Threads
The threads tying the different parts of my life together have gotten a bit tangled over the past 20 years or so. I haven’t felt much cohesion between “real life”, work, and the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent online since the mid-2000s. I’ve had the good fortune recently to find the mental space for the tangles to start unravelling on their own and I’ve also had the extremely good fortune to have always been able to have my place in the working world be truly connected to my goals and intentions even if I haven’t always been able to feel or see the connection.
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Around 2006, social media truly became “a thing”. We couldn’t possibly have understood at the time that it would come to have such a huge impact on almost every aspect of our lives. Prior to that, societies all over the world had been functioning in much the same way for eons. Our brains are wired with the expectation that societies will continue in the same way we always have. And I truly think that in the long-run (but hopefully not TOO long), we will resume communicating and living collaboratively like humans always have.
Our brains aren’t built for the way we’re living. They are designed to evolve as conditions gradually change. Homo sapiens have very slowly been evolving for 300,000 years and right now we’re dealing with a very rapid change to the way we form opinions and delineate cultural norms. We’re not set up for this.
We are at a point where the big shake-up that is social media has impacted the way we interact with each other, the natural world, and our inner selves. Its effects are being broadcast widely in the news – the mental health crisis, addiction, violence, division – but the specific causes of those effects aren’t getting as much attention.
We’ve gotten to this socially disconnected point bit-by-bit. During the Industrial Revolution, a cultural sea-change happened when millions of farm workers and people living in fishing villages and small rural communities moved to cities to work in factories and lost their natural rhythms based in seasonal changes. Violence and social unrest were endemic at the time. Another big societal change happened following World War II when Government propaganda, advertisers, TV shows, and housing developers all reinforced the idea that the ideal American life involved a married couple, children, and their own detached home rather than the multigenerational homes that had been traditional up to that point. Excessive drinking and domestic violence were the norm for years after that. We’ve gradually been losing what holds us together – to each other and to the planet’s ebb and flow.
The normal routine life of communities working together for mutual survival has been degenerating over the past few centuries – the same few centuries of the “American Experiment” referred to by our founding fathers – and now things seem to have come to a head.
When I refer to “real life” I mean the time we spend enjoying and exploring the world – times when our minds aren’t disconnected from what’s going on around us. I’m talking about attending concerts, eating in restaurants, going for walks, and learning about other people’s interests. For many, all of this has become performative. These days we seem to engage in activities with the thought in the back of their mind of how people online will react. Knowing you’ll tell your friends about an experience after the fact has always happened, but the difference now is your brain is going to the broad “how is the world going to react” rather than “how is my friend going to react”. Our brains are losing their ties to community and personal connection.
I’m starting to get back to doing things because I enjoy them rather than for the reactions of others. I was in my early 20s – a time when my brain was still forming – when people started using Instant Messenger and “chain emails” to communicate. I remember the anticipation of hitting “refresh” to see who had responded. We’ve been dealing with that intense dopamine rush ever since. Specifically with chain emails, our brains received a reward response due to the unpredictability of what you’d get, the novelty of the new medium, the social validation of someone choosing you to contact, and the scarcity of the infrequent messages. It’s not exactly the same now, but we are still receiving that reward response. Dopamine isn’t necessarily a “pleasure chemical” but something more related to anticipation and motivation. Social media gives us that rush that many of us now depend on.
I’m hoping to spend some time over the next year exploring these topics through video interviews with the help of my husband, Sid. I’m looking for people who have distinct memories of how they communicated or experienced life differently prior to social media. I’m also looking for suggestions of people living in the northeastern US who have been studying how social media has affected how we live – sociologists and psychologists. If you’d like to participate or have a suggestion of people who might be good for this project, please let me know.
We’re at a time when it’s become the norm to disconnect from the “real world” and stay there. It’s time to remember what we’ve lost, use what we’ve learned, and make things better.