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SOLO | Make Money by Understanding Social Media’s Role in the Loneliness Epidemic
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- [00:01]
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- [00:29]
Travis Chapel
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel. Com. For a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Is social media the cause of all of this loneliness that's going around? If you are new and this is a brand new episode for you know that we've been talking a little bit about social media or social social isolation and loneliness recently and the last episode we was a full sort of breakdown of some of my key takeaways from the report that the Surgeon General put out. Some of them being extremely alarming. Just in volume of people who are experiencing loneliness or social or social isolation. Social isolation is difficult to say. I feel like social isolation, social isolation, social isolation. Well set it there perfectly fine. Debunked my own theory. So in the volume of people who are experiencing these things, but also how detrimental it can be when you're experiencing these things. Double digit increase in all cause mortality. You are 50, 50% higher chance of survival when you do not feel these feelings of loneliness and social isolation. Worse for you than drinking six alcoholic drinks a day, than smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. It's worse for you than obesity. It's worse for you than basically anything else that is normally talked about inside of this space, which to me is really insane that nobody's, nobody's even talking about that. Especially in the biohacking space. There's so many people that talk about biohacking all the time and they're focused on these little things like what if I take this supp, can I increase my ability to sleep by 2.6%? And it's like people take all these supplement stacks and they do cold plunges and they do saunas and they have a three hour routine that helps them optimize their life and live a better life long term. Yet nobody's talking about the fact that social isolation and loneliness are actually the chief culprits of the majority of the issues that are plaguing this Country. And so on this episode, we're talking about social media, because this is sort of the. This is the elephant in the room when we're talking about loneliness, especially when it comes to this generation, because young people are experiencing loneliness at a rate that's higher than. Than ever before. Is social media the cause of all of this loneliness? Is it the evil that older generations have been saying that it is? And it's a great question. I'm so glad that you asked, because you definitely asked. This was absolutely no prompting from me at all. But last week, last. Last episode, we talked about the Loneus epidemic and some of the detrimental impacts that lacking social connection can have on your finances, your mental health, physical health. So now we're going to talk more about social connection. What is it? What are the three components that make it up? Then we'll talk about technology, the impact it has on social connection. And is social media truly ultimate evil, the thing that we should be blaming for all of this? And then to close, what are the main three ways that it influences the way we live our lives? And by the way, if we can't get to all of this on this episode, just know that we'll just break it up into two parts and we'll move on and we'll. And we'll break it off and you can listen to the rest of this episode tomorrow. So if you have some questions for me, just go to Travis Chapel. We'll be answering some of those questions, but we had a few questions come in from some of you, like, how do you keep in touch with a new friend that you're excited about without seeming cling. Without seeming clingy. Why is it so hard to make friends in your mid-30s in a new city? And a couple more depending on how much time that we have. So let's get into it. Social connection. What is social connection? Social connection, the. The three vital components of social connection is the extent to which an individual is socially connected depends on multiple factors, including structure, function, and quality. Structure is the number and variety of relationships and frequency of interactions. Function is the degree to which relationships serve various needs. Quality is the positive and negative aspects of relationships and those interactions. Right? So first, it's important to know that this is a continuum. Too often, indicators of social connection or social disconnection are considered in dichotomous ways. Right. That someone is lonely or they're not lonely. But the evidence suggests that it's more like a gradient, that it's like a. It's a. It's a sliding scale. It's sort of a spectrum. Everyone falls somewhere on the continuum of social connection, with low social connection generally associated with poor outcomes and higher social connection with better outcomes. Obviously, social connections also dynamic. The amount and quality of social connection in our lives is not static. It doesn't stay the same. Social connectedness change changes over time. It can be improved or compromised for a myriad of reasons. Illness moves, job transitions, countless other life events, as well as changes in one's community and society, can all impact social connectedness in one direction or another. Further, how long we remain on one end of the continuum may matter. Transient feelings of loneliness may be less problematic or even adaptive, because the distressing feeling motivates us to reconnect socially. Similarly, temporary experiences of solitude may help us manage social demands. Imagine that. However, chronic loneliness, even if someone is not isolated, which is sort of what we talked about on last. On the last episode, which is the more insidious nature of loneliness itself is that it's a subjective, internal feeling. So you could be surrounded by friends, seemingly totally socially connected, maybe even be the life of the party, the charismatic person everybody tries to be like, yet you can feel super lonely on the inside. So chronic loneliness, even if someone is not isolated, and isolation, even if someone is not lonely, represent a significant health concern. Meaning that even if you've solved, if you've solved for one of these, it doesn't solve for the other one. So if you are someone who is not by definition socially isolated, you have a bunch of friends, but you feel lonely, that's a problem. And then if you're somebody who is isolated, but you don't have internal feelings, loneliness, because maybe you've done a lot of inner work and you feel connected to yourself or to the universe, or to God, or to whatever you know makes you feel alive, either one of them, both of them represent a health concern on their own. And then, much like the absence of disease does not equate to good health, the absence of social deficits or loneliness does not necessarily equate to high levels of social connection. Although some measures of social connection represent the full continuum, others only focus on deficits which do not capture the degree to which social assets may contribute to resilience or. Or even enable thriving. Consider two examples. First, individual who's part of a large, highly involved family, and second, individual who has regular contact with colleagues through work, but has little time for personal relationships outside of work. In each case, such an individual is not objectively isolated and may not feel subjectively lonely. However, in both cases, key measures of Isolation and loneliness may miss whether they are reaping the benefits of social connection in other ways, such as feeling adequately supported or having high quality close relationships. So I know I'm talking to a bunch of high performers and achievers and people who want more out of life, and I tend to be the same way. But you can never sacrifice your interpersonal close friendships and relationships in pursuit of, you know, your higher calling or your dreams or your goals. I mean, look, you can, you can. Bottom line is you can do whatever you want, but it is not advised because you're still going to lack some of the major benefits of having this, this tight knit, socially connected group of friends who you can just be yourself around and feel belonging with. So, impacts of technology on social connection. These technologies include social media, smartphones, virtual reality, remote work, artificial intelligence, and assistive technologies, just to name a few. They're obviously pervasive in all of our lives. They are ubiquitous. They're everywhere. Nearly all teens and adults under 65 and 75% of adults 65 and over say that they use the Internet. Americans spend an average of six hours per day, day on digital media. Mind blowing by itself. And AB this is the average. This is not the crazy cases of the people who you see buried in their phones all day and, you know, older generations pointing the finger, the younger generations being involved on TikTok or whatever. This is the average. The average American spends six hours per day on digital media. One in three U.S. adults 18 and over report that they are online, quote, unquote, almost constantly. And the percentage of teens ages 13 to 17 who say they're online almost constantly has doubled since 2015. That is not that much time, guys. This is, we're talking about a decade. In the last decade, people age 13 to 17 who say they're almost constantly online has doubled just in the past decade. So when looking at social media specifically, the percentage of US adults 18 and over who reported using social media increased from 5% in 2005. Obvious, because didn't really exist back then. We're talking like MySpace and maybe Flixter or something like that. I think early, early, early days of Facebook to roughly 80% in 2019. That makes sense. Among teens ages 13 to 17, 95% report using social media as of 2022, with more than half reporting it would be hard to give up social media. I, I am still sort of forming opinions on this, but man, I do not believe that it would be a bad thing for social media companies to just not allow anybody under the age of 18 to be on them. I Everything changes when you become a parent. And for me, when I see all of the data around this and I see how, how malleable the brain of a child is, and child, by the way, especially using this definition, would be anybody under the age of 20.
- [10:11]
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- [10:33]
Travis Chapel
My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink. Then straight to the gym, pre K pickup back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius. Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits. I'm ready. Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com 5 before the frontal lobes fully formed. But obviously we have a legal definition of child which ends after you turn 18. So to me it's like, man, with how neuroplasticity works and the forming of the brain works, it just seems like it would be a better solution overall for people under the age of 18 to just not really use social media or if they're going to use it, to use it in a very highly controlled type of a way. And this is coming from somebody who grew up in a very high control environment, by the way. I, I tend to fight back against that to, to some degree. But also, kids are kids, man. Like they're not. Like. I do my best to treat my K adults in a lot of contexts and instances because they need to learn the responsibility of being an adult. But ultimately they are still not adults. We are still the parents. Like, we still have to watch out for them and understand that there's a lot of dangers to submitting yourself to this type of, this type of social scrutiny and all of the terrible things that come along with social media for our kids. And I think that, I think that we can do, I think that we can do a better job of this. 95% of teens age 13 to 17 are using social media that can't, that can't be good. Several examples of benefits include technology that can foster connection by providing opportunities to stay in touch with friends and family. This is kind of what I mean by the good side like if you're going to allow your kids on social, great, but just be highly controlled about it. Maybe it's just, you know, they have a private account and you approve the people who followed them, you turn off the DMs and the messages from any sort of creeps out there, things like that. Because it can be a good way to connect with people, especially if you're maybe in like a rural town and you don't have the ability to connect with, you know, your cousins or your aunts and uncles and you know, friends who, who you grew up with in a different state or something like that. So it can help foster connection, especially for those from marginalized groups and give online support groups for, you know, different topics or areas of interest. There's a lot of really good things that come along with it, but there's also a lot of negative things and a lot of harm. So several examples of harms include technology that displaces in person engagement, monopolizes our attention and reduces the quality of interactions and even diminishes our self esteem, which can lead to greater loneliness, fear, missing out, conflict and reduced social connection. For example, frequent phone use during face to face interactions between parents and children and between family and friends, increased distraction, reduced conversation quality and lowered self reported enjoyment of time spent together in person. That sucks. That, that is, that is fuel on the fire of the loneliness epidemic. Right there is the fact that even when we're in person, we're still completely socially isolated in our own chambers of consuming media. In a U.S. based study, participants who reported using social media for more than two hours a day had about double the odds of reporting increased perceptions of social isolation compared to those who use social media for less than 30 minutes a day. Additionally, targets of online harassment report feelings of increased loneliness, isolation, relationship problems, as well as lower self esteem and trust in others. Which is a huge problem I think in society at large is, is this, this, this pervasive distrust of any other human being, especially any other human being who doesn't share all of your same exact values, political affiliations, religious upbringing, et cetera. And then evidence shows that even perpetrators of cyberbullying experience weakened emotional bonds with social contacts and deficits in perceived belongingness. So even the perpetrators of the like, the people on the giving end of the bullying are also experiencing weakened emotional bonds with social contacts and deficits and perceived belongingness. So I mean this is again the pervasive nature of social media. And we'll get to sort of my clear takeaway on this here in A second. But there's another really interesting stat that I couldn't leave out here. The highest rates of social isolation are found among older adults. Young adults are almost twice as likely to report feeling lonely than those over 65. The rate of loneliness among young adults has increased every single year between 1976 and 2019. So this is what I thought was really interesting. I think it's clear that because it's been happening since 1976, that social media is not the only culprit. So we cannot point the finger and blame social media giants and huge tech companies for the explosion of loneliness and social isolation, because it's been increasing every single year since 1976. So it's just that with the advancement of technology, we get to solve new problems, and that's great. But along with solving those problems, it also gives us a new set of problems to solve, you know, and so now it's up to us to decide what are we going to do with this new set of problems? How are we going to attack this new set of problems? For instance, the steamboat was introduced to use in 1807 by Robert Fulton. This invention changed the way that we traveled. It was a technological advancement that quite literally propelled us forward. The lives of people of that time were significantly improved because of it. However, it brought a new set of problems. Boiler explosions, river hazards, the health of the people shoveling coal into the engine. They were difficult to control, required a ton of maintenance, and ultimately posed a new set of problems for those people as well. Yet there was a generation of people who had to deal with the problems of the advancing technology because they accepted that the technology was extremely useful. And then they said, what can we do to help mitigate the problems that this new technology introduced? And I bet you anything that there were a ton of people back at that point who were saying something along the lines of, man, I wish we could just go back to the time, you know, before steamboats. You know, that, that was. That was better. That was better for us overall. In fact, there's a quote from. I believe it was Napoleon Bonaparte who was talking about how crazy the steamboat was. And he, like, he could not imag imagine in his mind that this would be a better way of. Of getting around the world than using the traditional sailboat. But they didn't do that. No, they, they. They are human beings. We're humans. We're ultimate adaptation machines because we're not built to go backwards. When new technology presents new problems, we find new ways to solve the new problems that we gain from that technology and generationally, sometimes what happens is that the new generation gets presented the problems that are repercussions of the technology invented by the previous generation, right? So we as millennials or Gen Z can whine about the fact that the technological advancement of the generation above us propelled us into this world of social isolation and loneliness. Or we can rise to the challenge and start creating solutions to the problem.
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- [18:28]
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Travis Chapel
steamboat example in the early 1900s, there's a guy named Rudolf Diesel, a German engineer who developed, you guessed it, the diesel engine, which solved a lot of those problems and made the steamboat obsolete. Fascinating story by the way Douglas Brunt wrote a great book about it called the Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel, which involves World War II, the espionage endeavors of Winston Churchill. It's a crazy story. Check out the Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel. It's a fantastic book. But anyway, back to, back to the original question posed here. Okay. Is social media to blame? My personal opinion, I don't think it is the thing that we can point the finger at. We're always looking for distractions. You know, before phones, it was newspapers or TV or radio. But social media has just made engaging in that district, in that distraction, easier to access, more ubiquitous for everybody. Everybody now has access to a smartphone and can immediately distract their minds whenever they want to distract their minds. So is it. Is. Is social media or smartphones, is that the. The cause of all of this? No, I don't think the data supports that. However, is it an accelerant to these problems? Answer is, absolutely. It's gasoline on the fire. And we as a generation cannot afford to turn a blind eye to it, but instead must engage with it, be grateful for the problems that we get to solve, because that's what will ultimately lead to more fulfillment in our work anyway. And then it'll help us be grateful for all the things that it does help with. There are ple of great things that social media does, plenty of great things that technological advancement has done for us and for the world. And, you know, we, we can't just, we can't just go like, oh, well, that technology represent, you know, brought in a bunch of new problems and then just go like, oh, well, we should just ditch the technology. Like, that's just not how human beings are. We want to advance, we want to achieve. We want to push forward civilization together in meaningful ways. And so we, we are not going to go backwards here. So what's the solution? The solution is those of us who are at the forefront of generation need to take responsibility for the hand that was given to us by a previous generation and say, well, what are we going to do to solve some of these problems? So, listen, I would love to keep talking about this. I think we're coming up on time here on this episode, but we'll go into some of the solutions to the problem here in the next episode. Because there are plenty of ways that technology has affected us both negatively and positively. But ultimately, my biggest takeaway is this. The only more insidious thing about social media that I think is, is why I say it's an accelerant to the problem is because of the word social in the title. You cannot view social media as a social activity. You have to view it as a media activity. So stop focusing on the first word, start focusing on the second word. It is not a replacement for in person, social connection. It will not make you feel more connected to others or more belonging with a group of people. It will not, it will not solve the internal problems of human connectedness that, that are inherent in our bio, in our biology. So if you think that social media is a replacement for those things, it's absolutely not. What social media is a replacement for is watching tv, whatever you know, previous generations media consumption was, that's what social media is now. So instead of reading the newspaper, you're scrolling through news on your phone. Instead of watching a movie, you're scrolling through TikTok late at night. It is a, it is a replacement for media activity. It is not a replacement for social activity. If you're using it for a replacement for social activity, you will probably find yourself more socially isolated, more lonely over a long enough period of time. And you owe it to yourself to, to introduce that distinction in your life. Set boundaries for how long you're going to use social media in a given day and then, and then set times in your calendar to go out and actually connect with people in person and actually, you know, promote those, inter those inner feelings of connectedness and belonging with the tribe of people that you have around you. So that's it for this episode. We're going to keep talking about this here on future episodes. Appreciate you hanging out with me as always, Travis Chapel. Send me a DM over there. Be happy to answer any of your questions. We'll get into some of the questions that we got recently here on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys on the next one. Peace.
- [23:23]
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