believe our computers and phones are just gadgets — nothing more than glorified toys — this really is not the case. Computers are not just gadgets. Computers are our teachers.
The more we interact with our personal technology, the more we develop what I call a “technology mind-set.” This mind-set does not stop influencing us when we put down our phones. When we are constantly learning lessons about how to interact using our devices, those lessons spill over into our face-to-face interactions with people. Unfortunately, many of the lessons we’re learning are not helpful for creating closeness with real people in real life.
The primary lesson we are learning from technology — one that is particularly unhelpful in creating closeness — is the principle of efficiency. Google defines the word efficient as “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” This principle is core to making a good personal technology product. Think of how efficient interacting with your iPhone can be. You have to do exceptionally little to get what you want out of your phone. When we’re required to perform an extra step to find the thing we’re looking for, the annoyance we often feel is palpable.
Efficiency is a wonderful principle for making great tech products. The issue is that nothing lives in isolation. As we integrate these products deeper into our lives, the central principle they were built around — efficiency — seeps deeper and deeper into our minds. The more we expect perfect efficiency from interactions with our phones, the less patience we have for interactions with people.
My hometown in Silicon Valley has embraced the values of technology more completely than anywhere else, but we are not alone. People may not realize it, but the values of their iPhones have influenced their own values — and by extension the way they think about relationships. Interaction should be useful. It should get you closer to something you want — something beyond the interaction itself. And if you think it’ll be a waste of time or energy, you shouldn’t bother.
These values have prompted many of us to be much more wary of “unnecessary” human interaction. People might slow you down or just add a layer of annoyance to your day — like an extra step to open your camera on your phone. In the business of making successful devices, this is probably the right way to think. But what is this mind-set doing to our relationships? What is it doing to our hearts?
If removing unnecessary interactions left us with more time and energy to pursue meaningful interactions, this way of thinking would not pose much of a challenge to relationships. It could even improve them! Weeding out the most superficial interactions could leave more energy for deeper, closer ones.
But if that were the reality, we’d see an increase in the number of deeper relationships being reported . . . and we don’t. A comprehensive study published by AARP The Magazine in 2010 found that 35 percent of adults over the age of forty-five were chronically lonely, as opposed to only 20 percent in the 1980s.
And the numbers are even more dramatic for Millennials — those born between 1981 and 1997 — since they are the generation most entrenched in personal technology. Also in 2010 the Mental Health Foundation published a “Lonely Society” report, which found that “nearly 60% of those aged 18 to 34 questioned spoke of feeling lonely often or sometimes, compared to 35% of those aged over 55.” The report called the generational differences “striking.”
The reality is, the types of human interactions that generate closeness and reduce loneliness are not terribly efficient. . .and measuring the success of a human interaction by that benchmark helps to keep us lonely. We will need to unlearn some of the lessons technology has taught us in recent decades and relearn how to get close to one another.
Obstacle 3: Reduction of Our Natural Opportunities to Get Close
Beyond changing the way we think, technology is propagating yet another obstacle to closeness: it has unwittingly reduced our opportunities for getting close through natural circumstances. We really don’t need to interact with people much anymore. When it comes to getting essentials done — eating, shopping for goods, cleaning our clothes, getting around town — we can handle almost every task on our own.
In past generations, friendships and other kinds of relationships would arise organically when we ran into one another in our communities. But today we no longer need to be in our physical communities. We don’t need to go to a restaurant, since we can have our food delivered. We don’t need to go to a classroom to take a class, since we can take the class online. We don’t need to shop in stores, since we can order everything from Amazon. We don’t even need to go to a workplace to work.
As someone who’s lived and worked in Silicon Valley my whole life, I’ve seen the effect of this trend firsthand. In the modern workplace — the one championed by Silicon Valley — remote working is customary. Even the smallest start-ups have at least some employees working remotely at all times. As the tools and technology for remote working improve, teams can certainly complete their projects despite physical separation. The work will get done. But how is the slow dissolution of our work communities affecting us? How does it feel to work with people you can’t really get to know?
When I ponder these questions, I think of the time Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, ordered all employees who worked remotely to get back into the office or face termination. The move was criticized as a step backward for the modern workplace. How could a technology company reject the very advances it had helped to create?
Yet if you spoke to anyone who worked at Yahoo! at the time (as I did), you’d hear nothing but praise for the decision. As my friend who worked on Yahoo!’s mobile team put it, “The remote workers really were like nonentities. I would email these people every day and have calls with them every week, but if they’d passed me on the street I’d never have known it was them. It’s hard to make a company culture with ghosts.”
Of course, there are undeniable benefits to working from home, especially for parents. Most employers recognize these benefits and have encouraged more and more of their employees to work remotely. But while the benefits of remote working are undeniable, it’s also hard to deny that it’s substantially harder to get to know or start to care about coworkers when you never see them. I don’t imagine any former on-site employee would say he felt closer to his coworkers after he moved off-site.
And maybe you don’t even want to; after all, it’s not required to have a warm, close relationship with your colleagues. But what if you did? Wouldn’t it feel wonderful to know you had at least a few people available between 9:00 and 5:00, Monday through Friday, to talk to about something that matters? If you were not close to any of your coworkers, wouldn’t that be a missed opportunity?
Work may be just one missed opportunity for close relationships — one that we could theoretically make up for in other areas of our lives. If working from home increased closeness within our family, there would be little effect on our overall loneliness levels. The problem is that technology is erasing many of our opportunities to get close — so many that we hardly know where to find any organic opportunities at all.
For these missed opportunities, seen as small sacrifices for the larger benefit of a more efficient life, really do add up. It is harder to make friends when you don’t get coffee with your coworkers before your morning meeting. It is harder to have a magical moment with a stranger when you never meet any strangers. You will be lonelier if you never see anyone face-to-face.
This lack of organic opportunities for closeness is a huge part of why you’re struggling with loneliness. The good news is that you have it within you to create new opportunities. The people who will someday know you well and care about you deeply are already out there. Let’s learn how to find them!
Questions for Reflection
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