Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer delivered a deeply thoughtful commencement address at Middlebury College in 2013, exploring how technology — particularly smartphones and social media — is reshaping our capacity for empathy. He cited research showing that the higher emotions of compassion and empathy are born from neural processes that are inherently slow, requiring time for the brain to understand and feel the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. This observation served as the heart of his argument: that our culture's accelerating preference for speed, convenience, and constant connectivity is not merely a lifestyle choice but an erosion of our ability to feel deeply for others. He illustrated this with a story about encountering a girl crying on a park bench and the internal struggle of whether to engage or retreat into his phone.