"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."
This is brilliant. I would also add how this robbing actually also (paradoxically) fills us - it saturates our mind and mental capacity so that we are exhausted for good work/attention. Thus, as well as being hollowed out and diminished, as Eggers says, we are also filled - with junk. (Which limits our capacity to be filled with goodness).
What a coincidence that I was going to include, in my next newsletter, this resource compilation from one of my favorite scholars — who has taught on the subject of boys and men in the modern world: https://www.dranthonybradley.com/masculinity-resources
In case anyone is looking for even MORE helpful resources than what you've already shared. :)
There's so much good content in that post to comment on, but I'll try to keep it short. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, my dad hated rock music. He did everything he could to keep me from it. What do I listen to now? Classic rock. As a dad of 10 and 12 year olds now, I could banish video games from the house, but I fear a similar result. Instead, I limit their time and try to teach them moderation. That's a difficult task, I fully admit. Video games are designed to be addictive after all. I tell them "Ok, time to unplug your brains from the matrix." or "Time to come back to the real world." or "That's enough fantasy world for today.". I'm sure they get annoyed, but I hope my efforts eventually result in them self-regulating their digital time. The odds may be against me on this, and I feel like I'm battling the rest of society. It's sort of a middle-path which I hope turns out to be a wise one.
Thanks, David. Within our own family, keeping the conversation going with kids has been important. Our priority, in that sense, has been more about cultivating relationships first, and only secondarily about managing tech use. But fortunately the first has tended to lead to the second (though not always perfectly!). I suppose that’s our own version of the “middle-path” you mentioned.
Thanks for sharing your experience David. One important aspect of video games that we discovered that there is a distinction between games that are story-based single-player vs. multi-player reward-based game, which have highly addictive algorithms. I think continuing to encourage boundaries is a helpful approach, even if they get annoyed :)
This line jumped out to me: "If men in the 2020s are still drawn to this film, it’s partly because it speaks to an instinct to face real struggle, real risk—something we can’t get from digital devices or from an overly convenient, overly safe society."
Last summer I was sitting around talking to a friend about the various mundane things we were up to when he said "you know, I think we're meant to be out raiding fishing villages at this age." It was sort of a joke, and this friend is not a violent person at all. But I think the comment also spoke to the idea that there's this baked in desire for, as you put it, "real struggle, real risk."
As a mother to four boys I think about this need to put their physical drive to use often. It’s one of the primary reasons we’re evaluating a major life change — so they have space and actual jobs to expend energy. In the city we do our best to find physical outlets for them, and they are active with great imaginations, but to have them feel that their activities contributed to something in a meaningful ideal would be wonderful. Another thought that kept returning to me throughout reading was how vital it is for bodies to be able to move, in order to complete a stress cycle. There’s a natural response of adrenaline and cortisol that happens when we’re stressed — and there’s no end to this being delivered via screen, but without the body actually moving through discharging the adrenaline it just stays locked in the body, making one more reactive and less regulated. All mammals have some way of returning to equilibrium after a threat, but we seem to have discounted the amount of threat we subject ourselves to by just reading the news or playing a video game. I didn’t realize how many jolts of cortisol I got just scrolling Instagram, and the algorithms are finely tuned to get the most response.
Great thoughts! New technologies are sometimes called “disrupters” in the cool sense of the word, as in “disrupting” our usual humdrum way of living, but the potential disruption of our normal physiological cycles (stress, sleep, etc) is something less talked about. Not very cool maybe, but massively important!
Those are really relevant issues you raised here Anneliese! This is likely a particularly important concern for boys who get dosed with masses of adrenaline while playing video games without proper physical release. I stopped reading the news as I realized that it was just getting me intensely aggravated and without a possible action to sensibly release that irritation. Maybe this is why social media has become so terribly nasty...Will note your point down for future reference:)
Lots here for these interesting times; very best wishes. Time has moved fast recently and surprised me with old age. The world has changed faster than I guessed. The wartime Britain of early childhood seems remote, but somehow again relevant. We grew up in the barely recovered post-war, and thought it very modern. It seems rather quaint, America and ‘boys comics’, those futures. (I'll spare you my thoughts on war and boys, it would take a while.) I was lucky with my little gang in our road. We could roam unsupervised into a countryside not yet heavily re-policed by propertied interests and retaining still, if somewhat shell-shocked, leftover people and places from the agrarian past. For a brief comparison with my gang’s roaming, I turned this afternoon to Dimitri Orlov; 'Re-inventing Collapse' (in Adaptation; 'Lowering Your Standards'). My parents, unlike Dimitri's, most certainly would not have left me/my younger brother in charge at age 11, but I feel the similarity. And it was for us and friends sometimes unexpectedly beautiful. There was other stuff as well of course; scaring oneself silly, taking very ill-judged risks, and occasionally knowing the sharp corrective of shame. Fear could take other forms. Besides being tough, I remember a few times being seriously spooked. But we worked well together, had a code that did not rely on school and our interests ranged well-beyond. Orlov made many sharp observations of the USA. These could still be relevant more widely for the Western predicament. His reference to 'krugozor' (wide mental horizon) came to mind recently when listening to Iain McGilchrist on his mighty thesis 'The Matter with Things'; knowledge and knowing stuff - not quite the same as I understand it.
This was so good! 👏🏼 It’s great that you mentioned Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus. It was an eye-opening read for sure. Highly recommend it for those who have not read it quite yet.
I'm surprised that you didn't even mention the two main precursors of the digital age: music and movies/television. Without their influence computer, smartphones, and video games might well have not been invented or at least have taken a less invasive form.
Popular Music, with the advent of movies and radio (supercharged with the advent of handheld transistor models), overtook culture like kudzu and other invasive plants. Now we can't shop, ride an elevator, eat in a restaurant, or meditate in a church without a constant background (or foreground) of cheesy music, almost always accompanied by drums, immersing--often blaring at--us.
Constant stimulation grew to be the norm, with producers pushing the limits ever beyond what is socially acceptable. Even now, computer games, movies, television, and porn have rock and roll soundtracks energizing them.
Thanks for pointing out those precursors, Jesse. This is a huge topic, and so we narrowly focused on the digital side. Haidt’s article (and esp Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men) do point to earlier precursors. A major takeaway seems that what’s happening now is part of a larger historical trend moving us to more of a representational kind of living, away from the “real”.
Once upon a time, one hundred years ago T S Eliot used the phrase 'we are the hollow men". He also made a comprehensive description of our situation in his 1922 poem The Waste Land.
Two very sobering and prophetic books which describe the psycho-social origins and state of American culture as it was when he wrote them were written by the excellent poet Robert Bly. The situation is muchly worse in the now-time of 2124.
Bly was not very sympathetic with institutional religion and the naive religiosity of Americans.
1. Iron John A Book About Men 1990
2. The Sibling Society 1996
The culturally and religiously illiterate nihilistic barbarian Donald Trump is of course an extreme example of the type of person described in both books.
Having "grown" up in such a "culture" we are all to one degree or another examples of the hollow men and the sibling society that Robert Bly describes in his book.
The MAGA movement is an in-your-face manifestation of the Sibling Society.
Thanks for this - really good. The structure of our lives is mostly, now, inhospitable to the intuitions and proclivities of little boys. One of the attractions of online gaming is the distinctly boyish "coalitional competition", as you point out, alongside the very intense goal orientation . As a family gift for Christmas, I bought DVD's of the first 5 seasons of the old TV series "My Three Sons". It's an absolute study in boys' life in the 1960's. One of the first things you notice is the maximum agency with which those boys approach their lives. They are constantly building, creating, and optimizing the physical world around them - also, insatiably learning, but in an embodied, rather than exclusively bookish, way. They run a standalone car motor on saw horses in the garage, just to make it backfire loudly and learn how it works. They rewire an old broken down stereo as a gift for one of their girlfriends. They build a Huck Finn raft in the back yard and then stay overnight inside the "cabin" that they nailed together on the raft. They do art, blow trumpets, wash cars, and make a habit of creating messes in the house. The boyishness of these boys is more indulged than managed. More celebrated than controlled.
I have grandsons (one of whom I am raising) who very much enjoy video games. But rather than just saying "no", I'm trying to take a lesson from my own father by offering them some compelling boyish alternatives to their understandable interest in games. I recently bought a kit for building a go-kart entirely from parts, and it is going to be an on-going Saturday project for them and myself. We don't know anything about building go-karts, but we're going to learn. And then we're going to drive it around the neighborhood, and the green space nearby, with whatever attendant risks are involved.
Sometimes I think these boys don't do more flexing of their agency because we have foreclosed any field of play for them to do such things on their own initiative. When I was a kid, I wandered the neighborhood and nearby woods, dammed up the creek, dug caves into the side of the hills, and only ever showed up back at home when I was hungry, or when I heard my mom calling us in as the evening sun was setting. Most boys don't, I'm afraid, have woods any longer for roaming, or neighborhoods for free ranging. I suspect they mostly don't even have garages or backyards in which to explore their own agency by experimenting on the world around them. It is going to be incumbent on fathers, I suspect, to reorient both our time and our finances toward intentionally creating physical environments which are conducive to embodied boyish intuitions.
Also related I think. Not in regard to technology, per se, but in the latent cultural passive resistance to masculine intuition. For some boys, they may be drawn to gaming because their environment leaves them no other outlets for boyish concerns. https://keithlowery.substack.com/p/misapprehending
Keith, thanks for sharing such a thoughtful comment! I think offering "compelling boyish alternatives" is one of the most effective approaches, because who would not love to build a go-gart? (Our youngest would certainly come over to join you in an instant). Will make note of the points you raised here, thanks.
I am traveling at the moment but can't wait to find time to read this more carefully. Thi is such an important topic!! I'll be back with more thoughts soon.
If you're in the places these particular conversations happen, there's been a growing curiosity and recognition of the rising numbers of young men becoming interested in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Many have speculated (and I agree) that it's the draw to a Faith that challenges you to a greater degree than often found any many other expressions of Christianity. The call to prayer rule (morning and evening), the call to fast regularly, to attend the services of the Church (beyond just Sunday mornings), the call to really battle with the passions and engage in the "unseen warfare", to give sacrificially etc. My own anecdotal experience - which seems to match up with many others - is that while often it's the wife/mother dragging the men to church in other traditions, in this more recent influx of people into Orthodoxy it's more often being initiated by the men. Seems to square with many of the observations above about how we as boys and men are wired.
We were fortunate to grow up during the sixties, long before the machines started taking over our universe. Yes, it was often with high risk.
Like before I turned ten years old, when I ran into a rock that tore open my left big toe. I remember running home and when I got there, the blood was all over the floor and the walls of our simple home in Langlaagte, Johannesburg.
To this day, my grandchildren love to look and laugh hilariously about my left big toe. It looks horrendous, yet very funny. I won't publish a photo of it ever, cause it will make you sick.
"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."
This is brilliant. I would also add how this robbing actually also (paradoxically) fills us - it saturates our mind and mental capacity so that we are exhausted for good work/attention. Thus, as well as being hollowed out and diminished, as Eggers says, we are also filled - with junk. (Which limits our capacity to be filled with goodness).
Although, reading on in the essay, you touch on this very concept with the excellent phrase "Electronic oreos".
What a coincidence that I was going to include, in my next newsletter, this resource compilation from one of my favorite scholars — who has taught on the subject of boys and men in the modern world: https://www.dranthonybradley.com/masculinity-resources
In case anyone is looking for even MORE helpful resources than what you've already shared. :)
Thanks very much for this link, Haley!
Haley - that is indeed a great compilation! Thanks for the link :)
Brilliant
There's so much good content in that post to comment on, but I'll try to keep it short. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, my dad hated rock music. He did everything he could to keep me from it. What do I listen to now? Classic rock. As a dad of 10 and 12 year olds now, I could banish video games from the house, but I fear a similar result. Instead, I limit their time and try to teach them moderation. That's a difficult task, I fully admit. Video games are designed to be addictive after all. I tell them "Ok, time to unplug your brains from the matrix." or "Time to come back to the real world." or "That's enough fantasy world for today.". I'm sure they get annoyed, but I hope my efforts eventually result in them self-regulating their digital time. The odds may be against me on this, and I feel like I'm battling the rest of society. It's sort of a middle-path which I hope turns out to be a wise one.
Thanks, David. Within our own family, keeping the conversation going with kids has been important. Our priority, in that sense, has been more about cultivating relationships first, and only secondarily about managing tech use. But fortunately the first has tended to lead to the second (though not always perfectly!). I suppose that’s our own version of the “middle-path” you mentioned.
Thanks for sharing your experience David. One important aspect of video games that we discovered that there is a distinction between games that are story-based single-player vs. multi-player reward-based game, which have highly addictive algorithms. I think continuing to encourage boundaries is a helpful approach, even if they get annoyed :)
This line jumped out to me: "If men in the 2020s are still drawn to this film, it’s partly because it speaks to an instinct to face real struggle, real risk—something we can’t get from digital devices or from an overly convenient, overly safe society."
Last summer I was sitting around talking to a friend about the various mundane things we were up to when he said "you know, I think we're meant to be out raiding fishing villages at this age." It was sort of a joke, and this friend is not a violent person at all. But I think the comment also spoke to the idea that there's this baked in desire for, as you put it, "real struggle, real risk."
A funny remark, that was, by your friend—as if there’s an inner Viking in your friend’s inner child.
for sure!
I immediately forwarded this to my husband and want to send to every parent I know!
Thanks for sharing Kristine :)
As a mother to four boys I think about this need to put their physical drive to use often. It’s one of the primary reasons we’re evaluating a major life change — so they have space and actual jobs to expend energy. In the city we do our best to find physical outlets for them, and they are active with great imaginations, but to have them feel that their activities contributed to something in a meaningful ideal would be wonderful. Another thought that kept returning to me throughout reading was how vital it is for bodies to be able to move, in order to complete a stress cycle. There’s a natural response of adrenaline and cortisol that happens when we’re stressed — and there’s no end to this being delivered via screen, but without the body actually moving through discharging the adrenaline it just stays locked in the body, making one more reactive and less regulated. All mammals have some way of returning to equilibrium after a threat, but we seem to have discounted the amount of threat we subject ourselves to by just reading the news or playing a video game. I didn’t realize how many jolts of cortisol I got just scrolling Instagram, and the algorithms are finely tuned to get the most response.
Great thoughts! New technologies are sometimes called “disrupters” in the cool sense of the word, as in “disrupting” our usual humdrum way of living, but the potential disruption of our normal physiological cycles (stress, sleep, etc) is something less talked about. Not very cool maybe, but massively important!
Those are really relevant issues you raised here Anneliese! This is likely a particularly important concern for boys who get dosed with masses of adrenaline while playing video games without proper physical release. I stopped reading the news as I realized that it was just getting me intensely aggravated and without a possible action to sensibly release that irritation. Maybe this is why social media has become so terribly nasty...Will note your point down for future reference:)
Lots here for these interesting times; very best wishes. Time has moved fast recently and surprised me with old age. The world has changed faster than I guessed. The wartime Britain of early childhood seems remote, but somehow again relevant. We grew up in the barely recovered post-war, and thought it very modern. It seems rather quaint, America and ‘boys comics’, those futures. (I'll spare you my thoughts on war and boys, it would take a while.) I was lucky with my little gang in our road. We could roam unsupervised into a countryside not yet heavily re-policed by propertied interests and retaining still, if somewhat shell-shocked, leftover people and places from the agrarian past. For a brief comparison with my gang’s roaming, I turned this afternoon to Dimitri Orlov; 'Re-inventing Collapse' (in Adaptation; 'Lowering Your Standards'). My parents, unlike Dimitri's, most certainly would not have left me/my younger brother in charge at age 11, but I feel the similarity. And it was for us and friends sometimes unexpectedly beautiful. There was other stuff as well of course; scaring oneself silly, taking very ill-judged risks, and occasionally knowing the sharp corrective of shame. Fear could take other forms. Besides being tough, I remember a few times being seriously spooked. But we worked well together, had a code that did not rely on school and our interests ranged well-beyond. Orlov made many sharp observations of the USA. These could still be relevant more widely for the Western predicament. His reference to 'krugozor' (wide mental horizon) came to mind recently when listening to Iain McGilchrist on his mighty thesis 'The Matter with Things'; knowledge and knowing stuff - not quite the same as I understand it.
This was so good! 👏🏼 It’s great that you mentioned Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus. It was an eye-opening read for sure. Highly recommend it for those who have not read it quite yet.
I'm surprised that you didn't even mention the two main precursors of the digital age: music and movies/television. Without their influence computer, smartphones, and video games might well have not been invented or at least have taken a less invasive form.
Popular Music, with the advent of movies and radio (supercharged with the advent of handheld transistor models), overtook culture like kudzu and other invasive plants. Now we can't shop, ride an elevator, eat in a restaurant, or meditate in a church without a constant background (or foreground) of cheesy music, almost always accompanied by drums, immersing--often blaring at--us.
Constant stimulation grew to be the norm, with producers pushing the limits ever beyond what is socially acceptable. Even now, computer games, movies, television, and porn have rock and roll soundtracks energizing them.
Thanks for pointing out those precursors, Jesse. This is a huge topic, and so we narrowly focused on the digital side. Haidt’s article (and esp Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men) do point to earlier precursors. A major takeaway seems that what’s happening now is part of a larger historical trend moving us to more of a representational kind of living, away from the “real”.
Excellent essay with many good references.
Once upon a time, one hundred years ago T S Eliot used the phrase 'we are the hollow men". He also made a comprehensive description of our situation in his 1922 poem The Waste Land.
Two very sobering and prophetic books which describe the psycho-social origins and state of American culture as it was when he wrote them were written by the excellent poet Robert Bly. The situation is muchly worse in the now-time of 2124.
Bly was not very sympathetic with institutional religion and the naive religiosity of Americans.
1. Iron John A Book About Men 1990
2. The Sibling Society 1996
The culturally and religiously illiterate nihilistic barbarian Donald Trump is of course an extreme example of the type of person described in both books.
Having "grown" up in such a "culture" we are all to one degree or another examples of the hollow men and the sibling society that Robert Bly describes in his book.
The MAGA movement is an in-your-face manifestation of the Sibling Society.
Thanks for this - really good. The structure of our lives is mostly, now, inhospitable to the intuitions and proclivities of little boys. One of the attractions of online gaming is the distinctly boyish "coalitional competition", as you point out, alongside the very intense goal orientation . As a family gift for Christmas, I bought DVD's of the first 5 seasons of the old TV series "My Three Sons". It's an absolute study in boys' life in the 1960's. One of the first things you notice is the maximum agency with which those boys approach their lives. They are constantly building, creating, and optimizing the physical world around them - also, insatiably learning, but in an embodied, rather than exclusively bookish, way. They run a standalone car motor on saw horses in the garage, just to make it backfire loudly and learn how it works. They rewire an old broken down stereo as a gift for one of their girlfriends. They build a Huck Finn raft in the back yard and then stay overnight inside the "cabin" that they nailed together on the raft. They do art, blow trumpets, wash cars, and make a habit of creating messes in the house. The boyishness of these boys is more indulged than managed. More celebrated than controlled.
I have grandsons (one of whom I am raising) who very much enjoy video games. But rather than just saying "no", I'm trying to take a lesson from my own father by offering them some compelling boyish alternatives to their understandable interest in games. I recently bought a kit for building a go-kart entirely from parts, and it is going to be an on-going Saturday project for them and myself. We don't know anything about building go-karts, but we're going to learn. And then we're going to drive it around the neighborhood, and the green space nearby, with whatever attendant risks are involved.
Sometimes I think these boys don't do more flexing of their agency because we have foreclosed any field of play for them to do such things on their own initiative. When I was a kid, I wandered the neighborhood and nearby woods, dammed up the creek, dug caves into the side of the hills, and only ever showed up back at home when I was hungry, or when I heard my mom calling us in as the evening sun was setting. Most boys don't, I'm afraid, have woods any longer for roaming, or neighborhoods for free ranging. I suspect they mostly don't even have garages or backyards in which to explore their own agency by experimenting on the world around them. It is going to be incumbent on fathers, I suspect, to reorient both our time and our finances toward intentionally creating physical environments which are conducive to embodied boyish intuitions.
Also related I think. Not in regard to technology, per se, but in the latent cultural passive resistance to masculine intuition. For some boys, they may be drawn to gaming because their environment leaves them no other outlets for boyish concerns. https://keithlowery.substack.com/p/misapprehending
Keith, thanks for sharing such a thoughtful comment! I think offering "compelling boyish alternatives" is one of the most effective approaches, because who would not love to build a go-gart? (Our youngest would certainly come over to join you in an instant). Will make note of the points you raised here, thanks.
I am traveling at the moment but can't wait to find time to read this more carefully. Thi is such an important topic!! I'll be back with more thoughts soon.
Such a great and important read. And thank you for sharing the AI essay!
We have a quote of Teddy Roosevelt's on our wall and I think of it often -
"I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well."
Similarly - from Pope Benedict XVI - "The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness."
Love those quotes Katie!
If you're in the places these particular conversations happen, there's been a growing curiosity and recognition of the rising numbers of young men becoming interested in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Many have speculated (and I agree) that it's the draw to a Faith that challenges you to a greater degree than often found any many other expressions of Christianity. The call to prayer rule (morning and evening), the call to fast regularly, to attend the services of the Church (beyond just Sunday mornings), the call to really battle with the passions and engage in the "unseen warfare", to give sacrificially etc. My own anecdotal experience - which seems to match up with many others - is that while often it's the wife/mother dragging the men to church in other traditions, in this more recent influx of people into Orthodoxy it's more often being initiated by the men. Seems to square with many of the observations above about how we as boys and men are wired.
We were fortunate to grow up during the sixties, long before the machines started taking over our universe. Yes, it was often with high risk.
Like before I turned ten years old, when I ran into a rock that tore open my left big toe. I remember running home and when I got there, the blood was all over the floor and the walls of our simple home in Langlaagte, Johannesburg.
To this day, my grandchildren love to look and laugh hilariously about my left big toe. It looks horrendous, yet very funny. I won't publish a photo of it ever, cause it will make you sick.
It certainly prepared me for life.