Boomers, pt. 5
(99% sure there's only one more after this. Hang in there.)
Last time (linked below) we were talking about how we may be tempted to defend social media/devices/tech corporations so as to inoculate ourselves against allegations of boomerism. If my hunch is correct, though, this “safe bet” might have a shorter shelf-life than it seems. There might come a point in the near future when it’ll actually be considered lame to not be anti-tech. Eventually, it’ll be pitied, seen as something closer to Stockholm syndrome than anything else (this may partly explain what’s already going on, in fact.)
Regardless, for the foreseeable, at least, Zuckerberg&Co. probably won’t give a hoot what we think about them, as it’s more than likely we’ll still be using their products a ton - however grudgingly. Indeed, we’ve also talked about how even the folks (me included) who are aware of all these concerning stats, trends, etc. have great difficulty extricating themselves. Turns out, saying you want to unplug/be off the grid is a lot easier than doing it. (Not least because the modern world requires a certain degree of tech fluency to function at a basic level: submitting a job application is almost exclusively an online process, for example.)
But - in terms of the behavioral side of things - why is it so tough for people to quit? In the case of social media, why can’t we seem to stop ourselves from caring what strangers online think? Why exactly is it that heavy usage of these sites leads to depression, etc.?
This comes back (as so many things do) to our (aforementioned) little monkey/frog-brain problem. A feature of being barely evolved apes means we’re still wired to behave/think in ways that may have been useful a few [hundred] thousand years ago when our species was still trying to get a competitive foothold, but aren’t so helpful now that our circumstances have changed, and we (in developed countries, at least) are no longer defined by material scarcity.
We aren’t really designed to handle being compared to or judged by more than a few other people (who look/sound more or less just like us) at any given time, let alone by millions of strangers… especially ones whose images have been edited/enhanced to give an unrealistic or altogether false representation of their body/face/lifestyle. Who’d-a thunk it!? We still calibrate our own happiness by comparing our situation to those around us. This means it’s completely relative, and often out of our hands: you don’t control what kind of family or community you’re born into; what kind of values they have; or the lifestyles they aspire to or pursue - nor, by extension, their likelihood of being successful in those endeavors.
What’s frustrating is that we may well be able to understand all of this at an intellectual level, but that doesn’t mean it becomes something you can then just reason your way out of in practice; it’s too baked in. And this means you might not even like the people around you all that much - or even be able to see with your own eyes that they aren’t particularly happy or fulfilled - but that won’t stop you from comparing yourself; from wanting what they have. This perpetual sense of FOMO, of “if I can just get to the other side of the fence [where the grass is greener], I’ll never want for anything again…” was adaptive at one point, as it encouraged us to always be striving to improve our meager circumstances so that we could feed our families, and continue to reproduce.
This [tendency towards dissatisfaction with our personal circumstances] would be tough enough to manage at the best of times. The trouble today is that, with technology having shrunk the world, we’re given constant, behind-the-scenes access to strangers with whom we’d otherwise never have known about, let alone come into contact; the definition of people “close to us” has thus broadened, and can now apply to almost anyone. It’s used to be the 6 degrees of separation theory, but now it’s even easier to “connect” - and not in a good way, since “connection” is very often one-directional: anyone can watch hours of footage of their favorite Kardashian, model, or any other reality-show celebrity as they potter about their “real” lives, or we can watch on as [we feel like they] talk directly to us in their selfie videos or vlogs from the gym, the mall, backstage at a concert, or at a Bali resort. As you can imagine, this is bad, bad news for us [poor Frog-Brains], who inevitably come to perceive anyone to whom we’re heavily exposed as a member of our own tribe/inner circle, and thus compare ourselves to them. (This is also how you get parasocial relationships, celebrity stalkers, and all that, or even just the more innocuous stuff: people copying the slang/accents of their favorite streamer or influencer or rapper or Love Island contestant.)
These companies figured all this out long ago, and know that by beating people down emotionally and isolating them from the real world (and therefore from real people that might be able to build trust and connection and self-esteem, etc.), you can get them into a state whereby they will be happy for even the most pathetic morsel of pleasure. One like here, two likes there. One tinder match today, two on Friday. The trouble is, since all our social and psychological tools have been dulled/stunted, we don’t have any Plan B in our search for contentment/validation. There’s no other place that scratches the dopamine itch quite like this, so we’ll stick with them no matter how bad things get. (Hence the Stockholm Syndrome effect referenced above.)
If people who were grown adults when they first used the internet can fall into this trap - or could fall into this trap just from TV, which is positively primitive in comparison - then kids, who are growing up having far more potent shit piped straight into their brains, have no chance whatsoever.
(Not every example of this is sinister, of course; there are certain people/channels who are aware of this effect and focus on educating and not exploiting this weakness, unfortunately they are but drops in a roiling ocean of shit.)
Interestingly - and even more frustratingly - it’s not just that “grass being perpetually greener” issue we’re up against. There’s another layer of subconscious fussiness to consider: contentment/satisfaction only really kicks in if we can look around and see that we’re doing slightly better than our neighbors, a.k.a. competitors. (This is called the Easterlin paradox, if you want to look into it.) And even then, we don’t relax for long. We quickly revert to the mean - i.e. dissatisfaction, restlessness, anxiety - and begin striving for the next rung up the latter, whatever that looks like.
We’re taught that an increase in wealth (in terms of material comfort, or possessions, or any other metric by which people measure “success”) will bring with it an increase in happiness. Which is why, for a while, the focus/party line - at least in the US - was “if we can just get ‘rich’ [at a societal level], everyone’s gonna be on cloud nine. Just trust the process. So, if you don’t mind, shut up and get out of the way. We’re gonna throw everything at getting the GDP up, while ‘advising’ [read: drone-striking] other countries that it’s in their best interests to do the same.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t what happened. (The “having a rich country makes us all happy” thing, that is, not the drone-striking thing - that did happen. A lot. Oopsies.)
It turns out that if you see all the other boats around yours are rising, it’s nice, for sure, but you won’t feel quite as cheery as you would have been if your boat had risen a tiiiny bit higher than theirs. And I think this explains, in part, why we (in the US/UK at least) aren’t proportionally more happy than you’d think we should be when compared to other countries - we’re doing fine, but not exponentially so, which doesn’t make sense given that we’re certainly exponentially more advanced in terms of technological advancement, GDP, or whatever other government-issue metric you want to use.
This isn’t exactly revelatory, I know, but it’s always worth emphasizing, not least because it’s being deliberately exploited (as discussed); if it’s any consolation, though, it means that many of the frustrations/struggles we have aren’t necessarily due to personal failings. There are larger forces at play that have a vested interest in unassuming people being kept perpetually anxious and dissatisfied. (Hooray, I guess?) When you’re trying to build a global empire, it’s a really good idea to train people to feel ashamed for not working hard enough/producing enough. It’s like a parent being cold and unfeeling to a child for the first years of its life, or relentlessly comparing them to an older sibling; the kid is doomed to spend the rest of its days suffering from some sort of anxious attachment, some desperate, unquenchable need for validation. This sense of inadequacy haunts them no matter how successful they become. You see this all the time - how many celebrities or top business execs are actually well-adjusted, content, lead balanced lives, and have healthy relationships? It happens a lot with pro athletes, too, who very often have at least one parent who lives vicariously through them; they might not even like the sport but are desperate for the parent’s approval.
Not a perfect metaphor, but you get the gist: this [the inadequacy thing] is what’s happened to all of us. Alas, once you’re out of wartime and the global empire has begun to shrink, the ceaseless pursuit of production and growth and expansion - and the requisite societal “values” constructed to buttress this pursuit (e.g. near-sociopathic devotion to self-interest, competition, accumulation of wealth, etc.) begin to prove a little bit… unhelpful - if not flat-out catastrophic.
Not that we’re anywhere near large-scale recalibration of our perspective or anything, since the people who are made to suffer (which happens to be the vast majority of the global population) are the same folks whose political will has been all-but completely destroyed. But I’m sure this is just a coincidence!
We’ll pause here for a word from our sponsor:
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Here’s the next post:
Boomers, pt. 6, The Penultimate Installment
We were talking, last time (linked below), about the state of dissatisfaction and anxiety people are forced into despite our society having (putatively) ascended beyond scarcity, subsistence, privation, etc. The silver lining I offered is that this sense of inadequacy is not as much any individual’s fault as they/we are made to believe: it’s innate, and…