Here & Now
I am a former techie who now works as a psychotherapeutic counsellor. I find “right here,right now” to be an exciting place to be because: We aren’t talking enough about how it is to live Now.
From a media consumption point, I live “in-between”. Google has always thought I am a mid-thirties male because of my searches, the tech sites I read, the newsletters I subscribe to, and possibly (scarily, from a surveillance perspective) even the content of my emails. But both Vogue and Wired come through my door monthly. I read the FT on weekends and The Guardian daily. I listen to Tim Ferriss and Andrew Huberman and a bunch of therapy and sexuality podcasts. My social media feeds are local, LGBT+ plentiful, full of colourful clothes and a mix of hippie sex coaches and earnest therapists trying to convey something useful and pithy without destroying the integrity of our field (yes, I’m among this last group!).
I write this not (only :)) to give myself some sort of street cred, but to try to capture what my world looks like, and the schisms and opportunities I see arising, and really to try to articulate what Now means to all of us, but most specifically the midlife woman (I include everyone who identifies as a woman and midlife for me is 35-55). I want to bring in a transpersonal therapeutic perspective to tease out topics like meaning, purpose and identity today, and how to stay sane and hopefully even find balance and happiness in a time where technology is shaking the roots of what it is to be human.
Here’s a thing - women have been consistently left behind in the last 20+ years of technology and business. I don’t have solutions to this and I thank goodness for everyone working on the coalface of this issue - I’ve had more than my fill of “Women in Business” and “Women in Technology” newsletters and conferences and I just don’t have the energy at the moment. But I do want to try to grapple with why it is that mainstream women’s media consistently shies away from technology in particular. Our lives are being shaped (manipulated) by technology and we (women) appear to be scared to talk about it, or happier to nibble away at the edges (eg: how social media impacts our body image) rather than engage with some of the excitement and fear that I see in more “male” media sources. Why is this?
My sense is that without women’s engagement, big, important conversations become progressively more lop-sided. More bro-speak “tech will save us” and less “what are we changing or eroding with this?” More transhumanist “hey, who needs humans” and less “we get to make choices about the place of tech in our life and how we live”.
I want to explore what it is to be old enough to know better, and a woman, right here, right now - the contradictions, the urgencies, the uncertainties, the amazements. The old and the new, the wise and the profane. Join me.
