Humans first

Welcome back! I’m Jacqueline Nesi, a psychology professor and mom of three young kids who will always be my favorite techno sapiens.

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7 min read

When my daughter turned three weeks old, she started spitting up. Not the occasional dribbles I remembered from my other babies, but massive, full-throated exorcisms of barely-digested milk, spewing violently and without warning.

I brought her to the doctor on a Friday. Probably just bad reflux, they said, but let’s keep an eye on it.

The weekend brought more vomiting. We tried keeping her upright after she ate. We tried holding her all night instead of lying her flat. We tried switching to a hypoallergenic formula, which resulted in the same amount of vomit, but now smelling strongly of regurgitated cat food.

I, ever the scientist, started keeping a tracking log. I marked down the precise times she ate and vomited and kept detailed field notes. By Monday, the check marks in the “spit up” column had grown increasingly frequent—9, 10 times per day—and the notes more urgent. Extremely forceful. A LOT. Loud!!

I was starting to panic.

By Tuesday, we were back at the doctor. She had lost half a pound. Then I fed her, and on cue, she projectile-vomited on the shiny, tiled office floor. The pediatrician glanced up from my tracking log, the corners of her mouth turned down. She looked at the nurse in the way a person does when they’re trying to signal urgency without causing alarm.

We need to get her an ultrasound, she said. Today.

An hour later, we sat in an ultrasound room, a tiny probe resting on my daughter’s stomach. I gave her a bottle, and we watched on a screen as the formula trickled down her throat, into her stomach, and then…stopped. Vomit soon covered the ultrasound chair.

The diagnosis was clear, they said: pyloric stenosis. An abnormal thickening of the pylorus muscle, which prevents food from passing through the stomach, occurring in roughly 2 out of every 1000 infants.

We drove straight to the emergency room, constantly shifting our eyes to the rearview mirror to check on our baby, so tiny and helpless in her car seat. Then more tests, monitoring, and, due to her dehydration and minuscule veins, an IV placement that can only be described as harrowing.

Twenty-four hours later she was in surgery. The surgeon sat us down beforehand to explain the procedure: they’d go in laparoscopically, with three tiny incisions and a camera, and cut the thickened pyloric muscle. She’d be under general anesthesia, with a breathing tube inserted. The whole thing, he said, was incredibly routine. It would take less than an hour. He encouraged us to ask any questions. I, instead, wept silently.

As we sat in the waiting room, we received automated text alerts letting us know when the surgery started and, 45 minutes later, when it ended. The surgeon emerged with a photo of the inside of our daughter’s stomach. There it is! He said. All fixed. The tiny incisions were covered with a dab of medical glue—no stitches, no wounds.

We spent a few more days in the hospital. Our daughter was hooked up to beeping machines and recovering slowly, dressed in a tiny hospital gown covered in cartoon smartphones (a donation, apparently, from a major wireless company). We held our breath each time she ate, silently willing the food to stay down. Eventually, it did.

Then we went home, and she was totally, completely, fine. Apart from the tiniest pinpricks of scars, it was as if nothing had happened. There was no need for even a follow-up doctor’s visit. She was the picture of health.

What was 100 years ago a death sentence had been a routine procedure.

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The entire experience was, by all accounts, a feat of modern medicine. Identifying, via ultrasound imaging, a pea-sized muscle at the base of my daughter’s stomach. A suite of technological tools to monitor blood pressure, electrolytes, oxygen levels, heart rate. General anesthesia, a tiny laparoscopic camera, a cut to the muscle just a few millimeters wide. Text message alerts to update us throughout. And a full recovery just days later, with an imperceptible scar and a high-resolution photo of the abdomen to show for it.

It was a technological miracle.

And yet, when I think back on that time, the parts that stick with me have, actually, nothing to do with technology.

The parts that stick with me are the human ones.

The pounding in my chest and ringing in my ears as I explained to the doctors that something was wrong. The pleasant absurdity of attending my 4-year-old’s taekwondo lesson in the hour between the doctor’s visit and ultrasound. The suppressed urge, almost primal in its intensity, to grab my screaming daughter away from the nurses as they tried to place an IV. My husband and I hugging through tears, then hysterically laughing at the contents of his hurriedly-packed hospital bag (there was a single-serving blender?).

The calm, almost nonchalant face of the surgeon describing the procedure. The “oop!” of the post-op nurse, trying to swaddle my daughter around tubes and wires, while casually chatting about her own children. The wild oscillations between fear and relief.

The solid plastic of the chair beneath me as I clutched my sleeping baby to my chest, filled with a gratitude beyond anything I’ve ever felt.

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I spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection of humans and technology. You may have gathered that from the whole Techno Sapiens thing. My entire career has been dedicated to understanding how we use technology, how it helps and hurts us, how we might raise our kids to use it better.

In the hospital, the technology—of machines and surgeries and monitoring and text alerts and high-resolution images—was everything, and also, nothing. Its existence was so essential to the experience, the very basis for all of it, and yet somehow, nowhere near the heart of it.

Sometimes, I wonder if that is what it’s all about.

To live in a world where technology is everywhere, where each day we are surrounded by it, integrated with it. Where it is the very basis for how our modern lives function.

And in the midst of all that, to put our humanity at the center.

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So often, when we talk about our relationship to technology, we get caught up in the minutiae. How many minutes of screen time is optimal? Should we get our children a smartphone or a basic phone? A landline? A smartwatch? Is TV better than an iPad? Should we set those parental controls? Is this app educational? What age is right for social media? And these questions are good ones! They are tricky and important and worth thinking through.

It is so easy, though, to get caught up in those details. To debate those questions and so many others, with this research study and that statistical effect size, with parenting scripts and 5 rules for kids and tech.

Often, we’re so busy looking down, trying to decode an impossible map, that we forget what we’re aiming toward. We lose sight of our North Star, or maybe, we forget we have one in the first place.

Maybe that North Star is simpler than we expect, and maybe it goes something like: putting humans first.

Before we get caught up in the technology, in the right or wrong way of watching screens or handling devices, we take a step back. We think about what it means to be and raise a good person in this world. We stop and consider what they need to thrive as human beings, and how they can help others do the same.

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To embrace technology is fundamentally human, to innovate and to create. To build a system that can identify a pyloric muscle 2 millimeters too thick, or an Internet that connects every person in the world, or an AI model that talks just like us. It’s in our nature to advance, but also, to take it too far.

When it comes to our biggest problems, the technologies we build are so often both the solution and the cause.

The question, then, is how we want to be in that world. How to recognize when our technology is enhancing our humanity, and when it is taking it away. How to build technologies that improve our lives, save our lives, even—and as they do so, make way for the important stuff: the care and connection, the meaning and purpose, the holding a month-old baby to your chest and watching her tiny nostrils breathe air in and out.

How to navigate the strange and unbelievable and miraculous and exhausting thing it is to be and raise a human in this world.

I certainly don’t always get it right. But what I do know is that when I take a moment to reflect, when I put my phone down and look out into the world, I see my daughter.

And she is perfect.

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