AI transcript
– Okay, business leaders, are you here to play
or are you playing to win?
If you’re in it to win, meet your next MVP.
NetSuite by Oracle.
NetSuite is your full business management system
in one convenient suite.
With NetSuite, you’re running your accounting,
your finance, your HR, your e-commerce,
and more all from your online dashboard.
Upgrade your playbook and make the switch to NetSuite,
the number one cloud ERP.
Get the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning
at netsuite.com/vox, netsuite.com/vox.
– Thumbtack presents the ins and outs
of caring for your home.
Out, procrastination, putting it off,
kicking the can down the road.
In, plans and guides that make it easy
to get home projects done.
Out, carpet in the bathroom, like why.
In, knowing what to do, when to do it,
and who to hire.
Start caring for your home with confidence.
Download Thumbtack today.
– You’ve no doubt heard the phrase
loneliness epidemic many times.
But what does it mean to say
that there’s a loneliness problem?
More to the point, what does it mean to be lonely?
At the very least, loneliness implies two things.
One, that you’re alone.
And two, that you don’t wanna be.
That second part is important.
To feel lonely is to yearn for connection and company.
If you don’t wanna connect with someone else,
you’re alone, but you’re not lonely.
Here’s a question we haven’t really asked
in these conversations about loneliness.
Are Americans alone because they don’t have anywhere to go
or they don’t have anyone to go with?
Or are they choosing to be alone?
And if they’re choosing to be alone,
even when we know that’s not good for us,
why are they doing this?
And what does it mean long-term for society?
I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Great Area.
Today’s guest is Derek Thompson.
Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic
and the author of a recent essay called
The Antisocial Century.
The piece challenges the conventional wisdom
around loneliness.
Derek gathers a ton of data, much of it alarming,
and concludes that we’ve mostly
misunderstood the situation here.
It’s not that we’ve become lonely.
It’s that we’ve started to prefer solitude.
We’ve become antisocial,
and that’s a very different kind of problem.
One, we absolutely have to solve as a country.
So I invited Derek on the show
to talk about what he discovered
and why he thinks self-imposed solitude
might just be the most important social fact
of the 21st century in America.
Derek Thompson, welcome back to the show.
It’s great to be here.
Thank you, Sean.
Everyone’s been saying for years now
that we have a loneliness epidemic,
and you think that’s not quite right.
So tell me what’s actually going on.
So it’s probably worth defining loneliness.
Loneliness as the sociologist that I talked to,
in particular NYU’s Eric Kleinberg,
is a very healthy thing to feel.
Loneliness is the felt gap
between the social connection that you have
and the social connection that you want.
And so when I’m home working a lot,
taking care of my kid,
not hanging out with friends that’s at my house,
sometimes I feel lonely,
and that inspires me to reach out to my friends
and hang out with them, get a drink.
But something else, I think,
is the social crisis of this moment
and this century for America, and that’s social isolation.
If you’re spending more and more time alone,
year after year after year,
and you are choosing to socially isolate yourself,
and you’re even, in many cases,
as I see sometimes happening on TikTok,
celebrating when your friends cancel plans
because it means you can add another heaping scoop
of a lone time on top of the historic amounts
of a lone time they’re already spending,
well, my feeling is that’s not loneliness.
That is a choice to socially isolate more and more,
month after month, year after year,
even decade after decade.
This is not loneliness,
and the last thing I would say is,
if you choose to see this moment as a loneliness epidemic,
you have a research problem, you have an empirical problem,
because right now, two things are true from the numbers.
Number one, we spend a historic amount of time alone,
and number two, it doesn’t seem like for many Americans,
loneliness is spiking at the same rate
that social isolation is spiking.
What we have is not a crisis of loneliness
as it is broadly understood,
but actually something much more gnarly,
something much more toxic,
and actually something much stranger
than a mere crisis of loneliness.
– Well, just so we have a point of reference,
give me a sobering stat here.
How much more time are people spending alone,
relative to how much time we used to spend alone
10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago?
– So between the 1960s and the 1990s,
Americans were withdrawing from all kinds of associations
and clubs, this was the thesis of and point
of Robert Putnam’s book, “Bowling Alone.”
But in the last 25 years,
the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been running a survey
called the American Time Use Survey,
which asks Americans a bunch of questions
about how they spend their week.
How much time do you spend sleeping?
How much time do you spend eating dinner?
And they also ask how much time do you spend
in face-to-face socializing?
And the amount of time that all Americans spend,
the average American spends in face-to-face socializing
is declined by over 20% in the last 25 years.
For some groups, like black men and young people overall,
the decline is more like 40%,
negative 40% face-to-face socializing
over the last 20, 25 years.
So that brings us to a point now where there is no period
in modern historical record,
going back to the mid-1960s at least,
and probably going back decades before then,
that we have spent so much time by ourselves.
– And how does this break down across class lines?
Are we seeing the same trends across class lines?
Or are there noteworthy differences?
And if there are, why might that be?
– So what I would say is,
as a matter of sort of coming to a firm answer
to this question, is this an income-based phenomenon?
Is maybe, but because the best data we have,
it doesn’t have very large sample sizes
for the richest and poorest Americans,
it’s hard to say that this is a fact,
the same way we can say that it’s a fact
that for all Americans,
face-to-face socializing is at its lowest point
in 25 years or maybe 60, 100 years,
and a lone time is at its highest.
– Well, I just wanted to ask,
because we have a tendency to talk about
upper-class problems as though they are universal problems,
and this ain’t that, whatever else it is, it’s not that.
– I think it’s really important to say that,
you’re exactly right,
especially I would say in this space,
in talking about the way we live today,
the problems of modernity,
always very difficult to avoid the temptation
to talk about the upper middle class
as if they are representative of the entire country.
So when we talk about the problems of intensive parenting
or anxiety, college-based anxiety for kids,
a lot of times those fears are about
a large part of the country that is not all of the country.
In this case, however,
you will find that face-to-face socializing
is declining for men and for women,
for literally every age cohort,
the young and the old,
for white and black and Hispanic Americans,
for the bottom quartile, for the top quartile,
for married Americans, for unmarried Americans,
for college graduates, for non-high school graduates,
this is something that is absolutely happening to everybody.
And so therefore, if you want to understand it,
I think we need to look for causes
that are more universal than income inequality.
– So why was the first half of the 20th century so social?
What changed around the ’70s?
And why is the answer clearly neoliberalism?
– And why is the answer clearly
the election of Ronald Reagan?
So the simplest way to summarize what happened
is that there was a revolution of individualism
that struck this country
and affected it at many different levels,
at the political economy level, at the social level,
and it ended, as you said, a very social century.
Between the 1910s and the 1950s and early ’60s, certainly,
just about every measure of sociality in this country
was rising.
The marriage rate spiked in the middle of the 20th century.
Fertility rates spiked in an incredibly unusual way.
You had a surge in unionization rates.
You had more associations created, more clubs created.
So by so many different measures,
socializing was surging in the middle of the 20th century,
and that ended.
And I think that among many, many things,
two things that ended it
were the two most important technologies of the 20th century.
The first was the car that allowed us to privatize our lives
and move away from other people.
And the second was the television,
which allowed us to privatize our leisure time
so that we could spend it alone looking at a screen
and not necessarily spend it throwing a dinner party.
– Well, you talk to a psychologist,
you talk to a sociologist.
Why do we choose solitude?
If we know it, it won’t make us happy in the long term.
And I say we know not just in the sense
that there’s a lot of research telling us so,
but we all pretty much know this from lived experience,
as tempting as it is to stay home and Netflix or whatever.
Most of the time we all feel better
once we actually get out of the house
and spend time with friends.
So what’s behind this pathological behavior?
– I think it’s a very good and a very complex question.
And the first thing I’d say is that
we do things that we know aren’t good for us all the time.
You know, this is the whole problem with nutrition,
is that you have people coming up
with ever more complicated ways
of explaining what’s good for us,
but you inject anybody in the world with truth serum
and you say, you know, is the Twixbar good for you?
Is going to the gym good for you?
Is celery good for you?
Everyone knows the answers to these questions,
so the problem is actualizing the answers in your behavior
because we’re cross-purpose machines
and the relevant cross-pressure
is that we are dopamine-seeking creatures
and we’re also interpersonal creatures, we’re social animals.
And sometimes those drives
are totally a cross-purpose with each other
that seeking dopamine in the most efficient way
necessarily means not spending time around people, right?
Like if I were trying, for example,
to simply solicit as much dopamine as possible
and be surrounded by maximal stimulative novelty
as much as possible on a minute-to-minute basis,
what would I do?
I would never leave my house.
Our homes are so much more comfortable than they used to be.
They’re so much more diverting than they used to be
with their television sets and their smartphones
and their speaker systems and their streaming and their cable.
There’s so much that is interesting that we can do
just staying at home.
And so I think many people just do.
Now, I’m not here to say the television’s evil.
I am trying to say that the invention of television
was akin to the discovery of this element of human nature
that fundamentally wants to turn ourselves
into passive audience members.
And so we invented this technology
that seemed to elicit from us this aspect of ourselves
that just wants to lie back, open our eyes
and be awash in novel visual stimuli.
And I think that, unfortunately, when you ask,
why don’t we just leave the house?
Why don’t we just hang out with people more?
I think that we are complex creatures
and that this is a really relevant cross-purpose for us.
– Well, I mean, having an economy increasingly built
on personal convenience, it’s just such a huge part of this.
You know what I mean?
From streaming services to online shopping,
I mean, everything is curated, everything’s on demand,
everything is easy.
If you have a phone and Wi-Fi,
you don’t have to leave the house for damn near anything.
I mean, that kind of economic order
has to condition us psychologically
to want to avoid the messiness
and the unpredictability of the actual world.
– It’s a beautifully made point
and I wanna be really, really clear about my reaction to it.
The on-demand economy is good.
It’s good for busy families.
It’s good for the disabled.
It’s good for the elderly.
It’s good for the chronically sick.
The on-demand economy is an absolute economic mitzvah.
But life is complicated and progress has trade-offs.
The industrial revolution was good.
It allowed us to be rich enough to take a world
where the average person had a 50/50 shot
of living to see their 16th birthday
into a world where the vast majority of people
have a very, very good chance to turn 16.
But we also know that the industrialized economy
had costs and trade-offs.
One of them being that it took us a while
to recognize that industrialization was coughing up
all of this pollution that was choking the biosphere.
It took us a while to realize the cost of progress.
And it took us a while to recognize
what the cost of this economic mitzvah was.
And in the same way, I think a world of entertainment
and a world of on-demand convenience
is wonderful in many, many ways.
It just takes us a while to figure out
what the costs of that progress are.
And what I’m trying to do in this piece
is to hold up a mirror to Americans’ behavior
and say, this is the receipt.
What you bought is an economy
of extraordinary dopaminergic reward systems.
And it’s helped your life in many ways
and made life more fun in many ways.
But here’s part of the cost.
Here’s the receipt that you haven’t seen
for the progress that you’ve purchased.
And it’s not so much to say
that I want to move progress back.
I think we just need to find a way to adapt to it.
Support for the gray area comes from Blue Nile.
So you’re 99.9% sure your partner will say yes
when you propose.
So that means it’s time to find a ring.
And you’ve got some decisions to make.
What shape, size, style, color, it can be overwhelming.
Luckily, Blue Nile can help with all of that
so you can figure out how to do
one of those jumbo-tron proposals
or maybe something more low-key if that’s your thing.
At Blue Nile, they say you can create
a bigger, more brilliant engagement ring at a price
you won’t find at a traditional jeweler.
And according to the company,
they’re committed to ensuring
that the highest ethical standards
are observed when sourcing diamonds and jewelry.
Plus, your surprise will stay safe
because every Blue Nile order is insured
and arrives in packaging that won’t give away what’s inside.
In most cases, they’re even delivered overnight.
Right now, you can get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more
with code grayarea@bluenile.com.
That’s $50 off with code grayarea@bluenile.com.
BlueNile.com.
Support for the gray area comes from Greenlight.
Good money instincts don’t come naturally.
So when it comes to teaching your kids about finances,
you need the right tools.
Greenlight is a debit card and money at Made For Family.
Parents can send money to their kids
and keep an eye on kids spending and saving
while kids and teens build money confidence
and lifelong financial literacy skills.
With the Greenlight app, kids can learn how to save,
invest, and spend wisely.
They even have games that teach money skills
in a fun, accessible way.
The Greenlight app also includes a chores feature
where you can set up one-time or recurring chores
customized to your family’s needs
and reward kids with allowance for a job well done.
My kids five, so we’re not really talking stocks and bonds,
just yet.
But one of our colleagues here at Fox uses Greenlight.
He and his family find it really helpful and educational.
Millions of parents and kids are learning
about money on Greenlight.
You can start your risk-free Greenlight trial today
at Greenlight.com/grayarea.
That’s Greenlight.com/grayarea to get started.
Greenlight.com/grayarea.
Support for the gray area comes from Shopify.
If you think about the most successful businesses
in your neighborhood,
they probably all have a few things in common,
like great products, clever marketing, a good brand.
But one thing you might not consider
is the business behind those businesses.
Because to find customers grow and sell more,
you need a partner you can rely on,
a partner like Shopify.
Shopify is an all-in-one digital commerce platform
that wants to help your business
sell better than ever before.
It doesn’t matter if your customers spend their time
scrolling through your feed
or strolling past your actual physical storefront.
Shopify says they can help you convert browsers
into buyers and sell more over time.
And they say their shop pay feature
can boost conversion by 50%.
There’s a reason companies like Allbirds
turn to Shopify to sell more products to more customers.
Businesses that sell sell more with Shopify.
Want to upgrade your business
and get the same checkout Allbirds uses?
You can sign up for your $1 per month trial period
at Shopify.com/box.
That’s Shopify.com/box to upgrade your selling today.
Shopify.com/box.
(upbeat music)
– Did you ever see the Adam Curtis documentary,
The Century of Self?
He’s really about the birth of modern public relations
and consumer society.
And The Century of Self, the way he uses it
isn’t quite solitude or anti-social,
but it’s part of the same story.
I mean, there’s this shift from a needs-based culture
to a desires-based culture.
And more of life becomes about
eliminating inconvenience and friction.
And that ultimately leads to eliminating other people
because other people involve inconvenience and friction.
– It reminds me of what the University of Chicago
psychologist Nick Epley said to me.
And he talks about the ways in which
there’s an expectations gap that we suffer from
or several expectations gaps
that we suffer from in our social relations.
And one is that often we withhold ourselves
from talking to strangers
or asking people to hang out with us
because we’re afraid that we might be boring to them.
We’re afraid that we might disappoint ourselves
by being in that conversation
and seeing other people react negatively to us.
And he points out that a lot of human interaction
is instead governed by a principle of reciprocity
such that when you’re nice to someone
they tend to be nice back.
When you initiate a little bit of conversation
they tend to talk back to you.
And so there’s an expectations gap between the withdrawal
that we sometimes conduct ourselves with
and the social interaction
that would actually make us much more happy
in the next 15 minutes of life.
And the second gap that he talks about
that I think is really profound
is an expectations gap about depth of conversation.
And I think that people,
they wanna be asked deep questions.
They like talking about things that matter to them.
And often we’re afraid of initiating
deep conversations with people.
So I think that one of these just really wonderful points
is that despite the fact that we’re social animals
we live under this patina of illusion about asociality
where we withhold deep and meaningful conversations
both from ourselves and the people around us
because we have false expectations
about how those conversations are going to go.
– Well, speaking of connections and depth of connections
or lack thereof, it leads to I think a very important part
of the piece where you’re talking about these
three rings of connection, inner, middle and outer
and how this middle ring, which is key to social cohesion,
that’s disappearing.
Can you say a bit about that?
‘Cause it seems really, really important.
– So Mark Dunkelman, who’s an author and a researcher
at Brown University, when I called him
to talk about this piece,
what he said was that ironically, our digital devices
which might seem like they alienate us from each other
actually make some relationships much closer
than they used to be.
For example, at the inner ring of family,
it is possible for families to be connected
throughout the day, throughout the week
in ways that were totally impossible 50 years ago.
I mean, the amount of times per day that I text my wife
or my wife texts me is just enormous.
We’re just in constant contact and constant communication.
He said at one point, if my daughter buys a Butterfinger
from the CVS, I get a notification on my phone
which intensive parenting, take it or leave it,
like at least it’s a connection
that you could not imagine happening 30 years ago.
And then so at the inner ring, you have lots of intimacy.
And then there’s an outer ring that he describes,
which is you can sort of think of it as tribe,
people who share your affinities.
So if you’re a Cincinnati Bengals fan
or if you’re a New Orleans Saints fan, for example,
for the NFL, you can follow the world of Saints fans
and be in touch with them in a way
that was absolutely impossible 40 years ago.
Mark talks about the fact that he lives in Providence,
Rhode Island and he’s texting the beat reporters
from Cincinnati, Ohio about how the Bengals
should change their offense.
I mean, that is a connection that you could just never have
before the rise of group chats and acts and things like that.
So what he says is you sort of in a weird way
have this inner ring of family and friends
which can be strengthened by digital communications.
And this outer ring of tribe,
which can be strengthened by digital communications
because it puts us in touch with the crowd,
but there’s an inner ring that atrophies
and that inner ring he calls the village.
And the village is the people that live next to us.
It’s the people that we live around.
It’s the people that we might see at grocery stores
or form clubs with.
It’s people we’re not related to
and that don’t necessarily share our opinion
about everything in the world.
And that’s what makes it so important
because if the inner ring teaches us love
and the outer ring teaches us loyalty or ideology,
it’s that middle ring that teaches us tolerance.
It requires tolerance to be in the world
of people you’re not related to
who might disagree with you about things.
And in a world with that middle ring is atrophying,
you would predict if you knew nothing else about the world
that our politics would become a lot less tolerant.
There’s a section in the piece titled
This Is Your Politics on Solitude.
And you make the case that this drift towards solitude
is really rewiring our civic and political identity.
Is this how it’s rewiring it?
That it’s basically teaching us to love the people we love
perhaps even more,
but also hate the people we don’t really know?
– I think it might be that.
You know, the two implications that I draw from the piece
are one that you would expect
the political winners of an age of solitude
to exist in that sort of all tribe, no village level.
They’d be great at stoking out animosity
and they would be almost celebratory
of their lack of tolerance.
And certainly I think both those things
describe Donald Trump.
The second is that the conventional wisdom used to be
that all politics is local,
that people vote based on issues
that are local to the village.
But in a world with a village atrophies
and a more global sense of reality concretizes,
it’s not that all politics is local,
it’s that all politics is focal with an F.
All politics is what national media gets us to focus on
whether or not it’s relevant to our local interests.
So one example from the right,
and then maybe one example from the left.
Some of them from the right,
and this anecdote didn’t make it in the final piece,
but are the Russell Hawks child,
who’s a sociologist in California just published a book
and I was emailing her about that book
as I was writing this piece.
And she pointed out that there are folks in rural Kentucky
where she was doing some of her ethnography
where you walk into their trailer homes,
you walk into their houses and the television
is just the biggest piece of furniture in the house.
And for them, the most important issue in the 2024 election
was the rise of illegal immigration
and the hordes of migrants crossing the border.
This was incredibly alarming to them.
And you look at these census reports of rural Kentucky
and these are some of the places
with the smallest share of immigrants in the country.
So in a world where all politics is local,
rural Kentucky does not care about immigration politics
at all, but in a world where all politics is focal,
they’re paying attention to the same news stories
that a conservative living in downtown Chicago
or New York or San Francisco is paying attention to.
And that struck me as very interesting.
And the point that I made about the left
which got me into trouble among sunk people
is that I think that progressives
have comforted themselves with the understanding
that Trump is a kind of political alien
who is inexplicable to anyone who shares progressive values.
But it’s led them to simply not understand Trump
as a political phenomenon in a way
that I think has hurt the left
by not allowing them to take seriously
some of the values that underlie
this incredibly successful right populist movement.
The left would be better at understanding itself
which is to say the country that it lives in
if we spent more time around other people
who lived in our so-called village.
– I never thought of the village
as a moderating mechanism in that way,
but it makes all the sense in the world.
The lack of engagement, the lack of understanding
that has been brewing because of this disconnection
has just been toxic to our politics.
And I don’t know, I’m just whining out loud here.
– No, I accept your whining in the spirit
in which it’s intended, I think.
I’m not particularly optimistic about
Americans agreeing with each other.
And one thing that I don’t want to happen
and that I can see happening
is a world where people fall so out of touch
with where they live and the issues
that are material to their communities
that they vote for people that are giving them something
that’s bad for them and bad for their neighbors
who agree and disagree with whoever’s in the White House.
So I think there are material consequences to a world
where voters are fundamentally disconnected
from their local material realities.
How does the antisocial turn, especially among men,
lead to what you call chaos politics?
I think even use the phrase a grotesque style of politics.
– Yeah, it’s a term of art from a Danish researcher,
a Danish political scientist named Michael Bank Peterson
called Need for Chaos.
And he’s done a series of studies
with some of his co-researchers
and they’ve essentially felt
that there’s a certain demographic
that responds very positively to conspiracy theories
about any establishment politician left or right.
And they tend to agree with statements like,
I don’t believe in the political process,
I just want to see everything burned down.
And he calls them Need for Chaos
because his theory is that this is a cohort of the electorate
that is essentially given up on institutions
and establishment processes.
And they see politics at a distance
as a kind of, as a piece of entertainment
where the most destruction visited
on existing institutions, the better.
And while certainly it sounds like this movement
would lean far right, there are elements of the left
that he sees associated with it as well.
And what he found and the reason that I included
his findings in my piece is that one of the things
that correlates most highly with Need for Chaos
is self-described self-isolation.
And he says, these people aren’t seeking out friendships
the way that someone might if they were lonely
in a typical way, that is seeking out a friend
because you feel that gap between felt
and desired social connection.
Rather, they take stock of their own social isolation
and they seek to remedy it by going online
and seeking power in some way,
typically by joining some online horde
trying to tear down some establishment
or criticize some institution.
(upbeat music)
– Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile.
Maybe you’re someone who likes to save up
for a tropical vacation.
Or maybe you’re finally ready to buy
the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche
at the local university bookstore.
However you spend your money, I’m willing to bet
you’d rather use your hard earned cash
on stuff you actually want.
And not, say, on ridiculously inflated cell phone bills.
Mint Mobile can help with that.
Mint Mobile says they offer phone plans
for less than their major competitors,
offering any three month plan for just $15 a month.
Their plans don’t include the fine print,
hidden charges or large monthly bills.
Instead, customers get unlimited talk and text,
high speed data and more.
Delivered on the nation’s largest 5G network.
If you like your money, Mint Mobile may be for you.
You can shop plans at mintmobile.com/grayarea.
That’s mintmobile.com/grayarea.
Upfront payment of $45 for three month,
five gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 a month.
New customer offer for first three months only.
Then full price plan options available.
Taxes and fees extra, see Mint Mobile for details.
(upbeat music)
– Hey, whatcha doing?
– Programming our thermostat to 17 degrees
when we’re out at work or asleep.
We’re taking control of our energy use this winter
with some easy energy saving tips I got from FortisBC.
– Ooh, conserve energy and save money?
Maybe to buy those matching winter jackets?
– Uh, no, we’re also getting
that whole matching outfit thing under control.
– Discover low and no cost energy saving tips
at fortisbc.com/energysavingtips.
Matching tracksuits?
– Please no.
– TD Direct Investing offers live support.
So whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro,
you can make your investing steps count.
And if you’re like me and think a TFSA stands
for Total Fun Savings Adventure,
maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing.
(upbeat music)
– So what is a different pass we can go down at this point?
I mean, if the antisocial trend continues,
where does that leave us?
If we course correct, what might that look like?
– So should we do gate to hell first,
then gate to heaven so we can end in a happy note?
– Yeah, let’s lead with gate to hell.
– Okay, good.
I can’t imagine a world where artificial intelligence
continues to advance at the rate it’s advancing
and it not meaningfully inflecting this space.
– How so?
– We already see that if there was a big article
in the New York Times just a few days ago
about people falling in love with chat GPT
and having deep personal relationships
with a genitive AI software
whose guts live in some data center
in the Dallas quarter of Virginia.
That’s weird, but it’s gonna get less weird
because it’s become more common.
Jason Fagone, who’s a journalist who I spoke to
is writing a book about people’s relationship
with AI companions and the stories that he told me,
some of which I reported in the piece
and some of which were off the record
were just absolutely extraordinary.
I mean, mothers with families married to a man
but who feels bisexual and has a engaged emotional
relationship with an AI that identifies as a woman.
Men who having lost a girlfriend or fiance
creating avatars of their lost loves out of silicon
and having ongoing relationships with chat GPT
or with other AI companions that essentially mimic
the emotional life of their ex.
This is all gonna get more common
and it’s all gonna get weirder
because the technology is going to improve.
And also because these technologies
are gonna become more multimodal,
which is I guess maybe just a fancy way of saying
they’re gonna get better at talking to us,
literally talking to us and not just texting us back.
And in some ways people are gonna find
that silicon-based friendships and relationships
are just richer than carbon-based relationships
to put things so much frequently.
So I think this is coming and I think we need to see
it clearly for the threat that it could have
to the way that humans deal with each other
in the physical world.
– You know, I have to say, I think this is where some
of those old curmudgeonly cultural critics
like Christopher Lash, you know,
who famously wrote the culture of narcissism
are a little vindicated as you point out in the article,
you know, like one of the reasons we’re so prepared
for chatbot friendships is that we have come
to expect different things from our relationships.
And what a lot of us really want is a set of feelings.
We want validation, we want sympathy,
we want someone or something to make us feel
a certain way about ourselves.
That’s about self fulfillment.
That is kind of narcissism and it’s kind of where we are.
– Yeah, I mean, you know, this is maybe where we dust us
some of your favorite existentialist writers
and, you know, think about like what,
what, like phenomenologically,
what is friendship for the most part?
It’s a lot of spending time with people
in the physical world, hopefully,
but for a lot of people, it’s phone calls and it’s texts.
And it’s the feeling of, hey, I’m having an issue with work
or hey, I’m having an issue with my kid
or I’m having an issue with my relationship.
Hey, man, can we just like talk on the phone?
Can I just give you a call?
Can you just respond to a couple of texts
while we both watch the national championship game at home?
What’s happening there?
You’re picking up a piece of hardware
and you’re holding it to your ear
or you’re holding it in your palm
and you’re having a voice-based or text-based conversation
with an entity who is not there,
but an entity within which you entrust with love
and a host of complex feelings
that make it so that you want to spend time
with someone who is physically a ghost to you.
Well, like, you’re just talking to someone who isn’t there,
that you’ve decided to put trust in.
What’s phenomenologically so different than it being an AI?
– Hell, I probably have half a dozen friendships now
that exist solely through the exchange of funny memes
– Right. – on Instagram.
– And my point isn’t that my best friend
or your best friend is no different than an AI.
I want people to think capaciously
about the ways in which relationships with AI
won’t be weird to lots of people.
It’s weird to me.
I have no relationship with an artificial intelligence.
I’d be surprised if you did.
I’d certainly be surprised if my wife did,
but I don’t think that many people growing up in an age,
especially young people,
who, by the way, one of the first points made in the show,
spent a historic amount of time alone on their couches,
interacting with the world through their smartphone screen,
is it really going to be so strange for them
to have friends at school and friends on their phone?
I just don’t think it takes an enormous amount of imagination
to see how this is coming.
– Yeah, and I should say, I don’t think people today
are any more inherently narcissistic or self-involved
than people were really at any other point,
which is we have built a world optimized
to cater to these sorts of impulses.
– Oh, yeah, no, we’re no different.
I mean, biologically, how can we be different
than our grandfather’s, grandfather’s,
grandfather’s, grandfather.
We’re not.
Nothing’s changed about human biology.
Nothing’s changed about human biochemistry or very little.
Very little’s changed about human psychology.
We’re different because of technology,
and technology of different times
elicits different aspects of our personalities
because we’re incredibly cross-purposed.
We are designed to replicate our genome through history,
but that’s not all.
We’re designed to seek novel stimuli
and also designed to seek familiarity
and designed to seek safety and designed to seek adventure.
We’re so, so complex.
And we just live in a world right now
where I want people to recognize
just how much intelligence and treasure and talent
has been devoted to the job
of keeping us stimulated inside of our homes.
And what if we actually confronted
the costs of that world?
– When I asked you earlier
about the different ways forward,
you gave me the vision for the road to the gates to hell.
You didn’t give me the vision
of the path to the gates of heaven.
What’s the utopian optimistic sunny scenario?
– So the difference between science and culture
is that science tends to move linearly
and culture is a cycle.
Culture goes up and down.
Culture is backlash.
Culture is not just one thing accumulating
over and over and over again.
It’s backlash.
And a proper understanding of the antisocial century,
I think, will inspire its own backlash.
And we’ve backlashed before.
The late 19th century was a highly individualistic time.
And around the progressive era of the early 20th century,
up until the middle of the 1900s,
we had a social revolution in this country
that was inspired by religion and the social gospel,
that was inspired by a change of political economy,
the New Deal and the rise of collectivism,
and was reinforced by everything from behavior
and habits to technology.
It was a physical time, a time of physical togetherness.
And we can have it again.
People need to make new choices with their lives.
And those new choices need to be inspired
by a clear understanding of what we’ve done to ourselves
in the social century.
That year after year of being alone
is unacceptable.
And we can make choices as small as,
I’m gonna call my friend when I feel like I miss them.
I’m gonna spend more time outside of my house.
I’m gonna go out every single weekend absolutely for sure
to make sure that I prioritize a Friday or Saturday hangout.
The people who are in my life that I text
but don’t see physically,
I’m gonna make a point to see them.
I think that behaviors can cascade
and they can create norms.
And I think norms can cascade and they can create movements.
And this is a disease.
The anti-social century is a disease.
The cure is free and is well-known.
And that makes me optimistic.
– Is all of what you just said personally aspirational
or are you becoming the change you wanna see in the world?
Derek, after having thought this through so deeply
and reported this out,
are you changing the decisions you make day to day?
Are you out in the world engaging with more people?
– A thousand percent.
I’m an introvert.
I’m a couch potato, I’m a bookworm.
I love to stay home and read and think about things.
And writing this piece was a reckoning for my own behavior
and the ways that my own hour-to-hour
minute-to-minute preferences were affecting my life
and affecting my happiness.
As Nick Epley says,
you have a great conversation for 15 minutes
rather than be alone.
That doesn’t change your life.
It just changes the next 15 minutes.
But life is just one 15 minute block of time after another.
And the way we spend our minutes
is the way we spend our life.
And that understanding has affected me really deeply.
And I’m thinking so much more about how I spend more time
around people and how I reach out to people more.
That’s such a beautiful place to end.
We love your work around here.
So thanks for coming back on the show, man.
– Thank you, man.
Total pleasure to be here.
– All right.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I always love talking to Derek.
As always, we wanna know what you think.
So drop us the line at the gray area at vox.com and tell us.
And if you can spare just another few minutes,
please rate and review the podcast.
That stuff really helps our show grow.
(upbeat music)
This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
fact-checked by Anouk Dousseau,
and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
Listen and subscribe.
This show is part of Vox.
Support Vox’s journalism by joining
our membership program today.
Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
And if you decide to sign up because of this show,
let us know.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(gentle music)
[BLANK_AUDIO]
or are you playing to win?
If you’re in it to win, meet your next MVP.
NetSuite by Oracle.
NetSuite is your full business management system
in one convenient suite.
With NetSuite, you’re running your accounting,
your finance, your HR, your e-commerce,
and more all from your online dashboard.
Upgrade your playbook and make the switch to NetSuite,
the number one cloud ERP.
Get the CFO’s guide to AI and machine learning
at netsuite.com/vox, netsuite.com/vox.
– Thumbtack presents the ins and outs
of caring for your home.
Out, procrastination, putting it off,
kicking the can down the road.
In, plans and guides that make it easy
to get home projects done.
Out, carpet in the bathroom, like why.
In, knowing what to do, when to do it,
and who to hire.
Start caring for your home with confidence.
Download Thumbtack today.
– You’ve no doubt heard the phrase
loneliness epidemic many times.
But what does it mean to say
that there’s a loneliness problem?
More to the point, what does it mean to be lonely?
At the very least, loneliness implies two things.
One, that you’re alone.
And two, that you don’t wanna be.
That second part is important.
To feel lonely is to yearn for connection and company.
If you don’t wanna connect with someone else,
you’re alone, but you’re not lonely.
Here’s a question we haven’t really asked
in these conversations about loneliness.
Are Americans alone because they don’t have anywhere to go
or they don’t have anyone to go with?
Or are they choosing to be alone?
And if they’re choosing to be alone,
even when we know that’s not good for us,
why are they doing this?
And what does it mean long-term for society?
I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Great Area.
Today’s guest is Derek Thompson.
Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic
and the author of a recent essay called
The Antisocial Century.
The piece challenges the conventional wisdom
around loneliness.
Derek gathers a ton of data, much of it alarming,
and concludes that we’ve mostly
misunderstood the situation here.
It’s not that we’ve become lonely.
It’s that we’ve started to prefer solitude.
We’ve become antisocial,
and that’s a very different kind of problem.
One, we absolutely have to solve as a country.
So I invited Derek on the show
to talk about what he discovered
and why he thinks self-imposed solitude
might just be the most important social fact
of the 21st century in America.
Derek Thompson, welcome back to the show.
It’s great to be here.
Thank you, Sean.
Everyone’s been saying for years now
that we have a loneliness epidemic,
and you think that’s not quite right.
So tell me what’s actually going on.
So it’s probably worth defining loneliness.
Loneliness as the sociologist that I talked to,
in particular NYU’s Eric Kleinberg,
is a very healthy thing to feel.
Loneliness is the felt gap
between the social connection that you have
and the social connection that you want.
And so when I’m home working a lot,
taking care of my kid,
not hanging out with friends that’s at my house,
sometimes I feel lonely,
and that inspires me to reach out to my friends
and hang out with them, get a drink.
But something else, I think,
is the social crisis of this moment
and this century for America, and that’s social isolation.
If you’re spending more and more time alone,
year after year after year,
and you are choosing to socially isolate yourself,
and you’re even, in many cases,
as I see sometimes happening on TikTok,
celebrating when your friends cancel plans
because it means you can add another heaping scoop
of a lone time on top of the historic amounts
of a lone time they’re already spending,
well, my feeling is that’s not loneliness.
That is a choice to socially isolate more and more,
month after month, year after year,
even decade after decade.
This is not loneliness,
and the last thing I would say is,
if you choose to see this moment as a loneliness epidemic,
you have a research problem, you have an empirical problem,
because right now, two things are true from the numbers.
Number one, we spend a historic amount of time alone,
and number two, it doesn’t seem like for many Americans,
loneliness is spiking at the same rate
that social isolation is spiking.
What we have is not a crisis of loneliness
as it is broadly understood,
but actually something much more gnarly,
something much more toxic,
and actually something much stranger
than a mere crisis of loneliness.
– Well, just so we have a point of reference,
give me a sobering stat here.
How much more time are people spending alone,
relative to how much time we used to spend alone
10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago?
– So between the 1960s and the 1990s,
Americans were withdrawing from all kinds of associations
and clubs, this was the thesis of and point
of Robert Putnam’s book, “Bowling Alone.”
But in the last 25 years,
the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been running a survey
called the American Time Use Survey,
which asks Americans a bunch of questions
about how they spend their week.
How much time do you spend sleeping?
How much time do you spend eating dinner?
And they also ask how much time do you spend
in face-to-face socializing?
And the amount of time that all Americans spend,
the average American spends in face-to-face socializing
is declined by over 20% in the last 25 years.
For some groups, like black men and young people overall,
the decline is more like 40%,
negative 40% face-to-face socializing
over the last 20, 25 years.
So that brings us to a point now where there is no period
in modern historical record,
going back to the mid-1960s at least,
and probably going back decades before then,
that we have spent so much time by ourselves.
– And how does this break down across class lines?
Are we seeing the same trends across class lines?
Or are there noteworthy differences?
And if there are, why might that be?
– So what I would say is,
as a matter of sort of coming to a firm answer
to this question, is this an income-based phenomenon?
Is maybe, but because the best data we have,
it doesn’t have very large sample sizes
for the richest and poorest Americans,
it’s hard to say that this is a fact,
the same way we can say that it’s a fact
that for all Americans,
face-to-face socializing is at its lowest point
in 25 years or maybe 60, 100 years,
and a lone time is at its highest.
– Well, I just wanted to ask,
because we have a tendency to talk about
upper-class problems as though they are universal problems,
and this ain’t that, whatever else it is, it’s not that.
– I think it’s really important to say that,
you’re exactly right,
especially I would say in this space,
in talking about the way we live today,
the problems of modernity,
always very difficult to avoid the temptation
to talk about the upper middle class
as if they are representative of the entire country.
So when we talk about the problems of intensive parenting
or anxiety, college-based anxiety for kids,
a lot of times those fears are about
a large part of the country that is not all of the country.
In this case, however,
you will find that face-to-face socializing
is declining for men and for women,
for literally every age cohort,
the young and the old,
for white and black and Hispanic Americans,
for the bottom quartile, for the top quartile,
for married Americans, for unmarried Americans,
for college graduates, for non-high school graduates,
this is something that is absolutely happening to everybody.
And so therefore, if you want to understand it,
I think we need to look for causes
that are more universal than income inequality.
– So why was the first half of the 20th century so social?
What changed around the ’70s?
And why is the answer clearly neoliberalism?
– And why is the answer clearly
the election of Ronald Reagan?
So the simplest way to summarize what happened
is that there was a revolution of individualism
that struck this country
and affected it at many different levels,
at the political economy level, at the social level,
and it ended, as you said, a very social century.
Between the 1910s and the 1950s and early ’60s, certainly,
just about every measure of sociality in this country
was rising.
The marriage rate spiked in the middle of the 20th century.
Fertility rates spiked in an incredibly unusual way.
You had a surge in unionization rates.
You had more associations created, more clubs created.
So by so many different measures,
socializing was surging in the middle of the 20th century,
and that ended.
And I think that among many, many things,
two things that ended it
were the two most important technologies of the 20th century.
The first was the car that allowed us to privatize our lives
and move away from other people.
And the second was the television,
which allowed us to privatize our leisure time
so that we could spend it alone looking at a screen
and not necessarily spend it throwing a dinner party.
– Well, you talk to a psychologist,
you talk to a sociologist.
Why do we choose solitude?
If we know it, it won’t make us happy in the long term.
And I say we know not just in the sense
that there’s a lot of research telling us so,
but we all pretty much know this from lived experience,
as tempting as it is to stay home and Netflix or whatever.
Most of the time we all feel better
once we actually get out of the house
and spend time with friends.
So what’s behind this pathological behavior?
– I think it’s a very good and a very complex question.
And the first thing I’d say is that
we do things that we know aren’t good for us all the time.
You know, this is the whole problem with nutrition,
is that you have people coming up
with ever more complicated ways
of explaining what’s good for us,
but you inject anybody in the world with truth serum
and you say, you know, is the Twixbar good for you?
Is going to the gym good for you?
Is celery good for you?
Everyone knows the answers to these questions,
so the problem is actualizing the answers in your behavior
because we’re cross-purpose machines
and the relevant cross-pressure
is that we are dopamine-seeking creatures
and we’re also interpersonal creatures, we’re social animals.
And sometimes those drives
are totally a cross-purpose with each other
that seeking dopamine in the most efficient way
necessarily means not spending time around people, right?
Like if I were trying, for example,
to simply solicit as much dopamine as possible
and be surrounded by maximal stimulative novelty
as much as possible on a minute-to-minute basis,
what would I do?
I would never leave my house.
Our homes are so much more comfortable than they used to be.
They’re so much more diverting than they used to be
with their television sets and their smartphones
and their speaker systems and their streaming and their cable.
There’s so much that is interesting that we can do
just staying at home.
And so I think many people just do.
Now, I’m not here to say the television’s evil.
I am trying to say that the invention of television
was akin to the discovery of this element of human nature
that fundamentally wants to turn ourselves
into passive audience members.
And so we invented this technology
that seemed to elicit from us this aspect of ourselves
that just wants to lie back, open our eyes
and be awash in novel visual stimuli.
And I think that, unfortunately, when you ask,
why don’t we just leave the house?
Why don’t we just hang out with people more?
I think that we are complex creatures
and that this is a really relevant cross-purpose for us.
– Well, I mean, having an economy increasingly built
on personal convenience, it’s just such a huge part of this.
You know what I mean?
From streaming services to online shopping,
I mean, everything is curated, everything’s on demand,
everything is easy.
If you have a phone and Wi-Fi,
you don’t have to leave the house for damn near anything.
I mean, that kind of economic order
has to condition us psychologically
to want to avoid the messiness
and the unpredictability of the actual world.
– It’s a beautifully made point
and I wanna be really, really clear about my reaction to it.
The on-demand economy is good.
It’s good for busy families.
It’s good for the disabled.
It’s good for the elderly.
It’s good for the chronically sick.
The on-demand economy is an absolute economic mitzvah.
But life is complicated and progress has trade-offs.
The industrial revolution was good.
It allowed us to be rich enough to take a world
where the average person had a 50/50 shot
of living to see their 16th birthday
into a world where the vast majority of people
have a very, very good chance to turn 16.
But we also know that the industrialized economy
had costs and trade-offs.
One of them being that it took us a while
to recognize that industrialization was coughing up
all of this pollution that was choking the biosphere.
It took us a while to realize the cost of progress.
And it took us a while to recognize
what the cost of this economic mitzvah was.
And in the same way, I think a world of entertainment
and a world of on-demand convenience
is wonderful in many, many ways.
It just takes us a while to figure out
what the costs of that progress are.
And what I’m trying to do in this piece
is to hold up a mirror to Americans’ behavior
and say, this is the receipt.
What you bought is an economy
of extraordinary dopaminergic reward systems.
And it’s helped your life in many ways
and made life more fun in many ways.
But here’s part of the cost.
Here’s the receipt that you haven’t seen
for the progress that you’ve purchased.
And it’s not so much to say
that I want to move progress back.
I think we just need to find a way to adapt to it.
Support for the gray area comes from Blue Nile.
So you’re 99.9% sure your partner will say yes
when you propose.
So that means it’s time to find a ring.
And you’ve got some decisions to make.
What shape, size, style, color, it can be overwhelming.
Luckily, Blue Nile can help with all of that
so you can figure out how to do
one of those jumbo-tron proposals
or maybe something more low-key if that’s your thing.
At Blue Nile, they say you can create
a bigger, more brilliant engagement ring at a price
you won’t find at a traditional jeweler.
And according to the company,
they’re committed to ensuring
that the highest ethical standards
are observed when sourcing diamonds and jewelry.
Plus, your surprise will stay safe
because every Blue Nile order is insured
and arrives in packaging that won’t give away what’s inside.
In most cases, they’re even delivered overnight.
Right now, you can get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more
with code grayarea@bluenile.com.
That’s $50 off with code grayarea@bluenile.com.
BlueNile.com.
Support for the gray area comes from Greenlight.
Good money instincts don’t come naturally.
So when it comes to teaching your kids about finances,
you need the right tools.
Greenlight is a debit card and money at Made For Family.
Parents can send money to their kids
and keep an eye on kids spending and saving
while kids and teens build money confidence
and lifelong financial literacy skills.
With the Greenlight app, kids can learn how to save,
invest, and spend wisely.
They even have games that teach money skills
in a fun, accessible way.
The Greenlight app also includes a chores feature
where you can set up one-time or recurring chores
customized to your family’s needs
and reward kids with allowance for a job well done.
My kids five, so we’re not really talking stocks and bonds,
just yet.
But one of our colleagues here at Fox uses Greenlight.
He and his family find it really helpful and educational.
Millions of parents and kids are learning
about money on Greenlight.
You can start your risk-free Greenlight trial today
at Greenlight.com/grayarea.
That’s Greenlight.com/grayarea to get started.
Greenlight.com/grayarea.
Support for the gray area comes from Shopify.
If you think about the most successful businesses
in your neighborhood,
they probably all have a few things in common,
like great products, clever marketing, a good brand.
But one thing you might not consider
is the business behind those businesses.
Because to find customers grow and sell more,
you need a partner you can rely on,
a partner like Shopify.
Shopify is an all-in-one digital commerce platform
that wants to help your business
sell better than ever before.
It doesn’t matter if your customers spend their time
scrolling through your feed
or strolling past your actual physical storefront.
Shopify says they can help you convert browsers
into buyers and sell more over time.
And they say their shop pay feature
can boost conversion by 50%.
There’s a reason companies like Allbirds
turn to Shopify to sell more products to more customers.
Businesses that sell sell more with Shopify.
Want to upgrade your business
and get the same checkout Allbirds uses?
You can sign up for your $1 per month trial period
at Shopify.com/box.
That’s Shopify.com/box to upgrade your selling today.
Shopify.com/box.
(upbeat music)
– Did you ever see the Adam Curtis documentary,
The Century of Self?
He’s really about the birth of modern public relations
and consumer society.
And The Century of Self, the way he uses it
isn’t quite solitude or anti-social,
but it’s part of the same story.
I mean, there’s this shift from a needs-based culture
to a desires-based culture.
And more of life becomes about
eliminating inconvenience and friction.
And that ultimately leads to eliminating other people
because other people involve inconvenience and friction.
– It reminds me of what the University of Chicago
psychologist Nick Epley said to me.
And he talks about the ways in which
there’s an expectations gap that we suffer from
or several expectations gaps
that we suffer from in our social relations.
And one is that often we withhold ourselves
from talking to strangers
or asking people to hang out with us
because we’re afraid that we might be boring to them.
We’re afraid that we might disappoint ourselves
by being in that conversation
and seeing other people react negatively to us.
And he points out that a lot of human interaction
is instead governed by a principle of reciprocity
such that when you’re nice to someone
they tend to be nice back.
When you initiate a little bit of conversation
they tend to talk back to you.
And so there’s an expectations gap between the withdrawal
that we sometimes conduct ourselves with
and the social interaction
that would actually make us much more happy
in the next 15 minutes of life.
And the second gap that he talks about
that I think is really profound
is an expectations gap about depth of conversation.
And I think that people,
they wanna be asked deep questions.
They like talking about things that matter to them.
And often we’re afraid of initiating
deep conversations with people.
So I think that one of these just really wonderful points
is that despite the fact that we’re social animals
we live under this patina of illusion about asociality
where we withhold deep and meaningful conversations
both from ourselves and the people around us
because we have false expectations
about how those conversations are going to go.
– Well, speaking of connections and depth of connections
or lack thereof, it leads to I think a very important part
of the piece where you’re talking about these
three rings of connection, inner, middle and outer
and how this middle ring, which is key to social cohesion,
that’s disappearing.
Can you say a bit about that?
‘Cause it seems really, really important.
– So Mark Dunkelman, who’s an author and a researcher
at Brown University, when I called him
to talk about this piece,
what he said was that ironically, our digital devices
which might seem like they alienate us from each other
actually make some relationships much closer
than they used to be.
For example, at the inner ring of family,
it is possible for families to be connected
throughout the day, throughout the week
in ways that were totally impossible 50 years ago.
I mean, the amount of times per day that I text my wife
or my wife texts me is just enormous.
We’re just in constant contact and constant communication.
He said at one point, if my daughter buys a Butterfinger
from the CVS, I get a notification on my phone
which intensive parenting, take it or leave it,
like at least it’s a connection
that you could not imagine happening 30 years ago.
And then so at the inner ring, you have lots of intimacy.
And then there’s an outer ring that he describes,
which is you can sort of think of it as tribe,
people who share your affinities.
So if you’re a Cincinnati Bengals fan
or if you’re a New Orleans Saints fan, for example,
for the NFL, you can follow the world of Saints fans
and be in touch with them in a way
that was absolutely impossible 40 years ago.
Mark talks about the fact that he lives in Providence,
Rhode Island and he’s texting the beat reporters
from Cincinnati, Ohio about how the Bengals
should change their offense.
I mean, that is a connection that you could just never have
before the rise of group chats and acts and things like that.
So what he says is you sort of in a weird way
have this inner ring of family and friends
which can be strengthened by digital communications.
And this outer ring of tribe,
which can be strengthened by digital communications
because it puts us in touch with the crowd,
but there’s an inner ring that atrophies
and that inner ring he calls the village.
And the village is the people that live next to us.
It’s the people that we live around.
It’s the people that we might see at grocery stores
or form clubs with.
It’s people we’re not related to
and that don’t necessarily share our opinion
about everything in the world.
And that’s what makes it so important
because if the inner ring teaches us love
and the outer ring teaches us loyalty or ideology,
it’s that middle ring that teaches us tolerance.
It requires tolerance to be in the world
of people you’re not related to
who might disagree with you about things.
And in a world with that middle ring is atrophying,
you would predict if you knew nothing else about the world
that our politics would become a lot less tolerant.
There’s a section in the piece titled
This Is Your Politics on Solitude.
And you make the case that this drift towards solitude
is really rewiring our civic and political identity.
Is this how it’s rewiring it?
That it’s basically teaching us to love the people we love
perhaps even more,
but also hate the people we don’t really know?
– I think it might be that.
You know, the two implications that I draw from the piece
are one that you would expect
the political winners of an age of solitude
to exist in that sort of all tribe, no village level.
They’d be great at stoking out animosity
and they would be almost celebratory
of their lack of tolerance.
And certainly I think both those things
describe Donald Trump.
The second is that the conventional wisdom used to be
that all politics is local,
that people vote based on issues
that are local to the village.
But in a world with a village atrophies
and a more global sense of reality concretizes,
it’s not that all politics is local,
it’s that all politics is focal with an F.
All politics is what national media gets us to focus on
whether or not it’s relevant to our local interests.
So one example from the right,
and then maybe one example from the left.
Some of them from the right,
and this anecdote didn’t make it in the final piece,
but are the Russell Hawks child,
who’s a sociologist in California just published a book
and I was emailing her about that book
as I was writing this piece.
And she pointed out that there are folks in rural Kentucky
where she was doing some of her ethnography
where you walk into their trailer homes,
you walk into their houses and the television
is just the biggest piece of furniture in the house.
And for them, the most important issue in the 2024 election
was the rise of illegal immigration
and the hordes of migrants crossing the border.
This was incredibly alarming to them.
And you look at these census reports of rural Kentucky
and these are some of the places
with the smallest share of immigrants in the country.
So in a world where all politics is local,
rural Kentucky does not care about immigration politics
at all, but in a world where all politics is focal,
they’re paying attention to the same news stories
that a conservative living in downtown Chicago
or New York or San Francisco is paying attention to.
And that struck me as very interesting.
And the point that I made about the left
which got me into trouble among sunk people
is that I think that progressives
have comforted themselves with the understanding
that Trump is a kind of political alien
who is inexplicable to anyone who shares progressive values.
But it’s led them to simply not understand Trump
as a political phenomenon in a way
that I think has hurt the left
by not allowing them to take seriously
some of the values that underlie
this incredibly successful right populist movement.
The left would be better at understanding itself
which is to say the country that it lives in
if we spent more time around other people
who lived in our so-called village.
– I never thought of the village
as a moderating mechanism in that way,
but it makes all the sense in the world.
The lack of engagement, the lack of understanding
that has been brewing because of this disconnection
has just been toxic to our politics.
And I don’t know, I’m just whining out loud here.
– No, I accept your whining in the spirit
in which it’s intended, I think.
I’m not particularly optimistic about
Americans agreeing with each other.
And one thing that I don’t want to happen
and that I can see happening
is a world where people fall so out of touch
with where they live and the issues
that are material to their communities
that they vote for people that are giving them something
that’s bad for them and bad for their neighbors
who agree and disagree with whoever’s in the White House.
So I think there are material consequences to a world
where voters are fundamentally disconnected
from their local material realities.
How does the antisocial turn, especially among men,
lead to what you call chaos politics?
I think even use the phrase a grotesque style of politics.
– Yeah, it’s a term of art from a Danish researcher,
a Danish political scientist named Michael Bank Peterson
called Need for Chaos.
And he’s done a series of studies
with some of his co-researchers
and they’ve essentially felt
that there’s a certain demographic
that responds very positively to conspiracy theories
about any establishment politician left or right.
And they tend to agree with statements like,
I don’t believe in the political process,
I just want to see everything burned down.
And he calls them Need for Chaos
because his theory is that this is a cohort of the electorate
that is essentially given up on institutions
and establishment processes.
And they see politics at a distance
as a kind of, as a piece of entertainment
where the most destruction visited
on existing institutions, the better.
And while certainly it sounds like this movement
would lean far right, there are elements of the left
that he sees associated with it as well.
And what he found and the reason that I included
his findings in my piece is that one of the things
that correlates most highly with Need for Chaos
is self-described self-isolation.
And he says, these people aren’t seeking out friendships
the way that someone might if they were lonely
in a typical way, that is seeking out a friend
because you feel that gap between felt
and desired social connection.
Rather, they take stock of their own social isolation
and they seek to remedy it by going online
and seeking power in some way,
typically by joining some online horde
trying to tear down some establishment
or criticize some institution.
(upbeat music)
– Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile.
Maybe you’re someone who likes to save up
for a tropical vacation.
Or maybe you’re finally ready to buy
the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche
at the local university bookstore.
However you spend your money, I’m willing to bet
you’d rather use your hard earned cash
on stuff you actually want.
And not, say, on ridiculously inflated cell phone bills.
Mint Mobile can help with that.
Mint Mobile says they offer phone plans
for less than their major competitors,
offering any three month plan for just $15 a month.
Their plans don’t include the fine print,
hidden charges or large monthly bills.
Instead, customers get unlimited talk and text,
high speed data and more.
Delivered on the nation’s largest 5G network.
If you like your money, Mint Mobile may be for you.
You can shop plans at mintmobile.com/grayarea.
That’s mintmobile.com/grayarea.
Upfront payment of $45 for three month,
five gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 a month.
New customer offer for first three months only.
Then full price plan options available.
Taxes and fees extra, see Mint Mobile for details.
(upbeat music)
– Hey, whatcha doing?
– Programming our thermostat to 17 degrees
when we’re out at work or asleep.
We’re taking control of our energy use this winter
with some easy energy saving tips I got from FortisBC.
– Ooh, conserve energy and save money?
Maybe to buy those matching winter jackets?
– Uh, no, we’re also getting
that whole matching outfit thing under control.
– Discover low and no cost energy saving tips
at fortisbc.com/energysavingtips.
Matching tracksuits?
– Please no.
– TD Direct Investing offers live support.
So whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro,
you can make your investing steps count.
And if you’re like me and think a TFSA stands
for Total Fun Savings Adventure,
maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing.
(upbeat music)
– So what is a different pass we can go down at this point?
I mean, if the antisocial trend continues,
where does that leave us?
If we course correct, what might that look like?
– So should we do gate to hell first,
then gate to heaven so we can end in a happy note?
– Yeah, let’s lead with gate to hell.
– Okay, good.
I can’t imagine a world where artificial intelligence
continues to advance at the rate it’s advancing
and it not meaningfully inflecting this space.
– How so?
– We already see that if there was a big article
in the New York Times just a few days ago
about people falling in love with chat GPT
and having deep personal relationships
with a genitive AI software
whose guts live in some data center
in the Dallas quarter of Virginia.
That’s weird, but it’s gonna get less weird
because it’s become more common.
Jason Fagone, who’s a journalist who I spoke to
is writing a book about people’s relationship
with AI companions and the stories that he told me,
some of which I reported in the piece
and some of which were off the record
were just absolutely extraordinary.
I mean, mothers with families married to a man
but who feels bisexual and has a engaged emotional
relationship with an AI that identifies as a woman.
Men who having lost a girlfriend or fiance
creating avatars of their lost loves out of silicon
and having ongoing relationships with chat GPT
or with other AI companions that essentially mimic
the emotional life of their ex.
This is all gonna get more common
and it’s all gonna get weirder
because the technology is going to improve.
And also because these technologies
are gonna become more multimodal,
which is I guess maybe just a fancy way of saying
they’re gonna get better at talking to us,
literally talking to us and not just texting us back.
And in some ways people are gonna find
that silicon-based friendships and relationships
are just richer than carbon-based relationships
to put things so much frequently.
So I think this is coming and I think we need to see
it clearly for the threat that it could have
to the way that humans deal with each other
in the physical world.
– You know, I have to say, I think this is where some
of those old curmudgeonly cultural critics
like Christopher Lash, you know,
who famously wrote the culture of narcissism
are a little vindicated as you point out in the article,
you know, like one of the reasons we’re so prepared
for chatbot friendships is that we have come
to expect different things from our relationships.
And what a lot of us really want is a set of feelings.
We want validation, we want sympathy,
we want someone or something to make us feel
a certain way about ourselves.
That’s about self fulfillment.
That is kind of narcissism and it’s kind of where we are.
– Yeah, I mean, you know, this is maybe where we dust us
some of your favorite existentialist writers
and, you know, think about like what,
what, like phenomenologically,
what is friendship for the most part?
It’s a lot of spending time with people
in the physical world, hopefully,
but for a lot of people, it’s phone calls and it’s texts.
And it’s the feeling of, hey, I’m having an issue with work
or hey, I’m having an issue with my kid
or I’m having an issue with my relationship.
Hey, man, can we just like talk on the phone?
Can I just give you a call?
Can you just respond to a couple of texts
while we both watch the national championship game at home?
What’s happening there?
You’re picking up a piece of hardware
and you’re holding it to your ear
or you’re holding it in your palm
and you’re having a voice-based or text-based conversation
with an entity who is not there,
but an entity within which you entrust with love
and a host of complex feelings
that make it so that you want to spend time
with someone who is physically a ghost to you.
Well, like, you’re just talking to someone who isn’t there,
that you’ve decided to put trust in.
What’s phenomenologically so different than it being an AI?
– Hell, I probably have half a dozen friendships now
that exist solely through the exchange of funny memes
– Right. – on Instagram.
– And my point isn’t that my best friend
or your best friend is no different than an AI.
I want people to think capaciously
about the ways in which relationships with AI
won’t be weird to lots of people.
It’s weird to me.
I have no relationship with an artificial intelligence.
I’d be surprised if you did.
I’d certainly be surprised if my wife did,
but I don’t think that many people growing up in an age,
especially young people,
who, by the way, one of the first points made in the show,
spent a historic amount of time alone on their couches,
interacting with the world through their smartphone screen,
is it really going to be so strange for them
to have friends at school and friends on their phone?
I just don’t think it takes an enormous amount of imagination
to see how this is coming.
– Yeah, and I should say, I don’t think people today
are any more inherently narcissistic or self-involved
than people were really at any other point,
which is we have built a world optimized
to cater to these sorts of impulses.
– Oh, yeah, no, we’re no different.
I mean, biologically, how can we be different
than our grandfather’s, grandfather’s,
grandfather’s, grandfather.
We’re not.
Nothing’s changed about human biology.
Nothing’s changed about human biochemistry or very little.
Very little’s changed about human psychology.
We’re different because of technology,
and technology of different times
elicits different aspects of our personalities
because we’re incredibly cross-purposed.
We are designed to replicate our genome through history,
but that’s not all.
We’re designed to seek novel stimuli
and also designed to seek familiarity
and designed to seek safety and designed to seek adventure.
We’re so, so complex.
And we just live in a world right now
where I want people to recognize
just how much intelligence and treasure and talent
has been devoted to the job
of keeping us stimulated inside of our homes.
And what if we actually confronted
the costs of that world?
– When I asked you earlier
about the different ways forward,
you gave me the vision for the road to the gates to hell.
You didn’t give me the vision
of the path to the gates of heaven.
What’s the utopian optimistic sunny scenario?
– So the difference between science and culture
is that science tends to move linearly
and culture is a cycle.
Culture goes up and down.
Culture is backlash.
Culture is not just one thing accumulating
over and over and over again.
It’s backlash.
And a proper understanding of the antisocial century,
I think, will inspire its own backlash.
And we’ve backlashed before.
The late 19th century was a highly individualistic time.
And around the progressive era of the early 20th century,
up until the middle of the 1900s,
we had a social revolution in this country
that was inspired by religion and the social gospel,
that was inspired by a change of political economy,
the New Deal and the rise of collectivism,
and was reinforced by everything from behavior
and habits to technology.
It was a physical time, a time of physical togetherness.
And we can have it again.
People need to make new choices with their lives.
And those new choices need to be inspired
by a clear understanding of what we’ve done to ourselves
in the social century.
That year after year of being alone
is unacceptable.
And we can make choices as small as,
I’m gonna call my friend when I feel like I miss them.
I’m gonna spend more time outside of my house.
I’m gonna go out every single weekend absolutely for sure
to make sure that I prioritize a Friday or Saturday hangout.
The people who are in my life that I text
but don’t see physically,
I’m gonna make a point to see them.
I think that behaviors can cascade
and they can create norms.
And I think norms can cascade and they can create movements.
And this is a disease.
The anti-social century is a disease.
The cure is free and is well-known.
And that makes me optimistic.
– Is all of what you just said personally aspirational
or are you becoming the change you wanna see in the world?
Derek, after having thought this through so deeply
and reported this out,
are you changing the decisions you make day to day?
Are you out in the world engaging with more people?
– A thousand percent.
I’m an introvert.
I’m a couch potato, I’m a bookworm.
I love to stay home and read and think about things.
And writing this piece was a reckoning for my own behavior
and the ways that my own hour-to-hour
minute-to-minute preferences were affecting my life
and affecting my happiness.
As Nick Epley says,
you have a great conversation for 15 minutes
rather than be alone.
That doesn’t change your life.
It just changes the next 15 minutes.
But life is just one 15 minute block of time after another.
And the way we spend our minutes
is the way we spend our life.
And that understanding has affected me really deeply.
And I’m thinking so much more about how I spend more time
around people and how I reach out to people more.
That’s such a beautiful place to end.
We love your work around here.
So thanks for coming back on the show, man.
– Thank you, man.
Total pleasure to be here.
– All right.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I always love talking to Derek.
As always, we wanna know what you think.
So drop us the line at the gray area at vox.com and tell us.
And if you can spare just another few minutes,
please rate and review the podcast.
That stuff really helps our show grow.
(upbeat music)
This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
fact-checked by Anouk Dousseau,
and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
Listen and subscribe.
This show is part of Vox.
Support Vox’s journalism by joining
our membership program today.
Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
And if you decide to sign up because of this show,
let us know.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(gentle music)
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Americans are spending an historic amount of time alone, a phenomenon that is often referred to as an “epidemic of loneliness.”
But are we actually lonely? Or do we prefer being by ourselves? And if we do, what does that mean for us and our society?
Today’s guest is journalist Derek Thompson, who, in a recent essay for the Atlantic, challenges the conventional wisdom around loneliness. He argues that Americans prefer solitude, and that preference presents a wholly different kind of challenge for the country.
Derek and Sean discuss the far-reaching effects of America’s antisocial behavior, including what it means for our society, our politics, and our future.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Derek Thompson, staff writer, The Atlantic
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
