Christina Crook

You published The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World in2015, before topics like smartphone addiction and digital well-being had really entered the public consciousness. What was your original inspiration for the book?

I studied at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication before working for some of Canada’s leading media organizations, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and Rogers Digital Media. As email and then social media took hold, I was keyed into the shifts that were happening culturally and personally — particularly the shifts in habits, relationships, and social etiquette. By that time, I was a mother of two very young children. I wanted to figure out what kind of creative, mother, neighbor, and friend I would be without the demands of the web. So, I gave it up for 31 days and took up an older technology, the typewriter, and instead wrote a letter to the same friend every day, chronicling my experience. Those letters and experiences led to the writing of several essays that led to my publisher — a sustainability focussed press — reaching out to have me expand my thinking into what would become The Joy of Missing Out.

What are some common factors that prevent people from embracing JOMO, and how do you advise people to overcome them?

A lot of people are afraid that if they embrace JOMO they’ll fall behind and miss opportunities. That might be so. Every Choice is a thousand renunciations. I love James Williams’ framing when he asks: “What do we pay when we pay attention?” In Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, he writes, “We pay with all of the lives we might have lived.” That’s the truth. Everything has a trade-off.

As a mother, neighbor, and digital well-being expert, I’m calling out the “tech inevitability” excuse for what it is: a lie. It's Predicated on the effectiveness of liberal democratic individualism, co-opted by consumerist impulses nurtured by billion-dollar ad spends. It’s not bringing us joy. It’s not sustaining our world. It’s not serving the common good.

What I see in the present state of my culture is a way of life so at odds with our needs that we’ve begun to belittle human vulnerabilities. We’ve spent a decade trying to life-hack our way out of our imperfections in order to keep pace with our machines. We dehumanize ourselves and others by our refusal to admit the intrinsic inefficiency and interdependency of the human experience.

A growing number of us are no longer content to quantify our lives by what we do, what we have, or what others think of us. We’re fed up with trying to fit our complicated existence into curated grids of images. Time’s up for efficiency at all costs. Time’s up for the age of you. Time’s up for social media. It’s all one big ad anyway.

I am a big champion of avoiding avoidance. We use phones for avoidance all of the time. We need to relearn how to have a courageous conversation, to look people in the eyes, but we have to want it first.

This leads us back to the core question of JOMO: what brings you joy? Another way of asking this is, what supports your well-being and moves you meaningfully towards your goals? That’s the experience of joy. Merriam-Webster defines joyas “ the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires.”These are the common factors preventing people from embracing JOMO — not knowing what they really want. That's Why my work centres around values and aligning our tech use with those articulated values. When our values and time spent align, we experience peace. When they’re misaligned, we experience distress.

One of the guiding beliefs of JOMO, inspired by philosopher Jean Vanier, is “to be human means to remain connected to our humanness and to reality.” What is it about digital technology that poses a challenge to these connections?

The lines between the real and unreal are blurring faster than we can keep up as AI deep fakes and VR technologies advance — transformations in the ways we live, work, and relate to one another. We are told these changes are inevitable and advantageous: we must embrace and adapt to them (not the other way around) or be left behind. This blurring tool isat odds with the human experience because to be human means to remain connected to our humanness and to reality (Jean Vanier, Becoming Human.) That requires knowing what is really real.

Let’s talk about a real human so we can get out of the abstract.

Henderson is a young man who lives on my block. For at least an hour each morning and every afternoon, he stands on the sidewalk. I learned Henderson’s name after nearly a year of smiling, saying hello and chatting briefly about the weather, or politics or whatever was on Henderson’s mind that day. I asked him his name so I could write it down on my little neighbor map so I would remember.

I don’t know what kind of condition Henderson has but I know he doesn’t work. He is sometimes a little slow with his speech. Sometimes it’s hard for Henderson to fully form his thoughts about his opinions. But he’s always got opinions.About the neighborhood. About the weather. About politics (and the giant political sign hammered in his family's front yard.) And he’s always sharing them with the biggest brightest smile in the world. Joy.

I think a lot about Henderson. I look forward to walking or driving down his block just so I can meet his gaze and wave. Healways has a smile for me. Always.

I am thinking more about Henderson as we enter the new decade. When I consider my neighborhood and the fixtures of it, the things I love, the things that make this neighborhood worth living in, I don’t think about the fact that Prince Harryand Meghan Markle were spotted nearby when they first began dating; I don’t think about the hipster microbreweries orcafes. I think about Henderson. Henderson is who I’d miss.I think we could all be a little more like Henderson — less overworked, over-scheduled and overwhelmed. At what cost are we wasting time on the Internet? What is the impact of all our interstitial time being captured by the attention economy? Who is it serving?When we are honest about what we love, I don't think it is a hard decision to choose people.

If you ask people what brings them the most joy, they're faces light up and they spill with stories of friendship, family, nature, and active hobbies. When We remember these true joys and prioritize them - our phones dim in comparison.This focus of JOMO comes directly from Albert Borgmann’s philosophy: “My focus is less on setting limits than it is on creating the positive conditions in which technology becomes less compelling and different kinds of engagements thrive and flourish.”

Much of the tech ethics conversation focuses on what companies or regulators should be doing differently, while theJOMO movement puts the onus on the individual to take ownership over their digital habits. This is a stop gap. The Balance of responsibility falls to Big Tech for the platforms they’re creating. This is why the work of Pivot for Humanity,Center for Humane Technology and the new Digital Wellness Lab are so crucial. In the meantime, individuals need tools of resistance, strategies to move from surviving to thriving in the digital ageThat’s the beauty of All Tech is Human community — we are all doing our part to ensure human flourishing.

We are each doing it in our unique way. We need us all.