Are we suffering from social allergies?
Loneliness may be a symptom of an allergic reaction to interaction with other people
I’m not quite finished with a letter that I hope will delight you with a thorough debunking of “AI” hype. (The quotation marks around the acronym are there to signal skepticism.) Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who left the New York Times and now writes a great newsletter on Substack, put it this way:
For what it’s worth, I’m not fully sold on AI’s potential. As far as I can tell, large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect. On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs, some of them highly paid, that could also be described as souped-up autocorrect, so AI may have large economic impacts.”1
But more to come on “AI.” Today I want to share a hypothesis sparked by two newspaper articles this week, on completely different topics. One was in the Washington Post about a study of children’s allergies, and the other in the Financial Times Business Life section about how Gen Z employees don’t know how to talk on the phone.
“Allergies seem nearly impossible to avoid—unless you’re Amish” reports that Amish children, raised on traditional farms where they are around farm animals and run in and out of barns from the time they can run, have far, far few allergies than the average American child. They have even fewer allergies than Hudderite children, similarly reared but not with quite as much chance to engage with microbes. What this suggests, and perhaps even begins to prove, is that the combination of modern hygiene (ie, little exposure to the ordinary microbes our human ancestors evolved with) and artificial, lab-produced products and pollutants has made more than 50% of US children allergic to the real world. Read the whole story [gift link].
I began meditating on how this might apply to social life. Humans evolved with lots of varied social interaction and in close proximity to other people of all ages—family, extended family, neighbors, other children, passing strangers, employers, servants, officials, religious leaders. In modern America, they grow up in with one or two adults and perhaps one other child, have highly organized and age- and class-segregated lives, and spend most of their time alone looking at screens.
The column in the Financial Times, “A fresh phone hell in the office” by Pilita Clark, leads with stories about Gen Z employees who say nothing when they answer a phone call, even when they had arranged it and sent a reminder for it, and clearly knew who was on the other end. No hullo, no name, no shouted Wei! as one hears in China. Silence.
I can almost imagine how years of snapchatting might l ead o9ne to feel anxious about a phone call coming out of the blue with no appointment. But who picks up a call and says nothing?
The answer, it seems, is people yet to hit 25. A remarkable 40 per cent of Brits aged between 18 and 24 think it is acceptable to answer a phone call without any form of greetings, a YouGov poll found last year.
Only 27 per cent of those aged between 25 and 34 feel the same way, and support plummets to 14 per cent among those over 45 who I think I can safely say find it weird or just plain rude.
Another detail about the way we live today hit my inbox this morning: an article about bed-sharing around the world. It explains that bed-sharing is common in Asia, not studied in Latin America (or, presumably, in Africa), but frowned on in the West. Once again, a way in which US/Western children have less social contact than many other children. Read the whole story [gift link]. (I will note a conversation I had last night, where I heard about young women who didn’t like the idea of having a “village” to help raise children because they had known or heard of extended families where child sexual abuse was ignored. This merits attention, of course, but I hope that possibility doesn’t poison our relationships in general.)
In The Great Good Place, I am writing about the “loneliness epidemic” now with a focus on young people (and also the elderly). My Google Alert for “third places” produces loads of college and university newspaper articles and I’ve heard from students writing papers and theses on third places, so it’s clear that third places are a solution that’s being talked about.
Now I have to consider the possibility that young people are going to have unique difficulty with the full range of third-place interactions. Maybe we need to develop social allergen exposure therapy? Exposure therapy is a real thing, and I’m now curious about how it might apply to social life and social skills. Your thoughts are welcome!
I can’t get this footnote to work, so here’s a link: “Methods of Aeroallergen Immunotherapy: Proven, Unproven and Everything in Between” from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.
Who is Karen Christensen? Find out here. What is The Way We Live Now trying to accomplish? Read about it here.
I think the third space discourse is a red herring that allows people to externalize the problem, instead of looking inward. Colleges are literally entirely "3rd spaces" and yet college students can't seem to make them work. How will they manage to engage with others in less age- and class-segregated spaces if they can't do it on a college campus? If you can't make friends easily in college, you certainly aren't going to do it at the library or a bar at 27.
I recently taught a class at my small, rural liberal arts college. The student body president was in my class, and we had so many deep conversations about what college was like for me 15-20 years ago and how it's changed. Students don't eat together in the dining hall regularly. It's way more normal to eat alone or in your room. They don't talk to each other in classes as much. They don't show up to the events that they advocated for.
My student and I identified this problem: being connected to a smart phone reduces all spontaneity of interaction. In the dining hall, that means that no one will sit with people unless they had planned to meet because people assume all dinner plans are firm and exclusive. In between classes, students entertain themselves and/or put earbuds in, which results in less spontaneous interaction. When there weren't phones or widespread MP3 players to entertain us while walking across campus, we sought out other people who were walking in the same direction.
Essentially, smartphones (through various mechanisms, including constant connectivity, constant entertainment, social positioning on social media, etc) have eroded the concept of the acquaintance. I've seen a lot of people theorize that the loneliness crisis is caused by the death of loose ties, not close ties. This tracks with my experience on campus. Students don't seem to have a large network of acquaintances anymore because smartphones take away the ability to spontaneously interact with others.
I'm looking forward to your research.
I found that FT article surprising! I'm way more scared to pick up the phone than to speak once I do 😂