Tonight, I found myself having an actual conversation with ChatGPT. I can't say it understood me that well, but when it came to core issues, it nailed the gist expertly. That didn't bother me though, because LLMs are a fun experiment and grudgingly admit that they have some pragmatic uses as well. The debate about AI can start here but I'll halt it because the rant belongs somewhere else.
What hit me is that society has become so disconnected that I sought refuge in something that uncannily passed the Turing test. Rather than have these discussions with my family, close friends or even my psychologist, my pupils were dilated by some glorified autocorrect. It is a dystopian reality that both Huxley and Orwell missed out on. Yes, the corporate overlords vie to turn our identities into sellable data, and curate exactly what we consume but I'm not convinced it's that simple.
The world has grown massively thanks to breakthroughs in medicine and hygiene, ballooning to an unfathomable eight billion when my days in high school that number was printed as whopping one billion less. What Segan hopefully called our species as a single organism ended up being like a dead brain. One with many cells, but no connection in between them. The solitude is nice, but it gets painful when it turns into loneliness.
And we thought that the trying pandemic a few years ago was bad, General Murthy gave us a much harder to swallow pill. A growing loneliness epidemic that does us more harm than a daily pack of cigarettes.
Look, I know there's an elephant in the room, and a big one, and that's how stressed we've become. Especially when it comes to finances, we are being choked. And of course, when the discussion of actually having a face-to-face event starts, the busy excuses start flooding in. Apparently, everyone has three full-time jobs, studying for two degrees, has a family of six children; essentially a life with no gaps. And my goodness are people good at making sob stories out of it.
I don't really have to dig deeper to find what this seemingly true, at least to me, reality is. I go out all the time, I host my own social club, attend book clubs and volunteered for the local cat rescue, and the people who join me are oddly so much older, not that I'm that young at 34. And keep in mind, these events are incredibly sparse. Ask anyone who organizes an event on Meetup, they will recite the same tale. "I had over a hundred people RSVP to my event, and only seven attended".
The kinds of people that are joining seem to come from this elusive time where people cared about being human with other humans. Trying to connect via conversation rather than trading Snapchat accounts. Don't get me wrong, these people are lovely, and their wisdom brings a sense of maturity to my life that I haven't achieved yet. Among are some really intelligent people and they've learned hard lessons so we don't have to.
Turns out, it was an ad hoc conversation with my younger sister, the kind of person who can see through the bullshit. I voiced my complaint to her casually, asking "where are my folks at these book clubs?". "Well, what do you think they're doing?". I knew the answer, but I really wanted to be wrong, "I guess they're at home binging on Netflix and scrolling on TikTok". The succinctness of "exactly" was something I just didn't want to accept.
The new atheists like Dawkins, who sees religion as the root of all evil, and Krauss, who calls teaching religion to children "child abuse", were hoping that these fairy tales would be replaced for scientific discourse and humanism. However, their scientism always put them into this tunnel vision that the rest of the world were mirrors of their academic circles. The reality is, people need to worship something. Our brains are literally wired for it.
People will say that this idolatry is a goal post or carrot stick, it was television, then the Internet, social media, on and on… But the reality, there's one god that has become so accessible today — dopamine. Watts described this reality as a push-button world, but he only made it to the seventies. I doubt he could imagine that his metaphor would become literal.
Today, we can push a button or tap a screen, and have something shipped to our door in less than twenty-four hours. Bored, well, a quick pull on TikTok will give you short-form video that will hit your brain in just the right ways. It seems that every other app has found a way to master this quirk of ours. We are in such a rush for another flood of the sacred hormone that even a minute is too long. And for reading two sentences, ain't nobody got time fo' that.
It creeps me out how good smartphone apps have become at keeping me hooked. Yes, I know I sound a bit pretentious, but I'm not immune to it either. I've had my YouTube rabbit-holes too. But, how, it seems that these designers are as apt as manufacturers of casino machines to keep us playing. Maybe pull-down to refresh being analogous to pulling a lever on a slot machine isn't a coincidence after all.
I'm no neuroscientist, so my understanding of dopamine's functions is going to be very elementary. A neurotransmitter responsible for making us predict and feel reward in the form of pleasure. However, the dangerous quirk of this hormone is that not only does it make us anticipate reward, it can try to predict it. Since being right feels so good, when your waiting for your next hit, and that funny meme shows on your screen, you get a tiny, but addicting sense of pleasure.
Doesn't it seem like that mechanism is nailed to a T? Well, it's an open secret that app designers hire behavioural psychologists, euphemistically called engagement engineers, that enable them to nail those feedback loops. Facebook, TikTok and Duolingo are probably the biggest examples in the wild. And Meta in particular was exposed to having done internal studies revealing essentially how effective this is.
Huxley's "soma" was a happy pill that neutralized the subordinated population to ineffectiveness. The apps are much more magical, they do this all through something indistinguishable from telepathy.
Part of me wants to put my tin-foil hat on, this is a conspiracy that the globalists are doing to control and subjugate us. Reduce the population of the world and squeeze us dry from our wealth. Yes, some conspiracy theories end up being uncovered as true, but this isn't one of them.
The truth is much more gut-wrenching. We wanted it. Isn't it so enticing that we can have heaven on Earth, right now? Happiness is a push button away. Right? We should be in total euphoria and absolute felicity. Yet, the WHO is having a panic about the crisis of rising depression. Anti-depressants are becoming some of the most prescribed medications.
Things have become so disposable. Yes, the cheap goods we buy from Amazon and Temu aren't going to last more than a few months, but they don't need to, with fashion turning from a long-term statement to a microtrend. The whole world is turning to a trash bin, we already made third-world countries into that but we can't keep that forever. But even the immaterial has become so throwaway.
Social life especially for the younger is slowly dissipating. It's not just that they don't talk to each other even when they are five feet away from each other, but I feel like the humanity isn't there anymore. Your friends are the numbers of your Instagram followers. Anyone you happen to be texting with is not even an acquaintance, they're an app. That match you made on Tinder, he wasn't a comedian within the first five messages? Just block him. It's so easy now. My parents often had neighbours that they didn't like, but they didn't have the luxury of being able to delete them.
All of this is making me miserable, it's tugging away at my heart strings. Yes, the people I see on the street are going through all of this paralysis. But I'm watching myself and the people I love, my family and friends, going through these, honestly, unnecessary, hardships. Really, has the world become so unbearable that we need to neuter our minds? Or are we so scared at answering the big questions that anything that will keep us away from that is somehow better?
I'm heartbroken, because no one is living. I look into people's eyes and there's no soul in there anymore. We're as invisible as NPCs and extras. And it's all our fault. Because we weren't insightful enough that getting what we wanted so bad would mark our demise. At one point or another, we're going to have to face a harsh reality. What we are doing isn't working.
Try this exercise. Sit down for a second and you don't even need to close your eyes for this. We are Sagan's pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. That tiny dot is part of our solar system, but the sun is just a star.
The Milky Way, where our sun is tucked away in a team of another 100 billion stars. The universe, the only existence we can measure, has 2 trillion of them, galaxies like ours. And keep in mind, that's only what we can see, the observable universe. We have no clue how big is the actual universe is compared to the observable one. Trillions of stars are so far away, that even if we lived for eternity, their light would never reach us.
Don't our needs, our lifetime of 70 years, compared to 13.8 billion years seem so feeble and elementary? Spinoza inspires us to see the world in the same way that God, sees it: Sub Specie Aeternitatis - under the aspect of eternity. Just keep in mind these massive numbers, doesn't the count of Instagram likes seem so daft?
This isn't a call to action, because I'm not the right one to make it. But please, for God's sake, wake up.