“We live in continuous partial attention, we’re never present, therefore we don’t have time for deep thinking.” — Amber Case, American anthropologist
Have you noticed how difficult is to meet your friends in person? How unlikely is it to build strong bonds with people you recently met? Have you been noticing a weird feeling that not even your closest friends are really interested in you, listening to you, knowing your opinion on any subject or giving their time to support you? When was the last time you received a call or a visit just to check how you are feeling? It seems like we are forgetting how to treat each other, including the ones we love. But how did we get to this point?
According to the article Take Kids’ Smartphones, published in 2017 by El País, smartphones and tablets have been used to distract children when they need to wait or when parents simply do not want to give them attention [1]. So the brain, which at this age acts like a sponge, does not develop tolerance or empathy quite well. This creates an environment propitious to anxious, impatient and self-centered people [2].
Teachers Joe Clement and Matt Miles, authors of Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber, state that, because of the overuse of technology, children today are struggling to develop deep thinking and creativity [3]. “We were seeing students struggle to make basic connections and think beyond anything concrete. We both see that the content, concepts and skills we now teach our most advanced students are more basic than what we were able to teach our ‘regular’ or ‘average’ students a decade ago,” they say.
Sherry Turkle, psychologist and MIT professor who has been studying the influence of technology on human relationships for over 3 decades, says that over the last 20 years there has been a 40% decrease in empathy among young people. According to her, the last 10 years were especially critical due to the advent of smartphones.
Currently, 1 in 10 American children has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a number 10 times that of 30 years ago — when the internet and cell phones started to become popular. The data is not different from around the world. Recent research conducted by the psychologist Adam Leventhal, from Southern California University, concluded that children who use smartphones and social media regularly can double the chances of developing ADHD [4]. The problem, however, does not just affect children and young people. Adults of all ages suffer from the same symptoms, usually unaware of the causes. Dimitri Christakis, professor of Washington University, says that although there is no doubt about the genetic origin of ADHD, and knowing that DNA does not change in such a short time, it is likely that environmental factors are contributing to the growth of the disorder.
In 2016, scientists of Seattle Children’s Research Institute conducted an experiment with rats and concluded that too much exposition to displays can create disturbances in concentration and memory. Recent research with teenagers reinforces this conclusion, as it was demonstrated in a study led by Stella Xian Li, who conducted analysis together with colleagues from Stony Brook, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin universities [5]. According to her, the more time in front of a display, the more severe the symptoms of insomnia and depression are.
It is worth remembering the almost unlimited amount of entertainment options that do not even depend on the internet. Video games, movies, series, books, music, sports and many other activities recently introduced or dramatically expanded by technology. With so many options available, it is hard to match our interests with those of our friends, which can create a natural distance between us.
Also, according to the American psychologist Barry Schwartz, when faced with many options, people are usually forced to invest a lot of time before making a choice [6]. And once they choose, they are distressed with the idea that they may have not chosen the best thing. Because of that, people do not allow themselves to enjoy their choices, including relationships. Schwartz calls this the paradox of choice, and considers it a recent and irreversible social issue.
Nicholas Carr, the author of the highly recommended book The Shallows, conducted solid research on the subject of attention dispersion after noticing that he was struggling to read texts that were not extremely short. According to him, technology plays a key role in how our brain behaves. He mentions a curious episode involving Nietzsche who, long before we could even dream about the internet, noticed a change in his writing style simply by adopting a typewriter instead of a fountain pen. Carr says that our brain has high plasticity skills, allowing us to quickly adapt to new habits. Because of that, when we are bombarded every day with numerous notifications of superficial content, our brain starts to function this way, facing hard times when it needs to perform tasks that demand more time and concentration.
Brazilian philosopher Leandro Karnal says that the easy access to information, aided by the advent of smartphones, induces people to believe that everything in life can be accomplished with equal easiness. We forget that much of what we do still requires hours of dedication before we can be good at it. For example, learning a language, playing a musical instrument, practicing sports, writing, etc. According to Karnal, this illusion is causing many people to feel frustrated, distressed and impatient, especially because this pragmatism landed in our relationships.
The easy access to people through the internet leads us to think that they are all available, when in reality these are the same people from real life with whom we do not have much affinity. Dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble feed the genuine desire we have to find some company, but do so through a very superficial and potentially deceptive exercise. By focusing almost exclusively on photos, these applications induce people to build unrealistic versions of themselves. Thus, we see digitally retouched pictures following cliches that are known to increase the chances of likes, such as sports activities, trips abroad, sunsets on the beach, cute animals and a bunch of catchphrases. And because we have access to an endless list of people, we become more demanding and, especially, intolerant — discarding someone becomes routine, with no apparent consequences, after all an endless queue awaits. What we see is that even those who are looking for a long-term relationship may end up stuck on dating apps. The level of dispersion caused by the avalanche of information prevents us from trying to develop a real relationship, which will always require empathy, time, patience and a lot of dialogue.
Spanish psychologist and sexologist Lorena Berdún says we are living in the era of hyper-demand and perfectionism [7]. According to her, most people today have high expectations and very specific goals, which can block their ability to be open, surprised and to enjoy the moment. “I see little tolerance among couples. At the slightest change they break. People are setting an extremely delicate threshold of demand, looking for that exact perfect person, but there is no such thing,” warns her.
A survey published by Microsoft in 2015 concluded that, given a task, people start to lose concentration after 8 seconds [8]. The same experiment performed 15 years before, however, it measured a 50% better result. Larry Rosen, professor at California State University and author of The Distracted Mind, points out that the media has been adapting to these changes. According to him, until the 1990s, magazine reports were longer and television shows had longer scenes, in contrast to current ultra-short news segments and the most popular YouTube and TikTok channels which currently produce super quick videos. “When we return to a task that we interrupted, we need time to engage and continue from where we stopped. This extra effort we must put in, when repeated continuously, causes fatigue and impatience, so most people simply are not paying much attention. I see this as a teacher: when sending emails to students, they respond with questions that were already answered in the original message,” says Rosen.
The site Music Machinery compiled anonymous data in 2014 from millions of Spotify users and came to concerning numbers: of all the songs played, about 25% were heard for 5 seconds at most, and 50% of them do not even come to finish, all due to the users’ anxiety [9]. A study by Columbia University, in 2016, found that 60% of the news shared on the internet is not even clicked on [10]. With increasingly sensationalist and shallow headlines designed to garner a high number of shares, news websites seem to be yielding to this hysterical and sterile attention economy.
If this avalanche of online interactions may suggest that people are more engaged and fulfilled than ever before, what recent researches have been revealing, however, is disturbing: the feeling of loneliness, instead of decreasing, has tripled since the 1980s [11]. According to the article Loneliness, A New Epidemic, published by John and Stephanie Cacioppo, both neuroscientists at the University of Chicago, although people usually have family, several acquaintances and a large circle of followers on social media, much of them do not really feel in tune with anyone, resulting in the feeling of loneliness [12]. A recent study by Cigna, a US healthcare company, showed that people between 18 and 22 years old are the most lonely American generation, being even more disconnected and isolated than the elderly [13]. According to the researchers, 69% of this age group feel that people around them do not show interest in them, and 68% feel that nobody really knows them. It is estimated that 1 in 3 people in Western countries often feels lonely. England, for example, created this year the ministry of loneliness, dedicated to understand the causes of this issue and to give support to a growing number of people who feel solitary [14]. The situation is so critical that there is a new service called ‘People Walker’, which consists of a professional who simply provides company to people during their walks [15].
It is not hard to identify the symptoms of this epidemic. People nowadays seem self-centered, dispersed and not emotionally or intellectually committed to anyone. Conversations lack interest, are truncated and have no sense of continuity. There is also some sort of offline social phobia that, among other things, favors text messages rather than conversations in person or even phone calls [16]. Bombarded with constant online notifications, people do not find much space to develop deeper feelings. The pinnacle of mass engagement is an extremely fleeting euphoria with consumerism and online veneration. Everyone eagerly awaits the next unmissable news on the internet, while competing for likes. As a result of that, we are moving away from what makes us human, which is the affective bond.
Brazilian doctor Drauzio Varella argues that although quick episodes of loneliness are unavoidable and have no relevant organic repercussions, when they persist, their consequences become exceptionally harmful [17]. Continuous loneliness raises cortisol levels — the stress hormone — and the incidence of tiredness. Psychology professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, of Brigham Young University in Utah, compiled research based on more than 200 independent studies of loneliness and found out that this condition increased the risk of death by 50 percent — the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes per day [18]. John Cacioppo conducted experiments that showed that when we feel prolonged loneliness our brain becomes less susceptible to empathy [19]. According to him, this is a defense mechanism of the body, which when faced with threats, devotes energy and attention to self-preservation. “A person who feels alone is usually more distressed, depressed and hostile, and less likely to interact with others, but when it happens it’s usually in a negative way, contaminating others around them. Therefore, loneliness can end in reclusion, because it seems a better alternative than rejection,” says the scientist.
The huge popularity of social media seems to play a significant role in this scenario. With this overexposure and physical detachment mechanism inherent to the technology, in addition to the ease of dispersion, social media can cause a significant decrease in empathy, leading to comparisons that ultimately raise the level of intolerance and social competition. In his book The Agony of Eros, South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han says that our culture of constant comparison is losing sight of the experience of what makes each person unique, not allowing the enjoyment of one’s particularity. According to him, modern relationships are increasingly averse to differences, so everything is being flattened out into an object of consumption.
A study, conducted by the Royal Society of Public Health UK and the University of Cambridge, analyzed 1,500 individuals between 14 and 24 years old to discover the consequences of the usage of social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter [20]. Instagram has been accused of negatively affecting self-esteem, sleep and social inclusion, as well as providing digital harassment, anxiety, loneliness and depression. “Instagram makes it easy for young people and adults to feel that their bodies are not good enough, while people add filters and edit their images to look perfect,” says one of the study participants. Psychiatrist Patricia Conrod, from the University of Montreal, studied the behavior of over 3,800 teenagers and identified that the use of social media is associated with depression [21]. According to her, since young people spend almost 7 hours a day in front of screens, schools should develop programs to teach them how to develop healthy habits online. Recent news published by The Guardian reveals several reports of YouTubers who, despite being famous and wealthy, are constantly anxious and lonely [22]. It seems there is some confusion between popularity and the sense of belonging, in that, faced with a hungry desire for likes, people feel increasingly isolated.
Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania published in 2018 a peer-reviewed study called No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression where they conclude that social media can provoke depression and loneliness in their users [23]. The Facebook Experiment, an article published in 2015 by The Happiness Research Institute, concluded that in just one week, people who stop using Facebook feel happier and less worried, noticing less focusing issues [24]. The study, involving more than 1,000 participants, says that social media is like a channel that broadcasts only good news from its users, being a constant stream of edited lives that distorts reality.
Psychologist Silvia Álava, from the Álvaro Reyes Psychology Center, criticizes this fake world worship. According to her, we can not limit our happiness to the great events of life; we must learn how to enjoy simple moments, such as a breakfast with a friend or reading to our children at bedtime.
Jaron Lanier recently published the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, where he says that our society is experiencing a chronic problem of addiction. Lanier is one of those iconic figures of technology, having worked for Microsoft and Atari, and now he is devoting most of his time to study and alert people to the risks of the omnipresent technology. “It’s very similar to what happened to the cigarette, or when people drove drunk. In both cases, there were big corporate interests in these addictions, but somehow we could have a conversation as a society and we understood that it was something very stupid. And we changed,” he says [25]. When asked if perhaps this skeptical view of technology is the result of incomprehension of generations that were not born fully immersed, he replies: “It’s a myth that young people, because they are digital natives, are immune to the addictive control of technology. The addiction techniques are powerful and well studied. My proof is that my friends in the industry do not let their children use their products”.
His statement is well supported. In 2010 Steve Jobs said he did not allow his children to use an iPad at home. Bill Gates stated in 2011: “My children grew up in a home that forbade cell phones until age 14, banned cell-phone use at the dinner table, and set limits on how close to bedtime kids could use their phones” [26]. Recently, Tim Cook, Apple’s current CEO, said he did not believe in any benefits from the overuse of technology. “I don’t have a kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some things that I won’t allow. I don’t want them on a social network,” Cook said [27]. And just like these technology executives, many others follow a similar line, such as the editor of Wired magazine, chief executive of OutCast Agency and the founder of Twitter, to name just a few.
Recently, some of those responsible for creating Facebook came one after the other questioning the consequences of prolonged use of this type of media [28]. Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, says that, at the beginning of the launch of the social network, all people involved knew perfectly well that they were creating a platform that takes advantage of human psychological weaknesses, and therefore its consequences were not entirely known, especially on the younger generation. Roger McNamee, the mentor of Mark Zuckerberg and one of Facebook’s early investors, reveals that the platform makes use of persuasive techniques developed by advertisers and the gaming industry in a format that threatens public health and democracy. Justin Rosenstein, the engineer who created the famous like button, said he removed all social apps from his smartphone because he believes the market of permanent attention causes chronic damage to mankind. “By distracting and manipulating people, these technologies aim to turn their users into buying machines,” he explains. Antonio García-Martínez, former Facebook product manager, wrote the book Chaos Monkeys, where he accuses Facebook of influencing people based on the data it collects from them. And Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of Facebook, made a mea culpa for his contribution to the development of the service that, he says, is ripping society apart [29]. Palihapitiya argues that the constant flow of superficial information from social media unleashes substances in the brain that are addictive, feeding a loose, misinformed and, in a way, delusional society. “This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other,” he says.
Facebook itself has recently stated that its service can be harmful to those who spend a lot of time consuming content passively [30]. The problem, evidenced by other studies, is that in general people spend much more time rolling their timelines passively than producing content [31]. The report released by Facebook mentions a study of the University of Michigan which concludes that people who interact through Facebook rather than in person tend to have symptoms of stress and loneliness. They also mention a study from the University of California which points out that prying into people’s lives on Facebook can lead to negative social comparisons, far more than what would happen offline.
It seems very widespread that technology is neutral and that it would be up to each person to decide how to use it. According to Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, this belief is the result of a misunderstanding of how technology actually works [32]. He explains that the way we receive notifications, suggestions and how our timelines behave are not arbitrary, but rather the result of the specialized work of psychologists, neurologists, programmers and professionals of marketing, all working exclusively for big tech companies. The goal of these professionals, provided with increasingly detailed user profiles, is to get our attention for the longest time possible, as this is what provides revenue for the companies they work for.
Most people do not realize that when a company’s service is said to be free, the truth is that the customers are not us, but the advertisers. We, therefore, are the product — we provide our personal data in exchange for the service. Unfortunately, decent governmental regulatory mechanisms do not seem to exist, although this race for attention affects the lives of billions of people around the world, conducting in a non-transparent way the social, cultural, political, economic, and, ultimately, democratic areas of our society [33]. We no longer live in a time when people go after technology when they want. Carrying connected devices wherever we go, technology now has the active and directed power to draw our attention, indiscriminately using our weaknesses to keep us online for as long as possible.
It must be understood that this does not dependent on culture, age group or social class; it is a technology that understands how the human brain works in its essence. “There is a large misalignment between the business model of these companies and what is best for the public. Once aware of our conditions, we should claim a complete change in this logic,” concludes Harris.
According to psychologists, this constant race for novelty, facilitated by new technologies, brings a momentary pleasure that keeps people trapped in what is called hedonic treadmill, that is, the ability to get used to things, comparing their lives with others and always wanting more. “Nowadays society is focused on pleasure, short-term satisfaction, not having to give anything in return, hence we have so many frustrated and depressed people,” says Spanish psychologist Rosana Pereira. She argues that we must look for face-to-face relationships where we can be active, thus allowing connection and empathy, basic elements for the production of serotonin and, therefore, a more serene and lasting happiness.
Another way to escape from emptiness is to engage in some activity that involves progress, such as a music course, commitment to a sport or even the production of articles like this one. The idea of waking up every day and thinking about how much we have improved since yesterday, and how much we can advance today, is a stimulus that leads us to more solid welfare than constant notifications or scattered small talks full of emojis. That is the conclusion of a series of studies conducted by psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky [34]. They observed that circumstance goals (those that happen all at once, such as earning a raise, buying a car, moving house) make us happy for a maximum of 6 weeks, while activity goals (those that involve a process) have the ability to extend this period indefinitely.
According to Gloria Mark, psychology doctor at Columbia University, people who work in front of the computer change their screens every 47 seconds. Another study, titled Concentrates, Awake But So Distracted, conducted in 2015, revealed that on average people consult their email box 74 times a day and their Facebook account 21 times. It is estimated that smartphone users check notifications on their device about 100 times a day [35]. The average online time in the world is now 7 hours. These small and abundant doses of pleasure generate discharges of dopamine (the neurotransmitter of desire and motivation) just like a smoker when lighting a cigarette. And they are equally addictive. That is why people are in a permanent state of anxiety waiting for something new from the internet. Experts say that this constant alert (also called hyper attention) generates stress and compromises the ability to make decisions. Not to mention more subjective aspects, such as the inhibition of creativity, in which we depend on to come up with something new amid the trivial [36]. Or the increasingly rare sense of perplexity and contemplation that today seems to have given place to selfies.
The author of The Hacking of the American Mind, Robert Lustig, explains that while momentary pleasure is based on receiving, a more consistent happiness is based also on giving. Big technology companies are well aware of it, that is why in basically every online service there is an option to share. Eating and traveling, for example, currently translates into recording everything through the little screen and posting as soon as possible. The problem, of course, is that these frugal and impersonal shares provide, in practice, a shallow and ephemeral pleasure, especially because they are usually tied to an expectation for likes.
This cynical hedonism causes aberrations, such as those found in a study, published in 2016, by the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science where about 4,500 people were asked if to be happy they prefer money or free time [37]. Of the total, 64% said they prefer money. It was detected, however, that the remaining 36% were happier. The result of the research reveals that modern society is oriented to unlimited consumption of small and constant doses of pleasure. As it seems, immediate satisfaction has a greater appeal than the construction of something more solid.
The omnipresent marketing smashes us daily with the idea that we need to be constantly buying more and better products, which forces us to donate more of our time to a dull and alienating work routine that ironically ends up taking up almost all our energy and time. We forget what the Stoic thinker Seneca said: money and belongings are volatile resources, while time is a relentless entity that only walks forward. In other words, that musical presentation of your child that you could not attend because of your job can never be revived. Since the activities that are known to provide more satisfaction are nearly always free, such as being with who we like, listening to music, exercising and having sex, we should invest more time in these types of experiences.
It is impossible, however, to deny the inestimable potential benefits brought by the advancement of technology. Running away from it will not automatically teach us how to fully engage with each other. In this sense, the tool may not be the only source of the problem, but also part of the symptom. It seems that the question is how to use it and reconcile this avalanche of information with our limited biological machine. And while the causes of apathy and loneliness are open to further discussion, in order to clearly analyze their causes, data on the growth of these conditions and their consequences on the human brain appear to be well consolidated.
An important step in order to reduce these conditions, according to Tristan Harris, is to turn off all non-personal notifications such as likes, new posts and application updates, so that our attention is only called by people who really want to communicate with us. Jenny Radesky, pediatrician at the University of Michigan, proposes that young people should develop a critical view of technology, and understand that they do not need to be constantly online for social acceptance and relevance. According to John Cacioppo, people can feel fulfilled using technology to find people and then develop face-to-face relationships, but if daily interactions occur primarily through the internet, the feeling of loneliness is likely to prevail [38]. In addition, he suggests that people should be more positive and open to the world, allowing themselves not only to look down but around, making it easier to physically share good moments and build strong emotional bonds.
Perhaps the most important thing is to regain our ability to talk to each other. Celeste Headlee, author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter, listed what she considers to be the 10 most important things for people to have conversations that allow the exchanging of feelings and ideas that, ultimately, connect them. Her skills in synthesis, objectivity, sensitivity and good humor are simply remarkable, making her TED talk one of the 12 most valuable minutes in an era where dispersion disconnects us affectively, making us more lonely than ever [39].
