Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world,
do we begin to find ourselves, and realize
where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
—Henry David Thoreau
There’s this idea that keeps getting whispered through history…
the idea that we aren’t lonely because we are alone;
we are lonely because we have failed in our solitude.
—Michael Harris
The unexamined life is a threat to others.
—Parker Palmer
A Failure in Solitude
Today’s youngest generations—those twenty- and thirty-somethings that got my mother musing in Part I of this post—those generations have never had to be lost. They have never had to be literally lost because they carry every direction to everywhere in their palms, available at the simple touch of a screen or voice command. They have never had to be metaphorically lost because there is no need to endure an absence when you hold your entire social network at all times in your hand. Indeed, FOMO due to this level of connectivity has actually made solitude or absence quite frightening and anxiety producing for many young people, and I suspect a lot of them would find the idea that there could be value to being lost hopelessly anachronistic.
And it’s not just “lost” that has been absent from their lives. In a world of Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Tinder, the need for delayed gratification has also gone missing as well. Want some material good? It can arrive tomorrow (and once the drones are inevitably introduced, today). Bored? You can watch anything, anywhere, anytime on your device of choice. In need of some temporary physical companionship that’s disposable? It’s only a swipe of the screen away. In the meantime, there is plenty of multitasking to keep the dopamine hits coming because after all, just:
look at the multitasker in action. He or she appears to be a whir of productivity, not some slave to mindless responses. Phone (and cappuccino) held aloft while crossing the intersection—barely avoiding a collision with that cyclist (also on the phone)—the multitasker is in the enviable position of getting shit done (Harris, p. 120; original emphasis).
Yet so often, all that is truly being accomplished is avoiding the solitude that comes from momentarily finding one’s self temporarily lost. Time is killed merely managing rather than creating, spending “most of our lives pushing electronic nothings around while staring at a glowing rectangle” (Harris, p. 9), and while everyone so engaged looks productive, the value of the world it has produced is highly questionable: ever increasing consumption for consumption’s sake, with all the ecological degradation that goes with it that I have written about in It Could (Will?) Be Worse.
We have, then, a significant number of people that have never been lost or asked to delay their want, and again, enter stage left a deadly, highly contagious virus. Suddenly, society is demanding a level of isolation and personal deprivation (both materially and socially) never experienced before, and because so many in our younger generations were ill-prepared to handle it, I would suggest that —to paraphrase Michael Harris—they have failed in their sudden solitude and that the resulting level of unmet want and true loneliness is part of what is driving the reckless behaviors that are causing the current surge in positivity rates in these age groups.
However, I think there is more to the current situation (and more to the answer to my mother’s questions) than simply a failure in solitude. Never experiencing being temporarily lost also means never having to ask for directions, and because there are good sources for directions and bad sources for directions, learning how to tell the difference is a critical life skill that I think a lot of individuals in our society have never felt any compelling need to develop. What’s more, in today’s world, if you don’t actually know how to ask for directions (or direction!), others are there, eager to fill the void for you:
Since 2009, Google has been anticipating the search results that you’d personally find most interesting and has been promoting those results each time you search, exposing you to a narrower and narrower vision of the universe. In 2013, Google announced that Google Maps would do the same, making it easier to find things Google thinks you’d like and harder to find things you haven’t encountered before. Facebook follows suite, presenting a curated view of your “friends’ ” activities in your feed. Eventually, the information you’re dealing with absolutely feels more personalized; it confirms your beliefs, your biases, your experiences. And it does this to the detriment of your personal evolution. Personalization—the glorification of your own taste, your own opinion—can be deadly to real learning (Harris, p. 91; my emphasis).
The only thing I would change about Harris’ final statement is that it IS deadly to real learning, and it is so because here, once again, we bump up against one of those inconvenient limits of the human brain. It turns out that the more the brain is exposed to a body of information, the more the brain considers it reliable—basically, the more it thinks the information is true. This had tremendous survival value at one time because hearing over and over again that a leopard is dangerous kept you on the alert for leopards; repeatedly hearing that a certain type of tree produced fruit each year kept you on the hunt for a reliable food source. But as Emily Dreyfuss of the Harvard Shorensten Center points out, while this hard-wired feature of our brains was once invaluable to our survival, “in a disinformation ecosystem [such as the one we currently inhabit], it really is dangerous” as conflicting so-called “truths” simply get reinforced by the bubble described above (Garcia-Navarro). Like I said, deadly to real learning.
Also, as the pandemic is illustrating all too well, it can be literally deadly as well. Uncertainty is a form of being lost, with expertise a good source for directions. Yet in a disinformation ecosystem, “where everyone’s version of the facts is equally valid, and opinions of specialists become marginalized, corporate and politicized interests are potentially empowered” to keep people from finding their way to the truth (Harris, p. 75). As a result, you get super-spreader events such as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota and nurses reporting COVID-19 patients denying they have the disease even as they draw their last breaths. You get over a million people a day over the past week flying to visit family, having rationalized that the plea to stay home by health officials doesn’t apply to them, and you get a mounting death toll that, as of 12/30/2020, is 18% of the world’s total dead in a country that represents only 4% of the world’s population. All because—as Thoreau might have put it—too many people have failed to lose the world and thereby know “the infinite extent of our relations.”
The New Tribalism
If the only thing a collective failure in solitude were doing is simply making the pandemic worse in this country, one might argue let evolution take its course, grant the necessary Darwin Awards to the idiots who ignore public health policy, mask up, and keep social distancing—because like any disease, this one will run its course. But the failure in solitude is merely the consequence of the larger digital silos our uses of technology have created, leading to the growing tribalism in our society, and because this is the environment the plasticity of our brains now inhabits on a daily basis, this tribalism reinforces our digital bubble habits that feed the failure in solitude in the first place.
I fear we may be in a vicious cycle of positive feedback wherein our uses of technology sculpt a brain to think first and foremost only with the values of one’s tribe which simply reinforces those uses of the technology that lead to such a brain in the first place. And I am not alone in thinking so. Political scientist, Greg Weiner, argues that it is not the amount of disinformation that is the problem; it is people’s craving for consuming it. As he puts it, “there is a difference between being uncertain of what is true and being uninterested in finding out,” and what both he and I are concerned about is whether we can get this interest back under the current conditions in this country. When one of the brightest of my current students shares during the recent election that he only gets his news off his Instagram social media feed, I fear for our future.
The challenge is that we need the very solitude the Internet of Everything denies us to develop the insight needed to care once more about the truth, and as Michael Harris sums the situation nicely, “we cannot afford to count on accidental absence any more than we can count on accidental veggies at dinner” (p. 39). Where, then, do the absences come from and along with them, the will to fight today’s digital tribalism and its consequent damaging and dangerous social and political tribalism? How do we generate the necessary appreciation for solitude again? “True contemplation is always a two-part act: we go out into the world for a time, see what they’ve got, and then find some isolated chamber where all that experience can be digested” (Harris, p. 133). But right now, too many in our society are missing those “chambers,” and we have got to find a way and the will to change that fact—especially among our so-called digital natives.
Moreover, we cannot put the burden for doing so exclusively on them. I first thought of titling this two-part post, “The Not-So-Greatest Generation.” But then I realized that I cannot judge them for having brains with the properties of the very world in which we allowed them to grow up. That’s simply how the brain’s plasticity works. It is we digital immigrants who laid the foundations for today’s digital age (Jobs and Gates are my age-peers), and so it is we who in no small part bear the responsibility for the quality and properties of the minds at work in our country and during this pandemic.
Thus, my challenge to all of us is: how can we as educators, as parents, as adults in our society begin to create a different environment for brains to start rewiring for less tribal, less digitally siloed structure and function? I don’t have an immediate answer. But I do know that Parker Palmer is correct that “if I want to help heal the world, I must heal myself” (p. 147). Therefore, I and others must start by deliberately getting out of our own bubbles and consciously generate moments of isolation to examine our own lives, seeking the wisdom that might answer this paragraph’s opening question. Because until we do, not only is Socrates correct that our individual unexamined lives are not worth living; Palmer is equally so that such lives very much remain the threat to others that our collective behavior as a country during this pandemic has shown they can be.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/.
Garcia-Navarro, L. (Dec. 13, 2020) How Disinformation Spreads, And Why It’s So Hard to Combat. NPR Weekend Edition. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/13/945989935/how-disinformation-spreads-and-why-its-so-hard-to-combat.
Glenn, H. & Inskeep, St. (Nov. 18, 2020) A Nurse’s Pleas: ‘I Wish That I Could Get People To See COVID Through My Eyes.’ NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936096303/nurses-are-under-pressure-as-hospitals-strain-to-meet-pandemic-demands.
Harris, M. (2015) The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. New York: Current.
Johns Hopkins University of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/.
Palmer, P. (2018) On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, & Getting Old. Oakland, CA: Brett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Weiner, G. (Dec. 14, 2020) How Do We Get Herd Immunity for Fake News? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/opinion/trump-voter-fraud-education.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20201215&instance_id=25048&nl=todaysheadlines®i_id=56989331&segment_id=46964&user_id=c704fc9ed48c3e493f8da0c67ecfb906.
Light a Candle 