“Transformation is often more about unlearning than learning.”
-Richard Rohr.
The accelerated progress humanity has seen in technology and population growth has given us access to wonders heretofore unimaginable by our predecessors. The breadth of scientific knowledge in this 21st century information age is doubling about every 12 months. According to Systems Theorist and American architect, designer, and inventor Buckminseter Fuller’s Knowledge Curve, in 1945 that time span was 25 years and back in 1900, it was 100 years. Your smartphone has over 100,000 times the processing power of the flight computer onboard Apollo 11 after just five decades of research and development.
In our excited hastening towards a brave new world connected by an internet of things, our coattails are often caught aflame from the friction we create. We’re tapping into Prometheus’ fire without tempering it with the respect it deserves.
We forget that we are ancient creatures, designed to thrive in Earth’s pure garden state, with atomic power in our pockets. Fire, when contained within a stove, brings a pleasant warmth on cool evenings, eases us into our nights of rest, and makes our food more desirable after rotisserie cooking. But when the blaze hops its borders, our garden burns wildly out of control; it becomes inflamed. While innovation has given us the greatest quality of life ever known to our species, in many cases, it has come at the cost of exponentially increased rates of isolation, chronic disease, depression, mindlessness, feelings of meaninglessness, detachment from our sense of spirit, and ultimately, suicide.
We, as the human animal, have innate, inescapable needs. Ultimately, those needs can be summed up thusly: to know and be known. There are good paths to pursuing that need and there are substitutes. As we’ve made our rapid advancements, we tend to forget about the most fundamental needs, or at least, we forget how to fulfill them. We think our cleaver inventions, which have helped fight bacteria breakouts, expanded our understanding of the galaxies, and given us life-saving medical apparatus, can also fulfill the need to know and be known by others.
Without a doubt, some problems in this world need rapid solutions: the devastation to our oceans and rainforest from pollution, the lack of clean drinking water in many developing nations, accessibility to education and so on. But we create more problems than we started with if we appropriate our fire to the wrong things.
Won’t You be My Neighbor?
We were designed to be in groups of about 150 people. This number correlates to our neocortex size and was deemed “Dunbar’s number” based on the researcher who made these observations in various groups of primates. This area of the brain is responsible for healthy social interactions, among other things, and other primates band in numbers that respond to their own neocortex size.
Our online “friend” group inappropriately assigns the name “friend” to groups of people that fall outside your ability to have a meaningful, reciprocal relationship with. We are wired to only be able to handle so many and we forget ourselves when we think otherwise. Chronic social networking breaks down the very thing it was originally designed to improve: our social networks. The more “friends” we have online, the fewer and fewer people we end up interacting with in a real way. A 2009 study published in the Economist found that individuals with over 500 Facebook friends only interacted with 10-16 of them.
On average, humans tend to have about five people in an inner circle, or “support clique.” These are people in your life you contact on a weekly basis. The next ring is composed of about 12-15 people, or your “sympathy group,” those who would be devastated if you were to die or be severely injured. Following that ring is a group of about 50 whom you can have meaningful relationships with. Outside of that is the ring of 150, individuals with whom you could truly call friends, those you’ve shared some meaningful history with but don’t necessarily talk to very often. While 150 isn’t a hard and fast number for everyone, that’s the number we trend towards.
This number pops up in some intriguing contexts. Ancient tribal sizes averaged about 153. A study done in the UK found that the average number of Christmas cards people sent out was 153.5. An ancient Roman fighting unit, called a maniple, was composed of between 130-140 soldiers. The list goes on. Just because we have space-age tools that allow us to be technically connected to other people, it has not expanded Dunbar’s number. Friendships require ongoing mutual connections and each of us have a fixed amount of emotional capital to spread. We cannot substitute weak internet bonds with real exchange of intentional social bonding. Social networks have expanded the number of people we can include in our 150, but it has not expanded how much of our hearts we have to give.
When we trade “won’t you be my neighbor” for “add as friend,” we feed on speed and fall into social isolation. Over the past few decades, as knowledge is doubling and 4G turns to 5G, occasional feelings of loneliness have become chronic. When someone returning from war or who feels alone in their struggle with any past trauma tries to interact with a social structure that has an inflamed view of friendship, isolation begins to reign. While being alone once in a while can be refreshing, becoming isolated is poisonous.
Isolation during tribal times would have been equally disastrous to our survival as a broken femur. We are designed to be members of a whole so when we are cast out, whether by choice or force, our physiology breaks down as well. Numerous studies demonstrate the staggering impacts of isolation on physical health. Those who score lower in social connectedness tests have a weakened immune system, compromised memory preservation, impaired sleeping, declines in motor skill retention, and a higher risk of all cause mortality, other factors being equal. Weak social connectedness is as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
Tongues of our garden fire have scorched our abilities to interact with each other like we once used to. Two-day delivery means we can go for indefinite periods without needing to make eye contact even once. But we are hardwired for human contact. We even have pressure receptors in areas on our backs, you know, that spot you can’t reach, that positively respond whenever someone else hugs us. Stress symptoms across the board are improved by a simple (appropriate) touch from another human as we become awash in a healthy dose of feel good, healing hormones.
Monkey with a Wristwatch
Digital stimulation has been substituted for real connection. Our phones provide us with an incredible ability to contact practically whomever we want, whenever we want, a veritable Library of Alexander at our fingertips. But we confuse contact with connection. We confuse seeing a feed of others highlight reels with genuine interaction.
Cues from our apps were actually designed to take advantage of the brain’s reward pathways. Out in nature, we would have realized a survival advantage by paying attention to novelty. A rustling in the bushes demands our attention. By responding to a new noise, we can make better decisions about what to do about it. However, as with sugar, the ding’s from our phones, the little red circle with a number in it, are cheap substitutions of the real thing. The software developers (and food manufacturers) take advantage of this and can literally get us addicted to screen time.
The reward pathway in our heads is largely activated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. As we scroll on our phones, the dopamine actually rises in anticipation of an interesting post, not as a result of it. Social media algorithms are programmed to show you things it thinks you will find uninteresting followed ever so often by things that intrigue you. Your brain’s desire for novelty is hijacked by the novelty machine that is the internet. All it takes is a thumb swipe to signal to your brain, “there’s novelty here! Activate the reward pathway!” How many times have you found yourself scrolling without even cognitively recognizing you even picked up your phone? How hard is it to resist looking at a text the moment you feel the buzz in your pocket or on your wrist?
Overtime, this reactivation of the dopamine pathway leads to our brains’ down regulation of dopamine receptors. Our wiring changes as a result of using novelty apps. Funny how a “user” can refer both to someone online and someone on heroin. This is pathologic to addiction. In other words, exposure to constant novelty, far in excess to what we were designed to see, leads to real addiction. We see this with processed food consumption, excessive social media use, and internet porn. Addiction to cheap substitutes leads to a decreased ability for us to use our prefrontal cortex, the brain region involved in motivation and decision making.
We lose our self control in every aspect of our lives whenever we replace the good paths towards knowing and being known with the bad paths of rapid gratification.
Individual addiction is a societal symptom of choosing an unwise road to fulfill a genuine need. Some of us are addicted to the internet, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, pornography, alcohol, likes on social media posts, grains, and even our own, short lived relief we get from choosing to avoid social interactions. It’s not that we want to expose ourselves to toxic substances. Rather, we want the reward from them. In the 21st century, it’s easier than ever to access the initial sip of satisfaction, but the true value in that desire only comes when we consume the full can, as it were.
Coca-Cola found this out the hard way in the depths of the cola wars with Pepsi. Pepsi routinely out performed Coke in blind taste tests, and though team Coke were loath to tamper with an old recipe, the men in lab coats reformulated a classic. They reasoned that people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests because Pepsi had a sweeter initial impact than Coke. Coke’s flavor was more edgy at first sip and, so the thinking went, was turning people off to the product. After tons of research on what they thought their consumer wanted, they released New Coke in 1985. The launch was a disaster and shortly thereafter, they backpedaled and re-released Coke as Coca-Cola Classic.
So why were the sip tests so wrong? It turns out, there is a difference between enjoying an entire can of Coke in the comfort of one’s home environment versus a single sip taken out in public. What they should have researched is which product a consumer preferred to have in their house as a casual drinking experience rather than a gut reaction during a street test.
When it comes to meeting the deepest desires of our species, we simply cannot substitute. The statistics bear witness to what happens when we exchange the truth of the good path with the lie of the bad one. Meals are meant to be shared and eaten with gratitude. Friendships are meant to last through adversity and prosperity. Intimacy was meant to grow over a long period of time in order to fully know and be known by the other person. Evolution never selected out a good night’s sleep, but the majority of American’s simply live with chronic fatigue as a fact of life, pathing its symptoms with energy in a can.
The truth is, we’re all in this journey towards better wisdom together, regardless of your religious framework. At a minimum, most major world religions acknowledge that humanity is broken and detached from our real nature and wisdom involves finding our path back towards that first, unblemished seed. As we unlearn, we break down any idea of self-righteousness and dogmatism. We can still fall back on a few holy convictions yet allow space for new operating systems to gently guide us to a better reality. Our individual house of cards must fall that we can rebuild a foundation based on humility and a hunger for accessing the full can rather than a cheap sip.
-Richard Rohr.
The accelerated progress humanity has seen in technology and population growth has given us access to wonders heretofore unimaginable by our predecessors. The breadth of scientific knowledge in this 21st century information age is doubling about every 12 months. According to Systems Theorist and American architect, designer, and inventor Buckminseter Fuller’s Knowledge Curve, in 1945 that time span was 25 years and back in 1900, it was 100 years. Your smartphone has over 100,000 times the processing power of the flight computer onboard Apollo 11 after just five decades of research and development.
In our excited hastening towards a brave new world connected by an internet of things, our coattails are often caught aflame from the friction we create. We’re tapping into Prometheus’ fire without tempering it with the respect it deserves.
We forget that we are ancient creatures, designed to thrive in Earth’s pure garden state, with atomic power in our pockets. Fire, when contained within a stove, brings a pleasant warmth on cool evenings, eases us into our nights of rest, and makes our food more desirable after rotisserie cooking. But when the blaze hops its borders, our garden burns wildly out of control; it becomes inflamed. While innovation has given us the greatest quality of life ever known to our species, in many cases, it has come at the cost of exponentially increased rates of isolation, chronic disease, depression, mindlessness, feelings of meaninglessness, detachment from our sense of spirit, and ultimately, suicide.
We, as the human animal, have innate, inescapable needs. Ultimately, those needs can be summed up thusly: to know and be known. There are good paths to pursuing that need and there are substitutes. As we’ve made our rapid advancements, we tend to forget about the most fundamental needs, or at least, we forget how to fulfill them. We think our cleaver inventions, which have helped fight bacteria breakouts, expanded our understanding of the galaxies, and given us life-saving medical apparatus, can also fulfill the need to know and be known by others.
Without a doubt, some problems in this world need rapid solutions: the devastation to our oceans and rainforest from pollution, the lack of clean drinking water in many developing nations, accessibility to education and so on. But we create more problems than we started with if we appropriate our fire to the wrong things.
Won’t You be My Neighbor?
We were designed to be in groups of about 150 people. This number correlates to our neocortex size and was deemed “Dunbar’s number” based on the researcher who made these observations in various groups of primates. This area of the brain is responsible for healthy social interactions, among other things, and other primates band in numbers that respond to their own neocortex size.
Our online “friend” group inappropriately assigns the name “friend” to groups of people that fall outside your ability to have a meaningful, reciprocal relationship with. We are wired to only be able to handle so many and we forget ourselves when we think otherwise. Chronic social networking breaks down the very thing it was originally designed to improve: our social networks. The more “friends” we have online, the fewer and fewer people we end up interacting with in a real way. A 2009 study published in the Economist found that individuals with over 500 Facebook friends only interacted with 10-16 of them.
On average, humans tend to have about five people in an inner circle, or “support clique.” These are people in your life you contact on a weekly basis. The next ring is composed of about 12-15 people, or your “sympathy group,” those who would be devastated if you were to die or be severely injured. Following that ring is a group of about 50 whom you can have meaningful relationships with. Outside of that is the ring of 150, individuals with whom you could truly call friends, those you’ve shared some meaningful history with but don’t necessarily talk to very often. While 150 isn’t a hard and fast number for everyone, that’s the number we trend towards.
This number pops up in some intriguing contexts. Ancient tribal sizes averaged about 153. A study done in the UK found that the average number of Christmas cards people sent out was 153.5. An ancient Roman fighting unit, called a maniple, was composed of between 130-140 soldiers. The list goes on. Just because we have space-age tools that allow us to be technically connected to other people, it has not expanded Dunbar’s number. Friendships require ongoing mutual connections and each of us have a fixed amount of emotional capital to spread. We cannot substitute weak internet bonds with real exchange of intentional social bonding. Social networks have expanded the number of people we can include in our 150, but it has not expanded how much of our hearts we have to give.
When we trade “won’t you be my neighbor” for “add as friend,” we feed on speed and fall into social isolation. Over the past few decades, as knowledge is doubling and 4G turns to 5G, occasional feelings of loneliness have become chronic. When someone returning from war or who feels alone in their struggle with any past trauma tries to interact with a social structure that has an inflamed view of friendship, isolation begins to reign. While being alone once in a while can be refreshing, becoming isolated is poisonous.
Isolation during tribal times would have been equally disastrous to our survival as a broken femur. We are designed to be members of a whole so when we are cast out, whether by choice or force, our physiology breaks down as well. Numerous studies demonstrate the staggering impacts of isolation on physical health. Those who score lower in social connectedness tests have a weakened immune system, compromised memory preservation, impaired sleeping, declines in motor skill retention, and a higher risk of all cause mortality, other factors being equal. Weak social connectedness is as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
Tongues of our garden fire have scorched our abilities to interact with each other like we once used to. Two-day delivery means we can go for indefinite periods without needing to make eye contact even once. But we are hardwired for human contact. We even have pressure receptors in areas on our backs, you know, that spot you can’t reach, that positively respond whenever someone else hugs us. Stress symptoms across the board are improved by a simple (appropriate) touch from another human as we become awash in a healthy dose of feel good, healing hormones.
Monkey with a Wristwatch
Digital stimulation has been substituted for real connection. Our phones provide us with an incredible ability to contact practically whomever we want, whenever we want, a veritable Library of Alexander at our fingertips. But we confuse contact with connection. We confuse seeing a feed of others highlight reels with genuine interaction.
Cues from our apps were actually designed to take advantage of the brain’s reward pathways. Out in nature, we would have realized a survival advantage by paying attention to novelty. A rustling in the bushes demands our attention. By responding to a new noise, we can make better decisions about what to do about it. However, as with sugar, the ding’s from our phones, the little red circle with a number in it, are cheap substitutions of the real thing. The software developers (and food manufacturers) take advantage of this and can literally get us addicted to screen time.
The reward pathway in our heads is largely activated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. As we scroll on our phones, the dopamine actually rises in anticipation of an interesting post, not as a result of it. Social media algorithms are programmed to show you things it thinks you will find uninteresting followed ever so often by things that intrigue you. Your brain’s desire for novelty is hijacked by the novelty machine that is the internet. All it takes is a thumb swipe to signal to your brain, “there’s novelty here! Activate the reward pathway!” How many times have you found yourself scrolling without even cognitively recognizing you even picked up your phone? How hard is it to resist looking at a text the moment you feel the buzz in your pocket or on your wrist?
Overtime, this reactivation of the dopamine pathway leads to our brains’ down regulation of dopamine receptors. Our wiring changes as a result of using novelty apps. Funny how a “user” can refer both to someone online and someone on heroin. This is pathologic to addiction. In other words, exposure to constant novelty, far in excess to what we were designed to see, leads to real addiction. We see this with processed food consumption, excessive social media use, and internet porn. Addiction to cheap substitutes leads to a decreased ability for us to use our prefrontal cortex, the brain region involved in motivation and decision making.
We lose our self control in every aspect of our lives whenever we replace the good paths towards knowing and being known with the bad paths of rapid gratification.
* * *
Individual addiction is a societal symptom of choosing an unwise road to fulfill a genuine need. Some of us are addicted to the internet, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, pornography, alcohol, likes on social media posts, grains, and even our own, short lived relief we get from choosing to avoid social interactions. It’s not that we want to expose ourselves to toxic substances. Rather, we want the reward from them. In the 21st century, it’s easier than ever to access the initial sip of satisfaction, but the true value in that desire only comes when we consume the full can, as it were.
Coca-Cola found this out the hard way in the depths of the cola wars with Pepsi. Pepsi routinely out performed Coke in blind taste tests, and though team Coke were loath to tamper with an old recipe, the men in lab coats reformulated a classic. They reasoned that people prefer Pepsi in blind taste tests because Pepsi had a sweeter initial impact than Coke. Coke’s flavor was more edgy at first sip and, so the thinking went, was turning people off to the product. After tons of research on what they thought their consumer wanted, they released New Coke in 1985. The launch was a disaster and shortly thereafter, they backpedaled and re-released Coke as Coca-Cola Classic.
So why were the sip tests so wrong? It turns out, there is a difference between enjoying an entire can of Coke in the comfort of one’s home environment versus a single sip taken out in public. What they should have researched is which product a consumer preferred to have in their house as a casual drinking experience rather than a gut reaction during a street test.
When it comes to meeting the deepest desires of our species, we simply cannot substitute. The statistics bear witness to what happens when we exchange the truth of the good path with the lie of the bad one. Meals are meant to be shared and eaten with gratitude. Friendships are meant to last through adversity and prosperity. Intimacy was meant to grow over a long period of time in order to fully know and be known by the other person. Evolution never selected out a good night’s sleep, but the majority of American’s simply live with chronic fatigue as a fact of life, pathing its symptoms with energy in a can.
The truth is, we’re all in this journey towards better wisdom together, regardless of your religious framework. At a minimum, most major world religions acknowledge that humanity is broken and detached from our real nature and wisdom involves finding our path back towards that first, unblemished seed. As we unlearn, we break down any idea of self-righteousness and dogmatism. We can still fall back on a few holy convictions yet allow space for new operating systems to gently guide us to a better reality. Our individual house of cards must fall that we can rebuild a foundation based on humility and a hunger for accessing the full can rather than a cheap sip.
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