In 1995, Bill Gates appeared on the David Letterman Show, where he explained his ventures into the virtual world. Naturally, as a new and emerging technology, the internet materialized as the focus of the conversation, and a technologically illiterate Letterman was incredulous. What exactly is the internet? Gates named some of the things you could do with it at the time — listening to baseball games or creating business profiles — but one of the things Gates said is that the internet allowed you to meet people who share your unusual interests. Letterman balked at the notion, “You mean the troubled loner chat room on the internet?”
It’s somewhat funny to think about now, since so many people use the internet for seeking connections — dating apps, books groups via Zoom, or video games — or in other words, trying to find friends and romance in a world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so. What’s so paradoxical is that although modern technology has transformed our ways of communicating with each other, particularly in the way it connects us to others in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors, it is also restructuring society in a way that creates the conditions for loneliness and disconnection.
How is it possible that we can transcend geographical barriers and talk to people all throughout the world, while at the same time we find ourselves in what psychologist Michelle Drouin calls an “intimacy famine”? The internet, smartphones, and online communication provides the means by which we can seek out others with common interests and values. But this same technology is also leading to the erasure of old, social practices that involved the physical presence of two individuals in a shared spatial environment. The result? It leads us to feel more alone, more alienated from others to whom we compare ourselves on social media, and at the end of the day, more isolated.
We’ve traded the personal touch of in-person exchanges for the convenience of smartphone apps. At one time, famous intellectuals from centuries prior used to have long, hand-written correspondences that spanned multiple pages, where they gave their reactions to each other’s works and updates on each other’s lives — now we have memes and abbreviated text messages that don’t betray the same level of thought and care. Part of this is due to the shrinking attention span of people today — perhaps stemming from a common impulse for the instant gratification of our desire for information — but another contributing factor is that communication is becoming more automated, and hence it weakens the need to think and further depersonalizes social intercourse.
The pandemic has only served to worsen and accelerate the issue. For example, no longer do we have to leave our house to receive groceries, nor do many of us have to commute to work, since online jobs are increasingly plentiful. With a few clicks, the hottest, new collared T-shirt will show up shortly at your doorstep.
These things are easy, but they’re also symptomatic of a much larger crisis. I don’t know how much originality there is in the observation that technology leads to loneliness, and certainly I’m not the first one to talk about it. Perhaps it’s even trite at this point. Nevertheless, I feel that I have something to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon.
Cavemen and Smartphones: One Explanation of Why We’re Lonely
One explanation for loneliness is that we have caveman bodies, brains, and minds, and technological participation is actualized through contemporary social strata and economic conditions that were unbeknownst to our ancestors whose genetic traits we have inherited.
That is, we have the minds of our hunter-and-gatherer progenitors, but we exist in a world that is alien to our psychological mechanisms, which were adapted to exist in a state of nature. In other words, we have caveman bodies, brains, and minds that are ill-suited to the modern environment where we find ourselves in completely over our heads.
How Our Consciousness is Structured: Two Conflicting Views
The way we make sense of our social reality depends on cognitive structures that are possible only through embodied experiences that are disrupted through digital interfaces. Our experiences of the world — and our experiences of other people — are mediated through our bodies, which are the units of our existence. Understanding others and building connections takes place most adequate when the warm body of a human being is present.
One might say that phenomenology represents an approach to describing the structure of consciousness that is outdated. The skeptical reader may object that these old-school thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Edith Stein, et. al. developed their theses within the context of a technologically primitive human and without modern empirical evidence.
Today some AI researchers turn towards artificial intelligence to find insights into the minds of humans, an idea that trades on the possible structural similarities between the function of a computer’s neural network and the biological workings of the human brain. I quote Hector J. Levesque’s 2017 book to represent this view, “What computer science is mostly about is computation, a certain kind of process… [and] The hypothesis underlying AI — or at least one part of AI — is that ordinary thinking, the kind that people engage in every day, is also a computational process.”
However, Husserl’s philosophy also shows promise. He wrote that the results of scientific inquiry — useful though they are — diverge from our lived experience of the world. Husserl makes a distinction between the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude.
All the sciences — including the study of the mind as a computational device — belong to the former attitude, which includes the objects we think about in our daily activities, but phenomenology is ontologically prior to these other scientific views. Any attempt to explain away the results of phenomenological reflection as outdated, anachronistic, or useless are only possible through the consciousness that Husserl proposes to study, a consciousness that is not disembodied or disconnected from the world, but one that is fundamentally and deeply embodied in such a way that it gives meaning to our experience of the world. It is precisely through subjectivity that science is possible in the first place.
I am mentioning two conflicting approaches, because the phenomenological approach developed within the early 20th century seems to represent a theory of mind that explains why we are lonely today. However, the opposing view that the mind is akin to a computational device lends credence to our optimism that empathic communication can take place virtually, since according to some theorists, the limit is on the “bandwidth” — our thumbs are slow to connect us to each other through our phones.
The Gist
The most simple explanation for loneliness today is that many social practices that involved the physical presence of another person have been automated and replaced by virtual activities that deprive us of social encounters that previously afforded us opportunities for forming relationships. With Netflix or Hulu, you don’t have to leave the house to have a fun on a Friday night.
But I do not believe that this is the full story. It’s not merely the opportunities for making friendships are disappearing, since the internet has provided us a new means of making friends, and indeed for many people, relationships can be formed online. I once heard a story about two people who became friends through a video game, met in person, and ended up getting married. So, this article isn’t an expression of my animosity towards technology, nor is the internet a bad thing. However, loneliness is on the rise, and I propose that the reason we are lonely despite these new virtual affordances is that these virtual encounters don’t integrate embodied intersubjective interactions as the source of friendship, which is the foundation of community and sociality.
