Came across a great substack yesterday that I went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading entries. The topic is something I care a lot about, the intersection between kids, technology, and trying to live an alternative to our increasingly digital world. Bonus, the author seems to live in or around Toronto. Here's a taste from one of her posts on reclaiming leisure time in which she reflects on how her grandmother spent her time:

"She gardened and made spectacular flower arrangements in every room. She sat on her porch and watched birds at the feeder. She made dozens of handmade quilts. She made travel scrapbooks, wrote a daily journal entry, called her children and grandchildren weekly, mailed birthday cards to everyone, hosted friends for lunch, and volunteered in her community. She had a huge dollhouse (because she never had one as a child) that was meticulously decorated, with tiny electric lights. She only watched TV at night when she grew tired of reading. Her days were spent on tasks that may have appeared work-like, but also seemed to give her satisfaction and pleasure.

It seems that we, collectively, as a society, have forgotten that there is value in active pursuits and that relaxation can be found in doing and creating, not just lying on the couch and passively consuming."

Of course there are other factors to consider in the way lifestyles have drastically shifted between two generations and I want to avoid romanticizing the past too much, but there is certainly a truth to considering what we could gain if we gave up time spent just staring at our phones.

How much do you trust your neighbours? How about the wider community in which you live? I've come across a few things over the last little while on the decline of social trust and the importance of it, especially when it comes to surviving disasters. This seems to be one of the consequences of our increasingly online world, the loss of the day-today encounters with the people we live closest to. Many of the daily interactions we once had with neighbours and other community members are being replaced with online checkouts, AI support chats, and faceless deliveries.

The thing is, this loss of trust also erodes empathy. Humans are naturally tribal, it's how we've survived. Yet, we've shifted so much of that into online communities with people we don't actually know and do not share geographic proximity with. This leaves us more likely to extend empathy to @username10128 than the family living across the street.

What I want to note here is that as our world continues to move into crisis after crisis we need to reclaim the art of working together for a shared public good. Cooperation might be the most needed skill of the 21st century. And it begins at a neighbourhood level.

As Bill McKiben writes,

"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. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for [North] Americans will be hard."

I stumbled across a post on LinkedIn yesterday that was promoting some, admittedly, impressive AI tech that could translate what you were saying and actually change the movement of your lips while you were talking on video. The person sharing it was excitedly proclaiming, "we'll never need to learn another language again!" Unless of course you're not on a video call.

It's a good example of the way tech is increasingly mediating our interactions with each other in ways that have become so normalized that we're not even noticing it anymore. The pandemic threw many of us into a remote work setting. A side effect of this has been accepting video calls as a part of our lives; and with that has come all sorts of innovations to make our video calls even better.

Yet I can't help but think about what we're losing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for a back to the office pendulum shift. I prefer remote work, it's contributed to a much more fulfilling life rhythm. No, my interest is more around the things that contribute to a meaningful life and the ways tech is slowly eroding that.

One of the books I've been reading lately is all about the way in which our environment can have an impact on our happiness and the author makes some good points around the role that other people play in that. Not just in terms of our close relationships - though those do matter - but on a societal level. By being around other people that we learn to trust, we grow in empathy, and that increases our sense of wellbeing. The author writes,

“Not only does it feel good to experience positive social signs from others — smiles, handshakes, opened doors, bargains kept, and cooperative merging in traffic — but it feels good to reinforce those feelings of trust among both friends and strangers. It works best of all when we do it face-to-face: in the kitchen, over a fence, on the sidewalk, in the agora. Distance and geometry matter.”

This is one of my main concerns with the way tech is creeping into our lives. The digital realm is replacing many of the day-to-day touchpoints we once had with other people. Shopping, interacting with neighbours, learning, even borrowing. And what's important to note is that the tech that now mediates these interactions is made for the primary purpose of extracting profit for someone else. Yes, you can argue that a grocery store is the same; but those micro interactions with real people in the store were not.

This is why truly public spaces will always matter. Parks, libraries, trails, sidewalks/streets, community centres, public schools, etc. These are the places that belong to us all, they don't exist for the sake of profit, and they're where we practice and learn what it is to be human. This is something that online will never be able to replace.