Not social media but the phone itself. The phone is the physical interruptor of social interaction, the "I have to take this" or the "let me take an hour to scroll for must-see pictures of my cat."
Secondly, as our senses (not just our brains) take in the effects of climate change, the great disconnect between the fires this time and what we preoccupy our politics with has got to have an effect. This might be called "There are no adults left" realization.
I'm almost 40 and I would say I frequently have bad mental health days. These are just my own experiences, but when I examine why I feel like things are wrong and I'm not doing very well, I reflect on the damage done from about the 1970s to today to a lot of institutions that I always felt like you were supposed to be able to rely on when you get older.
One issue is that we've shredded the notion of the kind of tight-knit communities that existed before the WWII suburban boom. Towns where you knew a lot of your neighbors, where you hung out on porches and talked to them, where you'd run into them when you were out in town, where your kids all went to school together, and you were involved in each other lives, even if just glancingly. I'm fortunate to live in a town that has a bit of a semblance of that, but it's also an expensive town to live in, because so much of the built environment after WWII was placeless suburban sprawl where barely anything like that is possible. And even in my town, people would often rather hide behind their Facebook profiles or lawn signs rather than engage with people in real life. I think we've just trained ourselves out of actual community, and that the atomization and isolation of our culture is just so intense right now. It can be really lonely to live in our culture today, so many economic and social forces go against the fabric of community.
Which leads me to another reason I get bummed out a lot of the time: the astonishingly anti-family position of many Americans, even in the supposedly family-friendly suburbs. My wife and I have a young kid, and I'm a big family guy myself, so I'm attuned to the hostility that kids and families often illicit from people. Cities can be tough for things like pushing strollers through, finding housing for families in, let alone safety and all. But even in the suburbs, I've seen so many meetings in rich towns where older people fight against market-rate housing because they fear children showing up who would go into schools and raise their school taxes. I mean how antisocial is that, to try to engineer a town without the vibrancy and hope of youth because you want lower taxes? And then that extends to other facets of life: fancy restaurants for fancy adults, fewer options for people with kids; the intolerance of people towards kids in public space, making totally normal kid sounds; the fact that you can't let your kids just be out in the world without people thinking you're a bad parent for not helicoptering over them 100% of the time. The list really goes on.
And finally, I think a lot of the thrust of liberalism in the 20th and 21st centuries has been bent toward encouraging, enabling, and basically insisting that people put themselves first and forget anyone else. So even in a marriage or long term relationship, people just look after their own interests without much thought to how it affects people they're involved with. Living with people is a big investment and can be super difficult, and requires emotional intelligence and a willingness to meet people where they are and sacrifice things for the sake of making something work. And our society is just so not set up for that. I see so many op-eds glorifying divorce, never having kids, just focusing entirely on yourself, as a couple of examples, and it edges the whole society to a self-centered almost nihilistic way of being.
When you're someone who wants to build a life with someone else, who wants to live in a tight community, who wants kids and wants the society to value kids, you just constantly run up against barriers to the kind of world that would make any of that really possible today. And when you think about how these were things we had by default for a really long time, before our society lost its mind in the 70s, it can feel super bleak.
I think a core problem is that we are losing access to our ability to regulate ourselves. Marshall McLuhan was pointed when he stated that electric technology would become an extension of the nervous system.
This has made the phone the pacifier and the stimulant, both lulling us into a state of relaxation and also jerking us into a frantic stress.
This pattern over times leads to a numbing of how we truly feel inside and slowly erodes our inner ability to both access and attend to how we feel.
I think the numbing leads to more extreme sensitizations to feel alive. Be it through more immersive media, more extreme sports or more extreme highs through intoxicants.
I have both experienced and seen in others that numbing in this way makes daily life hard to cope with. I was very moved to read the words, 'deaths of despair'.
I question whether this can be overcome through the efforts of the nation state or with a tool of technology. I think this needs a more localized approach where the communal efforts happen in smaller, more intimate gatherings. We have trampled over tradition and ritual to make space for optimization and productivity and we now see that both need to live in harmony with one another.
What if we were to, and this sounds so crazy, declare a state of emergency and put a two-week "quarantine" on all social media? Would that be enough to break the collective spell long enough so that We the People can objectively re-evaluate our relationship with technology? And perhaps have a voluntary smartphone buyback program like they do for guns?
Hey, do you REALLY want to get to the ROOT of this problem, and throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mordor for good? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows us the way:
Banning surveillance advertising via comprehensive data privacy legislation would go a LONG way to disincentivize the current creepy, toxic, and addictive business model of Big Tech. Additionally, architectural changes and safety features for platforms would also be good, such as ending the current frictionless sharing (i.e. "stop at two hops"), and disabling autoplay and infinite scroll and other toxic and addictive elements of algorithms. Require transparency of algorithms too. And also have such platforms automatically log people off and have to manually log back in after a certain number of consecutive minutes as well. There are no perfect solutions, of course, but we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
A coupla ideas:
Not social media but the phone itself. The phone is the physical interruptor of social interaction, the "I have to take this" or the "let me take an hour to scroll for must-see pictures of my cat."
Secondly, as our senses (not just our brains) take in the effects of climate change, the great disconnect between the fires this time and what we preoccupy our politics with has got to have an effect. This might be called "There are no adults left" realization.
I'm almost 40 and I would say I frequently have bad mental health days. These are just my own experiences, but when I examine why I feel like things are wrong and I'm not doing very well, I reflect on the damage done from about the 1970s to today to a lot of institutions that I always felt like you were supposed to be able to rely on when you get older.
One issue is that we've shredded the notion of the kind of tight-knit communities that existed before the WWII suburban boom. Towns where you knew a lot of your neighbors, where you hung out on porches and talked to them, where you'd run into them when you were out in town, where your kids all went to school together, and you were involved in each other lives, even if just glancingly. I'm fortunate to live in a town that has a bit of a semblance of that, but it's also an expensive town to live in, because so much of the built environment after WWII was placeless suburban sprawl where barely anything like that is possible. And even in my town, people would often rather hide behind their Facebook profiles or lawn signs rather than engage with people in real life. I think we've just trained ourselves out of actual community, and that the atomization and isolation of our culture is just so intense right now. It can be really lonely to live in our culture today, so many economic and social forces go against the fabric of community.
Which leads me to another reason I get bummed out a lot of the time: the astonishingly anti-family position of many Americans, even in the supposedly family-friendly suburbs. My wife and I have a young kid, and I'm a big family guy myself, so I'm attuned to the hostility that kids and families often illicit from people. Cities can be tough for things like pushing strollers through, finding housing for families in, let alone safety and all. But even in the suburbs, I've seen so many meetings in rich towns where older people fight against market-rate housing because they fear children showing up who would go into schools and raise their school taxes. I mean how antisocial is that, to try to engineer a town without the vibrancy and hope of youth because you want lower taxes? And then that extends to other facets of life: fancy restaurants for fancy adults, fewer options for people with kids; the intolerance of people towards kids in public space, making totally normal kid sounds; the fact that you can't let your kids just be out in the world without people thinking you're a bad parent for not helicoptering over them 100% of the time. The list really goes on.
And finally, I think a lot of the thrust of liberalism in the 20th and 21st centuries has been bent toward encouraging, enabling, and basically insisting that people put themselves first and forget anyone else. So even in a marriage or long term relationship, people just look after their own interests without much thought to how it affects people they're involved with. Living with people is a big investment and can be super difficult, and requires emotional intelligence and a willingness to meet people where they are and sacrifice things for the sake of making something work. And our society is just so not set up for that. I see so many op-eds glorifying divorce, never having kids, just focusing entirely on yourself, as a couple of examples, and it edges the whole society to a self-centered almost nihilistic way of being.
When you're someone who wants to build a life with someone else, who wants to live in a tight community, who wants kids and wants the society to value kids, you just constantly run up against barriers to the kind of world that would make any of that really possible today. And when you think about how these were things we had by default for a really long time, before our society lost its mind in the 70s, it can feel super bleak.
Thank you for this piece Jean.
I think a core problem is that we are losing access to our ability to regulate ourselves. Marshall McLuhan was pointed when he stated that electric technology would become an extension of the nervous system.
This has made the phone the pacifier and the stimulant, both lulling us into a state of relaxation and also jerking us into a frantic stress.
This pattern over times leads to a numbing of how we truly feel inside and slowly erodes our inner ability to both access and attend to how we feel.
I think the numbing leads to more extreme sensitizations to feel alive. Be it through more immersive media, more extreme sports or more extreme highs through intoxicants.
I have both experienced and seen in others that numbing in this way makes daily life hard to cope with. I was very moved to read the words, 'deaths of despair'.
I question whether this can be overcome through the efforts of the nation state or with a tool of technology. I think this needs a more localized approach where the communal efforts happen in smaller, more intimate gatherings. We have trampled over tradition and ritual to make space for optimization and productivity and we now see that both need to live in harmony with one another.
What if we were to, and this sounds so crazy, declare a state of emergency and put a two-week "quarantine" on all social media? Would that be enough to break the collective spell long enough so that We the People can objectively re-evaluate our relationship with technology? And perhaps have a voluntary smartphone buyback program like they do for guns?
Hey, do you REALLY want to get to the ROOT of this problem, and throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mordor for good? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows us the way:
https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms
Big Tech can go EFF off!
Banning surveillance advertising via comprehensive data privacy legislation would go a LONG way to disincentivize the current creepy, toxic, and addictive business model of Big Tech. Additionally, architectural changes and safety features for platforms would also be good, such as ending the current frictionless sharing (i.e. "stop at two hops"), and disabling autoplay and infinite scroll and other toxic and addictive elements of algorithms. Require transparency of algorithms too. And also have such platforms automatically log people off and have to manually log back in after a certain number of consecutive minutes as well. There are no perfect solutions, of course, but we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good.