Homo Digitalis & the curse of Loneliness

14 min readMar 30, 2020

IIn the span of 30 short years, digital delivered on centuries-old promises of boundless communication and inclusive societies. Digital allowed us to attune, to the exact degree, the level of interaction we desired to have with others. And we loved it. All hail Homo Digitalis, mankind had finally entered the era of universal limitless human connection.

Empowered by this new-found power and freedom, we gradually started to model In-Real-Life behaviours to mirror Digital ones.

But… like we did before with the contraceptive pill, we are finding that changing a core feature of human inter-action/course, usually comes with unwanted consequences. In departing so radically with face-to-face interaction, we (blissfully) ignored hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

Our brains have literally been hard-wired to rely on face-to-face interaction. Our evolutionary process could not anticipate communication at a distance, and the change has left us dazed. This time, the disruption didn’t affect how man comes together to reproduce, but rather how man has stopped coming together, altogether. What essentially amounted to changing the OS for human-to-human communication, disrupted our most ingrained social norms and human needs, leaving us less mentally and physically healthy in the process.

To the technologist who built our digital world, technology provides a means of communication. For us, the digital world is a space for social interaction. Communication is a tool, social interaction is an outcome. One that entails much more than the mere exchange of data points between two parties… The world is slowly awakening to the idea that Digital is a double edged sword, a ‘social dilemma’ . We are left with no choice but to radically rethink the way we relate to each other on a day-to-day basis.

Why this matters

Depending on the support network you have around you at a given moment, you might be more or less incline to idea that something as seemingly benign as being alone, can have a dramatic impact on you.

Those who are confronted daily to people who feel or are alone, are adamant that this state of mind has pervasive consequences on our health. And that the scale of this is of epidemic proportions. The numbers are overwhelmingly with them. A recent report by an Insurer placed the number as high as 60% of Americans declaring they feel lonely. My personal experience building transient communities in coliving spaces can only confirm this.

In 2015, researchers at UCLA discovered that social isolation will actually trigger cellular changes that result in chronic inflammation, predisposing the lonely to serious physical conditions like heart disease, stroke, metastatic cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.

A new level of awareness has come and must be acted upon. Loneliness is depleting our lives and our economies. In silence.

They say that awareness is the greatest agent for change. I have become intimately convinced that we all need to come to terms, at our own paces, with the scale at which this is affects our societies. There lies the key to fixing some of our societies greatest ailments.

Here is more about how humans are so much more sensitive than they would think to feeling lonely; and the prevalent role the dawn of digital has played in building a society so oblivious to its members’ basic needs. The good news is that each one of us can alleviate this toll, provided we acknowledge we have a problem in the first place.

TL;DR: it seems that the more technologically advanced we get, the more we will need to get back to the basics of human connection.

Why we do the things we do

We behave the way we do because as societies, we have constructed norms for relating and interacting with each other. These mutually binding obligations underpin all of our social reactions, they define what seems “normal”.

While norms have changed radically over time, the way we enforce them hasn’t. We keep ourselves and others in check with:

the fear of shame (behaving in a way that can lead to being rejected by the group)
the seeking of esteem (or status — from the people we look up to and make us feel good about ourselves)

and should those fail, a policing force. This is the base for all human behaviours, whether traditional rites, aristocratic etiquette or the Berlin underground party scene (maybe less police there).

When considering how mankind functioned all the way up to Gen X, these gentle psychological pressures exerted their guiding force through people that were physically close to us. And with whom it was immediately obvious that we needed to be mindful of the exchange we had. Otherwise we’d get hurt: rejected or punched.

Physical communication has been our modus operandi for 99.94% of our time on this earth. So naturally, our norms are based on how we interacted face-to-face. If you say something to me in front of me:

I must acknowledge it and respond. Try not to, it gets weird very quickly.

We have many of such norms. When we first meet in the morning, we say hello. If I walk in with you, I hold the door. When we leave our homes at the same time: I wave. When we share a living room and you get something in the fridge, we speak. When I send you an email, we talk about when we meet.

And the list goes on…

When we meet in the lift, I don’t nose-dive into my phone

When a cabbie starts a conversation, we talk.

When we are speaking, I don’t look at my notifications.

Right… I’m guessing that like me, you’ve caught yourself doing the exact opposite, once or twice. Many times. On a good day, probably all before your first coffee.

While we might not be conscious of it, not engaging with somebody is a deliberate act. First, we decide there is a trade-off between our well-being and sticking with the norm (acknowledging somebody’s presence, keeping the focus on the speaker etc). And second, that faced with that trade-off: we choose the path of least disruption (to ourself) over the norm. Me over Us.

So how is it that we can to normalise such unnatural behaviour?

We saw another way, and we liked it

I’m going to pose that it is the digital world that made us consider this trade-off as normal, en masse. Digital created, by action or omission, the alternative universe where not acknowledging somebody you know, doesn’t get you hurt.

By allowing us to exchange blindly, anonymously and indiscriminately, digital shifted the notion of regarding others from by default, to optional. Challenging the very core of how we relate to each other.

Online, there is much less social pressure compelling you to behave in a way that is mindful of others. I can choose exactly who I want to receive my esteem and belonging from. And safely ignore all the other people. Or what my actions or words might do to them.

I guess we liked being able to remove the “pain” of going out of our way. No longer feeling compelled to being “considerate”.

There is an undeniable appeal to having a choice when previously we were “forced” by a rule. And sure enough, we started adopting those behaviours In-Real-Life.

Where before I felt strange not addressing somebody, now because I’m a ‘no read receipt’ kinda guy, I can not speak to you if I don’t feel like so. It’s my freedom.

Disrupting a 50,000 years old model

While the change felt seamless, changing the way we treat each other is HUGE. And that’s because, everything in the way we’ve developed as a species, has to do with how we relate to each other. Everything

Hard-wired for connection

The human brain has been shaped by evolution, over millennia, to manage increasingly complex social interactions. And in the day-to-day, emotions are the vehicle by which this materialises. To put it simply: our brains are literally built for seeking emotional connection.

And when this interaction goes missing, we suffer.

We actually, neurologically, hurt.

Dr Kip and his team from the University of Purdue were the ones behind this game-changing breakthrough, showing that when we are socially rejected, the same parts of the brain are engaged as for physical pain.

Pain’s first objective is to notify us that something is wrong and then, steer us clear of the behaviours that lead us there. This is how we ended up adopting the norms we did.

In the last 20 years, the advent of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI — which gave us the ability to see brain activity in real time) allowed us to understand that: all along, it is the avoidance hard-wired “social” pain at a neurological level, that gave power to any of our social norms. If you stick to the rules, “behave proper”, you won’t hurt. It’s been the same for cavemen, King’s courts and our modern societies.

Here comes Digital. Challenging these norms with every post that goes not liked, e-calendar invite ignored or pics of a party we weren’t at. Only 50,000 years of neurological evolution don’t just vanish in 30 years…

Ignoring the pain of digital exclusion, is leading us into a world of physiological distress and diseases. And evidence supporting this view has become compelling, to say the least.

Another 2015 meta-analysis, led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University which pooled data from 70 studies following 3.4 million people over seven years, found that socially rejected individuals had a 26% higher chance of dying. The figure rose to 32% if they lived alone.

A national survey by Cigna of Americans aged 18 and over showed that over 60% U.S. adults are considered lonely. Loneliness is not the actual fact of being alone, but the “perceived social isolation, or the discrepancy between what you want from your social relationships and your perception of those relationships.” In the US alone, estimates put the impact of social isolation at almost $7 billion a year cost to Medicare. We are facing a public health issue.

How did we get there?

The phenomena of lone-ification of society is said to have started in 1950’s with sub-urbanisation, the breakdown of traditional gatherers such as religion or the army and the generalised “individualising” of people’s leisure.

But, according to the 2016 Viceland UK Census loneliness is the number one fear of young people today — ranking ahead of losing a home or a job, being homeless or a terrorist attack. 42% of Millennial women are more afraid of loneliness than a cancer diagnosis, by far the highest share of any generation. The prevalence of the phenomena in millenials tells us that it is recent changes that are affecting them most, not ones that changed the world in the 50s.

And sure enough, 16 years after the launch of Facebook, a study from the University of Pennsylvania has now found a causal link between time spent on social media with decreased well-being. Melissa Hunt, the lead researcher for that study, concluded:

“Here’s the bottom line: Using less social media than you normally would, leads to significant decreases in loneliness.”.

Jim Collins said “technology is an accelerator, never a creator of momentum”, this proved true with lone-ification of society too.

So how did we get there?

How the juices stopped flowing

To understand why we ended embracing digital in our lives so keenly, let’s take a simple example of human-to-human interaction. Getting hit on.

And for the sake of the model,

let’s say this is your last day travelling in Rome.

Your companions are leaving tonight, your flight isn’t until tomorrow. Tap of the shoulder, a kind-eyed Italian man is making his move. Now let’s also assume he is quite the part, suavely intriguing and built like a semi-god. After 10 days basking in the sun, eating organic and freshly single, you too are feeling like Roman divinity. And again, for the sake of the model, we shall assume you aren’t against the idea of gelato.

Badabim, badaboum When in Rome, it’s done, numbers are exchanged.

Now, here is broadly painted, the chain of actions that you have undertaken between that first tap on the shoulder and the moment you handed him the phone back: React, Acknowledge, Respond, Evaluate, Benchmark, Probe, Assess, Observe, Interpret, Project, Remember, Check, Challenge, Lean, Compose, Turn, Smile, Imagine, Deduct, Mobilize, Engage. and more.

All of these micro-actions put together form the body of interactions we go through when we have a conversation with a stranger. This is what we call consciousness: deciding against a set of personal and contextual metrics what we are going to do next. Each one of these steps are linked together in a causal chain that has seamlessly engaged dozens of your cognitive functions, processed layers upon layers of memories and emotions, and been patched up almost instantly in a (hopefully) coherent narrative, that you told yourself and the guy.

Not an easy affair, especially with him right in front of you, and your body deciding to fire all sorts of neurotransmitters and bodily fluids.

While this is an illustrative example, assuming all sorts of things about Italian men and your penchants, it serves well to illustrate the complexity of human-to-human interactions. Our by default modus-operandi for all interactions before the digital age.

Fast forward to Bumble, the modern stage of our love birds’ scene.

By accepting a date on the platform, you go through the whole communication chain we described above, by dialling to your preferred degree, the amount, timing and format of the information you want shared.

You reach the same results as IRL, but have effectively cut yourself out of a world of fear of rejection and pain.

In the words of Sherry Turckle and broader context: “digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”

It wasn’t our fault, the techies made us

Paradoxically, we find ourselves facing the massive of loneliness because so much of our lives is influenced by people dead set on fixing things for us.

Never in the history of mankind has so much of what we do been shaped by 30-something, usually single, typically smart, often cynical, young males: the tech business leaders and their armies of coders. It’s not so much technology that has changed the way we live. But rather the firms that fund these innovations.

Like most businesses of our era, these firms are dead-set on solving problems for us. Who could blame them? this is precisely what business has come to mean to society. Removing pain from our lives, for a buck.

In the words of John Dalla Costa “while other political, religious and arts institutions see the need for suffering, valuing it as the price for the transformation to a new level of human experience, business organisations still regard suffering through that adolescent perspective of avoidance and presumed immunity.

One reason for this institutional immaturity is that the profits of business are often based on serving a need that eliminates pain, discomfort or unhappiness. Suffering and sorrow are words that for fifty years have been squeezed out of our consumer culture by the endless stream of products and services promising relief, convenience, self-fulfilment, and instant gratification.”

Big Tech went out there and solved the millenia-long pain caused by a lack of global, instantaneous and cheap communication for all. And when their technologies helped reduce the stress of face-to-face, all the better. This was their work providing incremental benefits.

The problem is by doing so they created another pain.

Impervious to the notion that profitably solving a problem could harm us in any way. They let their never-ending attempts to claim more of our attention by making our lives “easier”, turn us away from each other.

Dalla Costa concludes “Business in many ways provides the antidote to suffering, so it naturally tends to devalue that which it seeks to profitably eliminate.”

In our context, big tech devalued “suffering”, by underplaying the positive influence of the “pain” or “stress” we undergo (physiologically) when navigating any live social situation. Therefore not thinking twice about taking active steps towards reducing face-to-face time between humans.

That “stress” is the proof that human connection is valuable to us, otherwise our bodies would wouldn’t react to it. Big tech did not see that and led us into a digitalisation of the world that created loneliness in its wake.

The next frontier is human

What now?

The vast majority of tech companies do care about ethics and are genuinely trying to help improve the world. But as we’ve seen even good intentions can have unintended consequences. To be fair to them, our understanding of the human brain was only made possible because of the very technologies that caused is lonely demise.

Changing the businesses that have led us here will take time. But the giants are moving. Google appointed a whistle-blower to a newly minted position of Design Ethnicist after a heartfelt presentation he gave on the oversized impact technology designers had on our lives. Airbnb has appointed a Chief Ethics Officer. Gradually techies are dropping the how in: “how should we build this?”

On a personal level, there is always becoming the change we want to see in the world. Take the time to reflect on how you treat people. Remember that the default mode, for which evolution has shaped our brains for thousands of years, is to say hello in the lift.

For all of us who are fortunate enough to be creating and delivering products, services or consumer experiences. Let’s not attempt for perfect gratification anymore, but instead address our need for transformation.

Consumers today are willing to embrace “pain”, if it means preserving something important and becoming better in the process. Technology can help us “up-cycle” experiences that previous generations would consider as frustrations or “bad customer service” into worthwhile value propositions.

Urban city centres can’t house all of us in self-contained spaces for a decent price? — Let’s make living with people a dream.

Customers know our oceans are puking plastic — they will appreciate why we only sell in containers.

A new automated flow that reduces the need for people to exchange? — let’s make sure that when they do, they know more about each other. You get the point.

Now, doesn’t need to be the whole thing. Let’s get customer to enjoy benefits before their good is shipped so that it’s transportation footprint drops (account set-up, first few pages available…)

In order for this change to take on though, we will need to turn into evangelists.

Evangelism is difficult. Creating a tension when you could feature it out, is fraught with risk. It’s much easier to avoid. That said, if we are going to keep our world the way nature dictates, let alone leave it in a better state than we found it, we need to become that change. In the all encompassing words of Seth Godin, “what your customers want from you is for you to care enough to change them”.