The cost of spending time alone

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Episode: The Cost of Spending Time Alone
Guest: Derek Thompson (Staff Writer, The Atlantic)
Date: February 3, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Sean Illing speaks with Atlantic writer Derek Thompson about his essay "The Antisocial Century." The conversation critically re-examines the so-called “loneliness epidemic,” proposing that what’s actually happening in American society is a profound shift toward chosen solitude and social isolation. Together, they explore the historical, technological, and psychological roots of this trend, the consequences for civic life and democracy, and what it might take to reverse course.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Redefining the "Loneliness Epidemic"

• Loneliness vs. Social Isolation

  • Derek Thompson distinguishes between feeling lonely (the gap between desired and received social connection) and chronic, chosen solitude (social isolation).
    • “Loneliness...is the felt gap between the social connection that you have and...that you want. ...But something else I think is the social crisis of this moment...and that's social isolation.” — Derek Thompson [03:06]
  • Americans are not necessarily reporting higher loneliness, but nearly all are spending dramatically more time alone, often by choice.

• Shocking Social Trends

  • Face-to-face socializing has dropped over 20% in the past 25 years, with groups like Black men and young people seeing declines closer to 40%.
    • “For all Americans, face to face socializing is at its lowest point in 25 years...alone time is at its highest.” — Derek Thompson [05:22]

• Universality of Isolation

  • Unlike many issues often discussed in an upper-middle-class context, decline in socializing is present across gender, race, class, and age.
    • “This is something that is absolutely happening to everybody.” — Derek Thompson [07:23]

Historical & Economic Drivers

• Individualism and Technology

  • The rise of cars and television in the mid-20th century enabled Americans to privatize both their lives and leisure.
    • “The first was the car that allowed us to privatize our lives...The second was the television, which allowed us to privatize our leisure time.” — Derek Thompson [08:38]

• The On-Demand Economy

  • Modern conveniences (streaming, delivery, smartphones) make it increasingly effortless to avoid direct human interaction, conditioning us to avoid the “messiness and unpredictability of the actual world.”
    • “What you bought is an economy of extraordinary dopaminergic reward systems...But here's part of the cost...you haven't seen for the progress that you've purchased.” — Derek Thompson [13:03]

The Psychology Behind Solitude

• Why We Isolate (Even When We Know It’s Bad for Us)

  • Humans are “cross-purpose machines” — we seek both social connection and easy dopamine hits; technology exploits the latter.
    • “If I were trying...to solicit as much dopamine as possible...I would never leave my house.” — Derek Thompson [10:29]
  • Technology has “elicit[ed] from us this aspect...that just wants to lie back, open our eyes, and be awash in novel visual stimuli.” [11:26]

• Expectations Gaps in Social Life

  • We overestimate the risk of awkwardness and underestimate the rewards of interaction—leading to missed chances for meaningful connection.
    • “There's an expectations gap...often we withhold ourselves from talking to strangers...because we're afraid that we might be boring to them.” — Derek Thompson quoting Nick Epley [17:48]

Consequences for Civic Life and Politics

• The Erosion of the "Village"

  • Thompson references Mark Dunkelman's model of three social “rings”: inner (family), middle (“village”—neighbors, acquaintances), and outer (identity-based tribes).
    • The "village" is weakening rapidly—digital tech strengthens inner and outer circles but hollows out local social life.
    • “It’s that middle ring that teaches us tolerance.” — Derek Thompson [20:03]

• All Politics is Now "Focal"

  • With “village” ties atrophied, national media and identity-based “tribes” dominate, replacing nuanced local concern with broad-group antagonism.
    • “In a world where all politics is local, rural Kentucky does not care about immigration politics...But in a world where all politics is focal, they're paying attention to the same news stories...” — Derek Thompson [22:54]

• “Need for Chaos” and Online Power

  • Those most isolated display a greater tendency toward political positions that seek to “see everything burn down,” fueled by online tribalism and scorched-earth rhetoric.
    • “One of the things that correlates most highly with need for chaos is self-described self-isolation.” — Derek Thompson [26:53]

Looking Ahead: Gateways to Hell and Heaven

• Dangers of AI-Facilitated Solitude (Gates to Hell)

  • AI “companions” already offer substitutes for real relationships; these will only improve, posing a threat to genuine human connection and increasing our willingness to choose tech over people.
    • “Is it really going to be so strange for [young people] to have friends at school and friends on their phone? I just don't think it takes an enormous amount of imagination to see how this is coming.” — Derek Thompson [35:08]
  • This change is less about tech making people more narcissistic than about a world engineered to satisfy self-fulfillment and validation on demand.
    • “We're no different...We're different because of technology, and technology of different times elicits different aspects of our personalities.” — Derek Thompson [36:08]

• Optimistic Paths Forward (Gates to Heaven)

  • Cultural cycles can inspire social backlashes; society has previously swung back toward collectivity and togetherness.
  • Small personal choices to reach out, join, and connect can cascade into new social norms and movements.
    • “If this is a disease, antisocial century is a disease. The cure is free and is well known.” — Derek Thompson [37:19]

• Personal Reckoning

  • Thompson himself acknowledges the insights changed his own habits:
    • “I'm an introvert...writing this piece was a reckoning for my own behavior and the way my own hour to hour, minute to minute preferences were affecting my life and my happiness.” [39:27]
    • “The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our life.” — Derek Thompson [39:27]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “We are designed to replicate our genome through history. But that's not all: we're designed to seek novelty, to seek familiarity, to seek safety, and to seek adventure. We're so, so complex.” — Derek Thompson [36:08]
• “It's that middle ring that teaches us tolerance...and in a world where that middle ring is atrophying...our politics would become a lot less tolerant.” — Derek Thompson [20:03]
• “Life is complicated and progress has trade offs.” — Derek Thompson [13:03]
• “The cure is free and is well known.” — Derek Thompson [37:19]
• “The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our life.” — Derek Thompson [39:27]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment Topic | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------------------|------------| | The loneliness vs. isolation distinction | 03:06 | | Americans spending more time alone—key statistics | 05:22 | | Decline in socialization is universal across demographics | 07:23 | | Individualism, cars, and TV as root causes | 08:38 | | The psychology of choosing solitude | 10:29 | | Technology’s role in wiring us for isolation | 13:03 | | The “expectations gap” in making connections | 17:48 | | The vanishing “middle ring”/village and effects on politics| 20:03 | | From ‘all politics is local’ to ‘all politics is focal’ | 22:54 | | “Need for chaos” and online radicalization | 26:53 | | Possible futures: AI companions and cultural backlash | 31:00, 37:19| | Thompson’s personal reflection and changed behavior | 39:27 |

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Tone and Style

The conversation is thoughtful, analytic, self-aware, and occasionally humorous, balancing rigorous sociological insight with personal reflection and cultural criticism. Both Illing and Thompson are forthright about the challenges but maintain a sense of possibility and agency.

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For anyone seeking to understand how and why Americans are growing more isolated, and why this may be an even deeper crisis than loneliness, this episode offers an important, nuanced, and accessible entry point—rich with data, historical perspective, and calls to action for both individuals and the collective.

Transcript

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[B]

It's great to be here. Thank you, Sean.

[C]

Everyone's been saying for years now that we have a loneliness epidemic and you think that's not quite right. So tell me what's actually going on.

[B]

So it's probably worth defining loneliness. Loneliness, as the sociologist that I talk to, in particular NYU's Eric Klinenberg, is a very healthy thing to feel. Loneliness is the felt gap between the social connection that you have and. And the social connection that you want. And so when I'm home, working a lot, taking care of my kid, not hanging out with friends outside my house, sometimes I feel lonely. And that inspires me to reach out to my friends and hang out with them, get a drink. But something else I think is the social crisis of this moment and this century for America, and that's social isolation. If you're spending more and more time alone and year after year after year, and you are choosing to socially isolate yourself, and you're even in many cases, as I see sometimes happening on TikTok, celebrating when your friends cancel plans because it means you can add another heaping scoop of alone time on top of the historic amounts of alone time that you're already spending. Well, my feeling is that's not loneliness. That is a choice to socially isolate more and more month after month, year after year, even decade after decade. This is not loneliness. And the last thing I would say is if you choose to see this moment as a loneliness epidemic, you have a research problem. You have an empirical problem. Because right now, two things are true from the numbers. Number one, we spend a historic amount of time alone. And number two, it doesn't seem like for many Americans, loneliness is spiking at the same rate that social isolation is spiking. What we have is not a crisis of loneliness as it is broadly understood, but actually something much more gnarly, something much more toxic, and actually something much stranger than. Than a mere crisis of loneliness.

[C]

Well, just so we have a point of reference, give me a sobering stat here. How much more time are people spending alone relative to how much time we used to spend alone? 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago?

[B]

So between the 1960s and the 1990s, Americans were withdrawing from all kinds of associations and clubs. This was the thesis of and point of Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone. But in the last 25 years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been running a survey called the American Time Use Survey, which asks Americans a bunch of questions about how they spend their week. How much time do you spend sleeping? How much time do you spend eating dinner? And they also ask, how much time do you spend in face to face socializing? And the amount of time that all Americans spend, the average American spends in face to face socializing has declined by over 20% in the last 25 years. For some groups like black men and young people, overall, the decline is more like 40% negative 40% face to face socializing over the last 20, 25 years. So that brings us to a point now where there is no period in modern historical record going back to the mid-1960s at least, and probably going back decades before then, that we have spent so much time by ourselves.

[C]

And how does this break down across class lines? Are we seeing the same trends across class lines or are there noteworthy differences? And if there are, why might that be so?

[B]

What I would say is as a matter of sort of coming to a firm answer to this question, is this an income based phenomenon? Is maybe, but because the best data we have doesn't have very large sample sizes for the richest and poorest Americans, it's hard to say that this is a fact. The same way we can say that it's a fact that for all Americans, face to face socializing is at its lowest point in 25 years, or maybe 60, 100 years, and alone time is at its highest.

[C]

Well, I just wanted to ask because we have a tendency to talk about upper class problems as though they are universal problems. And this ain't that. Whatever else it is, it's not that.

[B]

I think it's really important to say that you're exactly right. I mean, especially I would say in this space, right in talking about like the way we live today, the problems of modernity, always very difficult to avoid the temptation to talk about the upper middle class as if they are representative of the entire country. So when we talk about like the problems of intensive parenting or anxiety, you know, college based anxiety for kids, a lot of times those fears are about a large part of the country that is not all of the country. In this case, however, you will find that face to face socializing is declining for men and for women, for literally every age cohort, the young and the old, for white and black and Hispanic Americans, for the bottom quartile, for the top quartile, for married Americans, for unmarried Americans, for college graduates, for non high school graduates. This is something that is absolutely happening to everybody. And so therefore, if you want to understand it, I think we need to look for causes that are more universal than income inequality.

[C]

So why was the first half of the 20th century so social? What changed around the 70s? And why is the answer clearly neoliberalism?

[B]

And why is the answer clearly the election of Ronald Reagan? So the simplest way to summarize what happened is that there was a Revolution of individualism that struck this country and affected it at many different levels, at the political economy level, at the social level. And it ended, as you said, a very social century. Between the 1910s and the 1950s and early 60s, certainly just about every measure of sociality in this country was rising. The marriage rate spiked in the middle of the 20th century. Fertility rates spiked in an incredibly unusual way. You had a surge in unionization rates. You had more associations created, more clubs created. So by so many different measures, socializing was surging in the middle of the 20th century. And that ended, and I think that among many, many things, two things that ended it were the two most important technologies of the 20th century. The first was the car that allowed us to privatize our lives and move away from other people. And the second was the television, which allowed us to privatize our leisure time so that we could spend it alone looking at a screen and not necessarily spend it throwing a dinner party.

[C]

Well, you talk to psychologists, you talk to sociologists. Why do we choose solitude? If we know it, it won't make us happy in the long term. And I say we know. Not just in the sense that there's a lot of research telling us so, but we all pretty much know this from lived experience. As tempting as it is to stay home and Netflix or whatever, most of the time we all feel better once we actually get out of the house and spend time with friends. So what's behind this pathological behavior?

[B]

I think it's a very good and a very complex question. And the first thing I'd say is that we do things that we know aren't good for us all the time. This is the whole problem with nutrition, is that you have people coming up with ever more complicated ways of explaining what's good for us. But you inject anybody in the world with truth serum and you say, is the Twix bar good for you? Is going to the gym good for you? Is celery good for you? Everyone knows the answers to these questions. The problem is actualizing the answers in your behavior. Because we're cross purpose machines. And the relevant cross pressure is that we are dopamine seeking creatures. And we're also interpersonal creatures, we're social animals. And sometimes those drives are totally cross purpose with each other. That seeking dopamine in the most efficient way necessarily means not spending time around people. Right. Like if I were trying, for example, to simply solicit as much dopamine as possible and be surrounded by maximal stimulative novelty as much as possible on a minute to minute basis. What would I do? I would never leave my house. Our homes are so much more comfortable than they used to be. They're so much more diverting than they used to be with their television sets and their smartphones and their speaker systems and their streaming and their cable. There's so much that is interesting that we can do just staying at home. And. And so I think many people just do. Now, I'm not here to say that television's evil. I am trying to say that the invention of television was akin to the discovery of this element of human nature that fundamentally wants to turn ourselves into passive audience members. And so we invented this technology that seemed to elicit from us this aspect of ourselves that just wants to lie back, open our eyes and be awash in novel visual stimuli. And I think that unfortunately, when you ask, you know, why don't we just leave the house, why don't we just hang out with people more? I think that we are complex creatures and that this is a really relevant cross purpose for us.

[C]

Well, I mean, having an economy increasingly built on personal convenience, it's just such a huge part of this, you know, I mean, from streaming services to online shopping, I mean, everything is curated, everything's on demand, everything is easy. If you have a phone and wi fi, you don't have to leave the house for damn near anything. I mean, that kind of economic order has to condition us psychologically to want to avoid the messiness and the unpredictability of the actual world.

[B]

It's a beautifully made point and I want to be really, really clear about my reaction to it. The on demand economy is good. It's good for busy families, it's good for the disabled, it's good for the elderly, it's good for the chronically sick. The on demand economy is an absolute economic mitzvah. But life is complicated and progress has trade offs. The industrial revolution was good. It allowed us to be rich enough to take a world where the average person had a 50, 50 shot of living to see their 16th birthday into a world where the vast majority of people have a very, very good chance to turn 16. But we also know that the industrialized economy had costs and trade offs. One of them being that it took us a while to recognize that industrialization was coughing up all of this pollution that was choking the biosphere. It took us a while to realize the cost of progress, and it took us a while to recognize what the cost of this economic mitzvah was. And in the same way I think a world of entertainment and a world of on demand convenience is wonderful in many, many ways. It just takes us a while to figure out what the costs of that progress are. And one thing I'm trying to do in this piece is to hold up a mirror to Americans behavior and say this is the receipt. What you bought is an economy of extraordinary dopaminergic reward systems and it's helped your life in many ways and made life more fun in many ways. But here's part of the cost, here's the receipt that you haven't seen for the progress that you've purchased. And it's not so much to say that I want to move progress back. I think we just need to find a way to adapt to it.

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[B]

It reminds me of what the University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley said to me. And he talks about the ways in which there's an expectations gap that we suffer from, or several expectations gaps that we suffer from in our social relationship. And one is that often we withhold ourselves from talking to strangers or asking people to hang out with us because we're afraid that we might be boring to them. We're afraid that we might disappoint ourselves by being in that conversation and seeing other people react negatively to us. And he points out that a lot of human interaction is instead governed by a principle of reciprocity, such that when you're nice to someone, they tend to be nice back. When you initiate a little bit of conversation, they tend to talk back to you. And so there's an expectations gap between the withdrawal that we sometimes conduct ourselves with and the social interaction that would actually make us much more happy in the next 15 minutes of life. And the second gap that he talks about that I think is really profound is an expectations gap about depth of conversation. And I think that people, they want to be asked deep questions. They like talking about things that matter to them. And often we're afraid of initiating deep conversations with people. So I think that one of Epley's just really wonderful points is that despite the fact that we're social animals, we live under this patina of illusion about asociality where we withhold deep and meaningful conversations both from ourselves and the people around us because we have false expectations about how those conversations are going to go.

[C]

Well, speaking of connections and depth of connections, or lack thereof, it leads to, I think, a very important part of the piece where you're talking about these three rings of connection, inner, middle, and outer, and how this middle ring, which is key to social cohesion, that's disappearing. Can you say a bit about that? Cause it seems really, really important.

[B]

So Mark Dunkelman, who's an author and a researcher at Brown University, when I called him to talk about this piece, what he said was that ironically, our digital devices, which might seem like, they alienate us from each other, actually make some relationships much closer than they used to be. For example, at the inner ring of family, it is possible for families to be connected throughout the day, throughout the week, in ways that were totally impossible 50 years ago. I mean, the amount of times per day that I text my wife or my wife texts me is just enormous. We're just in constant contact and constant communication. He said at one point, you know, if my daughter buys a Butterfinger from the cvs, I get a notification on my phone, which, you know, intensive parenting, take it or leave it. Like, at least it's a connection that you could not imagine happening 30 years ago. And then, so at that inner ring, you have lots of intimacy. And then there's an outer ring that he describes, which is. You can sort of think of it as tribe people who share your affinities. So if you're a Cincinnati Bengals fan or if you're a New Orleans Saints fan, for example, for the NFL, you can follow the world of Saints fans and be in touch with them in a way that was absolutely impossible 40 years ago. Mark talks about the fact that he lives in Providence, Rhode island, and he's texting the beat reporters from Cincinnati, Ohio, about how the Bengals should change their offense. I mean, that is a connection that you could just never have before the rise of group chats and X and things like that. So what he says is you sort of, in a weird way, have this inner ring of family and friends which can be strengthened by digital communications, and this outer ring of tribe which can be strengthened by digital communications because it puts us in touch with the crowd. But there's an inner ring that atrophies. And that inner ring he calls the village. And the village is the people that live next to us. It's the people that we live around. It's the people that we might see at grocery stores or form clubs with. It's people we're not related to and that don't necessarily share our opinion about everything in the world. And that's what makes it so important. Because if the inner ring teaches us love and the outer ring teaches us loyalty or ideology, it's that middle ring that teaches us tolerance. It requires tolerance to be in the world of people you're not related to who might disagree with you about things. And in a world where that middle ring is atrophying, you would predict if you knew nothing else about the world, that our politics would become a lot less tolerant.

[C]

There's a section in the piece titled this is your politics on solitude. And you make the case that this drift towards solitude is really rewiring our civic and political identity. Is this how it's rewiring it? That it's basically teaching us to love the people we love, perhaps even more, but also hate the people we don't really know?

[B]

I think it might be that the two implications that I draw from the piece are one, that you would expect the political winners of An Age of Solitude to exist in that sort of all tribe, no village level. They'd be great at stoking out group animosity, and they would be almost celebratory of their lack of tolerance. And certainly, I think both those things describe Donald Trump. The second is that the conventional wisdom used to be that all politics is local, that people vote based on issues that are local to their village. But in a world where the village atrophies and a more global sense of reality concretizes, it's not that all politics is local, it's that all politics is focal, with an F. All politics is what national media gets us to focus on, whether or not it's relevant to our local interests. So one example from the right, and then maybe one example from the left, someone from the right. And this anecdote didn't make it in the final piece, but Arlie Russell Hochschild, who's a sociologist in California, just published a book, and I was emailing her about that book as I was writing this piece, and she pointed out that there are folks in rural Kentucky where she was doing some of her ethnography, where you walk into their trailer homes and you walk into their houses, and the television is just the biggest piece of furniture in the house. And for them, the most important issue in the 2024 election was the rise of illegal immigration and the hordes of migrants crossing the border. This was incredibly alarming to them. And you look at these census reports of rural Kentucky, and these are some of the places with the least the smallest share of immigrants in the country. So in a world where all politics is local, rural Kentucky does not care about immigration politics at all. But in a world where all politics is focal, they're paying attention to the same news stories that a conservative living in downtown Chicago or New York or San Francisco is paying attention to. And that struck me as very interesting. And the point that I made about the left, which got me into trouble among some people, is that I think that progressives have comforted themselves with the understanding that Trump is a kind of political alien who is inexplicable to anyone who shares progressive values. But it's led them to simply not understand Trump as a political phenomenon in a way that I think has hurt the left by not allowing them to take seriously some of the values that underlie this incredibly successful right populist movement. The left would be better at understanding itself, which is to say the country that it lives in, if we spent more time around other people who lived in our so called village.

[C]

I never thought of the village as a moderating mechanism in that way, but it makes all the sense in the world. The lack of engagement, the lack of understanding that has been brewing because of this disconnection. It's just been. It's just been toxic to our politics. And I don't know, I'm just whining out loud here.

[B]

No, I accept your whining in the spirit in which it's intended. I think I'm not particularly optimistic about Americans agreeing with each other. And one thing that I don't want to happen and that I can see happening is a world where people fall so out of touch with where they live and the issues that are material to their communities that they vote for people that are giving them something that's bad for them and bad for their neighbors who agree and disagree with whoever's in the White House. So I think there are material consequences to a world where voters are fundamentally disconnected from their local material realities.

[C]

How does the antisocial turn, especially among men, lead to what you call chaos? Politics? I think he even used the phrase a grotesque style of politics.

[B]

Yeah, it's a term of art from a Danish researcher, a Danish political scientist named Michael Bang Peterson, called need for chaos. And he's done a series of studies with some of his co researchers, and they've essentially felt that there's a certain demographic that responds very positively to conspiracy theories about any establishment politician, left or right. And they tend to agree with statements like, I don't believe in the political process, I just want to see everything burned down. And he calls them need for chaos because his theory is that this is a cohort of the electorate that has essentially given up on institutions and establishment processes. And they see politics at a distance as a kind of. As a piece of entertainment where the most destruction visited on existing institutions the better. And while certainly it sounds like this movement would lean far right, there are elements of the left that he sees associated with it as well. And what he found, and the reason that I included his findings in my piece, is that one of the things that correlates most highly with need for chaos is is self described self isolation. And he says these people aren't seeking out friendships the way that someone might if they were lonely. In a typical way that is seeking out a friend because you feel that gap between felt and desired social connection. Rather, they take stock of their own social isolation and they seek to remedy it by going online and seeking power in some way. Typically by joining some online horde trying to like tear down some establishment or criticize some institution. Well, I was down on my last dollar.

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[A]

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[C]

So what are the different paths we can go down at this point? I mean, if the antisocial trend continues, where does that leave us? If we course correct, what might that look like?

[B]

So should we do Gate to Hell first and then Gate to Heaven so we can end on a happy note?

[C]

Yeah, let's lead with Gate to Hell. Why not?

[B]

Okay, good. I can't imagine a world where artificial intelligence continues to advance at the rate it's advancing and it not meaningfully inflecting this space.

[C]

How so?

[B]

We already see that There was a big article in the New York Times just a few days ago about people falling in love with ChatGPT and having deep personal relationships with a generative AI software whose guts live in some data center in the Dulles corridor of Virginia. That's weird, but it's going to get less weird because it's become more common. Jason Fagone, who's a journalist who I spoke to, is writing a book about people's relationship with AI companions. And the stories that he told me, some of which I reported in the piece and some of which were off the record, were just absolutely extraordinary. I mean, you know, mothers with families, married to a man, but who feels bisexual and has a engaged emotional relationship with an AI that identifies as a woman. Men who, having lost a girlfriend or fiance, creating avatars of their lost loves out of silicon, and having ongoing relationships with ChatGPT or with other AI companions that essentially mimic the emotional life of their ex. This is all going to get more common and it's all going to get weirder because the technology is going to improve and also because these technologies are going to become more multimodal, which is, I guess, maybe just a fancy way of saying they're going to get better at talking to us, literally talking to us and not just texting us back. And in some ways, people are going to find that silicon based friendships and relationships are just richer than carbon based relationships, to put things somewhat frequently. So I think this is coming, and I think we need to see it clearly for the threat that it could have to the way that humans deal with each other in the physical world.

[C]

You know, I have to say, I think this is where some of those old curmudgeonly cultural critics like Christopher Lash, you know, who famously wrote the culture of narcissism, are a little vindicated, as you point out in the article. You know, like, one of the reasons we're so prepared for chatbot friendships is that we have come to expect different things from our relationships. And what a lot of us really want is a set of feelings. We want validation, we want sympathy. We want someone or something to make us feel a certain way about ourselves. That's about self fulfillment. That is kind of narcissism, and it's kind of where we are.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this is maybe where we dust off some of your favorite existentialist writers and think about phenomenologically, what is friendship? For the most part, it's a lot of spending time with people in the physical world, hopefully. But for a lot of people, it's phone calls and it's texts and it's the feeling of, hey, I'm having an issue with work, or hey, I'm having an issue with my Kid or I'm having an issue with my relationship. Hey man, can we just like talk on the phone? Can I just give you a call? Can you just respond to a couple texts while we both watch the national championship game at home? What's happening there? You're picking up a piece of hardware and you're holding it to your ear, or you're holding it in your palm and you're having a voice based or text based conversation with an entity who is not there, but an entity within which you entrust with love and a host of complex feelings that make it so that you want to spend time with someone who is physically a ghost to you. Well, like you're just talking to someone who isn't there that you've decided to put trust in. What's phenomenologically so different than it being an AI?

[C]

Hell, I probably have half a dozen friendships now that exist solely through the exchange of funny memes right on Instagram.

[B]

And my point isn't that like my best friend or your best friend is no different than an AI. What? I want people to think capaciously about the ways in which relationships with AI won't be weird to lots of people. It's weird to me. I have no relationship with an artificial intelligence. I'd be surprised if you did. I'd certainly be surprised if my wife did. But I don't think that many people growing up in an age, especially young people who, by the way, one of the first points made in the show, spent a historic amount of time alone on their couches interacting with the world through their smartphone screen. Is it really going to be so strange for them to have friends at school and friends on their phone? I just don't think it takes an enormous amount of imagination to see how this is coming.

[C]

Yeah, and I should say I don't think people today are any more inherently narcissistic or self involved than people were really at any other point. We have built a world optimized to cater to these sorts of impulses.

[B]

Oh yeah. No, we're no different. I mean biologically, how can we be different than our grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather? We're not. Nothing's changed about human biology. Nothing's changed about human biochemistry, or very little, very little has changed about human psychology. We're different because of technology, and technology of different times elicits different aspects of our personalities because we're incredibly cross purposed. We are designed to replicate our genome through history. But that's not all we're designed to seek novel stimuli and also designed to seek familiarity and designed to seek safety and designed to seek adventure. We're so, so complex. And we just live in a world right now where I want people to recognize just how much intelligence and treasure and talent has been devoted to the job of keeping us stimulated inside of our homes. And what if we actually confronted the costs of that world?

[C]

When I asked you earlier about the different ways forward, you gave me the vision for the road to the gates to hell. You didn't give me the vision of the path to the gates of heaven. What's the utopian optimistic, sunny scenario?

[B]

So the difference between science and culture is that science tends to move linearly and culture is a cycle. Culture goes up and down. Culture is backlash. Culture is not just one thing accumulating over and over and over again. It's backlash. And a proper understanding of the antisocial century, I think will inspire its own backlash. And we've backlashed before. The late 19th century was a highly individualistic time. And around the progressive era of the early 20th century, up until the middle of the 1900s, we had a social revolution in this country that was inspired by religion and the social gospel, that was inspired by a change in political economy, the New Deal and the rise of collectivism, and was reinforced by everything from behavior and habit to technology. It was a physical time, a time of physical togetherness, and we can have it again. People need to make new choices with their lives, and those new choices need to be inspired by a clear understanding of what we've done to ourselves in the social century. That year after year of being alone is unacceptable. And we can make choices as small as I'm going to call my friend when I feel like I miss them, I'm going to spend more time outside of my house. I'm going to go out every single weekend, absolutely, for sure, to make sure that I prioritize a Friday or Saturday hangout. The people who are in my life that I text but don't see physically, I'm going to make a point to see them. I think that behaviors can cascade and they can create norms, and I think norms can cascade and they can create movements. And if this is a disease, antisocial century is a disease. The cure is free and is well known. And that makes me optimistic.

[C]

Is all of what you just said personally aspirational, or are you becoming the change you want to see in the world, Derek, after having thought this through so deeply and reported this out, are you changing the decisions you make day to day? Are you out in the world engaging with more people?

[B]

1,000%.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm an introvert. I'm a couch potato. I'm a bookworm. I love to stay home and read and think about things. And writing this piece was a reckoning for my own behavior and the ways that my own hour to hour, minute to minute preferences were affecting my life and affecting my happiness. As Nick Epley says, you have a great conversation for 15 minutes rather than be alone. That doesn't change your life, it just changes the next 15 minutes. But life is just one 15 minute block of time after another. And the way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our life. And that understanding has affected me really deeply. And I'm thinking so much more about how I spend more time around people and how I reach out to people more.

[C]

That's such a beautiful place to end. We love your work around here. So thanks for coming back on the show, man.

[B]

Thank you, man. Total pleasure to be here.

[C]

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I always love talking to Derek. As always. We want to know what you think, so drop us a line at the gray areaox.com and tell us. And if you can spare just another few minutes, please rate and review the podcast. That stuff really helps our show grow. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala Fact Checked by Anouk Duseau and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. This show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. Packages by Expedia.

[B]

You were made to occasionally take the.

[C]

Hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

[B]

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