Holy Shame
The eyes of others our prisons;
their thoughts our cages.
-Virginia Woolf
Woolf meant this as a warning. A century later, I can’t help but wonder if those same eyes might be the only thing that could set us free.
Last week I posted the following on BEEW Feed calling out the absurd spectacle of people glued to their phones all… the… freaking… time — and why shame, that ugliest and most painful of emotions, might be the only force left strong enough to snap us out of it.
Source: Blackbird Spyplane
The insanity I refer to in that post, of course, is the unseemly, all-too-common pageant of couples, friend groups, whole families silently communing with the tiny glass meth labs in their hands instead of the living, breathing humans beside them, like an ambient group prayer to the god of glow, a trance so total and unbroken that it’s managed to scramble our attention, hollow out our relationships, and steal whole futures, many before they even had the chance to imagine them.
Now, for the first time in forever, we’re seeing the first signs of a cultural flinch, a growing, if still faint, sense that the national religion of scrolling, tapping, and reacting to tiny dings might finally, mercifully, be losing its grip. According to Blackbird Spyplane, it's now uncool to be seen staring at your phone. Among the aesthetically literate and spiritually awake, a small but promising vanguard of Gen Z culture warriors, the new status symbol isn't what you own or post or kibbitz about with your AI chatbot buddy, but the audacity of attention itself.
A long, slow migration from the malignant attention economy finally seems to be underway, moving toward what I'm calling the presence economy, a deliberate return to the ancient art of being here, of showing up in your own life and in the lives of the people orbiting it, of remembering again how to be in the world instead of looking through it.
The entire attention economy thrives on status: who's online, who's in the know, who's viral, who's relevant. Coolness has always been its most reliable profit engine. Coolness is status. Coolness, therefore, built the addiction (certainly wouldn't be the first time). What Spyplane spotted is a cultural backflip of that logic. The fastest lever of change in a culture as performative as ours, is and always will be status, perception, reputation. The only forces strong enough to dismantle the addiction are inversions of the same mechanisms that built it — status flipped into shame, validation into cringe, belonging into rejection.
Reading Spyplane’s piece, it occurred to me that while their observation was sharp in all the ways they likely intended, it was also prophetic in ways I’m not sure they fully grasped. What they stumbled on, seemingly by accident, was the first real antidote anyone’s found, something even the experts and reformers missed. If cool built the addiction, maybe uncool is the clearest, quickest path to the cure.
Awareness is spreading, yes, but that won’t save us. Change begins when we finally look up, see what we’ve become, and can no longer bear the sight.
The Great Captivity
I launched this blog a year ago with a piece called Soon We'll Have Nothing Left to Give Away of Ourselves. I wrote:
Why, despite everything we know, do we continue to participate in this humanity-sized lab experiment? Why do we so freely capitulate to the well-known corrosions and cynical manipulations of Big Tech? Why do we so willingly hand over our interiority to companies that strip it for parts and mine it for unimaginable profits? This isn't some future sci-fi plot or Luddite fever dream. This is all happening right here, right now, an unprecedented, real-time tragedy unfolding before our eyes, streaming directly into the hollows of our minds where solitude and self-reflection once resided.
Smartphones and social feeds, once sleek emblems of efficiency and self-referential importance, have metastasized into something closer to portable sadness dispensers, engineered not for our benefit but for someone else's balance sheet, glowing benignly on café tables and nightstands while draining rooms of conversation and our ability to be present in our lives, tinting our faces the same hue as aquarium glass, blinking through notifications like fish nibbling at flakes that never stop falling.
Of course, not all smartphone use is malignant. This little marvel in my hand enables us to summon help in emergencies, calm panicked parents at midnight, guide lost drivers home — all small miracles of modern life. Like fire, miraculous, at least until it burns the house down.
Somewhere along the way, the thing in our pocket went from a tool to a leash, a prosthetic brain to a replacement soul, a pocket altar we rub for reassurance so much, so often, that we stopped noticing the subtle trade we were making: the slow surrender of our attention for meaningless motion, our curiosity for convenience, our idle wonder for the comfort of control, our agreement to invisible captivity masquerading as freedom.
The Cultural Crack
We all look stupid as hell when we're looking at our phones. There's been endless discourse about the negative effects of phones on our moods, sleep cycles, capacity for nuanced thought, and so on. But we have not grappled with the overwhelming negative aesthetic effect, which is that, when we are looking at them, no matter how cool and quick-witted we may be in other contexts, we can not help but look like dumbasses.
-Blackbird Spyplane
There it is.
Finally, someone with cultural cred saying the quiet part out loud: we look ridiculous.
And that, right there, just might be the breakthrough. To point directly at the ludicrousness. Staring all day at your phone with that compulsive Pavlovian twitch and thousand-yard zombie gaze, especially in the presence of other conscious humans you claim to know or love, is officially lame.
Am I being callous? Perhaps. A bit heavy-handed? Maybe. But nothing we’ve tried has worked. All the warnings, think pieces, and well-meaning experts with their graphs and grave concern have failed. We’ve studied this issue to death. We’ve quantified it, therapized it, rhapsodized about it — and nothing's changed.
You’d think, by now, we’d have realized the problem isn’t a lack of information but a glut of it. We don’t need more data or therapy or better intentions. We're not spreadsheeting our way out of this one. Not this spiritual hole. Not this time. We need something bigger, stronger, more forceful, more inevitable. Something wired in. We need deliverance. A force closer to magic, maybe even a miracle.
Luckily, evolution built one in. It just happens to feel sickeningly awful, shame does. That was the point. Nature wanted it to hurt. Shame evolved to keep us safely tucked inside our tribe, with our people. It’s the original safety feature, a self-conscious alarm designed to keep us from being mocked, erased, or exiled. It fires when we sense the eyes of others turning, when we feel their judgment forming. It screams, in that deep, stomach-dropping way, when we’ve wandered too far off the tracks. Shame is instant, involuntary, older than speech, more primal than hunger.
If it’s not obvious by now, it should be. Nature doesn’t do hugs or hold hands. It's ruthless, merciless, deeply purposeful. Shame doesn't teach or explain, it detonates. It moves faster than thought or reason and it knows its what-to-do’s and don’t-you-dare’s before logic has a chance to even blink. Biologically, it’s pure circuitry, a primitive reflex that cuts straight through the self-justifications we build to protect ourselves. It floods the system with the one thing modern life keeps trying, and failing, to destroy: our elemental need for belonging. This is the magic of shame and why it works so exactingly.
The corrosive, society-deranging spell we’re under won’t break because tech companies suddenly grow a conscience (that ain’t happening) or lawmakers pass some nonsense bill in the name of progress and protection (that likely will). It'll break when everyone stops pretending this behavior is anything close to normal. You’ll see — we all will — things will change very quickly when your friends, peers, colleagues, even strangers, start looking at you sideways in public.
Cool built this mess. Big Tech weaponized it. Shame is likely the only thing that will break it. Cool made us pick these things up. Uncool might be the only thing that finally makes us put them down.
The Everyday Absurd
How else to put this? There was a time, not that long ago, when life felt more human. Sure, it wasn’t all baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie all the time, but that very American ethos did exist. And it really was a call to adventure and a shorthand for promise, belonging, unselfconscious joy. Afternoons at the ballpark with your dad. Endless nights with your friends. Summer crowds roaring Sweet Caroline in glorious unison. Moments we shared together as a collective, as a nation — watching MJ moonwalk across that stage, learning Who Shot J.R.?, our shiver of pride when the Miracle on Ice stunned the world.
It sounds sentimental. It is. But at least the sentiment was real. And now? The crowds are gone, the chorus is quiet, the light is blue. The glow that once lit our faces now washes them pale. We are but a nation of empty eyes and atomized souls, scrolling ourselves to sleep.
Don’t believe me? Look around. You’ve seen it. Hell, you’ve probably done it. We all have.
As midnight nears on New Year’s Eve, the crowd counts down, ten, nine, eight... and ten thousand arms rise in perfect formation, not to look up, not to cheer, but to film. The air hums with anticipation, fireworks blooming above an ocean of lenses, every explosion mirrored back through glass. The light is dazzling, blinding even, but not one naked eye dares to meet it. Not a single one of them is willing to miss the post, the proof, the performance, the memory of being there.
Five friends sit together on a college quad, sunlight glinting off the grass, the smell of spring thick in the air, the faint sound of laughter drifting in from elsewhere. They’re near each other, sure, like five open tabs on the same browser window, but they're not with each other because their faces are tipped toward their phones, each in their own small, private world, thumbs flicking like metronomes, conducting tiny orchestras of make-believe. They share space, I guess, but not time, not true warmth, not sweetness, only a faint simulation of it.
You hear the clink of forks, the chime of glasses in something that looks like a restaurant and sounds like dinner, but at the table next to you a family of four sits hypnotized, each of their faces lit by a faint shrine of light. You see their forks moving, their mouths chewing, maybe even a small smile flicker across one of their faces, but something's off. The ritual remains in tact, and thank god for that, but the wonder, the presence, and most notably, the conversation, are gone.
A couple lies in bed, their backs touching just enough to feel the heat of another living soul, the faint warmth between them no match for the cold light of their screens, two separate worlds glowing inches apart. They aren’t talking or fighting or making love, only scrolling through other people’s lives while their own slips quietly away.
And then there are the dogs. God help the dogs. They’ve been watching us for two decades now, these loyal creatures bred to fetch and follow, trotting beside us while we stare slack-jawed into pour phones. Spyplane caught it with painful precision, pinning the moment to the wall like an exhibit in our slow domestication. A dispatch from the strange, shrinking edge of what we still call human, a perfect little epitaph for the species that invented the leash and then slipped it around its own neck.
Since the first iPhone came out in 2007, there are almost no dogs currently living who knew a time when their owners did not stare at their phones constantly during walks. The dog’s the one with the collar, but you tell me who’s really ‘leashed,’ friend.”
Funny, right? Well, hold the laughter for a sec. Let the image settle. Do you see it clearly now? The leashed man, the patient dog, the holy glow? Still funny? Didn’t think so.
The dogs, at least, still know where they are. We’re the ones who wandered off — and forgot how to find the way back.
The Presence Economy
It’s the phones stupid.
We may have forgotten how to find our way back, but some part of us still remembers what back felt like, the quiet pulse of being present, of inhabiting a moment instead of recording it. Then comes that small, spreading shame of realizing you’ve been staring at a glass rectangle built to capture you, addict you, and ring you dry like a casino till — ding-ding, ka-ching, ding-ding, ka-ching. You can almost hear the soul clearing its throat, the faint sound of something in us wanting to return. That longing has a name.
I call it the Presence Economy. Not a new market for attention, but a recovery from the sickness of monetized, mechanized focus to the sanity of being human again. From glass that cuts and plastic that poisons to eyes that see and are seen. From something you plug into a wall for power to the charge you feel showing up for others. Not the attention economy; the anti-attention economy.
I wrote:
Every age of exploitation meets its breaking point. Ours is arriving now. People have had enough. More and more are waking up to the sickened state of our relationships, to the hollowing out of our connections to others. Their longing for the sanctity of human presence is surging back.
I wrote those words in hope, but the reflex still holds. Press, swipe, tap, scroll, repeat — again and again and again, like an army of dutiful lab rats, twitchy and tireless, pressing the lever inside a digital Skinner box tuned so exquisitely to anticipatory dopamine that even B. F. Skinner himself would have blushed at the elegance of its cruelty.
If a neuro-hack built the cage, only a counter-hack can open it. That counter-hack is shame — the old alarm still wired into us, raw and involuntary, meant to keep us close to one another, designed not to punish but to warn.
And maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten. The human version of a notification that says you’ve wandered too far. We need to remember what that feels like, to face the thing we’ve spent years trying to mute or meme away.
Because shame, for all its brutality, still works. It hurts in a way data can’t soothe and language can’t soften. It’s the body’s way of telling the truth.
The Body of Shame
Enough about what shame means. Let’s remember what it does.
Before we end, let’s talk plainly about shame, about the agonizing collapse of the self when the eyes of others, or your own, real or imagined, turn toward you. When the whole world and everything in it — people, trees, roads, the sky, even the air itself — seems to harden into glass, every surface a mirror, every mirror lit by stadium lights trained on you, just you. The tightening in the chest. The pulse behind the ribs. The feeling of being seen through, like an X-ray left under a cold beam while everyone else watches. We’ve all felt that pain, pain so bad you want to disappear, crawl out of your skin, or die because it really does feel like dying. And once, evolutionarily, it almost was.
We were built to depend on others for everything: food, warmth, protection, survival itself. Which is why the global loneliness crisis isn’t just sad and worrying; it’s biologically unnatural. Humans don’t survive alone. We can't. Long before cities, language, and written law, exile was a death sentence. So nature, in its dark genius, wired us with a warning system that made exclusion feel like mortal danger. That alarm was shame, not an evolutionary oops, but a deliberate design feature. Its purpose was brutally simple: stay close or die. The pain of shame is the body’s emergency flare firing across the nervous system for you to stop doing what you're doing or get back to your people before it’s too late.
That's why it works. And why it hurts like hell.
Humiliation, loss of face, disgrace — these are grief with a heartbeat that tell you you’ve fallen out of rhythm, out of favor. Shame is the oldest, most primal corrective we have, older than speech and reason, older than gods, older than fire. The first law written into human skin.
Shame is powerful, primitive, and impossible to ignore. You can’t talk your way out of it or think your way over it. You can't ignore it any more than you can a Cybertruck landing on your head. You can try drinking it, numbing it, denying it — millions do — but that only feeds it. The only way out of shame is through it. Through the fire, the heat of exposure, the ache of knowing what you’ve become and what you’ve betrayed, even when no one else sees it. Because sometimes the eyes that condemn us are our own.
And then, only then, do you change.
Most of us spend our lives dodging that mirror. But every so often it finds us, and the truth it shows hits so hard we almost thank it. Maybe not then, maybe years later when the scar has cooled, but eventually we do. Because what feels like the end of belonging is often the first step back to it.
Holy Shame
Jonathan Haidt calls it the great rewiring. Blackbird Spyplane calls it telling time by the chimes. I call it the slow remembering. The re-emergence of presence after years of ghosthood. Coming back to earth where clocks tick, people age, and silence doesn’t mean buffering. Maybe that’s the point. That we’re finding our way back through the very feeling we’ve spent decades trying to escape.
Shame isn’t the villain. It’s the signal reminding us there are still other people around, still eyes that see, still minds that measure us, and maybe that’s the start of coming back. It's hard to imagine, I know, but maybe the emotion we’ve tried hardest to erase just might be the one that saves us.