Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,113

in many ways myself.

One day at my new practice, in the long lull between patients, I found a video online of MIT researcher Sherry Turkle talking about this loneliness. In the late 1990s, she said, she had gone to a nursing home and watched a robot comfort an elderly woman who had lost a child. The robot looked like a baby seal, with fur and large eyelashes, and it processed language well enough to respond appropriately. The woman was pouring her heart out to this robot, and it seemed to follow her eyes, to be listening to her.

Turkle went on to say that while her colleagues considered this seal robot to be great progress, a way to make people’s lives easier, she felt profoundly depressed.

I gasped in recognition. Just the day before, I’d joked to a colleague, “Why not have a therapist in your iPhone?” I didn’t know then that soon there would be therapists in smartphones—apps through which you could connect with a therapist “anytime, anywhere . . . within seconds” to “feel better now.” I felt about these options the way Turkle felt about the woman with the robotic seal.

“Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines us as people?” Turkle asked in the video. Her question made me wonder: Was it that people couldn’t tolerate being alone or that they couldn’t tolerate being with other people? Across the country—at coffee with friends, in meetings at work, during lunch at school, in front of the cashier at Target, and at the family dinner table—people were texting and Tweeting and shopping, sometimes pretending to make eye contact and sometimes not even bothering.

Even in my therapy office, people who were paying to be there would glance at their phones when they buzzed just to see who it was. (These were often the same people who later admitted that they also glanced at pinging phones during sex or while sitting on the toilet. Upon learning this, I placed a bottle of Purell in my office.) To avoid distraction, I’d suggest turning off their phones during sessions, which worked well, but I noticed that before patients even reached the door at the end of the session, they’d grab their phones and start scrolling through their messages. Wouldn’t their time have been better spent allowing themselves just one more minute to reflect on what we had just talked about or to mentally reset and transition back to the world outside?

The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.

The therapy room seemed to be one of the only places left where two people sit in a room together for an uninterrupted fifty minutes. Despite its veil of professionalism, this weekly I-thou ritual is often one of the most human encounters that people experience. I was determined to establish a flourishing practice, but I wasn’t willing to compromise this ritual in order to make that happen. It may have seemed quaint, if not downright inconvenient, but for those patients I did have, I knew there was a tremendous payoff. If we create the space and put in the time, we stumble upon stories that are worth waiting for, the ones that define our lives.

And my own story? Well, I wasn’t really allowing the time and the space for that—gradually, I became too busy listening to the stories of others. But beneath the hectic bustle of therapy sessions and school drop-offs, of doctor appointments and romance, a long-repressed truth was percolating beneath the surface and just beginning to make itself felt when I arrived in Wendell’s office. Half my life is over, I would say, seemingly out of nowhere, in our very first session—and Wendell would jump right on this. He was picking up where my internship supervisor had left off years earlier.

You won’t get today back.

And the days were flying by.

37

Ultimate Concerns

I’m soaked when I get to Wendell’s office this morning. During my short walk across the street from the parking lot to his building, the winter’s first downpour began unannounced. Having no umbrella or coat, I threw my cotton blazer over my head and ran.

Now my blazer is dripping, my hair is frizzing, my makeup is running, and my wet