People Were Already Declining Socially, Now What?

I was fortunate to have been born in the early seventies. This means I went through my youth and adolescent years with Atari and the Sony Walkman as the most sophisticated technology to play with. These devices did not negatively impact my social development. The majority of my time was spent outside doing nothing in particular but still spending copious amounts of time with people, even the ones I didn’t like. This taught me the art of having difficult conversations through medians like disputing kickball boundaries or whether someone was or wasn’t called out while playing running bases. Then, the Internet and cellular phones exploded.

I recently joked about how hard it was meeting girls when I was a teenager or even in my early twenties to a group of millenials compared to how things are these days. The system of asking for someone’s phone number, remembering it if you didn’t have a pen and paper (no cellphones to input them into), then building up the courage to call and have a conversation (no texting) was a skill. That skill is obsolete. Their faces went blank when I described a childhood without the internet, YouTube, social media, or smartphones. They were dry heaving when I explained my introduction to the Internet with AOL dial up modems and chat rooms. The unified response of “What did you guys do for fun?” was a question that seemed to produce physical pain if they were to reflect and attempt to answer it for themselves. The answer of just being outside with my friends was not enough. Sitting around doing nothing other than talking is not something that people seem to do anymore.

Technology has improved our lives in a great many ways but it has also hindered our development in one critical area, our social development. As a social species we seek connection and the foundational element for this is conversation. Communicating with one another was difficult for many even before the digital age. Effective communication requires practice and having difficult conversations may be the most critical of all social skills. Emails, text messaging, and social media instant messaging has all but made these things extinct. We live in an age where it has become acceptable to say difficult things via email, where engagements are ended over text, and the veil of technology shields us from ever having to feel vulnerable or uncomfortable in the realm of social communication. It’s the equivalent of drinking alcohol to avoid feeling what you don’t want to feel. It’s why in an era where billions of people are ‘connected’ we have a loneliness epidemic of the likes which this planet has never seen. It’s why the practice reading and writing, foundational communication skills, are declining. When was the last time anyone wrote someone a physical letter using pen and paper? People gather together in social settings and spend more time on their phones than looking into the eyes of the people they are with.

I can not help but wonder what effect the covid-19 era will have on this. We were already declining socially as a whole and now we are programmed to be even more distant from one another and nudged to rely more on technology to communicate. Technology is great in fields where some things are made quicker and more efficient but developing our social and communication skills takes time. There is no app for this. The app culture has made us all expect and want things faster and easier but developing authentic and strong connections with people can not follow this. Because we expect things to be easier and faster as whole, we don’t have the same gratitude and appreciation for things and this leads to a lack of patience, tolerance, and can diminish our commitment to persistence to achieve. Statistics show that millennials are not marrying at the same rate as previous generations and many studies attribute this to the economy, financial situations, differing definitions of marriage but I can’t help but wonder if it is also due to a lack of social and communication skill development impairing the ability to form the connection necessary to want to enter into such a relationship. Developing a relationship of any kind takes time. There is no shortcut in getting to know someone and developing a healthy relationship and authentic connection with someone. Getting to know someone and letting someone get to know who you are takes time and technology has implicitly conditioned people to take time for granted particularly in the area most critical to our survival as a species, our social development.