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Floriana Grundy
Instead of snuggling up on cool mornings beneath a fuzzy blanket with the adorable little Roku control in their hands, my daughters are busy falling into a scholastic rhythm which includes, among other things, the restart of nightly homework assignments, bleary-eyed early-A.M. flute practices, and after school showers to rinse the stink of pre-tweenhood from their persons.
In contrast, the end of summer for me at home alone has meant a lot of time under my Red Wings blanket, pressing the handy dandy Netflix button on the Roku for a lot of Netflix streaming as I try (and fail) to get back into a groove of writing, baking, soup making and napping with the cats. Okay, that last one I got down pat without issue.
Over the course of history, technophobes and technoskeptics have been fundamentally incorrect. Technological advancement has enormously improved the human condition, and the onward and upward trajectory of innovation and growth is very good.
Still, not every single innovation and advancement has been good. As I've written before, the opioid crisis is a complicated phenomenon, but it has a technological root: the world has become much better at manufacturing fentanyl, which is easier to conceal and smuggle because of its higher potency relative to other drugs. Similarly, I was recently rewatching Breaking Bad, the premise of which is that Walter White is a genuinely skilled chemist and that makes him better at methamphetamine manufacturing than the average meth cook.
Obviously watching too much Netflix is not unhealthy on the order of doing a ton of meth. But I do worry that the proliferation and improvement of home entertainment are perhaps making us more atomized, unhappy, and dysfunctional.
Lehman is a conservative writer, so when he expanded on this idea, the article included a lot of conservative tics, like a very snide view about education, the belief that college graduates are uniquely bad, and most of all, a broadly Hegelian view in which changes in our world are driven by changes in our ideas. Lehman thinks millennials, especially well-educated ones, are too risk-averse and that this ultimately leads to a life of boredom:
The video games theory of the 2008-2012 decline in labor force participation was wrong (note that it turned around as the labor market improved), but the long-term decline in the share of men who are working fits the picture of idleness becoming less boring.
Sort of weird that this post came up. Right now we have our son-in-law staying at our house with my step-daughter. He got out of the Marines a year ago. Since then he has tried multiple jobs and never lasted more than a week. He also tried college. Quit after one semester.
More importantly, I think this is absolutely true when it comes to dating, on both ends. I'm going to give of course, pretty hyperbolic examples, but I think parts of all of it are why there's a depression in sex on the edges.
If you're a guy, you can go out, on a date with a woman you may or may not like, likely pay a decent amount of money, and she'll either never call you back, or on the other side of things, you might be not that interested in her, but she'll be clingy toward you...or you could play GTA Online for 6 hours, and then watch very high quality porn of all kinds involving women much more attractive than you have any shot at.
Or, if you're a girl, you can go out on a date, or just out in general, get bothered by a lot of creepy dudes if you're not specfically on a date, and if you do go home with one of them, it's highly possible the actual sex won't be all that good, or they'll be clingy in a vartiety of ways (that are much more dangerous)...or you could watch 6 hours of really well edited reality shows, and then use a sex toy that's much better at giving you an orgasm than a majority of men.
Obviously, Bowling Alone and it's descendents have it's reasonable arguments, but honestly, hasn't this been the reaction to any kind of change in culture/leisure time? Look at how people reacted to comic books and television during the 50's, let alone previous times of moral outrage and worries about the undergirdings of society.
What I think is largely happening is a lot of mediocre sex, mediocre friendship groups, and mediocre relationships in general are dying on the vine, or never happening in the first place. I also think a lot of this is older people not understanding a different in communication - from what I know, the zoomers talk a lot to each other, it's just in Discord or whatever instead of in the park or the backyard of somebodies house. Now, you can judge whether that's truly a friend group or not, but I also think some of this is older Millenial's pushing their ennui about college/early 20's period friendships/relationships drifting apart as they tend to do, to some huge society defining thing.
Also, do people actually have fewer friends, or are people less apt to call a guy they see every couple of weeks to have a beer or two a friend? Perhaps those sensitive snowflake young kids just have stricter views, just like they do on a lot of societal views.
I'm being somewhat overblown, but I think this is something where there's something slightly screwy at the edges of society (like there is some evidence that a small percentag of kids who are having the usual lack of luck in high school are getting sucked into the incel vortex), and turning it into something that is effecting a wide swath of things. Like, I live in a large city - in our cities 'place 20-something's go out', things seem no different than when I was in my mid-20's, now that COVID isn't really a thing.
When the show premiered in 2008, Walt\u2019s \u201Cblue sky\u201D 99.1 percent pure methamphetamine was a sufficiently extraordinary achievement to serve as the whole premise of a work of fiction. Today, though, it\u2019s basically industry standard \u2014 that\u2019s the miracle of productivity growth! Of course the consequences of improving this particular type of productivity are quite bad.
Back in 1887, Edward Bellamy wrote the utopian novel \u201CLooking Backward\u201D about a man who falls asleep and awakes 113 years in the future to experience life in Boston circa the year 2000, by which time the United States has become a utopian socialist society.1
\u201CThere is nothing in the least mysterious about the music, as you seem to imagine. It is not made by fairies or genii, but by good, honest and exceedingly clever human hands. We have simply carried the idea of labor saving by cooperation into our musical service as into everything else. There are a number of music rooms in the city, perfectly adapted acoustically to the different sorts of music. These halls are connected by telephone with all the houses of the city whose people care to pay the small fee, and there are none, you may be sure, who do not. The corps of musicians attached to each hall is so large that, although no individual performer, or group of performers, has more than a brief part, each day's programme lasts through the twenty-four hours. There are on that card for today, as you will see if you observe closely, distinct programmes of four of these concerts, each of a different order of music from the others, being now simultaneously performed, and any one of the four pieces now going on that you prefer, you can hear by merely pressing the button which will connect your house-wire with the hall where it is being rendered. The programmes are so coordinated that the pieces at any one time simultaneously proceeding in the different halls usually offer a choice, not only between instruments and vocal, and between different sorts of instruments; but also between different motives from grave to gay, so that all tastes and moods can be suited.\u201D
That of course is not how terrestrial radio works. But as a forecast of the ability to tune into any genre of music from the comfort of home, it\u2019s not bad \u2014 and we didn\u2019t even have to wait until 2000 for that technology. By 2000, thanks to the internet, we were on the verge of the technological transformation that created today\u2019s streaming services \u2014 by paying a modest fee to one of several competing companies, you can access almost any music you want. And you can not only have it in your home but carry it around with you in your pocket.
One of my favorite podcasts (because we also have podcasts now) is The Rewatchables, a show that has a kinda obsolete premise that there\u2019s a certain class of movie that you lock in on if you see it on cable while you\u2019re flipping channels. The conceit is that the hosts pick a movie \u2014 the sort of movie that, if you were flipping through cable channels, would make you stop and watch \u2014 and discuss. But of course, these days nobody flips through the channels on cable. Instead, I purposefully stream the hosts\u2019 selection before listening to the episode, or else I listen to an episode about a movie I\u2019ve seen before and then I stream it. The hosts have a great rapport, but in terms of \u201Cjobs to be done,\u201D what makes the show so great is that for a movie fan, it serves as a complement to streaming video.
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