Understanding the Age of Loneliness
Discussion between Mattias Desmet and Aron Kheriaty
As the time when we will go back to office is coming very quickly, I want to give some comments on the recent interview on American Thought Leaders where Mattias Desmet and Aron Kheriaty discussing the current problems of loneliness. This topic is very important and I think it even explains how the covid psyops happened.
There has been many said and we need more deeper discussions like this.
Just from my viewpoint as I have experienced it on first hand few comments:
Please understand, that our generation grew up on the Internet as main platform to keep contact and then to earn living. It was our parents, who created accounts for us and give us into hand smartphone together with tablets. They were too busy with their own problems in social life - like divorces or bad family relationships so they wanted kids to not disturb them. Internet for us become authoritative source of wisdom and guidance. Temple of Google (I can't find the book now but it’s similar to this).
We didn't know, how unsafe the Internet is and how addictive it can be. It was a lot of fun, we could talk with our friends, share whatever we wanted, post memes and make jokes. We believed that people somewhere secured it for us and what we use is really how it presents to us.
The real problem became when the generation that builds these things decided to use them for political and commercial purposes. It wasn't anymore some virtual world, where you could do whatever you wanted but it become area where politicans were sharing their commands and influencers got paid huge money, gathering your data and tracking you. Most notably it was the Influencers, Bitcoin and the Politization of Social Networks.
Nobody really notified the users who lived in their own small echo chambers, that this is happening. The dialog in society was already broken as we communicated online and we were exhausted. We didn't know that but around 2019 we were hyper-socializing. I also didn't know that but there is limit, how many people you can congnitively manage to have as friends. It’s called Dunbar’s Number and he claim that maximum is around 150 friends. I used to have around 700 friends on Facebook - from high-school, university, abroad and others. Not mentioning other networks and physical connections. We feared the FOMO - losing the connections if you don't active them after some time.
Then also our parents joined on Social Networks and started to adopt the teenager style of talking and sharing informations - there is song “My Mom is on Facebook”. And then it become really strange. You couldn't refuse to connect with people as it would be consider rude to ignore them, when they found your account. But if you continue to sharing what you liked with group before, it didn't worked. It wasn't for all anymore as the people who were in your friend circle, were from different background and social spheres. They merged the worlds of teenagers and adults.
So you started to censor your opinions and share only something. But everything was happening so fast, that you never had again chance to meet the people physically. Everyone was on different place, going to university, moving, finding house, graduating and others. All was speeding up. I even tried around 2016 to get away from the Social Networks but it doesn't matter, if you remove your self from the hyper-social group they will continue, it won't slow them down. This might be the point, where the mass-formation even begun. You can get away from the mass but the mass will continue as enough of people will give them approval, that everything is fine there and the person who pointing out some dangers is just silly. It’s free, everyone is there so why do you making problems? Everyone is using it, so it can't be bad.
And then Covid Lockdown came. It was bad even before but with this, there was no more ways how to stop it. Any idiocy which would appear to be trending would be adopted by the crowd. For example like “Harlem - Shake”. Similar with BitCoin religion - people are using it, there are TedTalks and it’s new religion so you are just stupid if Internet says that. Of course politics and secret services spiced it up.
The rest is just history. In essence we completely lost any friendship circles we had. Specially during covid and due to the Twitter Trump and Woke war. The people prioritized connections online above any real groups. But that happened already around 2014. And the thinking was, I have my own group chat, my friends in my phone. Why should I spend my time talking or trying to understand strangers, I can just write to my group and we will gather. That was the main point, when we started to exclude others physically in favor of online groups.
Please understand, the social connections we had via online network were real. I even experienced break-up due to my girlfriend finding something on Facebook. And it can really wreck your whole life. Also if you have connection to someone online, it was real. You could just write “Hi, do you want to go to coffee?” and in one hour you could happily chat and enjoy evening.
The problem was indeed narcissism. We have this magical power of society on click so why to bother with real world? If this person have some problems, I don't want to deal with them, I can just ignore it or mute it. Another of my friends are partying so I will just join them and pretend, that I didn't see his message. Of course, people started to abuse it, they crossed the boundaries, rules and others. But the main problem was, that society didn't reacted to any of this problems. Nobody cared, adults or parents just simply completely resigned on what they have created at first place.
In Prague it ended up with mass-shooting last year. Probably now the narcissism personalities understood this message and hopefully we are past that. I really hope.
We all now have trauma from the online world I would say. Let’s imagine that you have real friendship relationship with someone or love relationship and then you discover that your broke up only because you liked someone post accidentally or someone took your phone and wrote something. There is huge anger and despair in many people. Specially after covid-lockdown as well. I am not surprised, that Mark Zuckerberg builds a bunker and the IT guys are hated. They did it to us and they were the one, who broke the promises and sold us as products.
But we have to continue, I do believe that there is no other way out. We have to talk about all what they created and how it harmed us or what problems they created.
We can be fixed and we can reconnect. But as with any addicted person, we need to get our dopamine, our memes and our brain needs to be activated. We just need different model which we adopted in 2010 and that means, that we share it between friends! Not for money or political message. We share it between people we know and like. Our messages are substitution for time when we can not be physically together but the whole purpose of communication via messaging is to talk and then eventually created some event or something where people will meet physically.
That was the whole purpose of online connections in first place.
I didn't even mentioned the Social Dilema, Tinder, Netflix AirBnB and others. But we need to continue and remove people from broken social networks and establish in real life connection to them via channels, which are not broken. And explain to them, what happened. This will fix society. Also of course religion is better than belief in all powerful Internet for sure.