New Time: We have adopted a Winter Season Time for Big Questions. The potluck gathering will be happening at 6:00, with the discussion following at 7:30. This may change again as the season progresses, but we will hold to this new schedule until further notice.
Topic: An alert BQ regular attendee sent me a link to an article about how the dynamics of work and connection with others has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, and most amazingly the past 10-15 years, and which discusses how these changes play out in social development, voluntary isolation, and how we feel about ourselves and others. (If you need a link to this article, please send me an email and I will make that happen.) It provides graphs that show how the rate of face-to-face socializing over the past 20 years has changed by age, race, gender, marital status, income, and education level, just to mention a few categories. It defines the time spent alone as being when a person is in a room with no other living person in that same room, but may be in contact with others via a screen of some sort (sorry Zoom attendees, but by definition you may be alone when you join with the rest of us, if you are by yourself).
But I would start off by asking, is this something we didn't know already? Haven't we all recognized that our lives have been changed by the screens we hold in our hands and that we sit in front of so many hours of the day? The pandemic notwithstanding we were already slipping into and increasingly work-from-home work model before it came along, and were growing comfortable with individual and group meetings on-line, virtual shopping, texting rather than talking directly to someone, and home delivery of goods and meals. Covid dropped the floor out from under this trend, and the line tracking the time we spend with other people face-to-face plunged to near zero. Six-foot isolation stickers on the floor were the tip of the iceberg. Wearing masks stifled communication and ensured you could never pick the person you were talking to out of a lineup of suspects at the police station.
The article explores this social phenomenon from many angles, and they prove very interesting reading? If our children and grandchildren are growing up in a world where there is no novelty to having access to a screen in your hand, but a normal part of life, what is that doing to their social development? Their social skills, like reading body language? Ultimately, their mental health? What do the studies say about this?
An aside: As an older person (I hate admitting that) I participated in the development of the "internet" from the early 1980's, and had one of the first non-military emails made available, then used dial-up 300-baud acoustic phone couplers to send individual letters one at a time to my buddies' computer several states away. I know what 300 baud is because I sat there and watched the letters appear on the KayPro's orange square screen one at a time. I like to remind people that while mass-market cell phones in various forms were available since the 1970's, the first iPhone from Apple was released in 2007. (Here is a link to the Wiki page for The History of Cell Phones. It gets bogged down in the development of cellular technology, which for many years was the limiting factor for data transfer and reliability.) The cell phone with internet capability changed the world with its access to the Sum of All Human Knowledge through the instantaneous search engine, Google. I remember the time before cell towers existed. My kids do not.
OK, I'm back: The article talks about teenagers and their relationship to loneliness caused by screens and screen time. It shares this nugget:
In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.
Where do we go to socialize? Increasingly, we don't go anywhere. We stay home. The author talks about how we have become a nation of Secular Monks. We forgo marriage until age 30 or later, and many live a monastic life of "intentional deprivation and ascetic self-control that includes cold showers (and ice plunge pools), intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps." We look inwards, at ourselves and the life we lead, not at the impact we have on others, and we use fitness tracking watches and daily reports they provide that show to what degree we have failed to achieve our objectives as our measure of success.
There is a lot more in the article, but you can read it for yourself. I look forward to seeing your on Friday at 6:00 or 7:30, so we can solve this problem of loneliness.
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