drawers that you've built yourself with IKEA instructions, which are unbelievably difficult for me to follow, than you are if you just buy something and it's ready-made. Why is that? Because there's a sense of ownership and mastery and agency that's gone into it. And I think this is a big point for technology in general, not just screen-based technology. So there's a guy called Albert Borgman who said, think of the difference in flicking a switch and turning on the thermostat, warming all the rooms in your house, to building a fire where there's a sense of mastery, there's engagement, everybody is involved in the process. I want to tend the fire, chop the wood, get the wood, and you sit around it. And I think it's actually really helpful to think of, yeah, it's important to know how technology can make us more efficient and save time, but it's also important to count the cost of that. What am I losing in the process of outsourcing this technology? If I text or send emojis rather than phone or visit someone, there's something really important that's lost there. There's the developing of a relationship, the sense of who I am through somebody else's eyes when I'm engaging with them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Laura and I talk about this. It feels like there's this rush to replace so many aspects to life. And actually, why don't we stop and go, do we really need to replace all these things? So there's been a bit of a swap in that sense with some people in their lives where they've decided enough is enough. I'm gonna go back to buying a newspaper on a Sunday morning and taking my time, maybe reading the news, or like a vinyl resurgence and really enjoying the song and not just flicking through immediately because I haven't wiped it to that moment and it just actually slowing down and enjoying what we have as opposed to needing to replace all these different aspects. We're obviously not anti-Turch. We think there's a use, definitely, efficiency, but we feel like there's this rush. And who's stopping to go? Wait a second, this is really needed. Is this really good for us?

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, yeah, 100%. So I I've had a couple of conversations on the podcast with some really thoughtful people. One of them was El M Sakassis, and his question is what should we be doing for ourselves, even if a machine can do it for us? The presumption is the machine does it better and more efficiently. If efficiency is your only guide for whether you should do something, then you outsource everything you can to some kind of frictionless life of convenience, and life kind of just thins out. I think your experience of it is is decidedly lacking, and you are not developed as a person as well. There's something that's constitutive of human flourishing in finding friction, yeah, like vinyl, like the slow food thing as well. The other guy who I find really helpful on this was Oliver Berkman. And he said he's got this observation it is somehow really frustrating to wait two minutes for something to cook in the microwave, more so than two hours for something to cook in the oven. There's this thing about technology that you know, you think how frustrated you are in a traffic jam when it's saving you half a day, you know, pre-cars. Uh and he said, We have this technology which promises that we can, in some sense, transcend our limitations of being human. We have almost godlike powers, and it just becomes more frustrating. Whereas if you make friends with your limitations, we're like, this has to go at the pace it has to go at. I'm gonna build fire when it's hot enough to cook something, I'll cook something on it. There's something about that that slows your nervous system down, and there's something about technology that just jacks your nervous system up and makes you more like, come on, I need to get this done now. Um, and at the end of it, one of the helpful exercises to do is if you have a little bit of space in the beginning of your day, think how do I want to feel at the end of my day? You want to have felt productive, you want to have felt like life has been meaningful and so on. And there's different ways of approaching that, but I think the way not to approach it is by trying to cram as much as you possibly can in terms of tasks and efficiency into that. By the end of the day, you're kind of spent and you wonder who you've connected with or what you've connected with.

SPEAKER_01:

So true. I feel there is this sense of us waking up a bit more to slower living and the trend more towards analog, which is great. Uh this needs to happen, hence why we exist as a Digital Detox Club or we should carte reset programs. I think we have to wake up to this, and we are, but it's tricky when there's so much we need to do on our phones. It was so tied to our smartphone. Yeah. And I keep trying to use it less, and then I will arrive somewhere to park, and the only way to pay is through my phone. Yeah, thankfully, you can still get a bus by paying with cash at the moment, but it feels so much easier to tap on and off. Yeah, it's ease, but it then disrupts that opportunity to say hello to the bus driver in the same way. Yeah.

Kenny Primrose:

I think that's a great example of the kind of weak ties that they call them in psychology that you get from buying a coffee or speaking to the bus driver or whatever. Those are actually really important. It's not only your strong relationships that are important, it's this sense of community and place and location. There's something of a fabric of a place that you get through weak ties. Uh but yeah, actually say it's so hard. My Christmas endeavor was to move to, I was gonna get uh Cat S22, I think the phone is, and it allows me maps and WhatsApp, which I think are although I've got problems with WhatsApp, they are helpful. I haven't managed to do it. The reasons you said, like I can't park. There's so many things I can't. Do I I think I just need to make peace with not doing them or finding another way around because it's either that or my attention. Just not very good at it.

SPEAKER_01:

This we recommend things like the balance phone because that's got what sound for it. I need WhatsApp because I'm part of a parents group for school. It would be a lot harder for me if I didn't have the parents' chat, even though I often mute it because I find it too disruptive.

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

If I do find checking through, there'll be something I've missed from school.

Kenny Primrose:

Oh, so it's totally, totally. There's so many, there's so many things that I yeah, they that only appear if you've got a smartphone.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a tricky, it's such a tricky one. But I feel, yeah. There are ways with thankfully, I think there's great options now, great alternatives for children at least. So we very much recommend, you know, look at alternative phones if you're thinking about a smartphone for your child. If they need, you know, you can you can get a balanced phone or a pinwheel or you know, a brick or knock your flip. You can still remain in contact with your child if you feel you need to, if they're getting the bus or something. No, they don't need the school parent screen.

Kenny Primrose:

This is where parents really have power to turn the tide.

SPEAKER_01:

So we've got another question for you, which is from your experience in education and leadership, what human capacities weaken most when attention is eroded?

Kenny Primrose:

I guess the capacity to focus, to resilience, mental resilience to get through tricky problems. There was some research that suggested attention span on say online watching videos on YouTube had gone down from two minutes forty to forty seconds in 20 years. And that was like five years old, that research. I'm sure it's gone down much more now, since videos have become a shorter form. So I think the ability to focus through difficult things, which is part of how you develop a sense of mastery and get good at subjects, craft that kind of thing. Uh what else we can human relationships because we're no longer engaging in them so much. I really feel sad when I see schools that have allowed phones at break times and lunch times when they should be playing with each other. 99% of them are sitting on benches looking at their phones. Um and therefore, what's the opportunity cost? They're not developing the relationships that are going to be so important for them throughout school and beyond. You know, I'm still friends with my friends from school.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, if I look back to the times of my childhood growing up without all this distraction, there were so many times when my friend and I would have nothing much to do, but we would come up with such great little ideas and stories, and that wonderful use of our imagination and creativity. It can be lost with children when they're on phones or games too much throughout the day. And it's a real shame. The resilience aspect is really interesting because too much time on smartphones is seen as a factor impacting resilience. It makes sense because we can use our phones to numb our feelings sometimes as well. So it's like we have that, and we don't know how it's the whole needing to be bored aspect, isn't it? Like we don't know how to sit with boredom or just sit in the stillness. I notice when I'm doing my talks, I say to people, oh, it when we watched Tracers, the moment the ads came on, my husband and I picked up our phones because it was a companion where we had to sit and wait for the ads to run through before we could then watch the program again. And it was that sense of habit of must fill the time. Can't just sit in this space for a few minutes unless we were busy chatting. We just end up scrolling for no reason. And so much of it, isn't it?

Kenny Primrose:

It's just the scrolling for no reason, like just doing scrolling and yeah, it might be the old, you know, bread crumbing dopamine thing that we're looking at. But yeah, we really struggle with that, don't we? And patience is a virtue, right? As the saying goes, it really is, and it's something that's rooted when we're never forced to develop it. Yes. And then there's a really good bit of Louis C.K. on the Saturday Night Live show or something like that. He's fallen from grace, but he talks about phones and it says something about, you know, I'm driving along and I feel that big sadness inside me that we sometimes get, but that you know, life is a tremendously sad endeavor in some ways. And I start reaching for my phone. I'm gonna text everyone I know, scroll and distract myself from it. At this moment, he says, No, that's like being a human. I need to actually absorb this and to some extent learn from it, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think from a resilience point of view, in terms of feelings, if we numb our feelings, if we're uncomfortable and scroll a lot to try and avoid the feeling, then it's just gonna come back ten times worse. And we're not embodied, and it's very kind of it's not to me, it's not actually experiencing the feeling, letting it work through the body, acknowledging it, accepting it, and then moving on. It's oh, I'll just numb that away for a while. And that just comes back worse.

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, absolutely. These things do not disappear, do they? And there's a it surfaces an anxiety, and you never, you know, you do you do embodied practices, and when you pay attention to where that anxiety is sitting in you and what what triggers it or whatever. That's that's when you integrate as a person, and this kind of numbing stops you ever integrating as a you know, as a as a human being. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

There's nothing wrong with sadness, it's not a negative, it's just part of the many emotions that flow to us.

Kenny Primrose:

We haven't even talked about the content that you do, we just talked about the fact that we're being distracted. But apart from the pornography and the violence and extremism that is, you know, awash with online platforms, you have the the fear of missing out and this idea that everybody is living a better life than you. And so there's there's there's another reason to avoid that sadness because you don't want to be and clearly all of those people who are posting photos of their amazing lives are struggling with exactly the same stuff as you, but you compare your insides to their outsides, and it's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, totally. And we had an offline cafe recently, and it was really lovely because people were just vulnerable. We didn't have our phones because the phones were into the tech motel for a few hours. We knew that there'd be no disruption, nobody was going to go and check something. It was just a really wonderful experience, a group of strangers coming together and being more vulnerable with each other about how they're really feeling. Um, and yeah, it was lovely. And I thought this is what it means to be human, to be able to share how you feel in the moment. Trust a bit more. Because I feel like there's a I feel unfortunately with all the things we absorb online, it can really build this sense of fear in the world and distrust and barriers up between us all. We need to connect more with each other and have that deeper connection. Um, so like the Princess of Wales said, devices and how we're preoccupied with our devices. She said, we are withdrawing the basic form of love that human connection requires. I think that's really powerful because it happens with families, it happens with friends, it's so disruptive.

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's the it's a it's a great quote. It's not only that you withdraw that, as she says, basic form of human connection. That that that love, attention is the purest form of love, but you're also sending this tacit message that my phone is more important than you. And how like of course you absorb that as a child. It's it's yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

As adults as well. I find I find with friends. Snubbing, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kenny Primrose:

Phone snubbing.

SPEAKER_01:

And even when you gather as as friends, because uh a lot of my friends have children, we'll have our phones near us. But then I've realized I don't have to have my phone written necessarily on the table. I can have it in my bang, I can make sure the sound is on so I can hear if it rings. If the skull's gonna call me, I can hear. But essentially, when we have our phones even at the table, the message is that the phone may interrupt this conversation at any moment. And yeah, that sense of it's not full, you don't feel like someone's fully there at times.

Kenny Primrose:

I think this is huge. It's a huge part of life we don't really discuss as presence. I struggle to be present, partly because I think I'm a you know wired in a slightly ADHD way, but partly because of phones as well. I did a master's thesis on presence as a virtue, it's being eroded from culture in the same way as patience is being present, having this attentional disposition of openness to what is. I think technology suggests that we're in more control than we are, and we become very anxious about uncontrollability. And when you're trying to control everything, then spontaneity, good things that were unexpected, you know, the best things in life are often unexpected, don't emerge because we're busy controlling our environments through tech.

SPEAKER_01:

I feel like we miss the deeper side sometimes when we've got tech in our hands so much. So if you're having a conversation with someone and maybe it's an important one where your friend needs to tell you something important that they're struggling with, if you're getting distracted by your phone, you might miss the facial expression that can say so much. But in that deeper connection, you might normally go, What was your face saying then? It feels like even though you're saying you're okay, your eyebrow raised, or it your face was telling me something. There's pain behind your eye, and I can see something's going on for you. I feel like we can give that to people when there's no other disruption. So the tech really does disrupt that. If you're sort of listening, but going, yeah, I'm listening, but hang on. I just need to reply to my friend. You're not fully in the moment, and you might miss those moments when you can really help somebody else. They might be struggling and you've missed it because you're busy.

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah. And I I've certainly with my in with my wife, she's been talking to me and I've been distracted by my phone, and I've missed it. It's huge. Oh, one thing comes to mind on the other things that we're missing is a conversation I had with a psychologist called Dacker Keltner. Uh, he's spent much of his academic life studying awe, the emotion of awe, which is universal and deep. It tells you what is meaningful in life. It's like a signpost to what is most beautiful, meaningful in life. And he'd say that we're an awe-deprived generation, partly because it's just like flattened to our screens. We see something that's in front of our noses, we are not looking up, whether it's the wild awe of nature or human connection or music or you know, so many things that we're we're not sufficiently attentive to appreciate them and take them in and be humbled by them in a really helpful way, I think.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I definitely think that's so true. And it links in very well with mindfulness because it's all about really feeling the richness of life, taking the moment to have those tingles from and song that just uh makes you feel alive or like you say, nature, and those moments, those memories when you were somewhere and you had that feeling, and you can recall that feeling. I remember seeing some deer once I was out with my dad, and we were on the farm. So we stopped, some deer jumped across the hedge and the road. And I remember saying to my dad, it's like I'm dreaming because it was such a beautiful moment. I was a child, and he remembers it. And I still remember the feeling behind it. Nothing was distracting us in that moment. It's those special moments. That's what it is being human.

Kenny Primrose:

Your attention is absorbed by that, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Completely, and then you remember it as well, you recall it in that sort of depth.

Kenny Primrose:

Time kind of does a funny thing, it dilates or expands in those moments. He is such a he's so interesting. I do recommend his book. He says there's all these physiological correlates, like the sound you make, the spine dingles, the heart rate that slows down. There's all sorts of stuff that happens that we need as humans to feel human, to know what is meaningful, and so on. And if we don't have good boundaries, good limits, then we're not going to experience it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Wonderful. I wanted to ask also how important our community, shared practices, and offline relationships in sustaining flourishing. So we've just been talking about offline relationships a bit already. But what about community and shared practices?

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, I think huge. I think like neighborliness being civically minded, I think those are virtues that we develop. Community ties is definitely part of what makes people care about their area. It makes them care about the people in their area. Robin Walkimmerer, the writer, said, all flourishing is mutual. I love that line. And she's talking really about nature, the symbiosis of things flourishing together. It's absolutely true in human communities that flourishing is mutual. But if we live in atomized cells that we don't communicate with one another properly, those relationships are not developed. That fabric of a community is not developed. The social problems that we see existing at the moment, I think, in no small way emerge from a lack of community and a community cohesion. I'm fortunate enough to live on this street where you can't see it from here, but it's kind of an arc of terraced houses, and there are gaps in all of the fences and hedges, like for 10-15 gardens. And so they're porous, and people just move between them. So in the summer, someone might walk up your garden with a glass of wine in hand, and you just sit down and have a chat. What's emerged from that is we're doing a pilgrimage walk together. Once a season, we do a bit of St. Cuthbert's Way and have meal together, the kids all kind of watch movies in the garden or play or whatever. So it's really I'm so privileged. It's been here for generations. I did nothing to create it, but I I would very much like to be a good custodian of it. This kind of thing used to exist much more than it does. One of the reasons that we we no longer have these kind of kind of community streets is that people live in atomized cells. The technology allows them to do that. We don't need each other anymore. And you know, sharing is a really hard sell. Privacy is a really easy sell. But sharing is actually what I think uh deepens us as humans and certainly deepens our relationship. Trust is involved in it, you know.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's really interesting. Big tech promised that all of these advances would help us to connect more, but actually it feels like we're just more separated and we're now, I think there's this feeling of wanting to have more of a community that's rising up in different places. Sapiens lab references that one of the key happiness indicators is the quality of our relationships.

Kenny Primrose:

Cannot be overstated. So uh once again, Harvard, but they they did the longitudinal study, and the factor beyond cholesterol, smoking, drinking, things like that that gave you good health and life expectancy was quality of relationships. So in your 50s, you're better looking at the quality of someone's relationships than you are looking at the cholesterol level if you want to know how long they're going to stay healthy for.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this is it. I think, yeah, we this can be eroded when we're on tech too much. But tech can be useful sometimes to help people to gather. So check what's happened. There's going to be a gathering offline somewhere, then that's great. But yeah, it's when we're on it too much. Loneliness is a huge problem, particularly for the younger generation. Um, unfortunately. It's definitely a concern. So as we come to the end of this interview, I was wondering what advice would you give us to live well in this digital age?

Kenny Primrose:

Well, I think we've talked about a lot of different things, and it isn't that probably you've sounded like a totally demonized technology, I use it all the time. It's very helpful. But I don't want it to program my life. In order to have some agency and decision over what gets my attention and where I'm going to spend my time, I need to have some boundaries. What one of the key things is thinking about where you want tech-free spaces that give you the chance to connect, for example, the dinner table is a really obvious place to be tech-free. So you actually connect with people, your family or your friends or whoever you're eating with, not in the bedroom, so it doesn't invade your sleep. You get you get an alarm clock, and it it's knowing that the power these devices have over us means we need to take deliberate action to remove ourselves from their lure. If you think of Odysseus tying himself to the mast so that he wouldn't be pulled in by the siren song to his destruction, he knew he needed physical restraints, and I think we too need physical restraints. So phones off at certain times, phones in different rooms at bedtime. You could also make your phone less persuasive by you know, the the the the gold standard for me is moving to a dumb phone, which I really hope to at some point. But until then, I can turn it grayscale, I can turn off notifications and can just add a bit more friction to it, like not having social apps and that kind of thing. Figure out what your boundaries are, what your rules are, try and make it less persuasive as a device, and then think what am I doing instead? If I'm creating some space by not looking at screens or my phone, what am I gonna do instead? Maybe I'm gonna phone someone, going to walk or do some exercise, and thinking, I suppose, what is the difference between the way I will feel after going for a run, for example, to the way I will feel after an hour of scrolling on my phone. Affective forecasting, thinking of how this is gonna affect me. I find that quite motivating.

SPEAKER_01:

Definitely. I think it's really important that we have that moment where we pause. We've got an acronym in the Digital Detox Club, which is space. Uh, and it's essentially you break it down, you stop what you're doing, put down your phone or device, acknowledge what's the feeling, what's really going on, and then choose an alternative and exhale. We're trying to create that moment where we pause when we don't go into default habits of pick it up, must pick it up, because we need to take that moment so we can become more conscious of our habits and then shift. But we need that gap first, don't we? That porn to actually stop ourselves from just getting into this tech trance, as they call it.

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great acronym. Space, so good as a word, so good as an acronym. Yeah. Yeah. So I I think try and live more deliberately by not letting tech have a say on where your attention goes.

SPEAKER_01:

Maybe it's thank you so much. It's been really, really useful. Really great to be able to interview you. So thank you for your time.

Kenny Primrose:

Absolute pleasure. And I love your mission at Digital Detox. I wish you the very best. I hope you reach an awful lot of people through it. It's so important.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Kenny Primrose:

Well, I hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation between me and Nikola. Do please check out Digital Detox Club, the great tips they offer, the work they are trying to do with giving us a better relationship with our screens. If you have enjoyed listening to this episode, do please subscribe, like the podcast, review it, that's really helpful for other people finding it. And sign up to the Substack This Examined Life for updates and information. You can also check out previous episodes where we've discussed a lot of the themes that have cropped up in this conversation. May I, in particular, draw attention to Elam Sarcasis, Tom Chatfield, Anna Lemke, Elizabeth Oldfield, and oh, there's one more. Oliver Burke, I think I mentioned as well. All of those conversations have been on my mind as I was speaking to Nicola today. So thank you so much for listening. I'll be back soon with more conversations, more episodes of the Exemplan Life Podcast.