The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen

We embraced the mediated life—from Facetune and Venmo to meme culture and the Metaverse—because these technologies offer novelty and convenience. But they also transform our sense of self and warp the boundaries between virtual and real. What are the costs? Who are we in a disembodied world?

In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen investigates the cultural and emotional shifts that accompany our embrace of technology. In warm, philosophical prose, Rosen reveals key human experiences at risk of going extinct, including face-to-face communication, sense of place, authentic emotion, and even boredom.

Considering cultural trends, like TikTok challenges and mukbang, and politically unsettling phenomena, like sociometric trackers and online conspiracy culture, Rosen exposes an unprecedented shift in the human condition, one that habituates us to alienation and control. To recover our humanity and come back to the real world, we must reclaim serendipity, community, patience, and risk.

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Why I Picked It Up

I, of course, have been on a digital minimalism kick in my reading habits. As someone who's built my (frankly) dream life based off of what I do and share online, I'm always teetering on the edge of this sense that caring about growth more will get me closer to stability and sustainability in my career—but I worry that being too visible to the Internet could dig into my sense of self too much. I post plenty of what crosses my mind, but maintain a healthy balance offline. Whereas the science of audience-building is essentially that of stoking a parasocial relationship with followers, and that can feel dissonant. Authenticity and privacy can occasionally feel at odds, and I need to get over that hurdle.

I read Superbloom and loved it, so followed the thread into The Extinction of Experience, which is similar to books like The Four-Dimensional Human in how it evaluates the digital age's effects on our physical space and movement.

As one striking example in the book points out, in-person networking events are no longer as impactful because during downtime when, years ago, people might be mingling during awkward gaps between panels, everyone's reaching for their phones instead. The format is the same, but the end result is not nearly as effective.

“Technology...the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.”

I'm all for remote work vs. in-person office visits, but there is truth to how shifting everything online doesn't keep physical spaces neutral. Instead, our participation in digital spaces does erode what's left behind.

As Superbloom and The Anxious Generation point out, you don't get to opt out of this by not using your phone or being online; everything about Internet culture ripples into your in-real-life interactions too. You're just as susceptible as everyone else, device in hand or not.

About the Book

Admittedly, when reading a cluster of books about a similar topic, there's usually one or two in the bunch that I like a little less. Down this particular rabbit hole, that's probably The Extinction of Experience.

Per the thesis of the book, I do of course agree that there's so much we learn by doing and sacrifice by not experiencing properly. I love the distinction the book makes in that we've "mediated" experiences and need everything to be somewhat diluted in that aspect. We're uncomfortable sitting with boredom or lack of stimulation. That all makes intuitive sense, and the mediated angle helps me think of all of our phone and device interactions in a new, fresh way.

What I Liked

The point that this book and others have been making—that nearly everyone is familiar with at this point—is that some of the most gratifying elements of life are difficult for a reason. Sitting with boredom is good for you. We don't need to "maximize" everything if we're sanding the edges off of all the work and care that makes us invested in something imperfect—in this case, an in-real-life experience—in the first place. When we optimize everything for efficiency, we often lose what makes something real in the first place.

Friction is what makes us love something, honestly. It makes us invested. It's why physical challenges or grit-based pursuits feel more satisfying in the end. (I think about this concept of "earned beauty" a lot.) Whereas frictionless living—like with the phones, mediated against any discomfort—is addictive, sure, but ultimately empty. Which we all know, but every POV addressing a different element of that can be helpful in actually enacting some safeguards against the slippery slope that is the tiny computer in your pocket.

In a related sense, The Extinction of Experience points out how this impacts our psychology in other ways, like people mistrusting their own physical reality more and more as they spend more time online.

“Today, many of us choose to live in a form of pseudo-reality governed by algorithmically-enabled individual experiences. Much of what passes for authentic experience today is vicarious and virtual.”

How many times have you had a friend say, on autopilot, "Oh, a friend told me—" or "I read something—" only to course-correct and realize that actually they realized they saw it on TikTok or whatever? For me, that's been a more and more common experience over the last year or two: more people blurring the lines. It happens easily and insidiously enough, because we don't credit enough how tailored our individual feeds are to what will keep us engaged. Everyone is living on a slightly different Internet, and that is a form of isolation that chips into and warps the plane of real life—our one real place for common ground. But for that reason, it's easier to prefer your own little universe, because the real world requires friction and discomfort and the compromise required to build actual relationships or navigational strategies, I guess.

It speaks to the broader sense many of us have nowadays that people aren't willing to do anything that's not instantly gratifying, even if they know their "perfect," mediated, tailored-for-them version of living is fake.

“Many of our current technologies seem to view people as the problem to which devices and platforms and algorithms provide a necessary solution.”

I appreciated the book's reliance on the Enlightenment and sensory experience and all that related philosophy, because grounding myself in the senses is a perpetual strategy of mine. Which makes sense too because engaging the H&N system (here-and-now processing) is the direct opposite of dopaminergic processing, which is the system that virtual living feeds.

“We are impatient with the limitations of physical reality, whether it is the physical limitations of our bodies or the need to wait in line and perhaps experience boredom. More and more, we prefer the simulated to the real.”

I loved its emphasis on doing things with your hands—how scrolling and typing are vastly different motions than writing longhand or crafting or building, for example. I've read so much about physicality and embodiment this year and "actions leading to thought" rather than the other way around that it's been an undoubted theme of my 2025 priorities.

Ultimately, the book has some fun chapters on aspects of embodied living like handwriting, for example. As a calligraphy geek myself, I love that Rosen examined how the friction of writing longhand helps with thought organization and retention; I had a neuroscience professor in college who didn't let us take notes on laptops for the same reason. The extra effort of having to condense something in your own words helps you process or package it more accurately, albeit more slowly, and we shortcut ourselves by opting for the speedy, "more convenient" option that makes no progress (see: ChatGPT producing word salad that means nothing and does not help you.)

I also loved the book talking about how online living lacks a sense of place, because I talk about "sense of place" all the time in my capacity as an author and a travel writer. No wonder that's the quality that gives me the biggest rush of being alive—because it's something you can't duplicate.

What I Disliked: Voice & Tone

Admittedly, I did not love the tone. For one, the book got repetitive. And then, about halfway through it, The Extinction of Experience started to feel...somewhat unbearably smug. Like the author was being so self-congratulatory about all the lesser beings on their dopamine factory devices. I think there's a line in talking about digital culture and its harms without turning it into a "holier-than-thou" experience, and I started to get the sense it was veering into the latter.

I agreed with plenty of her insights, but it started to feel too much like a lecture at times, removed from the reality of how many need to live and work with digital spaces too. Every civilization ever has complained about the newer generations lacking focus and attention on "what matters," for example; the difference with social media is that it's exponential, and our responsibility is to predict causal harms before we further addictive mechanisms. But capitalism always wins, babyyy.

I did enjoy the philosophical and scientific tie-ins, but I think you can layer all that without crossing from earnestness into snobbery. The Extinction of Experience left a bad taste in my mouth on that front; I ended up not liking the way it talked to the reader, because I'd say most people don't necessarily want to be tied to their phones anyway. You can critique and predict harms without being all-or-nothing, I think.

It's a broader problem (and I do appreciate how many different examples or stories the book dealt with), but The Extinction of Experience still sometimes feels like it's lacking nuance, like the bookish equivalent of the guy on the train telling you to smile and have a real conversation with a stranger when you're actually responding to an urgent email about your health insurance that you actually do have to answer before you get off at your next stop.

Overall Thoughts

The book dives into a nice cross-section of topics that I adore from other books, from the need to get outdoors to the role that friction plays in getting us to become more invested in challenges or other people—versus online reality, which makes us more and more resistant to the (necessary) role of all that makes us limited. For that reason, the concepts and examples were great and felt accurate, in line with the conversations had in other books I've read and loved like Four Thousand Weeks, Superbloom, and The Nature Fix.

It speaks to the same slippery slope you might have discussed with friends—like if you've ever used a facial filter or had someone use one on you in a photo, and realized it made you not like your natural face as much immediately after. Or if you feel like you're way more critical on those you encounter on a dating app than if you were to meet them in reality. Little bleeds like that which end up being a direct result of the way we sift through the digital experience and ultimately falsify it or flatten it into what's most palatable.

Making the online reality ecosystem less "real" also has the effect of making reality's flaws a little more obvious—which is why more and more people turn away from it. There's a cost to what we make digestible and how we train ourselves to expect ease (and the book makes this exact point with an anecdote about Soylent's startup philosophy of maximizing nutrition at the expense of the texture, taste, and pleasure of genuine food.)

Ultimately though, the positioning and tone weighed down the book for me, and made the second half of the book drag. I ended up reading a lot of this while on the gym StairMaster (the epitome of a painful, embodied experience—if you know, you know) and started to notice the repetition and tone. In fairness, that could have been the timing and the incline, but I got really irritated with the judgmental vibe of the author because I've read similar points delivered in a much more thoughtful way. It could have been more about solidarity than superiority, I suppose, but it's of course a hard line to walk. (I'm sure my critiques of the online ecosystem can come off similarly at times too.)

Still, The Extinction of Experience a good wake up call for those who need it though, and a solid reminder of some of the ways to combat this tendency towards mediated reality if you notice it in yourself or in others. It'll definitely trigger a nice little burst of shame for me next time I catch myself clicking into an app rather than reaching for a hobby that will keep me in my body. Good! I love having those alarm bells.

For fans of:

the broader harms of a phone-focused era / The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

physical presence in a digital world / The Four-Dimensional Human by Laurence Scott

resisting the urge to optimize everything / Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

the inevitability of imperfect choices / The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

the dopamine spiral, babyyyy / The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long

the need to get outside / The Nature Fix by Florence Williams