Sort of weird that this post came up. Right now we have our son-in-law staying at our house with my step-daughter. He got out of the Marines a year ago. Since then he has tried multiple jobs and never lasted more than a week. He also tried college. Quit after one semester.
Every thing he tries and quits, he always has an excuse for. It’s to hard. To messy. To boring. To whatever.
What does he do with all of his free time? He sits and plays video games on his laptop or binges Netflix.
My step-daughter however is hard working and conscientious. Quite frankly deserves better.
My son, who is bright, lives in Scotland. He has a job and a place with his girlfriend. But the job is literally working as a dishwasher at a restaurant. Because it’s the UK he can survive. He isn’t bothered because hey…. Video games, weed, and Netflix.
Another son-in-law, in the USAF. He goes to work, spends pretty much every evening playing video games. Despite having three kids.
These are just three examples, but I’m sure it’s repeated endlessly across the country.
Netflix and video games especially have become so good… so enjoyable that it cuts into the social life and fabric of Americans.
Honestly, as technology gets better, I suspect it will only get worse.
Personally, I think it’s a bigger risk for men than for women for whatever reasons.
The education gap will continue to grow between men and women. Educated women will continue to have poorer and fewer options for marriage.
*anyway, I’m trying to get my first son-in-law a job with my company as a winder (works on generators). It’s a travel job, but you work have the year, make very good money, etc…. One of the questions he asked me was about the hotels we stay in. He was obsessed with knowing if the Wi-Fi was good enough to play video games.
Somewhat hot take - a lot of people's families, jobs, and friends weren't all that great, and were easily ovetaken by video games and better streaming options.
More importantly, I think this is absolutely true when it comes to dating, on both ends. I'm going to give of course, pretty hyperbolic examples, but I think parts of all of it are why there's a depression in sex on the edges.
If you're a guy, you can go out, on a date with a woman you may or may not like, likely pay a decent amount of money, and she'll either never call you back, or on the other side of things, you might be not that interested in her, but she'll be clingy toward you...or you could play GTA Online for 6 hours, and then watch very high quality porn of all kinds involving women much more attractive than you have any shot at.
Or, if you're a girl, you can go out on a date, or just out in general, get bothered by a lot of creepy dudes if you're not specfically on a date, and if you do go home with one of them, it's highly possible the actual sex won't be all that good, or they'll be clingy in a vartiety of ways (that are much more dangerous)...or you could watch 6 hours of really well edited reality shows, and then use a sex toy that's much better at giving you an orgasm than a majority of men.
Obviously, Bowling Alone and it's descendents have it's reasonable arguments, but honestly, hasn't this been the reaction to any kind of change in culture/leisure time? Look at how people reacted to comic books and television during the 50's, let alone previous times of moral outrage and worries about the undergirdings of society.
What I think is largely happening is a lot of mediocre sex, mediocre friendship groups, and mediocre relationships in general are dying on the vine, or never happening in the first place. I also think a lot of this is older people not understanding a different in communication - from what I know, the zoomers talk a lot to each other, it's just in Discord or whatever instead of in the park or the backyard of somebodies house. Now, you can judge whether that's truly a friend group or not, but I also think some of this is older Millenial's pushing their ennui about college/early 20's period friendships/relationships drifting apart as they tend to do, to some huge society defining thing.
Also, do people actually have fewer friends, or are people less apt to call a guy they see every couple of weeks to have a beer or two a friend? Perhaps those sensitive snowflake young kids just have stricter views, just like they do on a lot of societal views.
I'm being somewhat overblown, but I think this is something where there's something slightly screwy at the edges of society (like there is some evidence that a small percentag of kids who are having the usual lack of luck in high school are getting sucked into the incel vortex), and turning it into something that is effecting a wide swath of things. Like, I live in a large city - in our cities 'place 20-something's go out', things seem no different than when I was in my mid-20's, now that COVID isn't really a thing.
I think one of the biggest reckonings coming for fans of autonomy and all its brainchildren (liberalism, capitalism, freedom, whatever) is with the fact that our preferences aren't stable throughout time, and that leaves us all consistently exploitable
A great many of our first-world problems center around this fact. You eat the pringles, then you regret the pringles. You binge the TV show, then you regret the time spent on the couch. You want to read a couple chapters of that fascinating book, but instead you scroll twitter for an hour.
And there's a fistful of dollars for any entity that manages to break your will on this. Meta and Kellogs and Netflix and whoever make the big bucks, in large part, by acting as our adversaries.
I have no solutions. I fall for this shit all the time. But that's how it is.
“ I’m really not so sure that there is that much more to life than family and friends and work combined.”
A lot of food for thought on a Monday. Reminds me of some of David Foster Wallace’s essays about tv, as well as some recent writing about friendship.
It seems like, during my adult life, people’s worlds have become increasingly narrow if they don’t consciously choose to push back on that. It takes effort to maintain friendships, and not everyone seems to want to put in the effort. Maybe home-based entertainment is easier, or maybe they’re driving their kids to travel sports every weekend. But the pre-vax portion of the pandemic, with its isolation (and my temporary move to a rural area), really drove home to me how much I value friendship, especially in person.
This might be a minority opinion but for me even the best streaming is a poor substitute for human interaction. And online communication can be really fun, even a lifeline. But again, to me, it’s not the same. About a week ago I was able to spend some time with a friend in another city who has a recurrence of cancer, with a not-great prognosis. We had been in touch virtually, but not in person since Covid started. Huge difference, and it reinforced my desire to prioritize time with people.
I just listened to the Ezra Klein podcast (that didn’t actually have him) about remote work and work from home. One thing that was an interesting click for me there - I’ve known for a long time that there’s a problem in the United States of health insurance being tied to work, but in recent decades we’ve also made our social life tied to work. As a result, when work becomes remote, we suddenly lose all that remains of our social lives. We have to figure out how to rebuild a non-work-related social life, which probably involves understanding why each other part of it died.
The neo-nationalists love to project these issues on millennials, but this is another thing that probably effects boomers more. I can see in my own environment how several of them just don’t leave the house at all anymore now that they took early retirement.
This article reminds me of my “theory of air conditioning.”
80 years ago, after dinner in the middle of the summer, people would escape their hotbox houses to go for a walk or sit on their front porch. They talked to neighbors. They got exercise. They fed their heads and their hearts while escaping the heat.
After the widespread adoption of air conditioning, that “after dinner jaunt” largely ceased, resulting in increased isolation in favor of the siren song of cool, clean sheets.
ToAC: delightful tech, like everything else, has deleterious effects on us as humans, and we must honestly and creatively interrogate the consequences of our adoption of the tech and adjust our behavior accordingly.
I am not a Luddite! I write this wearing a synthetic/cotton blend shirt, about to have breakfast including mass-produced almond milk, on my phone, wearing my glasses and with the benefit of electric lights and air conditioning. I take prescription medicines that allow me to live a modern life expectancy following cancer surgery… know that I share the world’s love of modern conveniences.
Yet! We humans do not naturally know how to make ourselves joyful. We are optimized for short term gains orthogonal to long term gains. Learning *how* to pursue joy is a lifelong task. I’d love to know how folks in 100 years will look back on our time: which of our adoptions of technologies will make them scratch their heads akin to our looking back at medieval medicine’s embrace of bloodletting or Victorians’ of medical arsenic.
So, agreed! Maybe call a friend (with your cell phone, *ahem*) over for dinner with your family followed by Netflix? Adoption of lovely new tech requires intention and practice.
It is HARD to be (*sigh*) *mindful.* We are faced with a heady bounty of tech that improves some aspects of our lives beyond the wildest dreams of the most narcissistic kings of yore. How to keep our heads?
Striving towards thoughtful adoption of new technologies is a worthy challenge for all of us (me more than many) as life becomes more and more “convenient” to the incremental loss of our shared humanity.
I'm probably not the best person to chime in on this (I haven't been single since I was 18) but I would say we watch way more streaming entertainment now that we have kids than pre-kids. Before we would go out for all sorts of things with our evenings, but now it's like "ok the kids are asleep. We can't go anywhere and leave them and we are exhausted so I guess more Netflix."
No doubt today's shows and games are generally better than what existed in the past, but I'm old enough to remember the '90s, and people watched a shit ton of TV back then, too. "Couch potato" is not a neologism. It seems like what we're missing here are some numbers to tell us whether people really are spending more time at home in front of screens then they did before the dawn of streaming.
At least back then, people seemed to understand that watching too much television wasn't good for you, and you would see a lot of bumper stickers saying things like "kill your tv." Now, because we have "prestige" shows, people will watch for hours and hours and pat themselves on the back at the end for being so sophisticated.
I started my academic career as a historian of technology, and I'm pretty skeptical of this take, but I moved into public health along the way, and that makes me somewhat hopeful.
Why I am skeptical: As Matt himself points out, there was a period just a few years ago where people argued that maybe video games were keeping young men out of the labor market. Then it turned out that the labor market was just systematically undersupported. People were not enticed by jobs in a market where labor was systematically undervalued. They could expect to be underpaid, and a lot of jobs were so simple and so unrewarding that they could just be automated--the job only existed because the labor was undervalued. It is a pretty understandable choice for people to not want to do "work" that, while it boosts someone else's profit margins, is functionally without worth in the the more metaphysical sense. And, to be honest, a lot of white-collar "work" falls into this category.
So my assumption would be that people choosing to pursue video games instead of relationships is an indictment of the other options in the face of competitive pressures. Like, the problem isn't that our video games are so great. It's that our churches and clubs and romantic experiences were so lousy, and we need to figure out how to build something different amidst a mass consumer society, and that is probably a legitimately very hard thing to do.
Why I am hopeful: If this is a pure "addiction" narrative, we have a good history on that, and that stuff tends to burn itself out. Go back and watch Robocop, Predator 2, or any of a half-dozen other action movies that were filmed amidst the crack epidemic, and you will see that the LA and NYC of the future would be dystopian hellscapes where heavily-armed drug gangs controlled the streets because crack was an unstoppable force. Except that crack wasn't an unstoppable force.
In every modern addiction event, you see a wave pattern. A generation of people takes up the drug at really high rate. Addiction seems to rise inexorably, with a ton of bad social fallout. But then the catastrophe abates to a large degree--crack is still around, but it is no longer king--because humans are learning animals, and children, in particular, watch the adults in their lives get f&*(ked up, and they decide not to do that particular bad thing. (The problem, of course, is that a capitalist society is always looking for the next lucrative bad thing.)
So if video games are the next bad thing, I would guess that we will get a handle on it in the next decade or so, because that's pretty much always what happens. And that's true even with less acute forms of addiction; booze and tobacco are still problems in our society, but they are way less of a problem today than they were in the '90s, and they were less of a problem in the '90s than in the '70s.
This is an argument for communal living. Having to live with your extended family or friends is great from a social perspective, but when you want to be alone you kind of have to just lay in your bed because the house is aways full of people. But now sitting on your bed alone is much more fun!
Anyway bring back nimby politics! Everyone needs to live squished together with others! Improved Building technology is only increasing our social atomization!
Seems pretty clear to me that the cost difference between starting up a family and a monthly streaming sub might matter more than the availability of the streaming sub itself.
Maybe a little controversial but I do think that the social aspect of video games can be underrated at times. Loads of kids are playing with headsets on, talking to their friends over online multiplayer - it's like a board game (remember those?)
I dont have data backing this up, but I suspect that the main issue isnt avoidance of risk, but the avoidance of obligation.
We don't like being tied down and having our choices constrained.
It really does make me think of Robin Hanson's 'forager' vs 'farmer' dichotomy. There is a strong desire to browse the wide selection that modern society has made available.
Sort of weird that this post came up. Right now we have our son-in-law staying at our house with my step-daughter. He got out of the Marines a year ago. Since then he has tried multiple jobs and never lasted more than a week. He also tried college. Quit after one semester.
Every thing he tries and quits, he always has an excuse for. It’s to hard. To messy. To boring. To whatever.
What does he do with all of his free time? He sits and plays video games on his laptop or binges Netflix.
My step-daughter however is hard working and conscientious. Quite frankly deserves better.
My son, who is bright, lives in Scotland. He has a job and a place with his girlfriend. But the job is literally working as a dishwasher at a restaurant. Because it’s the UK he can survive. He isn’t bothered because hey…. Video games, weed, and Netflix.
Another son-in-law, in the USAF. He goes to work, spends pretty much every evening playing video games. Despite having three kids.
These are just three examples, but I’m sure it’s repeated endlessly across the country.
Netflix and video games especially have become so good… so enjoyable that it cuts into the social life and fabric of Americans.
Honestly, as technology gets better, I suspect it will only get worse.
Personally, I think it’s a bigger risk for men than for women for whatever reasons.
The education gap will continue to grow between men and women. Educated women will continue to have poorer and fewer options for marriage.
*anyway, I’m trying to get my first son-in-law a job with my company as a winder (works on generators). It’s a travel job, but you work have the year, make very good money, etc…. One of the questions he asked me was about the hotels we stay in. He was obsessed with knowing if the Wi-Fi was good enough to play video games.
Sorry for the rant. The post was triggering.
Somewhat hot take - a lot of people's families, jobs, and friends weren't all that great, and were easily ovetaken by video games and better streaming options.
More importantly, I think this is absolutely true when it comes to dating, on both ends. I'm going to give of course, pretty hyperbolic examples, but I think parts of all of it are why there's a depression in sex on the edges.
If you're a guy, you can go out, on a date with a woman you may or may not like, likely pay a decent amount of money, and she'll either never call you back, or on the other side of things, you might be not that interested in her, but she'll be clingy toward you...or you could play GTA Online for 6 hours, and then watch very high quality porn of all kinds involving women much more attractive than you have any shot at.
Or, if you're a girl, you can go out on a date, or just out in general, get bothered by a lot of creepy dudes if you're not specfically on a date, and if you do go home with one of them, it's highly possible the actual sex won't be all that good, or they'll be clingy in a vartiety of ways (that are much more dangerous)...or you could watch 6 hours of really well edited reality shows, and then use a sex toy that's much better at giving you an orgasm than a majority of men.
Obviously, Bowling Alone and it's descendents have it's reasonable arguments, but honestly, hasn't this been the reaction to any kind of change in culture/leisure time? Look at how people reacted to comic books and television during the 50's, let alone previous times of moral outrage and worries about the undergirdings of society.
What I think is largely happening is a lot of mediocre sex, mediocre friendship groups, and mediocre relationships in general are dying on the vine, or never happening in the first place. I also think a lot of this is older people not understanding a different in communication - from what I know, the zoomers talk a lot to each other, it's just in Discord or whatever instead of in the park or the backyard of somebodies house. Now, you can judge whether that's truly a friend group or not, but I also think some of this is older Millenial's pushing their ennui about college/early 20's period friendships/relationships drifting apart as they tend to do, to some huge society defining thing.
Also, do people actually have fewer friends, or are people less apt to call a guy they see every couple of weeks to have a beer or two a friend? Perhaps those sensitive snowflake young kids just have stricter views, just like they do on a lot of societal views.
I'm being somewhat overblown, but I think this is something where there's something slightly screwy at the edges of society (like there is some evidence that a small percentag of kids who are having the usual lack of luck in high school are getting sucked into the incel vortex), and turning it into something that is effecting a wide swath of things. Like, I live in a large city - in our cities 'place 20-something's go out', things seem no different than when I was in my mid-20's, now that COVID isn't really a thing.
I think one of the biggest reckonings coming for fans of autonomy and all its brainchildren (liberalism, capitalism, freedom, whatever) is with the fact that our preferences aren't stable throughout time, and that leaves us all consistently exploitable
A great many of our first-world problems center around this fact. You eat the pringles, then you regret the pringles. You binge the TV show, then you regret the time spent on the couch. You want to read a couple chapters of that fascinating book, but instead you scroll twitter for an hour.
And there's a fistful of dollars for any entity that manages to break your will on this. Meta and Kellogs and Netflix and whoever make the big bucks, in large part, by acting as our adversaries.
I have no solutions. I fall for this shit all the time. But that's how it is.
Full house lifestyle is what the country needs
“ I’m really not so sure that there is that much more to life than family and friends and work combined.”
A lot of food for thought on a Monday. Reminds me of some of David Foster Wallace’s essays about tv, as well as some recent writing about friendship.
It seems like, during my adult life, people’s worlds have become increasingly narrow if they don’t consciously choose to push back on that. It takes effort to maintain friendships, and not everyone seems to want to put in the effort. Maybe home-based entertainment is easier, or maybe they’re driving their kids to travel sports every weekend. But the pre-vax portion of the pandemic, with its isolation (and my temporary move to a rural area), really drove home to me how much I value friendship, especially in person.
This might be a minority opinion but for me even the best streaming is a poor substitute for human interaction. And online communication can be really fun, even a lifeline. But again, to me, it’s not the same. About a week ago I was able to spend some time with a friend in another city who has a recurrence of cancer, with a not-great prognosis. We had been in touch virtually, but not in person since Covid started. Huge difference, and it reinforced my desire to prioritize time with people.
I just listened to the Ezra Klein podcast (that didn’t actually have him) about remote work and work from home. One thing that was an interesting click for me there - I’ve known for a long time that there’s a problem in the United States of health insurance being tied to work, but in recent decades we’ve also made our social life tied to work. As a result, when work becomes remote, we suddenly lose all that remains of our social lives. We have to figure out how to rebuild a non-work-related social life, which probably involves understanding why each other part of it died.
The neo-nationalists love to project these issues on millennials, but this is another thing that probably effects boomers more. I can see in my own environment how several of them just don’t leave the house at all anymore now that they took early retirement.
This article reminds me of my “theory of air conditioning.”
80 years ago, after dinner in the middle of the summer, people would escape their hotbox houses to go for a walk or sit on their front porch. They talked to neighbors. They got exercise. They fed their heads and their hearts while escaping the heat.
After the widespread adoption of air conditioning, that “after dinner jaunt” largely ceased, resulting in increased isolation in favor of the siren song of cool, clean sheets.
ToAC: delightful tech, like everything else, has deleterious effects on us as humans, and we must honestly and creatively interrogate the consequences of our adoption of the tech and adjust our behavior accordingly.
I am not a Luddite! I write this wearing a synthetic/cotton blend shirt, about to have breakfast including mass-produced almond milk, on my phone, wearing my glasses and with the benefit of electric lights and air conditioning. I take prescription medicines that allow me to live a modern life expectancy following cancer surgery… know that I share the world’s love of modern conveniences.
Yet! We humans do not naturally know how to make ourselves joyful. We are optimized for short term gains orthogonal to long term gains. Learning *how* to pursue joy is a lifelong task. I’d love to know how folks in 100 years will look back on our time: which of our adoptions of technologies will make them scratch their heads akin to our looking back at medieval medicine’s embrace of bloodletting or Victorians’ of medical arsenic.
So, agreed! Maybe call a friend (with your cell phone, *ahem*) over for dinner with your family followed by Netflix? Adoption of lovely new tech requires intention and practice.
It is HARD to be (*sigh*) *mindful.* We are faced with a heady bounty of tech that improves some aspects of our lives beyond the wildest dreams of the most narcissistic kings of yore. How to keep our heads?
Striving towards thoughtful adoption of new technologies is a worthy challenge for all of us (me more than many) as life becomes more and more “convenient” to the incremental loss of our shared humanity.
I'm probably not the best person to chime in on this (I haven't been single since I was 18) but I would say we watch way more streaming entertainment now that we have kids than pre-kids. Before we would go out for all sorts of things with our evenings, but now it's like "ok the kids are asleep. We can't go anywhere and leave them and we are exhausted so I guess more Netflix."
No doubt today's shows and games are generally better than what existed in the past, but I'm old enough to remember the '90s, and people watched a shit ton of TV back then, too. "Couch potato" is not a neologism. It seems like what we're missing here are some numbers to tell us whether people really are spending more time at home in front of screens then they did before the dawn of streaming.
At least back then, people seemed to understand that watching too much television wasn't good for you, and you would see a lot of bumper stickers saying things like "kill your tv." Now, because we have "prestige" shows, people will watch for hours and hours and pat themselves on the back at the end for being so sophisticated.
I started my academic career as a historian of technology, and I'm pretty skeptical of this take, but I moved into public health along the way, and that makes me somewhat hopeful.
Why I am skeptical: As Matt himself points out, there was a period just a few years ago where people argued that maybe video games were keeping young men out of the labor market. Then it turned out that the labor market was just systematically undersupported. People were not enticed by jobs in a market where labor was systematically undervalued. They could expect to be underpaid, and a lot of jobs were so simple and so unrewarding that they could just be automated--the job only existed because the labor was undervalued. It is a pretty understandable choice for people to not want to do "work" that, while it boosts someone else's profit margins, is functionally without worth in the the more metaphysical sense. And, to be honest, a lot of white-collar "work" falls into this category.
So my assumption would be that people choosing to pursue video games instead of relationships is an indictment of the other options in the face of competitive pressures. Like, the problem isn't that our video games are so great. It's that our churches and clubs and romantic experiences were so lousy, and we need to figure out how to build something different amidst a mass consumer society, and that is probably a legitimately very hard thing to do.
Why I am hopeful: If this is a pure "addiction" narrative, we have a good history on that, and that stuff tends to burn itself out. Go back and watch Robocop, Predator 2, or any of a half-dozen other action movies that were filmed amidst the crack epidemic, and you will see that the LA and NYC of the future would be dystopian hellscapes where heavily-armed drug gangs controlled the streets because crack was an unstoppable force. Except that crack wasn't an unstoppable force.
In every modern addiction event, you see a wave pattern. A generation of people takes up the drug at really high rate. Addiction seems to rise inexorably, with a ton of bad social fallout. But then the catastrophe abates to a large degree--crack is still around, but it is no longer king--because humans are learning animals, and children, in particular, watch the adults in their lives get f&*(ked up, and they decide not to do that particular bad thing. (The problem, of course, is that a capitalist society is always looking for the next lucrative bad thing.)
So if video games are the next bad thing, I would guess that we will get a handle on it in the next decade or so, because that's pretty much always what happens. And that's true even with less acute forms of addiction; booze and tobacco are still problems in our society, but they are way less of a problem today than they were in the '90s, and they were less of a problem in the '90s than in the '70s.
This is an argument for communal living. Having to live with your extended family or friends is great from a social perspective, but when you want to be alone you kind of have to just lay in your bed because the house is aways full of people. But now sitting on your bed alone is much more fun!
Anyway bring back nimby politics! Everyone needs to live squished together with others! Improved Building technology is only increasing our social atomization!
:P
Seems pretty clear to me that the cost difference between starting up a family and a monthly streaming sub might matter more than the availability of the streaming sub itself.
Maybe a little controversial but I do think that the social aspect of video games can be underrated at times. Loads of kids are playing with headsets on, talking to their friends over online multiplayer - it's like a board game (remember those?)
Yes to love, yes to life, yes to staying in more! - Liz Lemon
I dont have data backing this up, but I suspect that the main issue isnt avoidance of risk, but the avoidance of obligation.
We don't like being tied down and having our choices constrained.
It really does make me think of Robin Hanson's 'forager' vs 'farmer' dichotomy. There is a strong desire to browse the wide selection that modern society has made available.