**note: most of these are intended to have a long “discussable shelf-life,” which I believe to be equally true here — but this one takes on added importance at this moment in particular.**

**additional note: because of this moment in time (and the time it’s afforded us), I’ve also started experimenting with a video format. Similar content either way. Please be kind, it’s early days yet.**

In this coronavirus-plagued spring of 2020, we find ourselves stuck at home with our roommates, family or partners in a way we never have before.  Meanwhile the media (from news outlets to advertisers) have all-too-eagerly tried to frame this moment as a heartwarming opportunity — to spend that time growing closer, if we use it right.

This reminded me of an episode from John Greene’s podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, where late last year, while discussing the merits and uses of the iPhone’s Notes app, he quotes something he had once jotted down in his phone: a the poet Donald Hall’s much more artful take on how we spend time with loved ones. Less a maximization strategy, than a reckoning with the reality of relationships.

“We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”

So in this time of being together, alone, for longer-than-usual stretches, it seemed like a good time to reflect on those Third Things, and decide which ones are better at deepening our relationships vs merely filling time.

What are the Third Things in your relationships?

Which are best at bringing you together,
and what makes them better than others?

How is our reliance on Third Things a positive
or negative reality of how we connect to each other?

A good warm-up question: who in your life do you lie to the most?

As mobile computing, big data, location services and voice recognition converge, new possibilities emerge we probably never even thought about. The Atlantic had a smart piece on one possibility: the future of fraud-busting.

They cover several potential avenues that technology could protect us, but one in particular seems like it could change a lot more than how often we have to change our credit card numbers.

Picture yourself walking down the street when a man approaches and asks for bus fare; he says he lost his wallet and needs to get home. Right away, your phone buzzes with a notification: Stay away. He’s a fraud. The same voice has been asking for money in different locations all week. Such a possibility sounds far-fetched, but your phone company already gathers information from all the phones in its network, and several tech firms are developing voice-biometrics software that can identify individuals and even catch emotional patterns that may indicate deceit. [emphasis added]

The idea of catching on to repeat offenders with data is one thing. But what if someone unlocks that next level of real-time analysis, decoding an individual’s voice patterns and emotional cues, to foil lying? Imagine a world where an effective lie-detecting machine is in everyone’s pocket. Conversation would never be the same again.

Would you want this technology to exist, understanding that you’d know when people were lying to you, and they’d know when you lied to them?

Even if that meant the polite deceptions we use to smooth things over with friends or in relationships are no longer possible?

How else would this change our lives — at work, in commerce, in dating, even in public life like politics or dealing with the law?

It’s so great when friends get together like this.

This piece from the NY Times on how phones keep us disconnected hovers around a topic we see covered a lot (and that I keep coming back to myself, here), but references several studies that make it hit harder than your average thinkpiece.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

The studies make it seem undeniable, but the interpretation here isn’t simply about people having short attention spans or being shallow. There’s a more poignant spin that we’re just afraid to expose ourselves and be open, and the less practiced we are at that, the easier it is to retreat to the safety of the mediated conversation over the one right in front of us.

How often do you turn to the phone when you should be engaged in conversation? Why do you think you do this?

When other people do the same thing, what do you think of them?

Do you think your ability to have a meaningful conversation is improving or suffering over time? Does this have anything to do with the technology in your life?

Do you even want to change this trajectory, or is this an acceptable evolution of how we interact for you?

[Note: photo taken from artist Eric Pickersgill’s series of group photos with the phones removed for effect. Lovely project.]