Immobility, Loneliness & Negative Feedback Loops
[My guy Peter Liu kicked off an exercise to write 30 essays in 30 days as an effort to learn how to write more concisely and with more impact by exercising those muscles via habit creation. I’m all for it. So, I’ve decided to start writing again more regularly. Thanks, Peter!]
This particular musing/ramble is a little less structured and borrowed from a LinkedIn post I just banged out.
—
“‘Wanting to move but being unable to leave leads people to wonder about whether their other efforts in life will be rewarded,’ [Buttrick and Oishi] write [in their recent paper].”
The quote above is excerpted from a great long-form piece from Vox titled, “What happens when Americans stay in the same house forever?”.
Combine the inability to move with ramifications on expansion of weak ties connections and ramifications of lack thereof. Put differently, if we move less, and form fewer new network nodes, we develop fewer “edges” (or connections to other nodes) and information flow as well as empathy for other network “clusters” (collections of nodes) then we’ll only see an increase in tribalism and polarization, and less meta-community-oriented development and support of one another.*
And then in turn look at a quote circa March ’20 from US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy as he noted on Twitter:
As #COVID19 forces us to physically distance from one another and as our contact with other people drops, society is at risk for a *social recession*. A social recession is marked by an increase in #loneliness and isolation.
Murthy was concerned with the loneliness epidemic well before the COVID pandemic and covers his concerns extensively in his April ’20 released “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely”.
The compounding effects of these secular trends has me very worried, and in particular for generations that follow mine, let alone the current reality we face today.
Immobility + drop of participation in real-world social institutions + increased polarization + anxiety/depression increases in Gen Z vs. previous generations = a complex system that is unbelievably challenging to mitigate. That being said, we do need to mitigate and reverse these trends.
—
*Give “The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchy, and the Struggle for Global Power” a read! I’m 7 or 8 chapters in and absolutely loving it. It goes pretty deep into network theory from the perspective of may disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, math/computer science, and more, through Niall Ferguson’s amazing vantage as a historian. Thanks, Marc Andreessen for the recommendation via Farnam Street (Shane Parrish)’s “The Knowledge Project” podcast. Marc’s episode is here.
