Here's my photo for social media:
For years now, my wife has wondered why I'm always on Facebook so much. I didn't know the answer to that until I read this book.
Even before Facebook and other forms of social media, there were blogs. And I was hooked on them. Before that, internet chat rooms and USENET. Yeah, I'm showing my age. Fucking USENET, people. Back in the days when dial up modems were your only option, and it took fifteen minutes for a teenage boy to download a pic of a nipple.
But there was a brief period when I wasn't hooked on any of these. From about the time I was sixteen until the time I left the Army. Like many people, I used the internet to communicate with family when overseas (as well as meet women on dating sites for when I inevitably returned home, as I was single at the time), but other than that, the internet wasn't that big of a deal for me. I wasn't using it as some form of socialization.
In my early teenage years, in my days before karate and weightlifting, I was bullied a lot. Like, a lot. The internet was in its infancy and my mom got a computer with an AOL account, so I used that to socialize. It helped to deal with being an outcast in school.
In high school, things were dramatically different. I fell into a group of friends, I wasn't bullied anymore (because of the whole karate thing, mostly), so I didn't spend much time online unless it was to look up new bands or (hey, I was young, dammit!) to spend fifteen minutes downloading a pic of a nipple. Occasionally I'd look for martial arts wisdom as well. Nothing but using the internet for what it was intended. Looking up information and porn.
In the Army, you're forced to socialize. Privacy begins and ends when you take a shit in a bathroom stall. I'm not exaggerating. That's the only time you get to be alone. You're required to communicate with people. Because of that, you're also forced to make nice with all sorts of people as well. So the Army forces real life socialization.
Some time after leaving the Army, that changed for me. I started using social media more and more to communicate with people. Many of my best friends are on Facebook. The years passed and friends in real life drifted away, but my buddies online were always there.
And then I had kids, and I had no time to see friends in real life at all. And then my wife wonders why I'm spending all my time on Facebook, and I don't know. I just know that I don't want to be without it. Ever.
And now I get why I'm always on it, and why I'm constantly depressed. I'm lonely.
Before Hari starts talking about social media and internet addiction, he cites a scientist that studied the effects of loneliness on the human body. He found that feeling lonely causes the cortisol hormone in one's body to soar to the same level as being physically assaulted. As Hari put it, "It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger." It has the same effect on your health as being obese. It causes weakening of the immune system. It just sucks all around.
Not only that, but loneliness makes it even harder to make friends and break the cycle of loneliness. When you start to feel isolated, it causes you to to withdraw even further. It's a part of our evolution. If we're isolated, we begin to see threats much more easily, and often times when they're not even there. We feel insulted or judged when there was no intention to do either on the part of the other person. It's a cycle that causes more isolation and more loneliness. In fact, as the book says, for someone that has spent their life in loneliness and isolation, it takes even more love and respect from other people to bring them out of it than a more outgoing and social person would need. And that's a lot of emotional labor that most people don't want to spend on a stranger.
It wasn't just the creation of social media that caused this. Since the 1980s, there's been a steady decline of social engagement among society. Hari cites one example given by the researchers he interviewed: Bowling. In decades past, people would join leagues to bowl. Nowadays, the average bowler goes by themselves. Active involvement in community organizations fell 45%.
So many of us have turned to social media as a sort of band-aid to deal with the lack of real-world socialization. But Johann Hari compares it to the difference between porn and actual sex. It creates a short term fix, but you need the real thing to be truly satisfied. Hari, when interviewing one of the first therapists for internet addiction, that we've become more accustomed to using the internet as a means of communicating with friends, but what we really need is face to face communication. The internet just isn't the same.
Hari outlined a solution in chapter 17. He talked to a therapist that told a story of a woman that came to him because she was depressed. She was very lonely. So he put her in an experimental program in which she would work with a group of people twice a week in a community garden. The people, who were all suffering from mental health issues, were to build a community garden entirely from scratch. They had to meet twice a week to learn how to garden, to plan the garden, and build the garden. The results were, well, I'll let Hari tell it himself:
So some of you may be wondering, "If this is why you're so depressed, why didn't you discuss this first?"
Well, I had to take the time to discuss how economic factors make people depressed because as I learned about social prescribing, I decided to look into it myself. Try to find like minded groups of people that I could meet up with. I'm still very passionate about politics, so I decided to look up my local DSA chapter to meet up with leftists and find people I have things in common with. I looked at things involving fitness. And I looked and I looked, until I realized, I don't have time for any of these things.
I work nights, and I work almost every weekend. Guess when most of these social gatherings take place? When I'm either stuck at work, or sleeping.
The workplace condition and the social decline in this country are intertwined. In the 1980s, a concept called "neoliberalism" began to take hold. It's what's commonly known as "trickle-down economics". It goes against human nature. We're tribal creatures. We learned to survive for millennia upon millennia by banding together in tribes and working together, but now our economic social condition teaches us that we're all on our own. We're supposed to be able to handle everything ourselves, and if we don't, it means we're weak. And so instead of banding together and demanding better working and living conditions as we did in the past, we try to do it all on our own. We hustle harder. We work longer hours and take the lower wage because we have no means to increase our wage, and that causes us to live at our jobs. We're socially isolating ourselves so that we can afford to pay bills and die. And when someone comes along and talks about a solution to work collectively to make things better, we're told it's just socialism.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but it almost seems like the people that pushed neoliberalism designed it with social isolation in mind.
Well, that starts to make socialism sound pretty good, doesn't it? I mean, you have one side that has embraced some of the absolute worst elements of capitalism screaming, "Fuck you! You're on your own! I don't care if you starve!", and then you have the socialists saying, "We should work together to make the world less shitty and make sure your basic economic needs are met." If millennials and generation z are starting to embrace socialism, the reason for that is pretty obvious.
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