The pandemic of loneliness and polarisation

Teen loneliness machine

The tech ecosystem that surrounds today’s teens is fueling loneliness.

• • Why it matters: It’s a dangerous environment for a generation that’s already sad and stressed. And it’s more difficult than ever for their parents, teachers and coaches to understand and help them, Axios’ Erica Pandey writes.

📈 The big picture: Data shows that teens are spending less time hanging out with friends in person, and more time on their devices.

• • America’s 15- to 24-year-olds spend 35% less time socializing face-to-face than they did 20 years ago, The Atlantic reports.
  • Instead, American kids and teenagers spend nearly six hours a day looking at screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative.

We hate each other thanks to social media.

While we hate each other more than ever before, we are more lonely than we have ever been before.

We are lonely,  more depressed and sicker.

Our loneliness, our depression, our sickness are all fomenting the spin of social media hate algorithms which only further polarise our debate into All Tribe and No Village politics.

I think we are a clever ape who has evolved over 300 000 years. Because we have to compete against other sentient and self conscious clever apes and work with them as groups so our intelligence and ability to use tools could change our environment, we have had to bond and understand each other over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

When we meet in person, our bodies and brains and taking in millions of different details subconsciously and we are working each other out through facial cues, pheromones, gait, stance, smiles, eye contact, etc etc etc: we have taken those 300 000  years of evolution and replaced that  with flat screen interaction where we lose all that unseen evolutionary advantage and instead become brainwashed and trapped in rabbit holes of demented reality.

Flat screen interaction is warping our human capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t because we don’t have that sense of the person in front of us and all the million ways we asses each other in our evolved brain.

We have become an ocean of spite and resentment in an All Tribe No Village politics distorted by social media hate algorithms because 300 000 years of evolution can’t work in a flat screen interaction loneliness.

 

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