The Hollow Boys, and Girls: Restoring Risk, Efficacy, and the Small Triumphs of Life

Intrinsic motivation, digital dissipation, and masters and commanders

Return from Fishing by Johann Georg Meyer von Bremen

The tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs…It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive…

You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished. - from The Circle, by Dave Eggers

Years ago, long before I (Peco) published my first novel, I lived in a mouse-infested apartment near Toronto’s Little Italy. My roommates sometimes invited me to join them on Friday and Saturday nights, but often I declined, preferring to stay home and write, which was perplexing to them. “Why,” they seemed to wonder, “would you prefer to sit behind a desk, after a week of work and school, when you can come out with friends and drink beer and eat nachos?”

“Why,” I wondered in return, “would I want to waste a whole evening in a sports bar, when I can be here alone, pushing words into intricate patterns to create stories that nobody might ever read? What could be more wonderful than that?”

That was in pre-internet times, when being “alone” didn’t include that nagging background awareness that many of us struggle with today—that we’re never really alone, even when we’re alone, since the WIFI is usually on, a device is usually nearby, and just by touching the screen we can summon a universe of sports bars, nachos, or whatever turns us on.

That nagging awareness can rob us of our intrinsic motivation, though we don’t always notice it. The theft is like mental pickpocketing. We’re already thinking about going online, or we’re already online, by the time we realize what’s been taken from us, though often we don’t realize it at all.

And sometimes we do—like after an online binge. We feed too many electronic Oreos to our brain, and when it’s over we’re “wasted and hollow and diminished”, in Eggers’ words. It’s no accident that our energy levels and sense of substance are bound together. To be energized is to be real.

It can take enormous effort to climb out of the motivational crater that is formed in the wake of a digital binge. Even after we’ve climbed out of it, even after our energy returns, we might notice that our motivation still isn’t the same. The impulses that might catch fire and translate into useful action in the world somehow fail to spark or else lack their usual heat and flare. 

“Intrinsic motivation” refers to things we do for their own sake. Not for money or praise, but because they’re inherently satisfying. But harnessing intrinsic motivation can demand a kind of solitude and silence that Machine civilization works hard to disrupt, with all its speed and distracting stimulation. For Gen Z’s, raised in a world of devices, the continual whirl and distraction might not seem strange but the normal state of things, making their challenge even more difficult.

Take a Gen Z youth who spends hours a day on screen. If any delicate sparrows of intrinsic motivation are flitting about his head, he might not notice, or it he does, he might try to pursue them through the screen, as if he could find real things in virtual worlds.

Well, he might, if he’s writing computer code for a software engineering course. But not all intrinsic motivations can be realized within a virtual reality, and probably not even most. We are embodied beings, whose muscles, senses, and mind are intricately tuned to the tangible world.

Still, that might not stop our young man from trying to actualize his humanity online—and it’s hard to blame him. He’s following his instinct, struggling to satisfy his needs for exploration and achievement through virtual adventure, or his needs for intimacy in virtual sex. Even if he senses that something is lacking in these immersive experiences, internet gaming and porn can be addictive, especially to men, and so like pigeons in lab experiments, they will keep pecking for the dopamine kick, hopeless as the effort may be.

Our young man may not even see a need to stop his virtual binging, as society offers him little in the way of a moral or ethical compass for technology. We live in an ethos of digital whateverism: if anyone has a screen, they can do anything, anywhere, anytime. The electronic Oreos are everywhere. So the motivational pickpockets go to work on our young man, stealing away each flicker of intrinsic motivation as it arises in him, slowly bankrupting him of the possibility of discovering what he might actually want out of life.

Even who he might actually be.

A unique struggle for boys

Boy with Anchor by Winslow Homer, 1873

We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
   
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion…

from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

According to

Jonathan Haidt

, boys, like girls, are suffering from increasing rates of depression, with even higher rates of suicidality. This change has coincided with the advent of social media and devices in the early 2010s. The most striking change for boys, though, is in another variable: a retreat from the real world. Haidt—citing

Richard V Reeves

’ Of Boys and Men—suggests this retreat began in the 1970s, long before the internet. But digital technologies have only complicated that picture:

The virtual world was magical for many boys. In addition to letting them interact with new gadgets, it also enabled them to do—safely—the sorts of things they find extremely exciting but not available in real life: for example, jumping out of planes and parachuting into a jungle war zone where they meet up with a few friends to battle other groups of friends to the (virtual) death.

Just as video games became more finely tuned to boys’ greater propensity for coalitional competition, the real world, and especially school, got more frustrating for many boys: Shorter recess, bans on rough and tumble play, and ever more emphasis on sitting still and listening….

And all of this withdrawal happened before the arrival of the metaverse, which is just now taking shape, and before the arrival of increasingly compelling, witty, attractive, and customizable AI girlfriends. The virtual world is becoming ever more immersive and addictive. Every year it will pull harder and harder on boys, urging them to abandon the real world.

If boys are abandoning the real world, then their intrinsic motivation for that world is being abandoned too, and redirected to an often addictive virtual reality.  The increased rates of depression and suicide in boys may be a form of motivational rot, the ultimate result of natural energies that have spread into a thousand futile tributaries, like a river diffusing into a swamp. In the old days young men who gave themselves over to sex and alcohol were called “dissipated”. Today we might call it digital dissipation.

The true target of intrinsic motivation is creative efficacy. This kind of efficacy leaves a meaningful or healthy mark on the world. Children stack rocks on a beach, a farmer takes pride in a golden field of wheat, a writer feels pleasure at mastering a sentence. Each stands back and thinks, “I did that.” These rocks and golden stalks and words aren’t just forms of work or leisure. They are little forms of victory, not in the military sense, but as part of a human striving to leave our corner of the universe changed, to imprint ourselves on it, just because we can in our own original way.

And that change goes both ways. When we leave our mark on the real world, we, in turn, are touched, shaped. We are strengthened in who we are and why we are here. This is less likely to happen in virtual reality, where the pixels that make up the “experience” are too unidimensional, too temporary, too distant, to produce either a true mark on the virtual, or a true mark on us.

Someone who works in Silicon Valley might wonder if we could enhance the feeling of efficacy in virtual reality. Higher resolution, brighter colors, better sound, haptic bodysuits that make video games more realistic—for instance when you’re shot or stabbed during a battle. But there is something else about virtual worlds that makes them incapable of fully satisfying our intrinsic motivation: they are too convenient and too safe.

Photos used in Peter Gray’s post Risky Play: Why Children Seek It and Need It