How tech overextends your senses and leaves you with no way back to yourself

You carry the exhaustion of a self that has been stretched to its edges, asked to be everywhere at once, with nothing holding it together.

There’s a way of living, of sensing, that I’m obsessed with, called the longbody. It’s a felt understanding that the self doesn’t end at the skin. It extends further outwards, into family, community, objects, places and the natural world.

This idea has deep roots in the spiritual tradition of the Iroquois and other Native American peoples. And it’s always fascinated me because it suggests that the boundary between your self and the world can be permeable.

I think a lot about this permeability in relation to technology. In how devices have become a physical extension of our bodies, but also in how our sense of who we are and our place in the world has been irrevocably influenced by the internet.

We might physically sit at home on our phones, but we feel connected to people we’ve never met. We absorb the emotions of strangers, watch faces flash by in never-ending streams, take in more opinions in an hour than our ancestors encountered in a lifetime.

The impulse is the same ancient one – to extend beyond ourselves, into community, into connection. But the environment is entirely different.

The longbody extended the self into spaces built on reciprocity – like community, relationship, land and spirit. What we extend into now was designed, very rapidly and with no concern for our wellbeing, to take from us. Not to give anything back.

A daily session of synesthesia

Philosopher Marshall McLuhan saw something like this coming back in the 1960s, watching the first generation raised on broadcast media. When thinking about technology and its impact on experience, he wrote:

“These massive extensions of our central nervous systems have enveloped Western man in a daily session of synesthesia.”

He wasn’t describing a condition here, but naming the consequence of what was already happening when we extend ourselves too far. When our attention, emotions and senses are given over to technology, and slowly stop feeling like our own.

I experience mild synesthesia. I visualise it as a tray of watercolours, each colour a different sense. Mostly the colours bleed into each other in ways that are interesting, beautiful even. But sometimes the boundaries dissolve in ways that are disorienting – especially when I’m already stressed or sensitive.

Technology feels the same to me. Not wholly bad, but a place where experiences, emotions and opinions bleed into each other in ways that leave us feeling frayed and strung out. A loss of the clean separateness of things, and a dissolution of where you end and the rest of it begins.

Engineered over-extension

What McLuhan couldn’t have anticipated when he first compared emerging tech to synesthesia in this way was the degree to which that extension would be engineered.

Like infinite scroll, autoplay, the sidebar of related videos, the prompt asking if you’d like to know more. None of these are neutral features. They’re explicitly designed to prevent return to your self. To keep your nervous system extended, spread thin across the spidering network of servers and computers and smart devices, never quite contracting back to its source.

I’ve written about infinite scroll before and it’s clear what that wants to take from you: your sense of time. You lose all grasp of it, moving from video to video, conversation to conversation, face to face. But it’s not only time that gets distorted. It’s your attention, emotion, energy, senses and self. All of it spread so thinly outward.

Enough of us don’t think about it this way. We talk about tech in terms of distraction and addiction. But I think the issue is the never-ending, appealing invitation to overextend ourselves, perpetually, without limit. And we have almost no cultural framework for understanding what that means.

A natural holding environment

The longbody, for all its permeability, seems to have a natural mechanism for return built into it. You extend into your kin, your land, your ancestors – and I think they hold you. The extension feels reciprocal in a way that ours simply isn’t.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a name for what that holding makes possible. He called it a holding environment, a sense of being bounded, contained and met. Without it, he believed the self becomes precarious. Anxiety arises not from internal conflict alone but from an environmental failure.

And we have built an environment that is the exact opposite. One explicitly designed to dissolve edges, prevent containment, keep the self perpetually extended and therefore perpetually available and online.

I’ve written before about burnout and how I think we misread its symptoms as personal failure rather than as a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions. This feels like another version of that same argument. The exhaustion so many of us carry right now is the exhaustion of a self that has been stretched to its edges, asked to be everywhere at once, with nothing holding it together.

Maybe the longbody keeps coming back to me because it doesn’t say stop extending, stop connecting. It just reminds me that this hunger – to reach beyond ourselves, to feel connected, to be part of something larger – is ancient and real. We’ve just fed it into something that was designed to take from it. Not to nourish it.