I was at an event in London recently. It was 4 social impact businesses pitching to a room full of investors. I was there on behalf of the funder I work for part time. It’s such a delight to come out of my normal home working environment and be a part of something like this. Especially as someone who loves to observe the world & it’s workings, it’s so fun to do something a bit different to my norm!
One of the businesses pitching at the event was a women’s health app – fertility, menopause, menstruation, breastfeeding etc. The app was offering health tracking, medical advice, emotional support and more. It was very cool and was making insane use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The app was being trained to respond to the user in the way it has picked up the user likes to converse, to track their data and patterns and offer them personalised self care plans, advice and emotional support.
In a society which is time poor, with overwhelmed systems & people who are trying to get everything “right” I can see the social impact it would have. And there were the statistics to show its benefits, one being increased rates of mothers being able to continue breastfeeding when they wanted to, it’s pretty cool, and clearly super impactful.
It goes without saying, but the female founder was obviously an absolute fiercely incredible powerhouse of a woman. I don’t know how cool you can be, but she was it!
AND at the same time, once I finished watching this pitch, I just felt deeply sad. Really.
As lots of “angel investors” were buzzing around saying they couldn’t wait to pledge, I couldn’t help but feel that with the development of new technologies, like this one, the further we get from ourselves.
In so many ways we are OUTSOURCING our health and well-being to something external. We are creating and allowing technology to take us further away from ourselves and abandoning our own innate body wisdom.
And this isn’t specific to this app, it’s just what triggered these thoughts.
Overall, having more advanced tech we can turn to 24/7 for emotional and health support is missing something huge. It’s not the full solution. It misses something integral to our actual well-being.
In relying on it more heavily, are we, as western society, further losing our ability to meet ourselves? To real FEEL what we are feeling. To discern for ourselves what our body might be trying to signal to us. To figure out how to respond to our own needs. To get to know ourselves at a deep level?
It’s a skill so many of us already need to work on cultivating.
I believe that if we were taught how to cultivate those skills instead, the skill of how to feel, we wouldn’t need to work so hard to create such “innovative” solutions. Solutions, too, that generally keep us longer with our heads in our phones speaking to AI than connecting with people we love and care about. Solutions, too, that mean the creators work long hours, to support the users who work long hours. Exhausted people offering solutions to exhausted people. People disconnected from home lives selling solutions to those who also feel alone.
Because, in part, the solution is far more simple…if we are willing to accept a simple solution.
But if we were to accept such a simple solution, then we wouldn’t get to spend our time creating the business to find funding for or sitting in a room pitching our money, and telling other investors how much we had invested.
A simple solution, of meeting yourself daily, some meditation, some journalling, finding your joy, these things require pause. They require effort. Discipline. Sometimes discomfort. It’s a confronting space. You face yourself. You do not face a room full of people with your pitch. You do not face an AI chat bot with your problems. You do not face your peers with your bank balance. You face yourself.
All of this to say….it’s time for capitalism to calm down. It’s time for society to wake up and create time to meet ourselves, to check in. Outsourcing our well-being to capitalist solutions, even if they begin with social impact first, is the epitome of counterintuitive. We are so busy working to solve problems but in the being busy on working to solve, we are creating a lot of the disconnect in the first place, that would counteract the causes of the problems.
Modern western society seems so scared of feeling feelings that it actively creates overwhelm in order to avoid them.