May 22, 2024
if you cannot tell by the state of this website, one of my favorite activities is arguing with people; as a practical example, the joy i feel while talking to car dealership salesmen borders on ecstatic. it’s a problem. luckily, my girlfriend speaks this language of love – every time i post something on here, she responds with a list of everything i did well, errors in my writing, her thoughts on the matter, and general disagreements. i love her so much. the details of our conversations need not be relayed publicly, but in broad strokes, we were discussing the state of gen z in relation to other generations, and she mentioned the loneliness epidemic. suprisingly, besides having heard the term, i did not know much about it and decided to look into it. frankly, it is bleak!
the rest of the facts look similar to these. of note is that the fixation on the “male loneliness epidemic” in the news is mainly for men’s romantic relationships, which i do not think much about and will not discuss. rather, the true epidemic extends to platonic relations as well. looking at the data, it’s bleak for everyone, and the focus exclusively on men distorts the problem.
recently i was graced with the honor to be at my grandfather’s deathbed – to be with him as he left was a privilege not everyone is lucky to have. apart from that, what struck me was the number of people who filtered through his room to pay their respects; being that his friends, like him, were elderly, this must have represented a fraction of the web of people he had resided along in his life. though he may have been an outlier in this regard – when talking to other families of hospice patients, it seemed as their hinges flew open less often – to be blessed and bless others to the degree that he had is a gift with little comparison. if the measure of a life is the mark laid upon the world in its absence, his left a high standard.
another is my great-grandmother, who lived to be ninety-nine, independent to this age. again, the degree of connection she enjoyed is without comparison. i remember her sending emails to her friends who could not visit physically, talking to people at painters’ societies, bingo, and synagogue, hosting friends when she could. maintaining this level of activity could not have been easy and yet the memory of the amount of people at her funeral astounds me. as with my grandfather (and to a larger extent) she outlived most of her peers. if that was who was left–!
these dear relatives are mentioned both as shining examples of what to aspire to and to point out that they belong to a different time; few candidates for this level of connectedness come to mind. the ways in which the worlds of their youths (the great depression and world war two respectively) differ greatly from the modern day, which merits discussion.
mema (calling her my great-grandmother feels overly formal) grew up in borger, texas with her aunt and uncle, later moving to new york city to be with my great-great-grandfather, meeting my great-grandfather in the process. when she was my age america had just entered world war two and fdr was president. instant communication, while available, was infrequent, and most often mediated face-to-face. the world demanded this of a person if they wanted to live in it; furthermore, social and religious groups were much more common (and better-attended) than today’s. she was prolific in synagogue and at a womens’ shelter in dallas.
moving temporarily northward to middletown, ohio, my grandfather was born around this time (where he still had friends to the end of his life) and moved to texas about my age if i am doing my math right. this was a more modern age! there were televisions and cheaper landlines; the former possibly enabling the sort of dynamics discussed in bowling alone. but for now they were still inferior to social interaction, which was still a requirement to live. it was certainly asked of papa ken, who ran a men’s clothing store. customer service, especially in such a business, requires that one interact with tens or hundreds of people a day. outside of family, a majority of those who drifted through my grandfather’s last days had originally run through the store.
advancing the march of time over a generation, we come to the present day; trend which planted themselves in the fertile societies of earlier times spread like kudzu through the south. the telephone, once the promise of instant communication now lies in strange disuse, supplanted by its successor, social media, which offers the tantilization of knowing what everyone is doing all the time without the pesky inconvenience of talking. this was the acceleration of a pre-existing trend – the radio became the television, which offered stimuli of ever-increasing quality. why go outside when the screen is far more entertaining? (note that while the author of bowling alone and i do not agree on everything, he makes great points about the individualization of entertainment). these aren’t the only factors – suburbanization plays a role here – but i suspect it is not the main factor.
with regard to the trends of these super-stimuli, i can imagine a few different paths:
when i was a kid at my grandparents’ house in colorado, my eyes were much larger than my stomach in the morning such that i poured myself a veritable mountain of granola; instead of being allowed to pour it back in or waste food, i was required to eat every last bite while my grandparents went out and bought donuts. generally, granola is my favorite cereal. it is less good after two cups and hazardous to the roof of one’s mouth after four. by the end of the hour at the table i was convinced that i would never eat granola again (a lie – i have hippy tendencies). maybe this kind of stimulus is the same way – after a while, as optimization to get our neurons firing reaches a fever pitch – one day the algorithmically-generated slop stops pleasing us.
however i am of two minds on this. for it is that trends usually change due to preference cascades; it could be that these particular hyperstimuli go the way of cigarettes or fertility rates or public disapproval of gay marraige – a sudden step change. on the other hand, i’m not sure if that holds true for this category of stimuli; the trend from the spoken word to print to radio, television, and individualization does seem to only increase over time.
given the trajectory of increasing stimulus in daily life, there’s a chance that it just keeps getting worse. llm-generated slop fully individualizing everyone’s entertainment and effectively wireheading us. atomization to its natural extremes. tiktok is more effective than facebook and so on. despair is the proper emotion here.
social media usage, like alcoholism, follows a pareto distribution; i.e. 90% of usage is by the top decile (don’t quote me on this). this group of people are more likely than not to be screwed. another percentage of people, caught on the hedonic treadmill, adjust to a new normal of socialization. this is bad for extroverts and acceptable for most. in 2103 the fact that the average person spent one hour per day with friends becomes an interesting factoid in bar trivia. life goes on.
i’m not sure that i like any of the options here (maybe this is my belief that nothing ever changes). regardless, some considerations as to what could be done are in order:
i don’t think we’re putting this back in the bag. aside from this surface-level critique, generally, top-down high modernist approaches rarely succeed at solving the goal they’re intended to. this is unfortunate, but a fact of life, and even targeted age-based bans are likely to be unsuccessful.
i’ve seen some suggest cigarettes’ slow slide to disuse suggest similar strategies for social media. as a counterpoint, top-down approaches such as cigarette stigmatization may not work well now due to the social reinforcement of social media, and the counter-stigmatization of those who do not use it. this only works if there is something negative that people can clearly point to, and now a lot of the harms of the internet are nebulous.
everyone agrees that the current situation sucks in inarticulable ways and yet it persists; almost everyone who complains still uses social media in some form because the costs of not are too high. in other words, preference falsification. in 1970s eastern europe the government was supported by many who did not enjoy their political system, but the social cost of speaking against it was high. a decade passed and others realized which side the balance of people favored. tension between peoples’ actions and their stated beliefs may not hold forever.
the open question is how we reach this breaking point? i see a few strands snapping off the rope. a trick may be to return to the qualities which made past social lives so inviting; even if the first movers won’t see much immediate benefit, as the first rocks turn to landslide everyone will. better writers than me have written about how to move in this direction. to their credit i’ve been trying what they say with some success!