Читать книгу Stop Being Lonely - Kira Asatryan - Страница 11
ОглавлениеBefore we dive into the specifics of how to cultivate closeness, we need to understand what’s causing this new type of loneliness. Understanding the problem helps us to invent better solutions.
We are not experiencing this new type of loneliness because we are somehow worse people than our ancestors were. We are not intrinsically more distant from one another; we are not inherently more reserved. In fact, we probably yearn for closeness more than past generations did.
We are experiencing this loneliness — more and more every year — because our social environment is changing rapidly in ways that hinder the natural generation of closeness. Our social world is very different from what it was in the past. Most young people leave their hometowns for better opportunities, living with family past a certain age is considered a failure, and big commitments such as marriage and having children are being delayed longer than they ever have before. These interruptions in our childhood relationships, coupled with a delay in forming adult relationships, profoundly affect how much closeness we feel is available to us.
While these social changes certainly matter, the single biggest environmental change to affect our levels of loneliness is the proliferation of personal technology. I believe this is the biggest factor — by far. Technology has never been so much a part of our lives as it is now. It has never been so integrated into our routines, our reasoning, and our relationships. The products of personal technology — specifically the internet, mobile phones, and social networks — are always in our homes and in our hands. They are always on our minds.
Personal technology has undoubtedly provided us with advances too numerous to list here. You can probably think of a dozen ways your phone and the internet have made your life better. But I propose that personal technology has also built obstacles into our social lives that prevent the natural generation of closeness between people. The bad news is that this means you will need to make a conscious effort to overcome these obstacles. The good news is that your loneliness is really, truly not your fault.
You are not lonely because you are less likable than your grandparents were. You are not lonely because you are flawed. You are lonely primarily because your environment is working against you.
There are three specific ways in which technology is making it harder for us to get — and stay — close:
1. Mediated interaction (interaction through a device) is becoming the norm.
2. Technology is teaching us certain lessons that are not helpful for creating closeness.
3. Technology is reducing our natural opportunities to get close.
Let’s talk a little about each one.
Obstacle 1: Mediated Interaction
More and more, our default mode of interacting with one another is through a mediator — a device. This is the first way in which personal technology is putting up roadblocks to closeness: it is making mediated interaction the norm. Mediated interaction, by definition, is not direct access to one another. Remember, closeness is defined as direct access to another person’s inner world. The more we replace in-person closeness with mediated interaction, the harder it is to understand anyone else’s inner world — or for them to understand yours.
If mediated interaction were simply making a phone call or video chatting while saving up for a plane ticket to visit friends and family, I wouldn’t see it as exacerbating loneliness. Technology is extremely useful for keeping relationships going in between periods of in-person togetherness. The issue is that mediated interaction is replacing in-person togetherness. Phone calls and video chats become a problem when they start replacing plane tickets all together.
One type of mediated interaction that deserves special attention here is social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, to name just a few. In some ways the combination of mobile phones and social networks is the perfect storm of mediated interaction. It feels so much like you have people around. You can feel as if you are carrying people around in your pocket at all times. But is this ability really making you happy? Is it really making you feel less alone?
Tell me you haven’t felt disappointed when someone close to you posts on your Facebook wall instead of calling to wish you a happy birthday. Tell me you haven’t found it annoying when someone repeatedly “likes” your Instagram posts while simultaneously ignoring your attempts to hang out. Maybe you’ve gotten excited about someone you met on a social network, only to find out it was all smoke and mirrors. We’ve all received an email or text from a friend with an odd tension to it. It’s too short or too brusque, or just . . . off. A slightly accusatory tone? Maybe she’s mad at me. She’s mad. I’m pretty sure she is.
These are the barriers — the mental and emotional ones — we sense even after all practical barriers have been removed. It feels as if there are barriers because of our core point here: we do not really have direct access to one another.
We cannot feel what another person is feeling over Instagram. We cannot understand what our friend is thinking over Pinterest. We cannot embrace each other over Skype. You cannot really know and care through a screen.
Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are a more innocent result of technology’s lack of direct access. A more nefarious result is intentional secrecy. It’s been proven that everyone lies on online dating profiles, but generally just a little bit — an inch of height here and a few pounds there — nothing important. And it’s not as if people can’t lie in person; they certainly can. But they can’t lie nearly as much in person as they can online.
The secrecy afforded by technology has become something of a novelty. We’ve never been allowed to be this anonymous with one another before, and we’re starting to see anonymity as a fun pastime.
Just nine months after its launch, a mobile app called Secret raised $35 million in funding. Secret is exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to tell your friends (and friends-of-friends and neighbors) your secrets, while remaining anonymous. The company that created a similar app — Whisper — was named one of “the World’s Most Innovative Companies in Social Media” by Fast Company in 2014. Secret’s tagline says it all: “Share anonymously with friends, co-workers and people nearby. Find out what your friends are really thinking and feeling.”
Find out what your friends are really thinking and feeling. It’s a mind-boggling statement, when you think about it. It implies that somehow, despite our unprecedented levels of access to one another, we actually know less about what we are all really thinking and feeling.
These anonymous apps are not the only social media that make our interactions flimsier. The king of the fleeting interaction and fastest-growing app of 2014 — Snapchat — allows messages to be viewed for only ten seconds or less. Sobrr, one of the fastest-growing seed companies of 2014, enables “users to create ephemeral online friendships through messaging and photo sharing. These 24-hour friendships expire unless both parties agree to continue.”
Are these apps fun and entertaining? Yes. Are they popular? Definitely. Do they function in a way that’s inherently dysfunctional for communicating about anything that matters? I’d say so. Are they helping us build satisfying relationships? Not really.
Mediated interaction can be treacherous. In essence, it gives you the sensation of having more people around you than are physically present. Social networks can convince you that you have people in your life. This makes it all the more disturbing if you then wake up one day and find yourself profoundly lonely.
Luckily, the way to overcome the obstacle of mediated interaction is relatively simple: we need to view mediated interaction as something we use in service of in-person interaction. Technology should not be shunned — quite the opposite! Used in the right way, connecting via technology can help you have more closeness in your life. It just depends on how you use it.
The first step in using technological connectedness in service of closeness is adding layers of communication back in. Even when we’re doing our best to be honest and straightforward, connecting through an intermediary — a chat client, for example — removes layers of communication that people need in order to get to know one another well.
The value of voice tone, body language, facial expression, and emotional signals should not be underestimated. By some accounts, nonexplicit communication makes up 93 percent of the messages we receive. If you have a choice between simple words and words plus voice tone, go with the more layered choice. If you can add facial expression in, go for it. The more layers the better.
I also recommend reserving technological connectedness for maintaining an already close relationship, as opposed to using technology to create one. It’s extremely difficult to do the work of knowing and caring if you and the other person are not in the same physical space. But devices do remove many of the limitations of distance, travel, time zones, and overall busy lives. If used in the right way, they can help keep your hearts and minds close while your physical selves are distant.
Obstacle 2: The Lessons Technology Is Teaching Us
The second way in which technology is getting in the way of closeness is that it’s changing the way we think. Many of us — particularly those of us in the Millennial generation — feel that computers and mobile phones have helped to educate us about the world. While we may believe our computers and phones are just gadgets — nothing more than glorified toys — this really is not the case. Computers are not just gadgets. Computers are our teachers.
The more we interact with our personal technology, the more we develop what I call a “technology mind-set.” This mind-set does not stop influencing us when we put down our phones. When we are constantly learning lessons about how to interact using our devices, those lessons spill over into our face-to-face interactions with people. Unfortunately, many of the lessons we’re learning are not helpful for creating closeness with real people in real life.
The primary lesson we are learning from technology — one that is particularly unhelpful in creating closeness — is the principle of efficiency. Google defines the word efficient as “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” This principle is core to making a good personal technology product. Think of how efficient interacting with your iPhone can be. You have to do exceptionally little to get what you want out of your phone. When we’re required to perform an extra step to find the thing we’re looking for, the annoyance we often feel is palpable.
Efficiency is a wonderful principle for making great tech products. The issue is that nothing lives in isolation. As we integrate these products deeper into our lives, the central principle they were built around — efficiency — seeps deeper and deeper into our minds. The more we expect perfect efficiency from interactions with our phones, the less patience we have for interactions with people.
My hometown in Silicon Valley has embraced the values of technology more completely than anywhere else, but we are not alone. People may not realize it, but the values of their iPhones have influenced their own values — and by extension the way they think about relationships. Interaction should be useful. It should get you closer to something you want — something beyond the interaction itself. And if you think it’ll be a waste of time or energy, you shouldn’t bother.
These values have prompted many of us to be much more wary of “unnecessary” human interaction. People might slow you down or just add a layer of annoyance to your day — like an extra step to open your camera on your phone. In the business of making successful devices, this is probably the right way to think. But what is this mind-set doing to our relationships? What is it doing to our hearts?
If removing unnecessary interactions left us with more time and energy to pursue meaningful interactions, this way of thinking would not pose much of a challenge to relationships. It could even improve them! Weeding out the most superficial interactions could leave more energy for deeper, closer ones.
But if that were the reality, we’d see an increase in the number of deeper relationships being reported . . . and we don’t. A comprehensive study published by AARP The Magazine in 2010 found that 35 percent of adults over the age of forty-five were chronically lonely, as opposed to only 20 percent in the 1980s.
And the numbers are even more dramatic for Millennials — those born between 1981 and 1997 — since they are the generation most entrenched in personal technology. Also in 2010 the Mental Health Foundation published a “Lonely Society” report, which found that “nearly 60% of those aged 18 to 34 questioned spoke of feeling lonely often or sometimes, compared to 35% of those aged over 55.” The report called the generational differences “striking.”
The reality is, the types of human interactions that generate closeness and reduce loneliness are not terribly efficient. . .and measuring the success of a human interaction by that benchmark helps to keep us lonely. We will need to unlearn some of the lessons technology has taught us in recent decades and relearn how to get close to one another.
Obstacle 3: Reduction of Our Natural Opportunities to Get Close
Beyond changing the way we think, technology is propagating yet another obstacle to closeness: it has unwittingly reduced our opportunities for getting close through natural circumstances. We really don’t need to interact with people much anymore. When it comes to getting essentials done — eating, shopping for goods, cleaning our clothes, getting around town — we can handle almost every task on our own.
In past generations, friendships and other kinds of relationships would arise organically when we ran into one another in our communities. But today we no longer need to be in our physical communities. We don’t need to go to a restaurant, since we can have our food delivered. We don’t need to go to a classroom to take a class, since we can take the class online. We don’t need to shop in stores, since we can order everything from Amazon. We don’t even need to go to a workplace to work.
As someone who’s lived and worked in Silicon Valley my whole life, I’ve seen the effect of this trend firsthand. In the modern workplace — the one championed by Silicon Valley — remote working is customary. Even the smallest start-ups have at least some employees working remotely at all times. As the tools and technology for remote working improve, teams can certainly complete their projects despite physical separation. The work will get done. But how is the slow dissolution of our work communities affecting us? How does it feel to work with people you can’t really get to know?
When I ponder these questions, I think of the time Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, ordered all employees who worked remotely to get back into the office or face termination. The move was criticized as a step backward for the modern workplace. How could a technology company reject the very advances it had helped to create?
Yet if you spoke to anyone who worked at Yahoo! at the time (as I did), you’d hear nothing but praise for the decision. As my friend who worked on Yahoo!’s mobile team put it, “The remote workers really were like nonentities. I would email these people every day and have calls with them every week, but if they’d passed me on the street I’d never have known it was them. It’s hard to make a company culture with ghosts.”
Of course, there are undeniable benefits to working from home, especially for parents. Most employers recognize these benefits and have encouraged more and more of their employees to work remotely. But while the benefits of remote working are undeniable, it’s also hard to deny that it’s substantially harder to get to know or start to care about coworkers when you never see them. I don’t imagine any former on-site employee would say he felt closer to his coworkers after he moved off-site.
And maybe you don’t even want to; after all, it’s not required to have a warm, close relationship with your colleagues. But what if you did? Wouldn’t it feel wonderful to know you had at least a few people available between 9:00 and 5:00, Monday through Friday, to talk to about something that matters? If you were not close to any of your coworkers, wouldn’t that be a missed opportunity?
Work may be just one missed opportunity for close relationships — one that we could theoretically make up for in other areas of our lives. If working from home increased closeness within our family, there would be little effect on our overall loneliness levels. The problem is that technology is erasing many of our opportunities to get close — so many that we hardly know where to find any organic opportunities at all.
For these missed opportunities, seen as small sacrifices for the larger benefit of a more efficient life, really do add up. It is harder to make friends when you don’t get coffee with your coworkers before your morning meeting. It is harder to have a magical moment with a stranger when you never meet any strangers. You will be lonelier if you never see anyone face-to-face.
This lack of organic opportunities for closeness is a huge part of why you’re struggling with loneliness. The good news is that you have it within you to create new opportunities. The people who will someday know you well and care about you deeply are already out there. Let’s learn how to find them!
Questions for Reflection
• When you’re feeling lonely, what do you do to comfort yourself? Do any of these strategies involve your computer or your phone?
• Which relationship in your life — new or old — needs to be taken off-line?
• In what area of your life could you start creating opportunities for more closeness?
An Exercise to Challenge Yourself
Pick a way to limit your device time that still works with your lifestyle. Some ideas include “device bedtime” — turning your devices off after 9:00 each evening; “device Sabbath” — turning your devices off on Saturdays or Sundays (or any other day that feels right to you); and “device sabbatical” — taking a full week off from technology once or twice a year.
Chapter Summary
We are not lonely because we are flawed; our tech-centric environment is working against us in three specific ways:
1. It promotes mediated access, not direct access. More and more, interacting with other people through a device is becoming the norm and is replacing in-person interaction. This poses a problem because it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to access each other’s inner worlds through a device.
2. It is teaching us new and unhelpful lessons about how to interact. Tech products value efficiency above all else. Because we interact with tech products so much now, we are learning to believe all interactions should be efficient above all else — a technology mind-set that does not lend itself well to creating closeness.
3. It is reducing our natural opportunities to get close. Technology has made it so that we no longer need people the way we once did. We no longer need to be in our physical communities the way we once did. This reduces spontaneous opportunities to get close to others.
