Christine Rosen
speaker
131 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 14 Jun
Christine Rosen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's that people expect to be able to go from point A to point B whenever they want to, as they want to, with no delay. So our inability to deal with delay, whether that's waiting in line at a shopping mall or waiting in line of cars to be able to go home, we are just less patient.
And we're expressing that through very unhealthy means in the case of road rage, where many people tragically have been killed in some of these altercations. But it also then means when there's something that you must wait for, like the birth of a child or waiting in a doctor's office or waiting to hear good or bad news from a doctor. You can't rush these things.
But just culturally, I think you can also see some evidence of our inability to wait when you think about instant solutions to very complicated political problems, right? Long-term thinking, long-term strategic planning, all of these things, and all of these have been studied in terms of the amounts of time and all the details. And But I think the overarching picture says we're just less patient.
We don't wait the same way we used to. We're not willing to wait.
Yes, I'm fascinated by the idea of serendipity. For years, after I had an interview with Eric Schmidt, who was still at Google at the time, who was at a panel discussion, he said, oh, well, we manufacture serendipity now. We can do that. And I thought, huh, I actually don't think you can do that. That's the whole point of something being serendipitous. It's not manufactured. It just happens.
And humans have this great desire for those sorts of chance experiences, for those unexpected things that could potentially encourage feelings like awe and amazement, the kind of stuff that I think we take for granted as being possible in the world because we're so focused on our screens.
So when you think about how algorithmically driven and managed so many of the ways we spend our time looking for something, whether it's a spouse or partner or a particular kind of book, everything pulls us into that web because it's convenient, it's seamless, it's efficient, all these words we hear from Silicon Valley.
I find it fascinating that the computers have taken over the thing that we used to love to do as humans. So think about browsing. I used to love to go to bookstores and just browse, just go up and down, look at the shelves. And then you might pull something off the shelf, and it happens to be this amazing book of poetry or a magazine you'd never seen before.
And then that sets you down a path, a meandering path. That's harder to do online because everything is more managed. Your experience is managed. You're the user. That's why we talk about user experience.
serendipitous things browsing meandering those are things right that's how our brains work they wander and it's very frustrating at times because when you're supposed to be focused at that staff meeting your mind starts to wander you lose track of what everyone's saying but that's what we're designed to do because those are the paths so serendipitous paths that lead to creative insight to thoughts it's the cliche of suddenly you're in the shower and you have the aha moment
That's because you're distracted with your body doing something else. Your mind is allowed some freedom. It's not being constantly stimulated by something on the screen.
failing to recall that, in fact, a lot of those ratings are fake. A lot of them don't really reflect the experience of people and the rest weren't right. So we seek approval of our decisions now before we've even made them. We need this sort of constant algorithmically fueled approval.
And it might make the experiences more homogenized and safe feeling, but it also makes them a little bit, I think, boring. And in the realm of art and literature and music, it means that we are missing the opportunity to be humble appreciators of someone else's work.
If an artist, a truly genuinely creative person has made something, we owe them the respect of actually sitting and looking or listening to it and just being open to that experience, not filming it, not spending a minute, take a picture of it, moving on to the next picture in the museum, but really kind of treating that with respect, that creative act with respect.
I think they have. And it's funny. People always laugh when I say that, that we're all much more risk averse because of our phones. I just the other day, I was watching this guy jump out of an airplane doing this at the same time. I'm like, well, we've become more voyeuristic. Like we're really excellent spectators of other people's risk. But are we more risk averse? So think about it this way.
When's the last time you went to a new place and you just wandered around without using your phone? Very few people will answer that they've done that recently.
I think it's that we're never truly there in each other's physical presence anymore. We might be there physically sitting around a table at a restaurant, but throughout the several hours of a meal with our friends or family, everyone's taking turns checking out mentally. They're checking their phone. They're looking down and, you know, sending a text to someone else.
And we know the brain is not designed to multitask, and we don't multitask well. Multitasking is a myth. And every time you shift your attention from the people right in front of you to the world on your phone, that is an act, I think, of deepened gratitude for the value of the human experience of people being together. So...
It's become normalized in a way that worries me because it really does lead to very fractured interactions, anxiety in the professional context, a lot of miscommunication. It's not just kids these days and their technology. It's all of us. We've all become habituated to ways of checking out from each other that I think can be quite harmful over time.
Two things. The first is there are all kinds of things you can do to grayscale your phone. For example, you can eliminate all notifications. You can make the home screen be a very dull gray color. And I would recommend people do all of that, especially if they find themselves responding to every ping. Don't have those alerts.
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