LogFAQs > #986695069

GreenKnight127 posted...

I blame an entire generation of parents (many of whom are divorced) who don't monitor their kids' habits.

The problem is, there's only so much you can do.

Don't let your kid have a computer/phone until they're a teenager? Now they're treated like a loser at school, and lack the basic technical proficiency their peers have had since they could walk (which will almost certainly impact them later in life). You may have prevented one type of harm, but you've essentially contributed to another.

Aside from which, the state of the economy in recent times makes it almost a necessity for both parents in a household to work just to support themselves (and you'd better pray your kids don't have unexpected health scares). Which makes it extremely difficult to monitor every aspect of your child's behavior (especially if you have more than one). It's not like the old days where dad would go to work and mom would spend all day home with the kids. Many parents simply don't have the time to monitor their kids (or the money to pay for a babysitter to do it for them).

If anything, that's why the idea of extended families has grown a bit more accepted over the nuclear family model, where older grandparents or aunts/uncles can live in the same house and help raise kids effectively (like it used to be, for most of human history). But it's still not common enough in the US and other similar nations to really offset the problem.

And none of that really addresses the fact that a lot of that disassociation doesn't happen during childhood anyway. A lot of the currently alienated Gen X and Millennials didn't necessarily grow up locked in a room playing games or watching online videos, they really only fell into those behavior patterns once tablets and smart phones became ubiquitous. Losing touch with your ability to interact with other humans isn't just something that happens if you fail to learn how when you're young, it can also happen if you forget how once you're older.

My mother definitely found it harder and harder to socialize as she grew older, became a bit more shut-in, and slowly lost practice interacting with actual people (and Covid quarantines definitely didn't help). And she wasn't even on the Internet. She got to the point where any time she had to make an important phone call she'd usually ask me to do it for her, because her anxiety at talking to people on the phone (or worse, dealing with automated systems) made her panic, and then she was afraid she'd screw things up. It becomes a vicious cycle - the more shy and awkward you get, the less you want to try and reach out to interact with people, which makes you even more shy and awkward, and so on. Eventually you pull back into your shell.

I used to try to encourage her to go to local events (like our library sponsoring craft seminars or game nights) to potentially try and meet new people and make new friends, but she never wanted to, because she'd gotten to the point where she felt too socially awkward for it to ever be worthwhile to her. Much easier to just stay home and read books, watch TV, and listen to the radio alone.

That can happen to anyone, at any age. If your entire life consists of just going online, using automated ordering and delivery services, using computer ordering kiosks when you get fast food, paying for everything at self-checkouts, and generally minimizing the amount of interaction you have with actual people, you slowly start to forget how. It becomes harder to talk to people, and easier to avoid them.

And the more people start to feel that way, the more tech companies will create the "solutions" needed to help maintain that sort of lifestyle. Which in turn only makes the problem worse.

We're basically creating the conditions as a culture for everyone to just live in their own personal bubble and never have to interact with another human being ever again.

And because of how algorithms and content delivery work, most of those people's world-bubbles will be radically different from everyone else's, so they'll have almost nothing in common even if they tried to interact. It'll be like being the only human on Earth surrounded by a world full of aliens. But it will be like that for everyone. And it'll be maddening to try and deal with the idea that these other people somehow don't see the world the way you do. Are they crazy? Are they stupid? Are they evil?

And from there it's very easy to decide that those crazy stupid evil aliens don't matter. That they're not as important as you, that their personal experiences aren't as important as yours. And at that point, who gives a shit what they think or feel? They're wrong. And should be treated as such.

Welcome to the glorious future.