Why Modern Society Makes Us Feel More Lonely

so I came across some stats Drew and these are mildly terrifying I want to go through them really quick a 2023 Gallup survey found that over 50% of people say that they feel at least a little bit lonely in their lives 27% of people say they feel very lonely in their lives last year one in three Americans say that they feel socially isolated from others since the '90s the number of people who say that they have zero friends has quadrupled in the US and tripled in the UK and the marriage rate has fallen by over 60% in the last two Generations it's at a record low and a stunning 57% of single people say that they have given up or have no interest in dating yet this is happening in a time where the world is more connected than ever more of us live in closer proximity to each other than ever and it is easier to keep in touch with the people that we care about more than ever in short Drew what the [ __ ] is going on in the world right now I thought that's what you were going to tell me oh this is my job this is what I'm here for that is your job I'm just I'm here for the numbers I guess I don't know we're going to investigate three of these paradoxes today we're calling them the three paradoxes of modern loneliness and we're going to break these down one by one the first one is paradox number one we are more connected than ever yet loneliness is at an all-time high I actually heard a term just recently by the journalist Derrick Thompson he he called it dopamine inequality as soon as he said that it hit home really really hard because I've been experiencing this in my own social life social media it's just a bucket of dopamine in your face over and over again when you socialize with people in your real life particularly people you don't know very well or people you just met there's a lot of boredom and tedium that goes along with it when you're sitting in front of a new person or or a new friend you'll fall into conversation topics that you don't find very interesting or that you don't necessarily agree with or that you don't really care about and I think we've trained ourselves to just swipe away as soon as we hit that point as soon as we hit anything that's like not very interesting to us or not stimulating or not giving us a dopamine hit we swipe away mentally the problem is is that in-person social relationships require you to sit through a number of those tedious conversations or boring conversations that you don't really care about put the effort in to listen Maybe respond in a way that steers the conversation towards something that you care about and I've definitely been guilty of this in my own life I've absolutely found that my threshold for tolerating social interactions that are not interesting to me is almost like zero at this point and it's to the point that it's actually a problem and this this is a conversation that's been happening in my house with my wife quite a bit is like we have to remind each other give it another chance try again they're probably a good person like meet up with them more I think the other aspect of this too is we're so used to just being satisfied immediately with an interaction with something that we don't realize that like building a friendship takes weeks months even years like you have to see somebody 10 20 30 times yet will see somebody once have a boring conversation and then be like ah that person's boring I don't want to hang out with them and then you go back to the phone there's a momentum to intimacy and connection to build up to the Deep meaningful stuff you have to put in the hours in the surface level less meaningful stuff and people don't like hearing that but it it's true it's just human nature we don't tend to feel good about opening up to people that we haven't invested a lot of time or energy with and who we don't know super well and if you do go from 0 to 100 in like 2 minutes and just start sharing your deepest dark secrets with essentially a perfect stranger their reaction's not going to be meaningful to you like whether they reject you or give you advice or hug you and tell you it's okay it's not going to feel nearly as impactful or profound as somebody you've been friends with for 10 years doing the same thing I think the second issue around this is a social sorting effect and I think this this one is is counterintuitive the more connected we are with everybody around us the easier it is to find like-minded people this is well discussed when it comes particularly to politics but I think this is true for everything 30 years ago if you were into meditation or yoga you had to put in a lot of effort to go find other people who were in The Meditation and yoga if you were into pickle ball you had to put a lot of effort to go find other people to play Pickleball with today it's so easy whatever your interest or hobby or obscure Niche Obsession you can find a subgroup of people who are also equally obsessed and interested in that thing and that's great that's actually I would argue one of the biggest benefits of social media in the internet the problem is is when you remove that friction from finding people who have the same interests as you your tolerance level for people who don't have the same interests as you drops so you become less patient with those who maybe aren't into the same things that you're in and they want to show you the thing that they're into or it feels as though you should spend less time maybe hanging out with people who aren't going to do the same things that you're going to do the same way this affects our politics of kind of putting Us in an echo chamber I think this puts us in a little bit of a social bubble where we really just want to cocoon ourselves with those who do the same things and think the same things as we do and our tolerance level of people who are not into those things or who don't think those things drops yeah that's what big Tech missed I think too I I've said this before but social media is really good at just what you explained is connecting us um based on our similarities it's really bad about getting us to connect on our differences that's what they missed that's what Zuckerberg missed yeah you can sort us into these bubbles but you can't get us to connect on our differences in any way in any meaningful way do you think too Mark that the evolution of social Platforms in recent years too is making them even less personal there's data coming out now that people are sharing less and less on social media platforms they're being less social on social media platforms sharing has gone way down just in the last three or four years um people enjoy documenting their lives less frequently um they're becoming more passive consumers of content on these platforms and what that's doing is it's kind of consolidating the content production within a smaller group of people celebrities influencers people like you I would say too that's probably leading down a road where social media becomes less social and less personal I think 10 15 years ago social media was mostly social I think today it's mostly media there's a lot of stats around I think it's on any given platform 1% of the users will create 90% of the content 9% of the users will respond basically 9% will create the the other 10% and then the the other 90% are responsible for less than 1% so it's like 90% of users on social platforms are passive they're not engaging they're not commenting they're simply looking you also have things like so like the Tik Tok algorithm right the for you algorithm when Tik Tok came on the scene then everybody started uh copying that algorithm which was we're not going to show you as much from your own real life Network we're going to show you more from the expanded uh pool of content that's out there all around the world and so that is even yet another level of impersonalization of social media in the social media industry the Tik Tok moment if you talk to IND industry insiders the way they describe it is going from the social graph to the interest graph which basically Tik tok's big innovation was realizing that everything pre- Tik Tok was organized around who are the people you want to follow who are your friends or the people you look up to or the celebrities you're a fan of tell us who those people are and then we'll show you their content and and you'll enjoy it what Tik Tok figured out is that people ultimately just want to follow what they're interested in you could be a perfect stranger but if you give somebody the exact content that they're going to be interested in you don't really care who they are and so yeah it does make it more impersonal and again it kind of comes back to this point it's like it's becoming less social and more media it's becoming less keeping up with your cousins and aunt and uncle and more the same way you and I treated television when we were kids like you'd come home from school you turn on the TV you had no idea what was on but you would just flip channels until you found something that looked interesting and that that is essentially what social media is becoming and it's why I I personally think it's going to replace uh a lot of traditional media and in particularly linear television but that's it's a conversation for another another podcast the problem with this though is that I think there's a lot of data that supports the idea that even when we do interact with friends and family members and people that we admire through social media it's empty calories the digital interactions do not provide the same emotional satiety that a face-to-face interaction provides there's just something about being in the room with somebody feeling their presence reading the micro expressions of their body language hearing the Lil in their voice seeing the same things hearing the same things smelling the same things you can't replicate that through an Instagram DM or a a tweet thread and that's kind of an obvious thing but I think what we're seeing is that we're replacing quality social interaction with quantity we're replacing depth of interaction with breath so we have access to more people than ever before and we have access to more inspiring and smarter and more interesting people than ever before but the quality of those interactions is is a fraction of what it would be with somebody in person but it's just the the way we're wired the way we seek reward and seek interesting things and Novelty uh it's hard to combat that within ourselves like it's just it's always going to be sexier to like you know hop on YouTube and find literally the best person in the world at this one thing and watch them and listen to them than to like walk down the street and play Pickleball with your neighbor or whatever it's always going to be more enticing I think it's also I mean okay I hate to say this but if you are a person who let's say you don't have great social skills or you're kind of in a bad place in your life at the moment a little bit depressed Maybe you suffer from a lot of social anxiety social media apps like it's a quick fix you can get a little bit of that satiation without any effort whatsoever like it's completely risk-free you can hop on Twitch or YouTube or leave a comment somewhere and maybe send an email and it will feel good for a few seconds and that's better than nothing but at least you don't have to risk anything you can you can do it from the comfort of your couch or your bed so I think that's that's a real issue as well and you know it probably plays into the Mental Health crisis which I don't think we're going to get too much into today but if you are somebody who suffers a lot from depression or anxiety the fact that you have this kind of empty calorie solution that requires no risk or or no real effort on your part really keeps you in the same place yeah could be a very vicious uh feedback loop there very vicious cycle that can get into should we talk about dating I know like as the single guy on this podcast poor you just gets in and dating with with the dating app conversation oh I have a lot of thoughts go for it I feel like with dating it it compounds a lot of these things in a lot of ways but I'm curious to hear your your experience I've been thinking a lot about this and dating apps Prime people to look at the most superficial aspects of relationships even if that's not something you value in a relationship let's say you're somebody who values intelligence or you know some kind of like fuzzier concept uh in another individual that you're prospectively going to you know get with first of all they're very visual right like what this person looks like um you usually bios are super short so you're going to put something like your job or maybe a few interests and something like that a very superficial surface level things I don't it's like you're shopping on Amazon when you're using these apps right and so necessarily I think it leads towards more superficial interactions and relationships and people because they are prime to look at those more superficial aspects of the person in general so that I think is a big one that that people Miss they think well it's easier to meet these people yes it's easier to meet people but you're meeting people and trying to connect with them on more superficial features of that person or the the relationship when I look back at my dating experience one thing that regularly happened was the women that I thought I was going to be really into after a date or two it turned out I wasn't really into them and in the women that I didn't really think I would be that attracted to I would hang out with them a few times you know they'd be like a friend of a friend or something and after two or three times I'm like wow she's really cute like I'm kind of to her you know like never would have guessed never if you you would if she had put a profile on a site never would have picked her and that that happened all the time all the time a lot of my best relationships and dating experiences happened with women that I probably would not have picked on Tinder or hinge or whatever the kids use these days so whenever this topic comes up I I remember that I think about that a lot because we are so bad at knowing what we want to begin with and as you said the easiest things to filter people for are generally the things that matter the least right it's like I want a guy who makes this much money and is this tall and I want a girl who's looks like this is into this hobby those are pretty superficial things that's probably not going to map super accurately to who you're going to be happy with in a long-term relationship it'll map a little bit but not a whole lot whereas things that cannot be filtered for personality emotional history history culture values you can't filter for those things accurately without spending time with somebody and getting to know them for an extended period of time so I just look at the whole dating app thing and it just feels like a system that is optimizing for the wrong things it's optimizing for matching People based on what they think they want rather than accurately depicting what they actually want and I don't think you can ever accurately depict those things because it's so hard to figure those things out in the first place yeah I can't remember where I heard this but I heard this re recently and someone said if you are on a dating app say out loud what you're thinking while you're swiping and you will probably be appalled at what comes up when when you actually say it out loud because again this that's what these apps are doing they're priming you for all of these what you think you want or what they think people want in relationships and it's not actually what you want actually this just reminded me of of maybe a fourth reason why the technology is is making us feel more alone despite connecting which is that it removes repercussions for negative feelings or negative statements let's say you meet a woman at a party and she's attractive but like I don't know like let's say she's like a weird dimple or something in person you you might notice it but like you will immediately forget it and just be engrossed in whatever conversation you're having with her but when you're online and you see her it's like the only thing you can think of or it's the only thing you notice and then of course if you're a piece of [ __ ] you immediately go to the comment section and start trashing her for this weird dimple that she has on her face and like that's such a unrealistic FAS simile of what a a social interaction actually is I wrote an article years and years and years ago it might have even been before you started working for me called why everybody's an [ __ ] on the internet and it really looked at when you combine the pseudonymity of being able to post something and people don't really know who you are combine that with the lack of repercussions and lack of friction to comment or say something you basically create this fast lane for any antisocial person who wants to wreak some emotional Havoc to go Hog Wild just like start [ __ ] throwing bombs at people and there's absolutely nothing that any of us can do about it yeah a big part of of social connection I think in the real world is people who hold you accountable for your actions for your words for the way you behave and that lack of accountability is missing online but in the in the real world it's actually part of the glue that holds us together too I would say to the the acceptance or tolerance of flaws or obnoxious things right again if I hang out with somebody in person and they say something that kind of annoys me I just let it go and I move on to the next subject online though you end up in like a flame War for 5 days let's move on to the next one I feel like we could just talk about technology all day this episode is brought to you by 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drink a1.com IDGAF get all your free [ __ ] there link is in the show notes check it out now so the second Paradox which is the more urbanized our lifestyles become the lonelier We Are One study found that being in an overcrowded environment increased a sense of loneliness by up to 38% it's completely counterintuitive but as somebody who lived in New York City for 7 years totally makes sense why why is that you could be surrounded by people this is the this one kind of blows my mind a little bit surrounded by people all sorts of opportunities for connection and yet still feel so lonely what is that all about so in New York I think it was two things things one was there are so many opportunities to do interesting things with interesting people that you rarely run into the same people more than a couple times a year and again coming back to the frequency and the consistency piece you know real friendships are built by seeing the same person 10 20 30 times in New York it's so hard to see the same person 10 20 times I I have friends in New York that maybe in the the the entire time I Liv there I saw them 10 times wow yeah it's just everybody's doing their own thing people are traveling all the time people are busy they're working the second thing that I experienced in New York is once you hit a living environment of a certain critical mass you don't feel valued you feel insignificant every city that I've lived in that was say under 4 million people 5 million people even though it's a big city and there's a lot of stuff going on I feel like I'm part of the city I feel like I'm contributing to the city I'm contributing to the economy I'm taking part in various events and activities I'm meeting people in in different areas of the city New York is so big that it just feels like this it doesn't give a [ __ ] like you could come you could go it doesn't matter how much money you have doesn't matter how much stuff you do New York City doesn't give a [ __ ] you are a gnat on the back of an elephant and there's something that doesn't feel good about that coming back to your point about the accountability I think if you live in a small town anything you participate in there's a certain amount of importance and and meaning that comes with that and you feel accountable to that you're like okay I like showed up to this group in my town and I'm a part of it and people rely on me now and like that feels good like feeling that accountability and responsibility to something being a part of something greater than yourself if your participation feels pointless then you don't feel that accountability or responsibility I used to tell my friends that I felt like a tourist who was just staying in New York for for seven years I'm a little more optimistic about this one though because I think we will figure that out we've only been a majority Urban species for less than 20 years right it was the late 2000s where finally more than half the population started Living in cities um that's the first time in history that's ever happened so it's been less than 20 years I think we'll figure it out I think we just urbanize so quickly that we haven't had time to think about what are the social implications of rapid growth and Rapid densification of these cities there's new research coming out around like adding green spaces for example into cities that actually reduces loneliness by quite a bit there's this researcher Eric kleinenberg who is a social scientist and a writer and he talks a lot about the social infrastructure of places which is very important that's things like green spaces Parks libraries but also you know like a commercial area that's dense and people can walk to and interact with each other and you go to your your local butcher or whatever it is like you were talking about with the restaurants if if you have these restaurants that have been in a neighborhood for Generations or something like that I think there's actually a solution here it's not as easy as people are saying right now it's like oh you just need to talk to somebody more often it's I think it's a deeper structural problem than that but I think it is a problem we can solve the social infrastructure Point's really interesting because my experience of living in Europe Australia New Zealand I feel like they do it a lot better I don't know exactly why but like when you actually go spend a bunch of time in like France or Germany there are dozens and dozens of these little smaller cities and towns that are really interconnected and it's easy to get between them and you see that that each one has its own little individual Community with continuity and people know each other so I don't know how much of that's culture I don't know how much of that's policy I don't know how much of that's history but it definitely seems clear to me that this is something that those parts of the world do better than North Americans seem to do and from what I can tell this shows up in the data as well I mean it it seems that Europeans are doing better on these measurements than we are I definitely think there is something to this social infrastructure thing but I'm not sure H how easily we can just kind of wave a magic wand and improve it yeah I think along with the urbanization thing though too there's some other trends that go along with it first of all um the rate of living alone of single single person to households that's risen consistently for the last like 60 years across the developed world and if you look at the United States um for example it went from 7.7% in 1940 those single person households were 7.7% and in 2012 20 was 27.6% I mean that's a 400% increase in 80 years this trend has been seen in other places as well across Europe it's over 30% of the households are single person households in Sweden it's over half in Japan it's 40% however those last two Sweden and Japan also report some of the lowest loneliness of any of the developed countries as well so it's not just living alone again I think it's that social infrastructure thing we're talking about Sweden has a lot of social programs that get people out of homes and and interacting with one another so yeah I think the social infrastructure really is the key part it's not just you know getting people to live together or spending more time together necessarily it's building cities in a way that get people interacting on a daily basis and getting into the that more friction of life one of the things that I saw I saw this in a documentary it was about happiness one thing they did in Denmark which I thought was brilliant was they built these residential buildings with condos and stuff and they would Zone them specifically so that you could only live there if you were either retired or a single parent and so they basically design these condo buildings so that single parents always had babysitters cuz the retired people were there all the time with nothing to do and then retired people always had something to do CU there's always a neighbor somewhere down the hall that needs their kids babysat while they're at work so it was really fascinating when I think social infrastructure I think that I that strikes me as like just an excellent example of thinking in those terms of thinking of like okay how can we not only provide people housing but meaningful housing that's actually going to maintain their their emotional and mental well-being that's one of the solutions I'm talking about which is why I'm optimistic about this I think there's going to be some cities who figure it out and then we're going to replicate that eventually the United States will be slow to do it like we are with everything else but I think it'll happen why do you think so more people are living alone I can think of a few reasons why that would happen one is just I think as people individually people get more money it's easier to rent a place for yourself or buy a place for yourself one of the things that we come across all the time is that marriages and cohabitation between partners romantic Partners is is down alltime low essentially I feel like there's got to be some sort of connection there and again I I just keep coming back to this this point of friction of like the hidden cost of removing social friction you know marriages are hard they're pain in the ass and so if you have the financial means to avoid them I think a lot of people will avoid them yes yes especially women the the the research has born that out as well higher SCS Women Marry less so women with more money marry less that goes down a whole another rabbit hole that we could probably spend an entire episode on I mean the whole marriage question is really fascinating because despite the erroneous statistic that 50% of marriages in and divorce that has not been true in like 30 or 40 years actually the the story story around marriage is way more interesting in Nuance which is fewer and fewer people are marrying they're marrying later and they're marrying after they've become economically independent and so more of those marriages are succeeding since basically the divorce laws changed in the 70s so marriage is actually in a really good place quality-wise maybe the best place it's ever been but qualtity wise it's at an all-time low so it's it's almost like people are only getting married if they're really confident it's going to work and since you're usually not confident it's going to work they don't get married yeah we grew up with all those stats of oh half the marriages will into divorce and of the other half 90% of those are probably not happy marriages anyway so we heard all of that I still hear those stats on podcasts I heard it like two weeks ago I heard it on a podcast like a very reputable podcast too and I was like when are people going to update this [ __ ] stat in their head like it is not been true in decades the true divorce rate it's been dropping for decades and I think now it's down close to around 30% so it's still I mean not great right and as you pointed out it's probably due to people marrying later uh and waiting until they're financially secure absolutely absolutely do you think this relates at all to the the urban living yes I I absolutely do they' they've shown like in developing countries you know when um people urbanize rapidly when they move from the rural areas to the cities they will Mar less and usually it is economically related what they find while the people are earning more money the cost of living is higher you have um less space right so you're living in an apartment versus like a house maybe on an acreage or something like that or a communal plot of land out in the countryside people just they get married less part of it is probably too you're just you're surrounded by more people so you think you have more options maybe there's a paradox of choice maybe going on a little bit there the Paradox of choice thing makes sense to me and also I just feel like people who live in big cities are busy all the [ __ ] time they're working 60 hours a week they're going out dating is a little fun hobby maybe for them every now and then but it's not it's not taking up their their lives yeah I mean speaking of New York I I had a number of friends who were just literally like I don't have time to date which maybe that's a big part you know I I was really surprised by that stat I think it was 57% of single people say that they are not interested in dating or not they've given up trying to date that's crazy to me yeah that's my blowing and I wonder how much of that is simply a lack of free time how much of that is people in their 60s 7s ' 80s who are just like you know whatever I'm done and how much of that is just legitimate burnout frustration hopelessness this episode is brought to you by Factor you want to know something I hate cooking which is probably good because I'm absolutely terrible at it you know what I also hate eating garbage 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gf50 to get 50% off your first order that's code ID gf50 at Factor meals.com ID gf50 for 50% off they keep making me say this I'm going to stop saying this now let's talk about Paradox number three young people are more lonely than older people and from what I can tell this is a genin z first usually and I think anybody who can think back to their own adolescence when you're a teenager or in your 20s you're obsessed with your social life it's like all you think about and generally when you're older you have fewer closer friends and you spend less time with them and I think that's it's been typical forever and I think historically older people have tended to be lonelier or more socially isolated but gen Z seems to be bucking this trend which is interesting thoughts I'm not sure if it's actually been the case that teens have always been less lonely than older people as you just mentioned when you're a teen you are very very focused on your social relationships and so I think any change in your social relationship are very sensitive to that now there's some definitely some concerning Trends with teens right now the lack of face Toof face time we've seen that plummet in the early to mid 2000s it was about about 80% of teens said that they would hang out with their friends at least twice a week that's dropped to below 60% today which is insane in just 20 years wow yeah there's been a huge drop that's concerning for sure uh mental health obviously is not real great with with the teens these days either and loneliness plays a big part in that as well also you're right there is kind of this paradoxical thing going on though where since uh the start of the Millennium middle-aged people have actually reported that they're getting less lonely there's been like a four or 5% consistent drop since their like early 2000s to today the middle-aged people are getting less lonely while teens are getting more lonely so that's a strange thing lots of people have commented on this before but um you know we're overregulation the digital space for them so that's kind of where they Retreat to and so of course they're going to be more lonely as you get older too I think your expectations are just and you're like I don't need 10,000 friends you know or whatever I don't need 10 friends even I need one or two good ones and so it's easier to find there so I don't understand completely what's going on I talked to David Brooks about this when he was on it's interesting to me that all of the classic measurements of Teen Health that we used to look at 30 years ago are actually in great places teen pregnancy alltime low drug use alltime low alcohol abuse alltime low violent crime alltime low but the the mental health side is the worst it's been maybe ever and you know as a very surface level reading of the data it seems like kids are trading in their weed and booze for Tik Tok and Snapchat and is that a bad thing mark I don't know I don't know so when I say when young people are obsessed with their social lives where their brain is in their development is they are trying to figure out who they are they're they're playing this longterm identity formation game and to do that they have to experiment a lot they have to take risks they have to measure themselves against their peers and they need to build the first meaningful relationships of their life aside from you know their parents and I just feel like social media definitely scrambles a lot of that process for all the reasons that we talked about at the top of the show you know it provides the empty calories it provides the semblance of connection instead of real connection it prevents them from having to take social risk but then when something does go wrong they make a fool of themselves and it gets posted to Tik Tok and it goes viral at their school like they get punished excessively for anything that goes wrong so it it's like this funhouse mirror of a status game that is not an accurate representation of reality and so I can see how it completely scrambles their ability to to figure out who they are and what they care about and build any confidence around taking social risk or emotional risks I get that like that's definitely a mess but then you throw on top of that that they're being limited more in those face- to- face interactions which are super important I'm a big fan there's a really obscure Theory maybe maybe we'll have this guy on the Pod he lives here in Santa Monica uh Dan seagull he's a doctor at UCLA psychiatrist he's got this Theory called interpersonal neurobiology very catchy I'm sure he's trademarked it he's probably selling some T-shirts with it on it but basically interpersonal neurobiology is they explain it to me like I'm five explanation of it is humans are at our base a social species and when our brain is developing we develop in tandem so you know there's these the popular concept of mirror neurons so it's like when I see your facial expression when I see how you feel you know you express an emotion and they can go and look and see the neurons that are firing in your brain and as I am watching that expression on your face and sensing that feeling within you similar neurons will fire in my brain and I will empathize and start to feel a little bit of the same feeling that you're feeling that that's what empathy is and that predominantly has to happen in a personal space it's much harder for that to happen over a digital medium even if you have Zuckerberg's VR headset seagull's hypothesis is that that it turns out that that is a huge component of our brain's development that when you deprive young people of social interaction of face-to-face social interaction that they are not developing that empathy muscle and they are literally not developing the neuronal patterns to experience and express emotions efficiently and manage them within themselves to regulate them and you look at how there there seems to be this like delayed emotional development in each generation and meanwhile you look at these charts of like how much time people spend face to face over the last 40 years you know and the chart's just like [ __ ] nose diving I don't know it's hard for me to not see these things as related to each other I know there's there's some talk of policy change around social media of like not letting kids under 16 onto it and not allowing phones at school those are probably good ideas but for all the reasons I just said like I don't know if that's going to solve this like until we start letting kids go beat kids go outside and tell them they don't have to be home till Sundown and not worry that like the neighbor is not secretly a Serial murder I I just feel like that that's a huge component that is maybe undersold well yeah to your point there objectively we are in one of the safest periods ever there's been blips along the way of course but crime rates are lower um violent crime especially is down it really is a safer world than what we grew up in and yet we had more freedom in the physical world than than kids do today you can't blame the kids there this is on us this is our fault we we're [ __ ] the kids up so when you want to sit here and you want to say oh kids these days it's like no this is on us they they're not responsible for that we're the ones taking that away from them and I think we need to take some responsibility for that for example passing some legislation maybe to give some more protection digitally and then opening up the real world a little bit more for them I do think probably when these kids grow up they're going to look back and say how did they just give us these screens and let us go [ __ ] wild and not let us uh into these real world spaces and socialize like we should have I don't know if this was your case but me growing up in Middle America anyway like smoking you remember that that was just that was everywhere restaurants bars I'd have friends parents who smoked and we'd be in the car and they'd just be smoking you know like three four kids in the car with them and they'd be smoking and we look at that today and we're like that is crazy I think there there might be some sort of parallel um when when this generation grows up and they look back and they're like oh my God they they let us do that why it's a wild and crazy world Drew well that's it for this episode be sure to like And subscribe it helps out the podcast it helps us get really really cool guests to talk to be sure to leave a review on Apple and Spotify and uh be sure to sign up for the newsletter it's called the Breakthrough it's at markmanson.net breakthrough and I think that's it anything else you want to say drew Drew is shaking his head in resignation I still don't know what's going on Mark what is going on I guess that's the moral of this story Drew none of us know what the [ __ ] is going on until next week we'll still not know what's going on bye [Music] everybody [Music] oh

Channel: Mark Manson

Views: 200,482

Keywords: mark manson, markmanson, mental health, feeling lonely, social media, school of life, mental health issues, mental health recovery, mental health podcast, mental health awareness, loneliness epidemic, feeling lonely in a relationship, feeling lonely in college, feeling lonely and depressed, loneliness epidemic men, loneliness epidemic cold fusion, why am i lonely but have friends, why am i feeling lonely, why am i so lonely, mark manson subtle art, mark manson anxiety

Id: 0rxuBw5sic8

Length: 38min 32sec (2312 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024