One of my favourite newsletters shared this really interesting article this week. It's almost hard to define exactly what it's about, as it hits on many different fascinating ideas; but at its core it seems to be looking at our relationship to time and hurry. There's so many great things in this article that I would recommend taking some time to read it in full. But what I want to pause and reflect on here is when he talks about the way certain innovations in time saving or efficiency can move from being a good option to becoming a cultural obligation. He uses something like parking apps or self-checkout lanes as an example.

"We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started... And when behaviours become universal, they affect everybody."

I think this is a great point and I was particularly interested in how he took this idea and applied it to the behaviour of people using their phones to record concerts. I'm not sure if you've been to a concert lately, but this trend has become so big that it has become a normalized part of the experience. The author makes the observation that even if you don't want to participate in this shared behaviour, everyone else doing it can ruin the concert experience for you. He even notes that the people most affected are the performers themselves, who now have to perform for an online audience rather than just the people in attendance. It's no longer an option, it's an obligation.

"When one person does something, it’s an option. It’s something that somebody does. When these things become more widespread, they morph from being alternative options to being social norms, conventions from which you have no escape."

This is something I find myself reflecting on often as it relates to the public realm. Public space lives in this strange middle ground of belonging to no one and everyone simultaneously. As such, it is always vulnerable to the shifting norms and expectations of society. A lack of intentional reflection on those behaviours can result in our public spaces being hijacked by them in a way that actively destroys the value that public space should bring.

Perhaps one of the greatest sins of this modern era is the way we have let technology into our lives without intention or consideration of what we are giving up.

Settling back into my regular reading routine with Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation.' If you haven't heard of this book, you should check it out (especially if you have or work with kids).

My reflection this morning is on a section where Haidt talks about the way our society has increasingly lost any meaningful age milestones for kids as they mature. Where many cultures around the world have historically had rites of passage that would mark a child's transition into adulthood, our modern secularized society has eschewed such practices. He then goes on to say how this has become even more pronounced in the internet age.

"On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age. This is a major reason why a phone-based adolescence is badly mismatched with the needs of adolescence."

Kids will always try and seek out experiences that are older than they are. Rites of passage and milestones helped keep that in check by providing something to work towards. Online, kids can essentially be any age they choose. They are given access to information and experiences that are beyond their maturity levels. Basic parental controls are not enough to mitigate this problem.

Haidt's suggestion is to reintroduce some form of rites of passage to help kids move at an appropriate pace towards more responsibility, freedom, and maturity. All of this should precede giving them access to online spaces; which he recommends being age 16 (at the earliest).

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.