Software Is Eating Humanity
Imagine you are a caveman or cavewoman living 20,000 years ago. You spend days with your tight-knit tribe of roughly 150 people. Other than hunting and gathering food for survival, you pass the time bonding and socializing with your clan as you roam from one savanna to another. Life is simple, and the majority of your life’s meaning comes from building relationships with others so you can mutually support each other.
It’s incredible how much life has changed. Our predecessors never interacted with anything that resembled a screen. In order to understand how technology is changing humanity, let’s explore some of the body’s chemical systems. Our ancestors were motivated to hunt and gather due to a hardwired dopamine-based reward system that all humans share. Dopamine is responsible for making us feel good when we find something we lost or accomplish a task. We possess this system as a survival mechanism to ensure that we are motivated to find food and complete what needs to get done. Unfortunately, there are many modern-day activities that highly trigger our dopamine system, including gambling, alcohol, nicotine, drugs and technology use — especially social media and email.
Serotonin and oxytocin are two other chemicals that serve a substantial purpose in our wellbeing. The former is what you feel when you are proud, or when others like or respect you. We experience confidence and raised status when serotonin courses through our veins. Oxytocin is the feeling of love, belonging, friendship or deep trust. It helps us feel empathy and generosity, which are necessary for sociality and survival.
For our ancestors, “work” was hunting and gathering 35 to 45 hours per week. Our motivation to collect food comes primarily from our dopamine-based system. In today’s society, most humans don’t worry about their source of nourishment anymore. How do we feed our dopamine system now if it isn’t from hunting and gathering?
One possible response to this question is that our careers do, potentially giving us purpose and meaning. However, only 34% of people are engaged in their jobs, which means that about two in three people in the United States don’t get true fulfillment from their vocation. It is clear that our jobs don’t nourish our dopamine systems or give us as much significance as they could.
What does this mean for society? We are turning to other means to get our dopamine fix. The opioid epidemic is quickly spiraling out of control. America is becoming one of the most obese countries in the world at an alarming rate. The rate of heavy alcohol use is skyrocketing as well. But what is the biggest socially accepted way we are coping with this situation?
Excessive screen time may be the most universal means for humans to satisfy our dopamine-based needs. We are now spending close to four hours per day on our smartphones, a 59% increase compared to just two years ago. The total amount of time that each person spends in front of all media (including screens) per day is 12 hours and 21 minutes, which is up 11% over two years. The amount of time we spend socializing each day has dropped 18% compared to 2003. If we extrapolate these trends, where will humanity be in just 10 short years?
Our sympathetic nervous system is what prepares us for fight-or-flight scenarios in an attempt to keep us alive. If a robber broke into your house and held a gun to your head, your sympathetic nervous system would be in overdrive to give you the best chance of getting out of that scenario.
A hidden cost of technology is that its use activates our sympathetic nervous system, though not to the same degree as a robber entering your home. Regardless, the activation of this system starts a chemical cascade in your body that affects your gastrointestinal, immune, cardiovascular, endocrine and nervous systems all at once. A heightened sympathetic nervous system can be responsible for making you feel anxious, stressed out, and eventually depressed if it isn’t shut off, among many other consequences.
What’s most concerning is that the sympathetic nervous system can take up to 30 minutes to downregulate. The implication for you is that if you check your phone, email or other technology once every 30 minutes or more frequently, your body never has a chance to undo the negative effects of being in a constantly aroused state. Most of us are walking around frequently stressed out and anxious due to checking our devices all the time. We humans weren’t built for never-ending stress and anxiety.
Smartphone use in the United States reached 50% penetration in 2012. Many factors changed dramatically starting around that year, though these changes are correlational, not causational. Teenagers are going on fewer dates and having less sex, drinking less alcohol, and fewer have a driver’s license. Critical reading and writing SAT scores are plummeting, along with social party attendance. Most alarming is the rising rates of suicide and depressive symptoms among teenagers. Studies have shown that excessive use of screens by children under five can delay their development.
The negative effects of technology are not unique to teenagers or children. A recent causational study showed that people who stopped using Facebook for a month had a substantial increase in subjective well-being. Fake news spreads six times faster on social media than true news, clouding our judgment and beliefs. We spend an average of one hour per day recovering from digital distractions and getting back on track. The mere presence of a smartphone can result in reduced feelings of empathy, trust and closeness between two people. A parent using a cell phone for just two minutes in front of an infant can reduce the infant’s feelings of positive emotions. While it is difficult to definitively say that excessive screen time is the cause of a lot of our problems, there is building evidence that this is true.
Everything in nature happens for a reason. I believe that the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness are nature’s way of telling us that we shouldn’t be on screens as much as we are. An athlete training for a marathon doesn’t run 10 hours a day to prepare for their event. They train and then rest, allowing their bodies to recover. Countless people complete a technology marathon every single day, never allowing their neurological systems to get back to baseline.
A longitudinal study shows that the solution to many of humanity’s problems is to build and maintain close relationships with friends and family. Screens don’t have to be part of that equation. The 2020 World Happiness Report confirms that activities like texting, email, social media and browsing the internet hardly give us any increase in well-being. In-person activities such as socializing, playing with children and pets, exercising, and attending sporting events or live performances give us far more happiness.
While technology could be used as a tool to bring humanity closer, instead we use it to amuse or soothe ourselves during periods of boredom or discomfort. This happens because we slowly build an association of comfort with our devices.
Allow me to give you an example. Let’s say 13-year-old Billy is at middle school, and someone makes fun of him while he’s in the hallway. Thirty years ago when no one had a cell phone, Billy would get uncomfortable, and then process his emotions with himself. Today, Billy reaches into his pocket for the comfort and relief of his device. The smartphone is ideally designed for this because it offers him autonomy, competence in operating it, and perceived connectedness with other people. It is always available and easily accessible. Over time, when Billy feels angry, sad, lonely or bored, he retreats to his smartphone. The phone itself becomes associated with avoiding pain and providing comfort. Humans will do almost anything to avoid pain. This psychological association people create with their smartphone over time doesn’t just apply to teenagers, but to adults as well.
The most difficult part of solving this problem is that technology is integral to functioning in our society. If you were on a diet, you wouldn’t carry around cookies in your pocket. Unfortunately, we bring the technology equivalent of cookies everywhere we go even when we want to be on a low-technology diet. We need screens to help us communicate, be productive and do our jobs.
Another issue is that many of us think that all technology is good. I believe this is because back when technology became mainstream in the 90s, it basically was all good. People developed a positive association with it because of all the great things it could do for our lives. In today’s world, technology isn’t purely used for altruistic purposes. There are teams of hundreds of thousands of computer programmers at many technology companies whose main mission is to make their product as addictive as possible. How is one person supposed to consciously resist a force that great?
To be clear, I love and fully embrace technology. I have built desktop computers for over 20 years, and owned a small business repairing smartphones. Whenever the newest phone gets released, I pick it up within the first couple of weeks. I’m not anti-technology, I’m pro-humanity.
My struggle with technology was very real. As a teenager, I had crippling acne. I wasn’t very socially confident. One year, I refused to be pictured in my high school yearbook because I didn’t want people to remember my face that way. As an outlet, I turned to online video games during the mid-90s. I eventually became addicted, playing well past midnight on many school nights. I didn’t stop until my dad woke me up from what I was doing to myself. If you’re having a tough time with how much you use technology, I feel you.
We have replaced belly laughs, campfire stories and tight hugs with LOLs, Zoom calls and emojis. We’re more content staring at pixels moving around a screen instead of saying “Hi” to our neighbors. We think texting back and forth is a substitute for in-person conversations. Simply put, I believe the root cause of the problem we are facing is that we have replaced serotonin- and oxytocin-based relationships with a dopamine-based technology dependency. Software is eating humanity. In 2020, the most searched for fear on Google was a fear of other people. And unfortunately, the average American hasn’t made a friend in the last five years. Is this what we want for ourselves?
We are at a crossroads for our species. We can choose to elevate humanity above technology, or we can let it destroy the fabric of society. I believe excessive technology use is the greatest threat to humanity that we will see in our lifetime. The only way for us to rise above this danger is to start by being aware of how technology serves us, and what purpose it has in our lives. This daily awareness happens over time and takes deliberate effort.
My vision for an ideal future with technology is to use it as a tool to enhance our humanity, not stifle it. In this world, we would all be aware of how technology can degrade the human experience. It would be socially acceptable to ask others to prioritize in-person connection over electronics. Leaders of technology companies might even favor user mental health, time and attention over profits. Relationships could resemble those that we had 30 years ago, yet we could still retain the benefits of modern technology at the same time. It’s possible to successfully unite humanity and technology better than we are today.
I’ll leave you with one last question to ponder: How much love, success, and happiness could we have together if we all decided to put humans first in our lives?
There are a lot of resources that I have found helpful in learning about this topic. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, Hooked by Nir Eyal, The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene, Deep Work by Cal Newport, iGen by Jean Twenge, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, The Digital Wellness Institute, and the Center For Humane Technology with Tristan Harris have all been excellent assets for understanding this problem.
If you’re interested in discussing this problem and the potential solutions, I’d love to chat with you. It would be great to meet in person if you’re in the Denver, Colorado area. You can reach me at rob@humansfirst.us. I look forward to connecting with you and collaborating on how technology can better serve humanity.
