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Over the decades, research has chipped away at our most cherished ideas about human specialness: it turns out that we share such things as theory of mind, empathy, and time perception with many other creatures.
But there is one feature of humanity that we can claim to be uniquely our own. Animals – unless captured by humans or infected with zombie parasites – tend to act staunchly in their own interests. Why is it that this frog or that bat or this humming-bird behaves in the peculiar way it does? The answer is almost always the same: to further its survival and the propagation of its genes.
Humans aren’t like that. We self-sabotage. If David Attenborough were narrating a human life, he might watch us puffing away on cigarettes, stuffing ourselves with junk food and walking drunkenly into lamp-posts, and struggle to segue into a smooth evolutionary explanation. Drug takers, overeaters, gamblers and adrenaline junkies all act in ways that make their survival less likely. They keep going, even when they know full well they should stop.
These groups, compulsively inching themselves closer to death, make up a relatively small proportion of us: when harmful addictions spread to larger groups, it often becomes a national crisis. But what would happen if a self-sabotaging behaviour suddenly went global? What if everyone started acting against their interests all at once?
That is the puzzle of the moment. Evidence is mounting that a particularly dangerous habit is taking hold. As the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson wrote earlier this month, we are spending more and more time in solitude – a trend rising across the western world. And the effects are terrible – research is drawing firmer and firmer links between isolation and soaring mental health problems, especially among young people.
What explains this paradoxical behaviour? The decline in hanging out coincides with the rise of personal entertainment and mobile phones: it seems we would rather spend our time watching TV and scrolling social media than socialising. Or would we? We feel better when we see others, and worse when we spend time online. Evolutionary psychologists are fond of relating our activities to our “wiring” as a social animal – much of what we do, they say, relates ultimately to our history of mutually dependent survival. Odd, then, that our long-evolved impulses are not correcting this problem.
It could be that solitude is self-reinforcing. Having been tempted into staying home, safe and entertained, a vicious cycle began. The more time we spend alone, the more social skills decay, which in turn makes hanging out with others less rewarding. When scanning the brains of polar explorers living for several months in Antarctica, researchers found their brains had actually shrunk. Even the feeling of being desperate for connection can propel you into what scientists refer to as a “loneliness loop”. A combination of low self-esteem, hostility, stress, pessimism and social anxiety can actually make the lonely person distance themselves further.
Isolation may also perpetuate itself through what economists call “collective traps”. Let’s say that you prefer to meet in person and dislike social media, but all your friends think it a good way to stay in touch. The rational response would be to use the platforms, even if you would prefer not to. Or say that you enjoy the social aspect of office life, but most of your colleagues opt for working from home. You might decide not to bother going in either: what is the point of commuting to a row of empty desks?
If enough people are living in isolation, different norms may arise. I have previously suggested that the cachet of having lots of real-life friends has declined, particularly among the young. Having nothing to do on a Saturday night was until recently considered deeply uncool; this was the peer pressure that pushed otherwise lazy teens off their sofas and out into the world. But as more of us isolate, the force lessens. Now young people happily identify as introverts and share their social anxiety online – where others reassure them that cancelling plans and missing parties is perfectly acceptable. These things compound the solitude problem, but when we search for its initial cause, the trail leads us back in the direction of addiction – the common thread that links all our most self-sabotaging behaviour. There is an argument for framing our attachment to mobile phones in the same way that we do smoking and gambling – as a problem of dependence.
Phones keep us hooked and scrolling with many of the same techniques that casinos use to keep players feeding the slot machine. On social media, the social experience is given league tables, points, lucky streaks and dopamine-prompting rewards.
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This makes us feel as though we are accumulating social influence, boosted by the fact the influence is trackable – rendered as followers or likes. The desire for status, recognition, approval and inclusion that used to prompt us to socialise has not only been displaced but these things have been reconstituted into a highly addictive game.
Policymakers demur on using the word “addiction” to describe excessive phone use, reluctant to pathologise such a common human experience. But evidence mounts in the other direction. A recent summary of the best scientific evidence, covering 2,123,762 individuals from 64 countries, suggests a quarter of people worldwide were suffering from “smartphone addiction”. Research finds social media overstimulates the brain’s reward centre and trigger pathways associated with compulsive dependence.
Is it time to start using the word “addiction” to describe our phone-induced solitude? It might help nudge us in the direction of treating the problem. In Britain, we have become increasingly open to policies that help us temper our cravings – taxes and bans on cigarettes, sugar and junk food have proved both popular and effective. Phones are different, of course – you can’t push people off a product so central to navigating modern life. But if people want to limit their time on social media, should we start thinking about ways we can help them do it?
