We have taught ourselves to create and combine the most powerful of technologies. We have not taken pains to learn about their consequences.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Technological Progress & Us

The more individualised people are, the more difficult it is to attain identification.

The difficulties ought to chasten and challenge, not paralyse.

productivity

Productivity

philosophy

Philosophy

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

politics

Politics

Intense Ideas in Short Bursts of Words

<ul><li>Life-long friends make new life choices, drift apart.</li><li>The career mindedness, the self optimization, the adventures, the travel, the trying to survive in desirable places to live which become comically expensive to do so — all of it has left us very tired.</li><li>Difficult to make true friends <a href="https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-friendship-dip">after entering 30s</a></li><li>Friendship fizzling into WhatsApp volleys back and forth.</li></ul>

The dwindling presence of friendship in life

Modern loneliness masks itself as hyper connectivity. And so people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat. That loneliness, which is really a depletion of the social capital, is extremely powerful.

<ul><li>Friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction - it takes effort to know what is going on in someone’s day-to-day life and to show up for them when they maybe a vulnerable anxious mess — this is all friction.</li><li>Friction is not just interrupting your day or life to help out a friend, but also admitting you need the kind of help you cannot pay for or order yourself.</li><li>But only then, returns could be expected from them, for when your own self gets vulnerable, anxious and messy.</li></ul>

Friendship - The necessary friction

<ul><li>Modern life has brought us closer, nay made dependent, on technology and gadgets.</li><li>Modern technopolis has replaced humans with technological solutions to the problem of a lone self.</li><li>People living in their atomised technological fiefdoms - the way a hardcore capitalistic society expects them to be, to be able to sell more.</li><li>The essential skill of social negotiation learned on the streets during unscripted, un-choreographed, unmonitored interaction with people is slowly getting lost.</li><li>Social muscles are being atrophied.</li></ul>

Symptom of a larger problem - Social Atrophy

We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you.

<ul><li>It’s crucial to remember we are not machines.</li><li>Be willing to talk or engage with people who don’t share the carefully calibrated views that we broadcast online.</li><li>In addition to making the effort with friends — new, old, promising acquaintances — and asking for the kind of help and support we need, as well as providing it in return.</li><li>We need to make changes to regain the capacity to show up for these kinds of interactions and relationships.</li></ul>

Technological Progress & Us

Intense Ideas in Short Bursts of Words

The friendship problem

Alok P