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Notes -
With our increasingly atomized society, are we turning into the Solarians*? It seems like more and more, people are averse to actually meeting other people in person. Even things like getting food can be done without ever having to interact with another human. It makes me wonder if Asimov was on to something, and accurately predicted the course of (at least some of) humanity.
*For anyone who hasn't read Asimov, you should. But the Solarians are a group of space colonists who show up in his novels, beginning with The Naked Sun. The people on Solaria live by themselves on huge estates run by robots, and are horrified by the idea of meeting other people in person. The only time they get together is in cases of extreme need which can't be accomplished by talking over a video call (in particular, married Solarians get together once per year to have sex and conceive a child).
My current theory is that our psyche is shaped by common stressors the way our immune system is shaped by common pathogens. Now that it's easy to create a too-clean environment, the immune system can cause autoimmune diseases because it's designed to develop while while resisting constant low-level pathogenic stress.
In the same way, our mind has evolved to develop while resisting constant low-level psychological stress, mainly caused by interactions with other people. They blame us, they shame us, they don't do what we want, they like things that we hate, they don't like us, they have bad hair days, they don't reciprocate, they lie, they cheat, they gloat when they beat us.
All these interactions used to be unavoidable for literally hundreds of thousands of years. But now modern society and modern technology let us avoid them, and we do. And this doesn't just hurt our communication skills, which is the motte, this causes various psychological traits that serve a useful purpose when developed normally to grow unchecked into pathological forms.
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I think social media has become a sort of super stimulus. much like the beetle in Australia that finds a beer bottle much more sexy than an actual female beetle, social media tends to give people the feeling of socializing, but none of the actual community. It’s friends without work, without needing to make time or space for the other person. You actually don’t have a social relationship with online “friends”, as there’s no real sense of reciprocal relationship. I don’t think I could legitimately expect anyone here to help me with anything. I don’t think I could really talk about a genuine emotional need with anyone here. But it’s the same in reverse. You don’t expect that from me either. We talk at each other. And to be honest, I don’t think we really know each other as friends. I know very little about your life, and you know nothing of mine. It’s a pararelationship, where we have a simulation of a relationship, but don’t really have one.
Many Australians can say the same, without even having to be a beetle!
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