Breathing in the Soot of Loneliness
During the industrial revolution, our society (mostly) unknowingly placed the quantity of goods over quality of life.
Our many coal-burning factories built item after item after item without realizing the major affects the soot and smog were having on the people who worked in those factories and, eventually, on everyone else as well.
The Great Smog event of 1952 is estimated to have killed more than 4,000 Londoners and to have made over a hundred thousand people ill. Smaller but similar events killed hundreds of people in Pennsylvania and other parts of New England.
Government edicts had done little to effect change. It was only when the people banded together to form unions that we started to see real change.
Today, there is a sadness in the air. It’s not soot, but it’s just as dark. More and more of us are finding ourselves lonely or feeling isolated, as shown in several well-curated surveys, such as the PISA study.
More and more evidence has come to light that the cause — not just a correlate — is our social media use.
Like the factories of old, social media platforms have pushed the quantity of human interactions over quality. We may receive hundreds of interactions — thumbs ups, hearts, comments (good or bad)— from displaying our curated photos and thoughts on these platforms, so we feel connected. But the interactions are cheap. They often come from people whose voice we haven’t heard in weeks, months, years, or maybe ever, and who won’t be spending any actual time with us in the near future. The interactions are asynchronous — coming whenever they will and not as an in-time reactions to our actual person and humanity. It feels like we’re connected, but the connections are as fragile as a seedling in a hurricane. The roots can be snapped with a simple scroll or the push of a ‘block’ button. There’s no investment in the relationship. And there’s no real consequence of leaving it.
As with the smog of London, those in the “factories” are not the only ones being affected. If you abstain from social media, you’ll still find that everyone else has their eyes to their palms when you go for a walk — if they’re even out of the house at all. In school and at work, their speech patterns have changed, their moods have changed. They’ve learned to judge more, they’re angrier and sadder, they find homogenous groups of us-versus-them’s and live in their own echo chambers.
In our case, governments are not really doing anything about this, and, like times of old, it’s probably not the answer anyway. We need to band together on this one, to unionize.
When will we see enough damage to move us to action? It’s difficult, because we’re not dying (well, suicide rates are up, so that’s not entirely true). Instead of visibly dying by the thousands as was the case with smog in the industrial revolution, though, we’re dying internally, choking on soot that’s harder to see. Can we stand up against the factories yet?
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