7 reasons why the 21st Century is making us miserable

[Zalandris]

http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=2370

Wow, really good advice from Cracked magazine of all places. I especially like this part:

You want to break out of that black tar pit of self-hatred? Brush the black hair out of your eyes, step away from the computer and buy a nice gift for someone you loathe. Send a card to your worst enemy. Make dinner for your mom and dad. Or just do something simple, with an tangible result. Go clean the leaves out of the gutter. Grow a damn plant.

It ain't rocket science; you are a social animal and thus you are born with little happiness hormones that are released into your bloodstream when you see a physical benefit to your actions. Think about all those teenagers in their dark rooms, glued to their PC's, turning every life problem into ridiculous melodrama. Why do they make those cuts on their arms? It's because making the pain—and subsequent healing—tangible releases endorphins they don't get otherwise. It's pain, but at least it's real.

That form of stress relief via mild discomfort used to be part of our daily lives, via our routine of hunting gazelles and gathering berries and climbing rocks and fighting bears. No more. This is why office jobs make so many of us miserable; we don't get any physical, tangible result from our work. But do construction out in the hot sun for two months, and for the rest of your life you can drive past a certain house and say, "Holy shit, I built that." Maybe that's why mass shootings are more common in offices than construction sites.

And I believe the advice contained inside isn't just for the emo kids hanging around online. I think lots of us are suffering because of the lack of real social interaction in our lives these days. Somehow in college, I had tons of friends I used to hang out with, go to movies, genuinely talk to. Nowadays? Not so much... Most nights it's the wife and me hanging out by ourselves. Just getting some friends to commit to a night out of dinner and a show feels like I'm trying to stage a production of Hamlet.

[MWT]

Hmmm. My condolences to the author of that article. My own online experiences have been much different.

[Zalandris]

I'll be the first to admit it does have a rather Luddite feel to the whole piece but I don't think he is necessarily wrong about any of it.

[MWT]

The online communities I've been in have been nothing like that. Some of my most rewarding friendships have come from them. I have quite a few good friends that I've only ever known online.

Online and offline communities operate on all of the same principles. They are both real. All of the same things happen in them. The medium is different, but the medium is a tool, and tools can always be used either well or badly.

What I find most disturbing is when parents teach their children to lie while they're interacting with online communities. As if the people on the other side of the screen are just text and nothing more, and not real people at real keyboards. As if one can do anything they want because they're somehow anonymous, and somehow nobody else can ever know. As if one can walk away at any time. That kind of sentiment - that it's perfectly okay to be bastards just because it's online - is what, in my opinion, causes a lot of the problems that David Wong expresses in his article. It's a destructive element of offline communities, too, for much the same reasons. Also he wants to blame the medium for his own personal failings (why didn't he clear up that misunderstanding about his chili right then and there? Am I supposed to infer that he has no trouble whatsoever with misunderstandings in real life due to stomping off in a huff?).

Fundamental wrongheaded concept that I really, truly am getting tired of hearing from people like David Wong: "It's just text." It isn't just text. I'm not the only one who has noticed that text has "tone," pacing of conversation works very well as "body language," and charisma carries through the Internet too. It's just not something a lot of people pick up on because they're not used to the concept, and don't listen for it. Your subconscious picks up on a whole lot more than what your standard five senses pick up on, but your conscious filters most of it out; online nonverbal communication is included in that.

I'm sorry that this is a disorganized rant; I haven't really had a chance to sort out how to say what I've been wanting to say for decades in a better way. It's why I left it at that short post earlier, because otherwise it was going to turn into a dissertation.

[Zalandris]

It's all good MWT, I was kinda hoping this would start a debate on the subject.

You make a point about lying online and it being a bad thing. Something I'd like to point out is that when you are interacting with someone purely online then by default, you are being dishonest. The other person only sees what you want to share with them, the best parts of your personality. I feel that it is really impossible to genuinely know someone until you sit down and talk to them face to face. Not that people can't be dishonest IRL, it's just much tougher.

I too have sent a lot of time in various online communities and I've met lots of great people from them. Had a lot of fun and a lot of laughs, but none of them have had the longevity of friendships I've made in real life. I'm not entirely sure why that is. I suspect it has to do a lot with it is just easier to drift away when you don't have the same ties.

[MWT]

Well, my experiences have been different from yours. Online and offline have been about the same. But I've moved around a lot offline, too, so it's been just as easy to lose track of people I've known offline when I've graduated, left one workplace for another, moved to a different city, etc. By the same token, even though I've now been in the same place for six years, other people have come and gone from the places I've stayed.

I disagree that online interactions are inherently dishonest. They are if you make them so, but they don't have to be. Every time you're in front of other people - online or offline - you're presenting some sort of face. You might have different ones for different people and different roles (in front of friends, in front of coworkers, in front of your boss, etc.). The online one(s) will by nature be different from the offline ones because it's a different medium. But every face is still a reflection of you.

And I've seen and shared some of the worst parts of myself/others while online too. They aren't shallow friendships. That's what I most resent about people who are quick to dismiss online interactions as unreal or unimportant - the assumption that my friendships aren't real ones and can't possibly have any depth. The idea that they aren't longlasting - or at least aren't as longlasting as offline friends. Mine have been.

In any community, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. If you take it seriously and treat it with respect, you reap far greater rewards. If you use it as a place to vent, don't be surprised if nobody likes you. If you make up a fake persona and then discover you're really getting drawn into a community you like, it'll eventually shatter. Online or offline, it's the same.

[Snave]

I can get those "little happiness hormones" from on-line interactions, too. They aren't reserved for just physical face-to-face interactions. Granted, I get them more often from the physical, but that's because I have more physical relationships than on-line ones. And I agree that on-line isn't inherently dishonest. The more on-line interactons I have, the more history is built up, and the thing about the Internet is that history can easily be checked. For people I regularly interact with, I can feel if they are consistant or not. Over months, or more, there's a lot going on. And I can reread not only what they have said, but even what I've said.

My on-line ID usually also points to my blog, which I started almost 5 years ago. Anyone with questions can check there. Could it be faked, sure, but it's an additional source of history to be checked. I'm not 100% open in my blog, because it's still a public document, not a private journal, but there's lots there that's really me, who I am. I think the more we all interact on-line, the more we'll all be able to recognize people for what they are. That doesn't mean I'll be naive about on-line relationships, any more than I am in person. It's easier to be open and still be wary.

I like this new world of interconnected people. There's lots of ways to be social, and a new definition of "local" in the way of availability. My local is much broader that it used to be.

[udarnik]

I think that the debate here is conflating two different things. One is the lack of physical activity that results from knowledge work. Most of what I do in my current job is conceptualize and push paper, while other people execute my plans. I miss the physical activities in the lab, the idea that I was creating something that no one had every made before. I still have samples of some of my patented materials sitting on my shelf - a reminder that I was the first person in the world to make those things.

Referencing the "cutting" - idle hands are the devil's workshop. Take your kids fishing for Pete's sake! Since shop has been cut from school, teach them woodworking yourself! Make them appreciate how much of the fruits of other opeople's labor they take for granted every time that they walk into a Wal-Mart. They'll be happier for it. There is something special to walking around my old construction site and saying "I helped build that". Physical hobbies are necessary for human mental health. I don't think that's debatable.

The second thing, and the issue that the comment thread has concentrated on, is the nature of on-line relationships. That is a bit more debatable than the benefits of physical labor. Think of the pioneers for whom most of their non-family social interaction was an infrequent letter. Or sailors in the Age of Sail. They lived in an analagous world to the geek who communicates largely by email excpet for his coworkers and immediate family. I'm not sure that one can make a blanket statement that on-line or face-to-face relationships are better on the individual scale. On the aggregate, I'd say that it takes <i>longer<i/> to spot a marginal flake online (the whoppers are evident either electronically or in meat space right away) because of the lack of non-verbal cues. Also someone who works out with me (even if they're trying to beat my head in for the 30 minutes we're in the ring) or can offer physical help to me probably has a better chance of developing a deep relationship with me than someone I only know online - that's just the way I am made. I have a feeling that MWT is not the marginal case, as the economists say, and that there are a lot more people like Zalandris and me out there.

[Ray]

Udarnik. Well said.

[izanobu]

I completely agree that physical work and the act of building/making/doing is very important to health both physical and mental.

However, there are plenty of things about this article that are silly. Now I will pointlessly refute them using examples from my own life.

Not enough annoying people? or annoying friends?
Example: I love writing. I honestly can't stand about 80% of the people I've met both online and in the real world who also love writing. Same goes for many of the things I like. People are annoying (in my opinion). Even my best and closest friends annoy me to death on occasion. That's ok. Also, I don't want more friends. My friends are more like family at this point (I literally grew up with most of them). I like having a few very close people I can completely rely on as opposed to 50 people I'm not sure would take me in if my home exploded.

#3, well, then this guy needs to learn to either ask for clarification if he misses the sarcasm or lack of it, or he should learn to read other cues. I think this one says more about the author (as does the whole piece) than anything substantial about texting or people in general.

#4- loneliness makes us lonely, not online company. I went through a pretty awful time my senior year of college where I could go weeks without seeing any of my real life friends (I went away from them for college and we were all really busy at weird times). I was playing Dark Age of Camelot though, and I think it partially saved my sanity. I had a pretty fun guild and they loved me because I was good at tactics and fun to chat with. They kept my spirits up, let me know I was missed when I wasn't able to go on raids or mine gold with them, things like that. My point is, interaction is interaction. I think you get what you put into it, online or IRL.

#5- well, criticism hurts sometimes even when it isn't from someone you know. Ask any published author how they feel about bad reviews and I think they could tell you that someone who doesn't know you at all can still strike a nerve.

#6- pretty much this one can be answered by "if you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention." Of course anyone with half a brain and the ability to parse news and information would be pretty sad about the state of the world. Geez.

#7- again, says more about the author than making any real point. Also, I used to cut (self-injure) but it was because people, in real life, were being very very cruel to me and I didn't know how to get away from them or get rid of the pain of it.

Basically this whole thing could have been summed up by: Have a 50 real friends outside of the online world and annoy them for your pleasure and theirs, oh, and build sandcastles together.
And never text message this guy when he's in a bad mood.

[Wonko]

I'll be the first to admit it does have a rather Luddite feel to the whole piece but I don't think he is necessarily wrong about any of it.

I once tried to stop the automation of my life by stuffing a clog into my computer. It was an older desktop model and there was no place to really put it where it might have done some good.