2021-10-16 | Rant, The Core Pathology
Unstructured thoughts reflecting growing frustration
The emergence of accessible, personalized internet is the core pathology underlying our most prominent societal ills.
Commoditizing Attention
In 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick, and, to bastardize history only slightly, created the modern internet economy. With DoubleClick, Google made, then proved, the power of algorithmic advertising, and established that a consumer's attention was sufficiently valuable that it could support a business without subsidy from the consumer itself. What predictably emerged was an arms race to attract and capture that attention at ever-greater scale, leveraging BJ Fogg's multi-billion-dollar behavioral model (a barely nontrivial commercial application of well-established habit science) to reduce the investment and effort required to receive some sort of emotional, physical, or social reward. Given the choice between a greater reward requiring greater effort and a lesser reward requiring lesser effort, the average person, on an average occasion, will choose the latter.
As these mechanisms spread, the average amount of effort we expended on a daily basis dropped. Tasks that were previously tolerable - standing in line without stimulation, walking into a new bar without knowing who or what is inside, withstanding a difficult conversation - became ever-more-difficult, not because the amount of effort they required changed, but because the baseline level of effort in our moment-to-moment lives dropped, and so the relative effortfulness of these tasks rose.
Parts of this, of course, have been the core thesis of dozens of books and hundreds of thinkpieces:
Tim Wu outlined the commodification of attention, and the emergence of the human brain as a target for product development;
Nicholas Carr argued in The Shallows that the internet has eroded our attention span and robbed us of our ability to think deeply;
Adam Alter argued our devices are addictive, and the companies behind them run on business models fundamentally dependent on this addition;
Cal Newport's Deep Work and Digital Minimalism are fundamentally premised on the belief that indeliberate engagement with our devices leads to predictably trivial lives;
Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death prophesied the rapid emergence of a Braver, Newer World than we would like to admit.
These arguments are each true, but insufficient. Our predictable shift toward less effortful lives has caused deeper collateral damage that explains why so much of our behavior, and so much of our peers' behavior, feels so fundamentally frustrating and unsatisfying. We have lost our executive function.
Corruption at Scale
Executive function refers to the set of cognitive processes that nonscientific people call "functioning like an adult." Our executive function is defined by our ability to resist the pull of our biological impulses to do what is right for ourselves or others. Dawson and Guare mapped executive function as our performance across twelve skills:
Response Inhibition (Ability to "bite your tongue")
Working Memory (Ability to retain information)
Emotional Control (Ability to act despite compelling emotional distractions)
Task Initiation (Ability and willingness to begin uncomfortable tasks)
Sustained Attention (Ability to remain immersed in uncomfortable tasks)
Planning / Prioritization (Ability and willingness to anticipate and comply with responsibilities)
Organization (Ability and willingness to invest effort to structure objects and information)
Time Management (Ability to accurately assess one's own abilities)
Flexibility (Ability to respond to external challenges effectively)
Metacognition (Ability and willingness to reflect on one's own actions)
Goal-Directed Persistence (Ability to withstand immediate discomfort in pursuit of long-term goals)
Stress Tolerance (Ability to withstand acute and sustained stress)
It is only a small stretch to generalize these as twelve manifestations of the core skill of choosing the path that is more effortful, but more rewarding, over that which is lesser on both fronts.
As we spend an ever-greater share of our days experiencing pleasures and rewards with ever-less effort, our ability to demonstrate any of these twelve skills degrades. A simplistic view of the problem argues we no longer read books because apps and media provide an easier-to-access form of stimulation with more immediate rewards. While this is true, it understates the problem.
Not only has the emergence of alternatives made previously-valuable activities seem inferior in comparison, but it has actually eroded their value. A loss of executive function - in this analogy, manifest in a degradation of working memory, task initiation, sustained attention, and goal-directed persistence - is in effect an increase in the deterrent effect of effort.
Reading a book feels hard for those of us that spend time on our devices both because it is much harder than the baseline level of effort we experience and because we lack general experience with, and tolerance for, exerting and overcoming effort itself.
Resistance and Impact
The cure illustrates the disease. Over the past decade, a huge range of tools, habits and behaviors have been associated with improved quality of life, greater professional achievement and resistance to depression:
What is meditation but a practice solely directed to establish (or reestablish) our ability to recognize discomforts, large and small, and act as we wish in response instead of how we would in reaction? (Response Inhibition, Emotional Control, Sustained Attention, Metacognition, Stress Tolerance)
What is aerobic exercise but a cauldron in which to experience repeated, extended physical discomfort, and continue in defiance of its call? (Time management, Goal-Directed Persistence, Stress Tolerance)
What is cold-water swimming but learning to accept, rather than run from, externally applied discomfort? (Emotional Control, Flexibility, Stress Tolerance)
What is college athletics but an extended decision to make our lives more difficult in pursuit of an abstractly meaningless goal? (Task Initiation, Planning/Prioritization, Organization, Time Management, Goal-Directed Persistence, Stress Tolerance)
Why do so many business leaders hunt but to have a humiliating, exhausting experience where success is directly proportional to their preparation and effort? (Response Inhibition, Emotional Control, Planning, Organization, Flexibility, Goal-Directed Persistence, Stress Tolerance)
The list is far from comprehensive, but you get the gist. Many of the most strikingly common correlates of happiness, fulfillment, and personal and professional success are experiences that directly foster the practice and development of executive function.
When we lack executive function, we are helpless - our lives are defined for us, by those who offer us the least effortful path forward at any given time. Is it any surprise, then, that we:
Can't tolerate conflict in the workplace?
Pursue get-rich-quick schemes?
Are increasingly confident in our political views despite a weak understanding of politics?
Choose to spend our money with those who pander to our comforts?
Interact less with those who disagree with us?
Are more depressed, frustrated, and hopeless?
By choosing to introduce repeated doses of low-effort, low-grade satisfaction into our lives, we have set fire to our own ability to act as confident, effective, independent agents, and to tolerate the discomforts, small and large, that were once considered our duties as members of a functional society. We have lost our ability to become adults. We are all suffering for it.
In the early 2010s, before he became a persona non grata, Louis CK lamented that we were ungrateful for the incredible times we inhabit, and that we had lost our willingness to feel difficult emotions. (H/T to Dave Perell for bringing the videos to my attention) His observations were correct, but his anger was misplaced. It is not a failing that so many members of our society have been hollowed out, but a tragedy, a predictable consequence of our inability and unwillingness to understand the second-order consequences of our immediately gratifying behaviors.
Personal Addendum
I wrote this piece for entirely personal reasons.
I am sick and tired of things I once loved feeling more difficult and inaccessible with every passing month; of choosing consumption over production and feeling helpless to stem the tide; of feeling trapped by my ever-shrinking ability to tolerate discomfort, or even a mere lack of comfort. This was not always the case, and I can trace the degradation of my mental state directly to the point at which I began to use the internet for entertainment and comfort.
I published this piece because its core thesis, while resting on an unnervingly rickety foundation, is something I believe to be true with every fiber of my being. The war against the great hollowing may be worth fighting.
I’m going to go outside, and when I get back, I think I’ll read a book.