Ghosts in the Starbucks line

Disembodiment, and why it matters

I like the occasional Starbucks drink as much as the next girl. I mean who doesn’t enjoy a custom-made cup of deliciousness and comfort? I have my standard order (grande decaf Americano, hot, with two pumps of raspberry and steamed milk). A detailed drink, yes, but not over the top. And I always enjoy it on the occasions when I slip into the shop for an hour, usually in a quest to get a little work done.

You’ve been to Starbucks too, so let me ask you this question:

Have you ever been waiting for your drink at the end of the bar… and waited and waited, while drinks get made and placed on the “mobile order” shelf? You’re standing alone; no one else is present. But this doesn’t matter, because the orders of invisible people were placed online before you showed up at the counter, so they’re prepared first.

They want a drink and you want a drink. But you are THERE in person, feet shuffling on the spattered tile waiting for your drink to be made, and they are…. not. One writer (see

Mehret Biruk

) calls being the person physically waiting while others queue virtually as dwelling among “ghosts.”

“We have even brought these ghosts into the real world now among us, like when you’re waiting in line for your coffee while 20 mobile orders are being served before you… You will be served last, and not one of these ghost-orders will be picked up before you receive yours. …(Ghosts find) themselves welcome - nay! prioritized! – in our 3D reality.”

What exactly is she getting at here?

Embodiment is dwelling in a physical body. This writer is talking about disembodiment – doing something in a different place than where our body is located. Today we’re accustomed to doing stuff… where we physicallyaren’t. She’s calling this disembodiment “being a ghost.”

In his much acclaimed book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt lists embodiment first in features that characterize the “real world.” Social interactions in the real world, he says “are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously.” This isn’t true in the virtual world.

The person waiting at the Starbucks counter is embodied. The person still home on her couch, who lodged her order remotely, is disembodied.

Haidt – among others – has much to say about the effects of disembodiment on today’s humans, especially young people. It’s caused damage, he writes, to their “social lives… by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.” The person ordering Starbucks from their couch may read 100 Twitter comments each day, but she never interacts with the person who makes her drink.

The notion of embodiment is far from new. The great thinkers of the world have been talking about it for millennia. They identified that we humans are limited beings and exist simultaneously in three forms: body, “spirit” (the animal part of us, where instincts, feelings, and drives reside), and “mind” (reason). See: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and our other forebears in the natural law tradition. (Natural law: the set of universal truths, derived from nature and common to all humans, that’s discovered through reason.)

Being disembodied in itself isn’t fundamentally bad, and we all experience it sometimes as part of life. For example, you’re disembodied when you talk on the phone to your friend – the mind and spirit part of you connecting while your bodies are far apart. However with this disembodied conversation, you’re pursuing the basic good of friendship, which leads to flourishing. Another example of being disembodied is when you read a book – in your mind you’re with your hero horseback riding or running a marathon, but in reality you’re sitting in your bed turning pages. In reading the book, though, may pursue the basic good of knowledge, which also leads to flourishing. So the message isn’t: never be disembodied. We will all be disembodied, at some level, sometimes.

There’s such a thing as too much, though. And in the modern world, we’re disembodied way, way too much. Mostly for bad reasons.

Usually today, we’re disembodied for either convenience (e.g., mobile orders) or “fun” (e.g., video games, social media, virtual reality). These experiences of disembodiment aim to increase our here-and-now pleasure. We want and like them. Why wouldn’t we, then, opt in to being disembodied in these ways?

Here’s why: the path of “convenient and fun” is fraught with hidden perils. It’s short-term gratification that leads to long-term floundering – for us individually as humans, and for our society. Without care, this path leads to self-absorption over virtue, disinterest over engagement, and a raging epidemic of loneliness. Oh, and ghosts in the coffee shop.

So here’s to preferring embodiment whenever we can. Here’s to making choices aimed at the basic goods – life, beauty, knowledge, friendship, play, practical reasonableness – even if they’re less convenient. Or seem, in the short-term, less “fun.” Our future selves, and our future society, will thank us.