“Empathy Lessons for the App Generation”: Mockingbird

writes:

…Turkle here is indicating that there is a strong connection between empathy and solitude. I am reminded (beyond Louis CK) of Pascal’s famous line about humanity’s problems consisting of “man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” (Two Pascal lines this week?!) Turkle here conveys the human need to sit down with one’s self, to deal with one’s self, and while she doesn’t cover any religious dimensions, it is where prayer happens. For Christianity in particular, this is where repentance can happen, where we confront things we’ve done and things we’ve left undone. Here, in a discomforting self-appraisal, is the root of empathy with another human being.

more–and I’m not a smoker, but my sense is that one of the attractions of smoking is precisely that it creates a certain private space for reflection. Where nobody will ask you what you’re doing, because you’re smoking, that’s what you’re doing. (As with a lot of things we do, if you want to stop doing it it often helps to figure out what you’re getting from it and try to get that in a more honest/humiliating way.)