The Extinction of Experience

I’ve passed the halfway mark of life as what Koreans call a gireogi appa, a “wild goose father” — a man who stays behind while his wife and children live abroad. When I heard my wife’s bank was posting her to Singapore, and again a few weeks later when I watched her and our daughter disappear past the departure gates, three years felt like a distance I could not measure. That was eighteen months ago. Eighteen more and we will wake up under one roof again. Korean conscripts remind each other that the army clock keeps ticking no matter how slowly the days pass. My situation hardly compares, but I’ve come to feel a similar gratitude toward the clock on our living room wall, doing its work without complaint.

What has carried me through these eighteen months is a video call app. Twice a day, morning and evening, my family and I meet on a screen. At 7:20 Singapore time, about five minutes before the school shuttle arrives, they call me on my way to work. Two faces fill the frame and we trade the day ahead: what my daughter is looking forward to, what she is dreading. Then the bus edges into view behind them, and I watch her climb aboard and wave. My wife waits until the bus is out of sight before turning back to the camera, and we wish each other a good day, and the morning call ends.

After we’ve each spent our day, at 11 p.m. Korean time we gather at the screen again. School, the bank, the public health center I direct — the day’s leftovers turn into conversation. A school recital, a difficult client meeting, next week’s district council session. When the talk finally winds down, we say an abbreviated rosary adapted to the constraints of a video call, and go to our separate beds. These two windows a day keep us from forgetting that we are apart without being separate.

Not long ago, the video phone was the stuff of dreams. It appeared in every film and illustration that tried to picture the future, though never as something you could hold — always a heavy console with a screen bolted to a telephone. Now it runs in the palm of my hand as an unremarkable part of the day. Families were separated long before this technology existed. How did they bear it? I find I cannot imagine.

And yet a video call cannot substitute for the ordinary friction of living in the same house. When a call ends, silence rushes in as though it had been waiting for the chance. Against the animation on the screen a moment earlier, an empty apartment can be brutally quiet. Video calls connect us to what we cannot reach, and they do it beautifully, but they do not replace occupying the same room.

Nearly everything I do now passes through a phone. I check the weather app instead of opening a window, and I learn how my friends are doing from their photographs. The destination all of this technology is heading toward is not mysterious. It is convenience. And convenience is a compound of two things: speed, which delivers the result faster, and ease, which strips the bother out of getting there. The desire for both has been the great engine of human civilization. We invented speech and writing so that thoughts could travel quickly and cheaply between minds. From a prehistory in which the only means of transport was a pair of legs, we borrowed the strength of animals, then invented the wheel, and eventually the car and the aircraft. The passage from parchment to letters to telegraph to telephone to email follows the same logic.

Civilization, in other words, is the sum of the devices we built to make things fast and easy. Look closely at those devices and a curious thing about them emerges. They are all intermediaries. Speech, writing, letters, email — these carry meaning between minds that are physically apart. Firewood and photovoltaic cells differ in form but do the same job: they mediate the sun’s energy into something we can use. And transport? An intermediary whose cargo is neither information nor energy, but ourselves.

Here is where the character of the intermediary becomes interesting. Walter Benjamin distinguished the original artwork from its reproduction. I want to apply that distinction not to art but to the whole apparatus of civilization, and when I do, our intermediaries fall into two kinds. Fuel and transport move the thing itself; what arrives is what departed, and nothing remains at the origin. These carry originals. Letters and the internet work differently. A letter travels as physical paper, but its substance is the message inside, and the message is copied rather than moved. What travels is a duplicate; the original stays where it was. The smartphone plainly belongs to the second kind.

So the hollowness that arrives when I hang up is, I suspect, the hollowness of having met a copy. Not my wife and daughter, but images of them, carried to me. And we are thoroughly at home with this arrangement. We begin and end our days in front of copies the phone displays, tapping and swiping at these images, conducting a great deal of our lives through them. In The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World, Christine Rosen examines this world where the copy has taken over.

Rosen holds a doctorate in history from Emory University, where she studied American intellectual history. She is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a senior editor at The New Atlantis, and a columnist for Commentary. What distinguishes her is that she approaches technology as a historian rather than an engineer or a psychologist. The book therefore does more than catalogue the harms of our devices; it traces when and how our habits — and our working definition of what it means to be human — quietly changed.

Across a prologue and seven chapters, Rosen takes inventory of the faculties we have mislaid: looking at another face, writing and drawing by hand, tolerating delay and boredom, feeling an emotion through to its end, taking pleasure in the body, and belonging to a particular place. The losses she catalogues fall into two registers. Some are visible — handwriting in decline, no one in a public space with their eyes off a screen. Others have become so ordinary that we no longer register them as losses at all: a diminished capacity for pleasure that isn’t technologically mediated, a growing discomfort in the presence of other people. Published in 2024, as ChatGPT was moving rapidly into everyday use, the book issues a cold warning about how thoroughly technology is rewriting the human condition.

Three things stayed with me.

First, a mediated experience cannot substitute for the experience itself. Mediating technologies can hand you the product; they cannot hand you the process. A weather app gives me the temperature but not the damp on my face or the smell the wind carries. An AI can produce a finished piece of writing but cannot walk the road of thought that leads to its conclusions — and the whole point of writing, as an experience, is not the text at the end but the act of composing it. Rosen observes that technology recasts anything time-consuming as a problem to be solved: standing in line, writing by hand, finding your way. What our intermediaries have removed is not merely inconvenience. It is the time an experience requires in order to become one.

Second, waiting has a value nothing else supplies. Waiting is more than the endurance of discomfort; it furnishes the interval in which reflection happens. Rosen quotes the poet W. H. Auden here, on the impulse that led the first humans to the forbidden fruit: perhaps impatience is the only cardinal sin — impatience drove us out of Paradise, and impatience is why we cannot return. Which is to say the fruit was taken not out of a hunger for knowledge but out of haste. Wait a little longer and the outcome might have differed. Waiting has never gone anywhere. What changed is our posture toward it: we now dismantle patience willingly, and call it progress.

Third, some things cannot be treated as means. Impatience corrodes how we treat people. Someone accustomed to never waiting starts to see others as devices for producing results on demand. In Korea we have a word, gapjil, for the abuse a customer or superior heaps on whoever is obliged to serve them; it grows directly out of treating a person like an app that ought to respond when pressed. But a human being is not something you replace when it fails to respond. Nor, for that matter, is a life a means to anything. In the film Click, Adam Sandler’s character acquires a remote control for his own existence. He skips the traffic on the morning commute, then an argument with his wife, then the years spent waiting for a promotion. The remote learns. It begins fast-forwarding anything tagged as tedious, on its own initiative. What he ends up holding is a life consisting only of outcomes. Skip the waiting and it is not only the waiting that vanishes. The living that happened during it goes too — along with whatever growth and meaning it contained.

Closing the book, I found myself asking again what humanity is actually made of. Asking for something and enduring the interval before it arrives. Absorbing the friction when a service isn’t smooth. Extending to a person who fails my standards the recognition that they are a person, and that the failing is simply their particular shape. By the logic of efficiency, all three are waste to be eliminated. Technology has been steadily eliminating them, because we asked it to.

I have had to reconsider my own waiting. Without quite admitting it, I had decided that the few days I spend with my family in Singapore are the valuable part of my life and that the months alone in Busan are something to be got through. Had that remote control been in my hand, I would have fast-forwarded through Busan — and to that extent my life would simply have ceased to exist. But I see it now. The days with my family are the original, and so are the solitary months.

Which means calling those video calls a copy was only half right. What the screen carries may be a copy of my wife and daughter, but the five minutes we spend on either side of it are not a copy of anything. My daughter confiding her nerves about the recital, and my listening to her — that happened. Mediation cannot replace experience, but there are experiences that would never have occurred without it. A video call cannot stand in for sharing a house; what it can do is stitch our days together across three years apart.

The trouble comes after the call ends. Pascal held that all our unhappiness stems from an inability to sit alone in a quiet room. Rosen picks up that line to argue that our real problem is not a scattered attention span but an incapacity to sit with our own thoughts. The silence that floods in after a call may well be that quiet room. I have reached for the screen to escape it more times than I care to count. In those moments the phone stops being an instrument of experience and becomes a remote control. Open it to kill an hour and the evening is deleted from your life.

Rounding the halfway mark, this is where I have arrived. The eighteen months ahead are no longer merely time to be waited out. The hours I spend anticipating the eleven o’clock call, and the silence after it ends, are equally my one life, which will not be issued again. The clock on the wall will go on keeping faith. What I intend now is not to skip that time, but to fill it with experience.