No, There Isn’t a Loneliness Epidemic (And That May Be an Even Bigger Problem)
Episode Stats
Summary
Face-to-face socializing in the United States has declined by more than 20 percent since the early 1990s. But strangely, this hasn't led to the loneliness epidemic you hear so much about. Instead, we re seeing a new phenomenon: rising aloneness without rising loneliness. Today, on the show, writer Derrick Thompson will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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face-to-face socializing in america has declined by more than 20 percent nationwide
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among some groups like young adults and unmarried men the drop is closer to 40 percent but strangely
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this hasn't led to the loneliness epidemic that you hear so much about instead we're seeing a
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new phenomenon rising aloneness without rising loneliness today on the show derrick thompson
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will help us understand this puzzling disconnect and its profound implications derrick is a staff
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writer at the atlantic who recently wrote a piece entitled the anti-social century in the first half
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of our conversation derrick unpacks the cultural shifts and technological developments and no it's
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not just the smartphone that have created what he calls the convenience curse we then get into why
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even self-described introverts are often happier when forced to socialize the concerning trend of
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young men settling further and further into isolating sedentary leisure and practical ways
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we can strengthen our atrophied social muscles to become better happier people after the show's
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over check out our show notes at awim.is alone all right derrick thompson welcome to the show
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great to be here thank you so much so you recently wrote a piece for the atlantic called the anti-social
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century which traces how much less time americans are spending socializing than they used to what are
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some of the numbers on this front like what's been the general decline in in-person socialization
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the basic story is that american socializing declined in the second half of the 20th century
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and then in the early 21st century it pretty much fell off a cliff overall face-to-face socializing
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is declined by more than 20 percent nationwide among some groups like black men and teenagers
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decline as more like 40 percent so almost half of the face-to-face socializing that people had is gone
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now in just 20 years like that's a remarkable remake of human experience and then some of the
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individual statistics are really jarring like you know the fact that couples now by i think a margin of
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four to one spend more time watching television together than talking to each other women who
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own cats this one got me in trouble with some people but um i'll say it here women who own cats
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now uh spend more time caring for their pets than they do speaking to another person in a face-to-face
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situation so we've really seen just a total transformation of how americans spend time with
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each other yeah you talked about how it's particularly pronounced amongst young adults
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there's a line from the article the share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost
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daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s it's pretty nuts
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i don't know what else to say it's incredibly depressing it's wild and it's one reason why when i found
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these statistics i was like i need to do something big on this you know i write essays for the
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atlantic i have a podcast plain english those outlets you know those 1000 word essays or 40
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minute podcasts those let me get a little bit into a subject like this but i really was getting the
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sense that the decline in face-to-face socializing and its flip side which is the rise of mere aloneness
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of absolute solitude was becoming one of the most important social facts in america and i think the
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implications of this decline in socializing that you've pointed to are just truly immense
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yeah and you know besides some of the numbers we just mentioned you talk about some of the things
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that robert puttman talked about in his book bowling alone the rate of people being involved
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the community community organizations declined the frequency of people entertaining at home like
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hosting friends for parties games dinners that's all been declining as well and that have been
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declining for a while that that's the stuff that have been declining since the 1960s so you know
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brief history of bowling alone for those who haven't read it or maybe have just heard of it or like
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have heard of it so many times they feel like they've read it here's the upshot between the early
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1900s the 1960s practically every measure of socializing was going up people were spending more
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time together they were more likely to join associations and clubs and then somewhere around
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the 1960s 1970s the tide turned and america became much more individualistic our cars allowed us to
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drive away from each other homes got more comfortable entertainment got more awesome so it became more
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fun just to stay at home and sit on the couch and watch tv or play video games or look at your phone
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and then finally in the 21st century if the automobile privatized our lives and the television privatized our
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leisure the smartphone privatized our attention it meant that we could be in huge crowds of people and be
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essentially alone on our phone getting involved in some psychodrama millions of miles away in phone land
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and so that's the story that putnam sort of sets up and what i tried to do is to extend it into the
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21st century you know when he published his book in 2000 there were a lot of people who said i'm not
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entirely sure that you're right about this bob i i think maybe you're wrong and we might see a great
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surge of socializing in the world remade by the internet and in fact everything just got worse from one
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perspective and so that's that's really where this piece picks up how did the pandemic accelerate
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this trend so this this has been going on for you say 50 maybe 40 years this trend of people not
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getting out and socializing as much how did the pandemic accelerate this well the pandemic accelerated
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it because if you're locked down you certainly aren't spending a lot of time with other people
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outside of your home so clearly we know that the pandemic increased time spent at home and decreased
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time spent with other people but what's interesting to me is what happens if you compare say the years
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2021 which is when people were coming out of lockdown what if you compare 2021 and 2023 well it turns out
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that alone time actually increased so even in the post-pandemic era we were spending more time
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alone and if you look at time spent at home you know the work from home revolution is sort of its own
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secular thing there's some people being called back to the office there's some people still working
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at home but the princeton sociologist patrick sharkey who looked at time spent at home concluded
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that in 2022 the the average american was spending about 99 minutes more every single day at home and
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that wasn't just about working from home it was about eating more at home praying more at home
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entertaining more at home socializing more at home we really did become more of a phone bound
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and home bound nation even around the acute crisis of the pandemic yeah see i think something that the
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pandemic did is it kind of built an infrastructure like the infrastructure is already there to do this
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stuff but it kind of forced us to do it like oh this is actually an option i can instead of going to a
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restaurant i can just do doordash instead of going to the movie theater i can just stream a movie to
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my home i mean i've noticed that in my own life well yeah and all that's great i i want to be very
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clear that stuff is awesome like sometimes you're just exhausted and you're like i could cook dinner
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or i could go out but damn i really just want to order you know a burrito to the house and watch
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whatever on netflix right like catch up on severance watch white lotus like we've all been there okay i am
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not trying to tell people in any way that these conveniences are somehow evil i'm trying to get them
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to recognize the cost of progress the cost of convenience i think with television or smartphones
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we're becoming more familiar with the fact that yet television is incredibly entertaining smartphones
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are ludicrously entertaining but maybe smartphones are causing a bit of anxiety maybe watching too much
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television means being a bit of a recluse and pulling yourself out of the physical world and in
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fact i'll just pause here to say one of my favorite statistics from this piece is that uh between the
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1960s and 1990s the average american added about 300 additional hours of leisure time per year and you'd
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think like what what would you do what would you listener of this podcast do with an extra 300 hours
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of leisure time next year well it turned out that people spent almost all that extra leisure time
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watching television so we really really love watching television that's for sure
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what i'm trying to get us to recognize is not television's bad smartphone's bad ordering food
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to eat at home is bad no these are conveniences but convenience can have a cost and the cost of
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what i call the convenience curse is that leaning too much into these behaviors and devices and
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technologies often means pulling ourselves out of the physical world yeah i think that what you just
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said about the increase of leisure time i think a lot of people think oh if i had more time
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i would hang out more i would do creative hobbies i'd become an artist i'd write a novel but it seems
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like what we typically do is we just plow whatever time opens up into the path of least resistance
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activities which is mainly screens which is interesting yeah screens are incredibly entertaining
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i mean they're amazingly entertaining and they're also super easy i mean i i don't remember every single
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thing that you just listed but you talked about you know hanging out with friends becoming an artist
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writing a novel writing a novel is freaking hard okay becoming an artist means sucking for a while
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before you become an artist that you're not embarrassed of being learning a new language right
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i'm thinking of things that you know people might say if you ask them what would you do with 300 extra
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hours of leisure i think most people might imagine that they would do hard things but we're exhausted
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and simple creatures to a certain extent and we prefer many times to do easy things and there's
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practically nothing easier than folding yourself into a comfortable couch and turning on a streaming
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service that's very easy and that's why i think we've been essentially donating our time and our
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dopamine to screens rather than to physical world activities okay so the television increased the amount
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of time we spent alone in the second half of the 20th century the smartphones in the you know early
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part of the 21st century you also talk about the role that cars played in this what what role has the
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car played in us not socializing as much the car is another great example of a really wonderful
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technology that has costs one cost i guess you could say is you know pollution unless you're driving
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like a plug-in electric but one social cost of cars is that they allow us to be away from other
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people and the vast majority of time that an american spends in a car is not carpooling it's alone the
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vast majority of time that americans spend in cars is alone which means that if americans overall they're
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increasing their car use they're probably increasing their time spent alone as well and what happened in
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the 1950s and 1960s is that we built these you know ribbons of asphalt leading from cities into suburbs
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and people could buy bigger houses that's cool but that also meant lots more time spent in the car
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it meant longer commutes and it meant houses that were a little bit further away from other people
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and so when you put all that together i think you have the beginning of this revolution that putnam
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was talking about where this nation of clubs and associations and people coming together became a
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nation of you know not front porches but backyards people pulling back into their own spaces their private
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spaces and associating the american dream associating a sense of of wealth of having made it as maximizing
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control over private spaces and i think that sort of kicks off this revolution that i'm talking about
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yeah it's even as you mentioned earlier it's influenced how our homes are designed today and
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it's created what you call this idea of a remote life where we're trying to do everything in our home
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homes if you're out in the suburbs some of these homes have like those giant cinema rooms in the bonus
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room upstairs a lot of homes these days have garage gyms so they don't have to go i have a garage gym i
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haven't been to a public gym in almost a decade and even like bedrooms are being designed like how can
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we maximize people being by themselves and what's interesting if you look at the 70s in the 60s 70s
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like homes were designed for socializing i remember 70s there's that trend of like conversation pits
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you know yeah that doesn't happen anymore sunk in living rooms that's my wife's favorite piece of
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of home decor yeah whenever we're on zillow and she uh she sees a sunken living room yeah her heart
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goes a flutter for sure i everything you said is is very true and you know when it comes to
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architecture two of the more interesting conversations that i had were with clifton
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harness who's the co-founder of test fit which is a company that makes software to design layouts for
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new housing developments and he told me you know the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design
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is that every room has to be built to accommodate maximal screen time so whereas in previous conversations
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about how do we build a beautiful space it was like you know how do we let the light in you know
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high ceilings how do we make it a perfect space for light and now the question is how do we give the
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most comfort to the most people and the answer is make sure that there is an obvious space to put the
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flat screen television and a couch and bobby fion who's a real estate developer that i also spoke to
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offered up an amazing quote he said for the most part apartments are built for netflix and chill
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this is something that architects and developers are thinking about they have our preferences in
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mind they wouldn't be able to make money if they didn't they are designing not for our stated
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preference of oh if i had an extra 300 hours of leisure i would learn a new language with 10 new
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friends and we'd all become picasso no you make money by watching what people do by watching the
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revealed preference and the revealed preference of americans is we want to spend as much time
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at home as we can and i would just say here but before passing back to you is that like when it
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comes to things like you know home gyms i work at home all the time i work out at home all the time
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i definitely don't want to give people the impression that i'm trying to stigmatize a bit
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of solitude or stigmatize activities done at home what i want to do is to show people the receipt
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of the choices that we're making you can make a series of totally understandable choices and then
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lift up and recognize that your socializing time is declining year after year after year right that
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is the awareness that i want us to have it's more about awareness than it is about stigmatizing
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okay so the amount of time people are spending by themselves has been increasing you'd think
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since alone time is increasing loneliness has increased is that the case is there as we often hear in
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the media a loneliness crisis going on no i don't think there is i think the loneliness crisis is
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overblown and that might seem like a very confusing record scratch moment for people if they're like
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this guy talking about the surge of aloneness doesn't think there's a loneliness crisis well here's
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the data shows the data shows that for young people loneliness is up a little bit but for people
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overall there's really not a lot of evidence that loneliness is increasing what we have instead
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is rising aloneness without rising loneliness now one interpretation of those two statistics is that
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there's no problem people are absolutely thrilled being alone that's why they're not lonely but turns
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out when you use the same american time use survey to ask people if they're happier around other people
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or alone people tend to be much happier around other people so here's what i think is happening i think
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loneliness in small doses is actually good i think that loneliness is a biological cue to tell us to
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get off the couch and get out into the real world and to see people and be around people and touch and
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high five and hug i think that what's happening instead is that people are spending an enormous amount of
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time on their phones and they're dumping their dopamine onto their phones they're scrolling on tiktok
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they're scrolling on x they're scrolling on instagram they're basically getting all of this dopamine
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flushed into their brains looking at their phones also probably a bit of cortisol if you're on x or if
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you're just made anxious by whatever you're seeing on instagram or these other platforms you've got all
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of this anxiety and all this dopamine that's being flushed into our brains and then we put our phone
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away and how do we feel at the end of this leisure time we feel exhausted we feel like we're absolutely
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spent ironically this leisure time has made us feel less inclined to want to have the drive to go out
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and be around other people and even risk the hazard of i'll drive there but there won't be parking i'll
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get on the subway but it'll be delayed so i think that people aren't feeling the historical biological
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impulse to be around other people and it's registering in surveys as are not feeling as lonely as we should
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be and that's why aloneness keeps rising year after year after year i think we are quietly making
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ourselves miserable because we're not feeling the healthy pinch of loneliness okay so let me just
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recap that so you're saying because we're on our phones all the time we're kind of getting like this
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pseudo socializing going on on our phones when we actually want to spend time in real life with
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people we're like ah the signal's not there because we're like well i already got my fill like i've
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already been around people i think it's it might be that for some people i mean there's so many
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different people in the world and so i can't speak for all of them um but there's two different things
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that could be happening here and i want to make sure that that i'm precise about distinguishing
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between them so one thing that you're describing is that lots of people think that time spent on the
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phone is a sort of substitute for time spent with people i think that's wrong for a variety of reasons
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i think it's much harder to build intimacy by catching up over text than spending time with someone
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over a table i also think that people have a much stronger relationship with other humans in a
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physical world presence than they do on their phones so i i i think there's a problem of replacing
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sociality hanging out with people in the real world with parasociality which is spending our time with
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people on the internet and imagining their inner weather and their inner lives so i absolutely agree
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to a certain extent with the the picture that you just painted the time spent on phone is a poor
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substitute for time spent with other people in the physical world but something else is happening
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that i think is biochemical with dopamine cycles there's something called uh phasic dopamine which
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is the dopamine hit the amount of dopamine that we get when we experience something that elicits a
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bunch of dopamine and there's tonic dopamine which is our underlying baseline levels of dopamine
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and i think one thing that's happening is that people are spending so much time on their phones
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that their phasic dopamine is going nuts and it's leaving them with lower levels of tonic dopamine
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which means their baseline level of dopamine is depleted when they put down their phone
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and that means when a friend reaches out to you at say 7 p.m on a wednesday when you've spent you know
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the last hour and a half just you know scrolling through tiktok and that friend says hey do you want
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to hang out you say ah i don't know man i'm kind of beat i you know work was really a lot and also
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like i'm really stressed about whatever thing is happening in the world and it's just too much
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of a misadventure for me to get out of the house i'm gonna pass i'm sorry dude and we see this to
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a certain extent there's a there's a section of the article where i describe this tiktok trend that
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my wife introduced me to where you have uh young people who are socializing less than any young
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generation that we have on record celebrating when their friends cancel plans it's called cancellation
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among some folks that makes no sense if you think about young people being lonely it does make
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sense if you consider my biochemical explanation that young people are spending so much time with
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their phones that when a friend cancels plans they're happy because they're dopaminergically
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exhausted by their phone experience so i think in by summary two things are happening not only are our
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phones a poor substitute for real socialization but also our phones are absorbing the dopamine that
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we should be giving to the friends in our life okay so we're spending more time alone but we're not
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necessarily lonely because of it and that's because while loneliness usually manifests as a signal that
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drives us to be be with other people we're not feeling that drive anymore because we've donated the
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thing that gives that drive our dopamine to our devices and you point out in the article that
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even though studies show that alone time increases unhappiness in the long term you say this in the
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article nonetheless many people keep choosing to spend free time alone in their home away from other
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people perhaps one might think they're making the right choice after all they must know themselves best
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but a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don't know what they want or what
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will make them happy yeah there's an idea uh the the harvard psychologist dan gilbert i believe called
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it miss wanting and it's this idea that people aren't very good at understanding what they'll want
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and in a way it's a bit of an extension of the principle that predictions are hard especially about
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the future right predictions are hard especially about the future especially about us it's hard to
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predict exactly what's going to make us happy so you know sometimes you know you buy a piece of
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furniture that you're obsessed with or a coat that you're obsessed with and three months later you
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never really think about it it doesn't really offer any additional unit of happiness to any
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particular day this happens all the time it's what gilbert calls miswanting well i think people might
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miswant aloneness as well i think they might miswant introversion and how would you prove this well
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there's a university of chicago psychologist named nick epley who did a really interesting study where he
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asked commuter train passengers to make a prediction how would they feel if asked to spend
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that train ride in chicago talking to a stranger versus being alone and the vast majority of
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participants predicted that the quiet solitude would make for a much better commute than being forced
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to talk to a stranger but then epley's team creates this experiment and he has some people
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keep to themselves and other people are instructed to talk to a stranger and those people are told the
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longer conversation the better and then afterward you have both groups fill out a questionnaire
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how do you feel in this moment not a prediction of the future how do you feel right now and despite
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this broad assumption that the best commute is the most silent commute it was the people instructed
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randomly instructed to talk to strangers who reported feeling significantly more positive than those who
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kept themselves so this is a really really fascinating and possibly fundamental paradox at the core of human
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human life as epley told me we are social animals we are made better by being social but we are afraid
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of sociality in various ways we're afraid of not being light we're afraid of boredom we're afraid of the
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awkwardness of an initial conversation with someone who we don't know well or maybe the initial awkwardness
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of a conversation with someone we used to know well or even do know well there's all sorts of social
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anxieties that can accrete around the social animal but fundamentally it does seem like in
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a variety of research settings if you force most people to be social even those that consider
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themselves introverts they will tell you immediately after the experience that they're happier than the
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people who were not forced to be social so yes to your point i do think that we misunderstand
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something very core to human nature i like it to and making the analogy of like social life to physical
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fitness like you cannot exercise and not eat well and on a day-to-day basis you'll you'll feel okay
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you'll feel fine but then eventually you reach a point where you realize oh man i'm i'm overweight
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i'm really out of shape my cholesterol is high i've just got really poor health and it's the same
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thing with socializing if you're not socializing very much i mean you feel okay on a day-to-day basis
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but then you realize oh man something's wrong something's wrong here like not only have your actual
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social skills atrophied right you get rusty in how you interact with people but you feel like something
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is wrong internally yeah i mean i would love to hang out in this metaphor here this this and this
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equation of of physical fitness and social fitness because i think it's a really fruitful connection you
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know how is social fitness similar to physical fitness well at the highest level modern life isn't built for
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it so why do we exercise why do you have a gym in your garage well the answer is that you're not
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a hunter-gatherer you're not getting your exercise from the essentials of life from day-to-day living
00:25:18.520
you probably spend a lot of time sitting you know maybe you're sitting right now you probably spend a
00:25:22.040
lot of time just not walking that much by being in your house and so we had to in the modern world
00:25:27.640
invent this bizarre thing called a gym where we go and work out which is not something our ancestors
00:25:35.160
did they lived they didn't you know lift weights just to get ripped there's a way in which modern
00:25:39.800
life has made it harder to be physically fit unless you make physical fitness a priority and in the same
00:25:46.440
way i think modern life has made social fitness more difficult unless you make it a priority it's all
00:25:52.440
too easy to just work from home in certain jobs work from home order into home cook for yourself at home
00:25:59.720
entertain yourself at home you know watch the infinitude of stuff that's on you know amazon
00:26:05.080
prime and netflix and max watch a bunch of stuff on tiktok on your phone infinitely divert yourself
00:26:11.400
without ever leaving the four corners of your house it's very very easy and it's especially
00:26:15.960
easy right now looking out in north carolina it's been snowing for the last 24 hours i don't i don't
00:26:20.440
want to go out so this is easy but i i would love to think about ways that we can equate physical
00:26:27.080
fitness and social fitness the same way that we purposely divert from our lives to go to the gym and
00:26:31.800
work out how can we purposely divert from the convenience curse to be more socially fit as well
00:26:38.280
we're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
00:26:43.080
and now back to the show you all talk about the idea of introversion i think because we live in a
00:26:48.200
very therapeutic culture we like to psychoanalyze ourselves and people like well i'm an introvert and
00:26:53.320
so i don't need to socialize as much because that doesn't give me any energy it drains me is that the
00:26:58.760
case can introverts get away without socializing as much i think introversion probably exists i
00:27:04.840
definitely don't think it exists in a binary this is not like males and females this is like a normal
00:27:11.240
gaussian distribution right this is like height there's the vast majority of people who call
00:27:16.920
themselves introverts are like sort of kind of introverts you know if you really put truth
00:27:21.320
theorem into them then they would be introverts in some circumstances and not introverts in others
00:27:26.760
they might feel a little bit shy at a party where they didn't know anybody but if you put them in
00:27:31.560
front of their best friends they would open wide up and i would add according to nick epley the
00:27:36.440
university of chicago psychologist if you nudge them just a bit to be more social at a party what you
00:27:44.680
would have is someone who has a slightly better experience than the wallflower who just sits in the
00:27:50.360
corner of the party and looks at their phone yeah that's the evidence i'm sure some people are listening
00:27:55.400
thinking you know what i hate parties when i go or when my friends make me go when my wife makes me go
00:28:01.080
i just i'm fine standing in the corner and just reading espn i don't know your life right like maybe
00:28:06.760
that works out for you but it does seem like for many people introversion is a bit of a delusion yes it
00:28:15.400
can be nice to recharge yes of course a bit of solitude can be a blessing but people tend to be made
00:28:21.880
happier in other people yeah i think people typically i've done this too like they use
00:28:26.200
introversion as an excuse to not socialize it's like well you know that's just my personality
00:28:29.800
it's like well actually if you did it you'd feel good you'd actually enjoy it yeah my colleague olga
00:28:34.840
kazan has a great book out called me but better which is about the science of personality and
00:28:39.080
personality change and the tldr i read it it's wonderful is that personality change is not only
00:28:45.320
possible it's like kind of easy if you commit yourself to it like personalities are a little
00:28:50.840
bit fixed by genetics and environment but not that much people can absolutely change their personalities
00:28:58.520
and people's personalities change all the time in different circumstances right someone listening
00:29:03.800
might know a friend who was really closed off and shy in high school and then just you know found
00:29:09.880
their community in college and suddenly became like a totally more confident person or maybe they knew
00:29:14.520
like some nerd in college who like went off and made a bunch of money in their 20s and 30s and now
00:29:20.040
are very different in many ways personality change happens all the time and a part of it is the
00:29:25.800
recognition that our personalities i think are are much more elastic than we think and sometimes to your
00:29:31.720
point we define ourselves in in very narrow boxes in order to justify our behavior if we don't
00:29:37.960
want to hang out with people oh i'm an introvert that's my concrete unchanging behavior if we're a little
00:29:43.160
bit mean to someone oh i'm just i'm just a little bit neurotic that's just who i am right if we're
00:29:47.720
too much of a hard ass oh you know i'm just a conscientious person i can't help it no you probably
00:29:51.960
can help it personality is incredibly incredibly liquid and it does seem like if people use that
00:29:58.280
liquid nature of their personality to become a little bit more social overall it makes them happier
00:30:03.720
okay so in the book you talk about how men are spending more alone time than women and you talk about
00:30:09.800
this uh trend in which young men on the internet are becoming secular monks what's a secular monk
00:30:17.080
what's going on here so yeah secular monk is not my term uh it's a term that i love from andrew taggart
00:30:23.480
who wrote an essay in the religious journal first things in 2020 and he was describing this group of
00:30:29.800
men who he said seemed to be foregoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto rather than focus their 30s and
00:30:36.440
40s on you know getting married and having kids they were committed to their bodies and their bank
00:30:42.120
accounts and their meditation practice and their coal plunge and he called them secular monks because
00:30:47.240
he said it's interesting that they are on the one hand you know really committed to this idea of like
00:30:52.760
monitored self-control right they want to master like the monkey within right master the demon within
00:30:59.400
and at the same time they aren't particularly religious what they believe in isn't god but you
00:31:04.280
know coal plunges or you know intermittent fasting or meditation boot camps and what i thought was
00:31:10.040
interesting about it is again not that i think coal plunges are bad or meditation is bad but rather that
00:31:15.400
taken to an extreme you can see how this kind of behavior is very lonesome and when i read the essay i
00:31:25.800
really felt this shock of recognition because in the previous months i've been thinking a lot about
00:31:30.120
this sort of tiktok instagram trend that i'd seen where it was basically like men showing off the
00:31:35.480
perfect morning routine and these videos were like all always of a piece it was always like a good
00:31:42.120
looking guy wakes up alone with his eye mask and in a beautifully lit room any journals and he cold
00:31:50.200
plunges and maybe he saunas and he meditates and he works out and all these things happen
00:31:55.720
he eats something ludicrously healthy you know farmed from some you know algae farm in nepal or
00:32:01.800
whatever and all these things happen alone we see him wake up and meditate and journal all alone
00:32:08.200
there's no people in these dioramas of a life perfectly lived and i just thought that was really
00:32:13.240
interesting because if you look at the data the group with the largest increases in alone time
00:32:19.720
are young men and particular young men without a college education and i was just very interested
00:32:27.640
in the possibility that we were building a vision of masculinity that was a bit like a like caveman
00:32:36.120
masculinity it was a set of behaviors that an individual could do alone in a cave in siberia
00:32:44.200
you can wake up you can meditate you can journal you can work out you can do push-ups you can do
00:32:48.840
incline you can do all of that alone in the cave in siberia but you can't be a friend you can't be a
00:32:54.840
dad you can't be a son you can't be a mentor or a mentee all of these relational aspects of masculinity
00:33:04.440
are wiped away in the caveman masculinity depicted in these videos and i've done a bunch of episodes for
00:33:11.480
my podcast plain english about how i think the ultimate expression of 21st masculinity needs to
00:33:17.720
be a more relational masculinity it's not about being strong for yourself it's about being strong
00:33:23.160
for other people and yeah that can mean you know bench pressing your body weight times 2.5 but
00:33:29.720
ultimately the expression of masculinity should be for other people because life is about other people
00:33:35.560
i mean like you know i i don't think that we want to represent the ultimate expression of happiness
00:33:42.760
and strength in the 2020s as being a ripped person who journals perfectly masters the interior weather
00:33:51.480
of their psychology and basically doesn't use it to help anyone other than himself that seems like a
00:33:58.120
really impoverished version of masculinity it's yeah i mean i think if you go back into history even like
00:34:02.680
a couple hundred years ago that was the ideal of masculinity like to be a man was like to be useful
00:34:07.080
to your family to your wider community it's about giving back giving more than you take but yeah it's
00:34:12.840
something about our culture the hyper individualized culture we've gotten away from that and i've seen
00:34:17.720
those videos you mentioned they give off very patrick bateman vibes whenever i watch them i'm like this
00:34:22.840
is weird and i think it's interesting what's ironic about this whole like you know some of these guys
00:34:26.280
call themselves secular monks or they're going into monk mode is that monks yeah they do have there's you
00:34:32.520
know solitude plays i'm talking about real monks solitude is a spiritual practice but most monks live
00:34:37.960
in communities because yes they're looking for that friction and accountability that other people can
00:34:43.160
provide to help them live a disciplined and holy life so yeah if you really want to go into monk mode
00:34:48.840
like you need to be with a bunch of other guys or people who are helping you yeah you need to be in
00:34:54.120
a community if you want to be a real monk yeah totally and then you also talk about how even with
00:34:58.920
these men are spending time alone with self-improvement there still is a lot of depression
00:35:03.320
anxiety despair and something you talk about is men i think all people need this but i think men in
00:35:10.280
particular young men they want to feel needed they want to feel like a group needs them and because
00:35:17.160
they're spending so much time alone and not within a group or community they're not getting that
00:35:21.560
yeah i think neededness is incredibly important and this is uh what richard reeves who's the president of
00:35:26.920
the american institute for boys and men told me he says this is what men need they want to feel
00:35:31.080
essential to their families to their community to their office to their work he said the quote that
00:35:36.600
i that i loved in the piece is quote i think at some level we all need to feel like we're a jigsaw
00:35:42.280
piece that's going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere and it can come from you know this neededness can
00:35:47.080
come from all kinds of directions you know friends children partners colleagues religious congregations
00:35:53.560
but it is again about moving away from this sort of caveman sense of what a man is for and toward
00:35:59.000
a more relational sense of how can i use the strength that i'm building to help other people
00:36:03.720
continuing on young men for every secular monk out there using his alone time to work on his body and
00:36:09.000
productivity there are many more guys out there using their free time alone to engage in sedentary
00:36:15.080
leisure uh what is sedentary leisure yeah so the sociologist liana sayer who is at the university of
00:36:22.040
maryland shared analysis with me about how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and
00:36:27.400
women and the most important most interesting thing is that she divides leisure between engaged which is
00:36:34.760
stuff like socializing or going to a concert or playing a sport and sedentary leisure and sedentary
00:36:39.800
just means like sitting down watching tv playing video games and the largest increase the largest
00:36:45.800
increase the most dramatic thing she found is that single men without kids who have the most leisure time
00:36:51.400
are overwhelmingly likely to spend their leisure time by themselves in solo sedentary leisure so
00:37:00.040
playing video games watching tv looking at your phone and again that's just kind of sad i mean i just
00:37:06.440
think that i don't know these guys so it's it's i don't want to be this you know writer who hops on
00:37:12.760
the horn and just tells people how to live their lives i don't know them i don't know what makes
00:37:16.600
them tick but it really does seem from the best evidence that we have like a life spent alone is
00:37:21.800
a bit of a life wasted we really are made into happier more meaningful people through relationships
00:37:28.120
with other with others and if you know young guys without kids are going to spend most of their time
00:37:33.000
watching tv alone that really does seem like a wasted decade yeah and i imagine there's consequences of
00:37:37.400
that psychosocial physical consequences if you're sitting around doing nothing playing video games you're
00:37:43.560
going to have health consequences obviously psychology you're probably going to be depressed
00:37:48.280
and yeah i mean like all the things we talk about deaths of despair drug use etc all of that serious
00:37:53.240
stuff and this is this is serious but it's also you know a little bit has a little bit levity to it
00:37:58.040
you're also not going to get laid if you spend all of your time at home playing video games and
00:38:01.800
watching tv you do in fact have to go out into the physical world to meet other people at some point
00:38:08.360
and you know i'm very interested separate from this article in the decline of coupling that we're
00:38:13.800
seeing throughout the world it's not just that teens have fewer friends or that teens as you said
00:38:19.160
at the top of the show have reduced their face-to-face socializing with friends by 50 percent people in
00:38:24.200
their 20s are dating less people in their 30s are getting married less and then people in their 40s
00:38:28.840
consequently are having fewer kids something something really big is happening here in terms of the
00:38:33.720
pulling away of people not just the pulling away of sexes but the pulling away of people and i i do
00:38:39.160
wonder to your point whether the behavior of today's young men who are maxing out on solo sedentary
00:38:46.280
time is going to create all sorts of problems for these guys in their 30s and 40s and it could it'll
00:38:52.280
probably have consequences on a society level eventually yeah yeah right yeah i agree i think it
00:38:59.080
could i mean i don't i can't say exactly what those those consequences will be but you know we
00:39:03.080
talked briefly about the political consequences here and it does seem like from research by michael
00:39:07.640
bang peterson who's a danish political scientist uh people who spend more time alone and who have
00:39:13.960
more social isolation are more likely to look to politics as a place of entertainment and he calls
00:39:22.200
these voters um need for chaos voters because what they want most from politics isn't any particular
00:39:28.920
outcome for any particular group what they want is the feeling of chaotic entertainment so that's
00:39:34.040
just one flavor i think of how we could absolutely see some of the changes happening today have real
00:39:42.040
repercussions in the future you say that while some of our social ties are getting weaker some are
00:39:47.080
getting stronger which bonds are getting stronger and which ones are getting weaker yeah so this is
00:39:53.080
probably the part of the essay that was quoted most often back to me uh mark dunkleman who is
00:39:59.640
a researcher at brown university has a great book that just came out called why nothing works i talked
00:40:04.280
to him a couple months ago and he said you know the irony here is that the internet has actually made
00:40:09.240
some of our relationships much stronger i am texting this is mark talking i'm texting my wife
00:40:14.840
all day long um when my daughter buys a butterfingers i know the moment she's bought that
00:40:19.320
butterfingers from cvs because of the credit card data that i have in my phone so in many ways our
00:40:24.680
most intimate relationships are tighter than they used to be and then you think of that as the inner
00:40:28.920
ring of socializing and there's an outer ring of socializing that's sort of like the tribe not the
00:40:33.800
family but the tribe the people in the world who share your affinities and interests so you know
00:40:38.280
maybe if you have favorite sports team and basketball or football it's everyone in the country who's
00:40:43.240
a fan of that team and you're probably following people across the country maybe even across the world
00:40:47.960
who are fans of that particular team certainly if you're you know a fan of english premier league
00:40:53.000
so that's sort of the outer ring of tribe there's a middle ring though of village it's not the people
00:40:58.920
related to or best friends and it's not the people we just like find online and form groups with
00:41:04.120
it's the people who live around us all right it's the village it's our it's our neighbors it's the
00:41:08.520
people we we know when we walk around the street and it's there that our relationships have really
00:41:12.680
atrophied we really know our labor our neighbors uh worse than we used to and one good question is
00:41:18.280
like okay who cares you know what if you just like have friends who aren't your neighbors totally fair
00:41:22.760
question i would say that if the inner circle of family teaches us love and the outer circle of
00:41:29.560
tribe teaches us loyalty the middle ring of village teaches us tolerance it is naturally tolerating to be
00:41:37.160
around people you're not related to who you disagree with a little bit because you're not already best
00:41:42.760
friends and i think that we are losing touch with that village layer and i think it is showing up in
00:41:48.680
a variety of ways in our politics and in sort of the the social fabric yeah we had mark dunkelman on
00:41:54.360
the podcast a long time it was like nine years ago is episode 176 so yeah he wrote that book the
00:41:59.880
vanishing neighbor where he introduces those three rings and i ever since i read that book i think about
00:42:04.520
that all the time that sort of concept about the three rings and i think he's right like that
00:42:09.160
middle ring of village has gotten weaker and you see it in you know just declines in people participating
00:42:15.480
in pta volunteering for organizations and even when you do get in those sorts of things people don't know
00:42:21.720
how to interact like they just yell at each other like you said they haven't practiced the virtue of
00:42:26.360
tolerance yeah and you can see this play out like on next door the app have you used next door before
00:42:32.920
i have and i stopped very quickly because i realized what a cesspool it was well yeah because
00:42:36.760
i think it's a perfect example of how we no longer have the skills to handle like how to live in a
00:42:42.840
village so if you know if you have a problem used to be if it was like 1985 and you had a problem with
00:42:47.880
your neighbor say your neighbor was blowing leaves into your yard well you'd you'd have to go over to
00:42:51.640
your neighbor and calmly say you know i understand you're trying to clean your your yard out but you
00:42:55.720
know can you not blow in my yard people don't do that anymore what they do now is they'll just post it
00:43:00.600
up on next door and just put the person on blast like look at this idiot he's just so inconsiderate
00:43:06.360
and then people are chiming in yeah what a dummy and the middle ring is gone i have a question about
00:43:12.440
next door the people who are commenting what a dummy are they all direct neighbors or are they in
00:43:17.960
some like like where where are they it's like in your sort of an area so when you sign up for next
00:43:22.440
door you can sign up to only get updates within a certain geographic radius so like maybe the
00:43:27.000
neighborhoods around you i see so and so yeah it becomes very polarized some people will just be
00:43:32.520
like yeah like the guy blowing leaves is dumb you're like oh you're a dumb you shouldn't care
00:43:35.960
and it's just like oh my gosh and what's interesting about that is you're taking like the village you're
00:43:40.200
turning it into the tribe right you're essentially taking the relations that would theoretically be
00:43:45.000
neighborly but you're turning them into a social network which creates in groups and out groups um
00:43:51.320
which is not what you want in any pleasant neighborhood yeah it's been a while since i did a full
00:43:56.120
ethnography of next door but um sounds no good it is no good at all i get on there every now and then
00:44:01.960
when i have to sell something yeah i'll get on there and then i'll just kind of check in what's
00:44:05.240
going on like oh no i don't want to go to that feed anymore so yeah the the middle ring we've that
00:44:10.520
the skills of socializing of dealing with people we're not really close with don't have a lot in
00:44:15.720
common with those are atrophying and there's some consequences that you're just neighborhood life
00:44:20.600
isn't as pleasant isn't as productive it has consequences for civic life in your town your city
00:44:26.440
and also you know you can even say our national level with our politics what can be done as
00:44:30.760
individuals to restore a richer social life because it seems like we have all these external factors that
00:44:36.520
are kind of nudging us towards spending more time alone so what can we do to restore a richer social
00:44:43.000
life in our lives yeah fortunately this is easy you know you don't need any medical invention to spend
00:44:49.560
time with other people you don't need any kind of invention at all you just need to choose you need to make
00:44:55.640
different choices you choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone but texting a
00:45:01.160
friend to meet up and then you choose to spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone but
00:45:05.240
texting another friend to meet up and then you spend the next 15 minutes not looking at your phone but
00:45:10.520
rather thinking about how can i create a new habit in my life that puts me around other people rather
00:45:16.600
than puts me on my couch at 7 30 pm every single night it's really easy on the one hand unfortunately
00:45:24.280
it's not so easily done because a lot of these issues are collective action problems and i totally
00:45:29.400
recognize that so if you're a couple and you want to have dinner parties with your couple friends
00:45:35.720
well it's much easier to do that if there's already a habit of dinner parties if there's not
00:45:40.600
a habit of dinner parties then you're going to have a hard time getting people to come over you're
00:45:44.760
going to feel a little bit more embarrassed about you know making the ask and maybe being turned
00:45:48.920
down because people aren't in the habit of going over to each other's houses on thursday nights or
00:45:53.800
friday nights and i get that it's collective action problem but i also think that it's important to
00:45:59.400
give people this sense of agency like the the topics that i'm writing about here are are huge we're
00:46:05.160
talking about national politics and you know things that exist the level of nationwide and planet-wide
00:46:11.400
technologies the automobile and the television set and the smartphone these are big big things and it's
00:46:17.160
ridiculous to ask people to be absolutely amish and just reject all technology but the truth is the
00:46:24.040
amish have a very interesting way of thinking about technology that i learned when i was reporting for
00:46:28.520
this piece they don't just reject all technology that's modern they reject technology that isn't in
00:46:34.120
keeping with their values so they look at a technology and then evaluate it and then choose to accept or
00:46:41.960
reject it depending on whether their virtues are amplified by the use of that technology and it's
00:46:48.120
very interesting i think that the amish probably go way too far i am not interested in becoming
00:46:52.600
amish anytime in the near future but it is very interesting to think about a sort of a mystic approach
00:46:58.360
to one's own life which is to say what if rather than embrace every technology that made our life a
00:47:05.000
little more convenient we instead were really explicit about the values that we had maybe even
00:47:10.840
we wrote them down and said the most important things in my life are my family my child spending
00:47:15.880
time with friends work that's meaningful to me you know a fitness routine that keeps me healthy as long
00:47:21.560
as possible what if you wrote down your values and then only embraced the technology that furthered
00:47:28.040
those values rather than took away from them that might be a way for people who are not amish to
00:47:35.640
inject their lives with just enough amishness that they reorient their living around a set of values
00:47:43.240
rather than a set of dopamine giving devices hey i love that idea that you can change the social
00:47:49.480
texture of your life in just 15 minute blocks so instead of using 15 minutes just to surf instagram
00:47:54.760
mindlessly use that 15 minutes to connect with a friend or make plans to get together and i i really
00:48:01.080
like the idea of just being intentional and going back to that you know the fitness analogy we need
00:48:05.400
to get out of this habit of thinking that i'm only going to hang out or socialize when i feel like it
00:48:10.200
before you know you socialize yeah we've all been there yeah yeah just make it like working out
00:48:15.240
it's like well it's it's six o'clock i don't feel like working out but this is my workout time so i'm
00:48:20.920
gonna go work out anyway and it's the same thing with socializing it's like well there's a party
00:48:25.480
tonight i don't feel like going out tonight but my social muscles need exercising so i'm gonna go
00:48:31.160
anyway this is why i love this analogy of physical fitness to social fitness because what you said i
00:48:36.280
think is really slyly subversive like it's common among people who work out to say you need to commit
00:48:43.880
to the habit because there's going to be days you don't want to do it and you should do it anyway
00:48:48.440
right so the sense that that essentially working out is a little bit like a vegetable you should
00:48:53.560
eat it even when you don't want to i don't think we think of socializing like a vegetable i think
00:48:58.120
we think of socializing like a fruit something that like tastes delicious and if you don't want
00:49:03.080
to have a blueberry that day no one cares no one's gonna scream at you for not having a strawberry
00:49:07.560
on a wednesday but what if we thought of socializing as more like a vegetable more like
00:49:12.520
something that was good for us more like something we should commit to even when we didn't feel like it
00:49:17.080
i think it's a very clever way of subtly recasting this activity that we think of as being sort of
00:49:23.320
frivolous and extraneous as being actually like fundamentally core to a healthy life well lived
00:49:30.600
so we talked about some individual things we can do you mentioned that this is also a collective
00:49:34.360
action problem are there any communal rituals or maybe some new things some things we can implement
00:49:41.080
into our culture to help this along or have you seen anything in the in your research where
00:49:45.480
there are groups communities towns who are cultivating more in-person socializing yeah there's
00:49:52.120
definitely new trends that i'm following you know independent bookstores are booming i think they've
00:49:56.360
had more than 50 growth since 2009 and a lot of them are basically like miniature theaters they've got
00:50:02.680
you know author talks every night and so that's sort of a a new ritual that that's that's starting
00:50:08.920
here where i live near chapel hill north carolina there's a ton of board game cafes and i know the
00:50:14.040
board game cafes are sort of flowering across the country and this is sort of an interesting inversion
00:50:19.640
of the typical trend of american entertainment typically it's like movie theaters where you used to have to
00:50:27.160
drive to the movie theater and now you can just stay home and do the activity with board games
00:50:32.040
they're invented to stay at home and do the activity but these new board game cafes mean you
00:50:36.760
actually drive to a third place in order to play board games to other people i think that's really
00:50:40.840
interesting and it gets people out of their house and and around other people but you know i'm most
00:50:44.920
interested in really really humble rituals i'm interested in rituals uh that are essentially the
00:50:50.120
equivalent of friday night sabbath where you know in the jewish tradition you say a prayer you break the
00:50:57.000
bread you pour some wine you have a meal and that sounds just about fantastic to me and i hope that
00:51:03.000
you know we i think really lovely to have a renaissance in dinner parties you know this is
00:51:07.800
a trend that we actually have data on it the number of dinner parties in america or at least the number
00:51:12.920
of dinner parties people say they go to has been collapsing not just for the last 20 years but really for
00:51:18.360
the last 60 years i mean the cocktail party is practically extinct compared to where it was the
00:51:23.800
1950s 1960s i think it'd be absolutely beautiful to bring that stuff back and that's simple you don't
00:51:29.880
need another building you don't need any other infrastructure all you need is an email and a
00:51:35.320
person willing to send it well derek this has been a great conversation where can people go to
00:51:39.480
learn more about you and your work well there's three places they can find me i'm a staff writer for
00:51:43.640
the atlantic i host a podcast plain english with derek thompson with the ringer podcast network
00:51:49.080
and march 18th i have a book coming out called abundance co-written with ezra klein about the
00:51:55.880
future of american progress and if you like some of what you've heard today i think you'd love the book
00:52:01.800
fantastic well derek thompson thanks for time it's been a pleasure thank you my guest name is derek
00:52:06.200
thompson he recently wrote a piece for the atlantic called the antisocial century you can find
00:52:09.800
that at the atlantic check out our show notes at awim.is alone we find links to resources we
00:52:14.440
delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to
00:52:26.200
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00:52:30.600
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00:52:33.960
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