Technology has drastically improved the medical field in countless ways, but it has also led to unexpected consequences. In particular, whether you’re a nurse or doctor or technician or chaplain, you will spend an astonishing amount of time clicking boxes on a computer. While many of these clickable boxes refer to procedures and medications, some of them are a little more subjective. For example, after every visit to a patient’s room, I fill out a short spiritual assessment featuring this question:

Describe the patient’s feelings (check all that apply):
acceptance, joyful, denial, depressed, bargaining, anger, shock, confusion, unaware, unconscious, anxious, fearful, frustrated, other: _______.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve filled out a form like this over the past four years. Initially, I found the options confusing, but over time, I grew accustomed to clicking boxes to describe my patients’ feelings. Soon, I started to find the practice a little funny, always laughing a little as I thought, “Only thirteen emotions? No human is really this straightforward.” But then it hit me: even this restrictive form still offers more variety than social media.

Facebook gives its users six options: like, love, haha, wow, sad, and angry.
Twitter and Instagram have “likes” and “favorites” indicated by a heart.
YouTube and Reddit have up and down votes.
These aren’t exactly complex feelings.

At one point, I thought of an experiment: just for a day, instead of clicking one button on social media, I should respond with a comment or a picture or something to hint at my deeper feelings. When I tried this out, I lasted about an hour before falling back into the rhythm of clicking “like” and scrolling on. With the flood of information on social media, crafting personalized responses to every post proved a herculean task, which really shows more about the limits of social media than of our thoughts or emotions or creativity. Human beings are never so simple as a like or a checkbox.

There will always be something special about sitting down with another person and acknowledging all the emotional complexity happening on the other side of the table. Joy and regret, denial and acceptance, anxiousness and confidence— humans skip back and forth across these lines constantly, and yet the emotion we choose to share with another person in any given moment is always just one strand of a far more complex web which connects us all.

May we stay aware of the depth in all of our neighbors,
and may we never lose our senses of wonder.