OOH …Here’s One Thing
by Jim Johnsen,
Managing Director, Johnsen, Fretty & Company
https://youtu.be/TMiAQPABgHA?si=BxL4EjMg3WwUeh-n
Based on the title of this little diddy, I bet you think I will delve into the tragic situation in Los Angeles this week. My heart breaks for the whole community in what I consider one of the greatest cities in the world. And Jim Morrison’s lyrics do seem eerily prescient:
“I see your hair is burning
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar”
But no, I will leave coverage and the aftermath of that national tragedy to a real writer. My song choice stems from this stanza:
“Driving down your freeways
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman so alone
So alone, so alone, so alone”
In particular, so alone. Why? I just finished reading an article in The Atlantic titled “The Anti-Social Century”. To say I was “alarmed” would be like saying other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play? Here is the warm-up:
- “In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.” “The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years.”
- “Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.
- Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.
- A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue.
- The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality
- From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half. e decline was astonishingly broad, affecting just about every social activity and every demographic group that Putnam tracked.
- If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak.”
- “The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30% of their waking life.”
- “The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.”
- “Teen anxiety and depression are at near-record highs: e latest government survey of high schoolers, conducted in 2023, found that more than half of teen girls said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.”
- “Young rats and monkeys deprived of play come away socially and emotionally impaired.”
- “Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood.”
- “Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.”
- “modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone.”
- “compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home.”
- “Streaming services, video-game consoles, and flatscreen TVs make the living room more diverting than any 20th century theater or arcade. Yet conveniences can indeed be a curse. By Sharkey’s calculations, activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self reported happiness”
- “new flavor of masculinity seemed to be emerging: strong, obsessed with personal optimization, and proudly alone…young men are increasing their alone time faster than any other group, according to the American Time Use Survey”
- “All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional.”
- “It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said. But if PTA meetings are still frequently held in person, many other opportunities to meet and understand one’s neighbors are becoming a thing of the past…So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy.”
- “For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort—a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible.”
- “A night alone away from a crying baby is one thing. A decade or more of chronic social disconnection is something else entirely.”
- “Time and again, what we expect to bring us peace—a bigger house, a luxury car, a job with twice the pay but half the leisure—only creates more anxiety. And at the top of this pile of things we mistakenly believe we want, there is aloneness.”
- “A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”
- “Despite a consumer economy that seems optimized for introverted behavior, we would have happier days, years, and lives if we resisted the undertow of the convenience curse—if we talked with more strangers, belonged to more groups, and left the house for more activities”
- “The anti-social century has been bad enough: more anxiety and depression; more “need for chaos” in our politics. But I’m sorry to say that our collective detachment could still get worse. Or, to be more precise, weirder.”
- “Character.ai, the most popular platform for AI companions, has tens of millions of monthly users, who spend an average of 93 minutes a day chatting with their AI friend.”
- “If you find the notion of emotional intercourse with an immaterial entity creepy, consider the many friends and family members who exist in your life mainly as words on a screen. Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship,”
- “The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation. We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated.”
- “When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades.”
In short, 2025 is the year of connectedness for me. I am taking my life back from the smartphone. I look forward to seeing you out there on the road.
And lest you think I totally blew off other New Year’s resolutions this year…I will leave you with one quote that may help sort life this year:
“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this — To rise above the little things.
Anais Nin
PS – all quotes are from the Article “The Anti-Social Century,” which can be found here: The Anti-Social Century – The Atlantic
Securities transacted through StillPoint Capital Member firm FINRA/SiPC
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