Deskilling the body

As a woman in my late 40s, I have become prone to waking at this witching hour, as the early sunlight meets the night, sliding across the earth like a red tide. With the rest of my household asleep, and still half in and out of wakefulness myself, I take hold of my phone. With scarcely a thought, I switch from one app to another, scrolling through images and opinions and adverts for no discernible reason beyond habit.

Later, I head for my office and open my laptop to a slew of half-completed documents and an inbox brimming with emails. My stress levels begin to nudge upwards. I have vague memories of what my professional life felt like before smartphones and video calls.

I used to do my writing by hand. And I could concentrate for hours at a time, getting little upticks of arousal from lifting my head from the page, letting the hold on my pen loosen, and gazing at the life beyond my window, the light softening on my skin and eyes like snowfall on warm tarmac. Nowadays, my productive bursts come from caffeine and sugary or salty snacks, even if I try to pick the healthier ones, and from checking my emails or picking up my phone to update my inbox.

By the end of the day, the sheer volume of work I expect myself to do, now that digital tools make so much possible, has kept me nailed to my seat. Another day has passed and the hope I’d had that I might have time for a run or a hike outside has been dashed again. I wish I could say that this is atypical.

Yet, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I went from hours spent in nature and on physical activities to a passive, phone-addicted individual, meeting people first and sometimes only online. We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book.

Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time.