Hey everyone, I’m alive ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶
To refresh your memory, I’m Nikki, and I started this newsletter to amplify cultural perspectives in tech, product design, and psychology. My last post was three years ago. Somewhere along the way, I fell off my writing habit, but I’ve still been moving in the same direction of learning how to be a more mindful technologist.
Seeing a lot of new folks joining the mailing list (over a hundred of you now!) gave me the extra push to revive this space — know that I’m so grateful to have you here.
I’d also love to meet more of you and talk about everything tech. Holding a tiny virtual gathering this Saturday afternoon, come swing by 🤍
EVENT: Towards a Mindful Relationship with Technology
☕️ April 6, Saturday, 2:00 - 4:00 PM PHT
The internet today offers so much convenience, yet so little comfort.
Our senses are bombarded with new content, hot takes, and virality. Trapped in a cyclical rat race for relevance and attention, we can’t help but wonder: Is it possible to maintain a healthy relationship with social media without disconnecting altogether?
Sign up for this free discussion below to receive the meeting details. Together, we’ll explore ways to cultivate more mindful, expansive online experiences.
Today’s letter contains reflections fresh out of a period of burnout. I took a few days off from juggling the demands of two tech jobs with my senior year of college.
The impossibility of retreat
“To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
I've been thinking a lot about what Jenny Odell called "the impossibility of retreat".
It started when I met up with T for dinner at the height of my burnout, and we talked about our plans after graduation. I told her that a year from now, I want to get to a point where I can delete all social media apps and live in creative hermitude, spending my days reading and deepening my craft as a designer.
What's stopping you from deleting them now? she asked. I explained how my work at present depended on it (I've had clients reach out to me through Instagram), it's how I document my life at university, and how I know what's going on in my circles through friends' posts and stories. Then she said, Those reasons are still gonna be there a year from now. Isn't having that goal like... a palliative thing?
And I thought, fuck, she's right.
Even beyond my life as an undergrad, there will still be people to check up on, cool events to discover and attend, organizations whose work I'll want to amplify. And as idyllic as it sounds to silo myself away from big tech, doing that won't necessarily uproot my need for external validation or address the structural factors that have shaped and reinforced those mental models.
Let's face it — disconnection is a privilege. Our society is becoming increasingly tech-institutionalized, as in: Are you really a legitimate business if you don't have a Facebook page to your name? Can you apply for a driver's license without an internet connection, or navigate a new city without Google Maps? (I thought so.) It feels wrong to opt out of it now when so much of civic life takes place in the online sphere.
To be clear, I am not villifying those who choose to take digital detoxes, short-term or permanent; I need those too. It can be beneficial for our well-being to unplug, to disappear, to remove ourselves from a media landscape polluted with ads, fake news, and addictive content. Yet as a technologist, as someone who plays a role in shaping the mediums we engage with through our screens, I believe there is merit in resisting in place. Highlighted this line from Mia Birdsong's How We Show Up:
"The places we go to escape the distractions and obligations and stressful busyness of our everyday are not where we build our lives. And it is in the mundane, the hardship, and the realness of life that what we’ve built is tested and refined."
I draw strength from those who go beyond individualistic aims to bring forth the civic functions of social media: the fact-checkers, the internet activists, and community archivists, to name a few.
Resisting in place, to me, looks like being as mindful as possible about my relationship with technology. Sitting with the hesitancy of deciding whether or not to post something and all the questions that arise from the curse of knowledge: Does this feel authentic to me? Why does hitting 'post' feel more high-stakes than putting out a story? Am I reproducing norms of online performativity? And allowing space for that discomfort, rather than trying to engineer it out my experience. It is looking for the middle way, "the middle path between extreme asceticism on one hand and sensual indulgence on the other."
It also looks like taking small steps to divest from platforms that have dealt harm, and making space for the kind of internet I actually want to see. Personally, that means deleting dating apps that have made me feel acutely commodified and doing a deep dive into questions like: How can technology facilitate meaningful, soul-deep connection — not just with strangers, but with people we may have lived alongside all our lives — with our friends, neighbors, family members, and yes, even ourselves? This is what guides me in my research for the psychology pillar of so/ul.
Note that my optimal use of technology may look different from yours; We each have the agency to decide what a life worth living (and a world worth living in) means and how we can curate our media diet and tech stack to match that.
Closing this out with a line from a paper I recently wrote for school:
For all the vitriol and cynicism that social media has fueled, it has also introduced me to a thriving ecosystem of nonprofits, grassroots movements, and businesses cultivating well-being for people and planet. In a nation fragmented, it’s these practices of communal care that I wish to make space for online.
I'm so excited to be back on this journey of learning in public alongside you all, and to see what kind of online experiences you wish to make space for, through small, agentic acts of resisting in place.
Stretch Your Mind
🎧 Your Undivided Attention: Artificial Intimacy
A great podcast episode with acclaimed therapist Esther Perel, where she talks AI therapy, dating apps, and how both can potentially deprive us of real connection. So many sound bites here that I broke a glass in my rush to take down notes.
📚 Book Rec: A Psalm for the Wild-Built
I realized a lot of my work lately has involved thinking about the ways we relate with technology as a tool, space, an extension of ourselves, or perhaps even as a friend. This is a heartwarming story about a tea monk who meets a robot when he escapes from city life to the woods.
💌 Newsletter: So/ul Studies
I write another newsletter for my new role where I investigate the spiritual meaning of technology, ie. how we can use it to see ourselves and others more clearly, and understand our place in the world at large.
I’ll be more active publishing letters above than on here. Until the next volume of Reclaim — hope to meet some of you online this Saturday!
Thanks for joining me today 🤍
I'm Nikki and I work at the intersections of care, culture, and technology. Currently, I study psychology at the University of the Philippines.
If you enjoyed this issue, please feel free to spread the word, buy me a coffee, or let me know your thoughts and feedback :) Have an enchanting week ✨