One way of thinking about modern people is that we have two modes, survival mode and pleasure mode. In the United States, though I'm generalizing, very few currently face the scarcity that might have threatened 80 percent of 19th-century Americans. But we can still experience the panic of feeling like we're not going to survive. On the other hand, we have pleasure mode, dopamine mode—the dominant mode. We have all these amazing, very cheap dopamine sources: gambling, porn, drugs, alcohol, transactional sex, advertising, Netflix.
Third and fourth modes are available—the Kierkegaardian modes of the aesthetic and the religious—but they’re not native to our social ecosystems; these modalities have to be chosen and willed and created.
The aesthetic mode is like the pleasure mode, but it's enhanced, cultivated, pruned. The aesthetic mode risks dopamine addiction, but it tries to put dopamine in its place. Poker is the aesthetic. DraftKings isn't. Hedonistic sex can be aesthetic. “U up?” sex isn't. Spending an afternoon in a museum is aesthetic. Liking a high fashion advertisement on Instagram isn't.
Arguably the aesthetic has to be cultivated to displace the temptations of the second mode: pleasure/dopamine mode. The hardest part for porn addicts isn't quitting porn or anything, but figuring out how to have sex and pleasure without reducing themselves to the level of a rat pressing a lever in an experiment.
Mode two is mode three without thought, without intention, without will, without soul, without taste.
The fourth mode, the religious, the sacred seeking… I might have to save for another diary entry. Perhaps goes without saying that it's the most important mode of all, and that it's just as connected to the aesthetic as the aesthetic is connected to the dopamine phase.
Right now, apps, and I'm going to contradict myself here a little, are part of our ecosystem. I wrote about this in my last entry too. We can't reverse the world, not as individuals, we can't by fiat, will ourselves back to 1999, or 1899. Living with the technology that's part of our environment requires creativity. I have a digital voice recorder, I have an iPod, I have an iPad, an old iPad, I have an old laptop. My bag on a given day has a jumble of books and cords and notebooks. There are a few, very, very few apps that I use that I find useful on my iPad. Still, even those useful apps are addicting, and so I don't have Wi-Fi in my apartment. The best apps connect us to others, bring us into the world, and bring the right amount of pleasure and the right amount of information. Maybe there's no such thing as a best app, but there are a few apps that can be used selectively. During the first months of the pandemic, whenever I was quarantined, I wrote a lot of letters to women I met on Tinder. When people started trickling back to New York, some of these letters led to relationships .None of those relationships worked out, obviously. I'm engaged to someone else now, but there was pleasure in those quarantined phone calls and letters.There was pleasure in the anticipation of meeting. In one case, I think there was even flawed love. Now, of course, Tinder has also led me down weird and shameful paths.I've sent the 3 a.m. “u up?” text, for instance—but in limited doses, the hyper-connectivity and pleasure-seeking we can create through screens can make our lives more interesting. But again, the thresholds have to be far higher than we currently have. Far, far, far higher. We should not be taking vacations from hyper-connectivity, but maybe trips into them. A few days a year where we're all swiping and scrolling and finding each other, advertising to each other might be interesting, but not 365. I'm thinking out loud here, speculating, but my broader point is that the problem of technology requires us to think existentially, rationally, psychoanalytically, and personally. We have to think of ourselves as ecological zones that have been impacted by pollution. We need to clean up and protect our environments, but at the same time, we have to learn to live with the transformations that have been wrought. You can't regrow an old growth forest, but you could plant a very productive and ecologically fit food forest if you have enough acreage.
I've been reading Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation and it's almost impossible not to draw dire conclusions. I've read some passages out to S, who is Gen Z, and she's not sure she can bring herself to read the book.
It's scary. People who are adolescents during what Haidt calls The Great Rewiring have different brains, different incentive structures, different desires, different impulses. They've been strip-mined and manipulated so that tech companies can profit.
In social media, you could grow up out of order. You could watch a beheading or hardcore porn or send nudes, and much more at age 12 or 13. You might go from spending your summers outdoors playing with the kids in the neighborhood to voluntarily locked in your room scrolling and swiping and linking like an old person at a casino.
I hinted at these things in my own play, Zoomers, but as a playwright, I could take a more humane and consoling view of Gen Z as individuals, but in the aggregate, statistically, their situation, at least according to Haidt, and the many social psychologists that Haidt cites, things are grim.
For the iPad alpha generation, I'd imagine outcomes will be even worse.
The depression and anxiety and ADHD of Gen Z, the famously poor mental health can be conceived as just the outcome of the failure to socialize young people as required by their DNA. Children need to climb, run. They need dirt and bacteria. They need risk. As Haidt says, children are anti-fragile. They need danger and risk to grow and survive.
Maybe not since Victorian, which both because of the extreme poverty on one end and the extreme repression and normativity on the other end of the social spectrum, can civilization have claimed of so thoroughly, basically voluntarily wrecked childhood.
Or we can think of the 20th century as a brief respite for childhood and adolescence, and that the concept of teenager was invented to denote this new oasis of time and space that civilization had created for young people, not just to grow, but to fuck around and really take risks and learn through trial and error. A kind of perfect synthesis of too much danger and too little.
A safe danger. But now, like the Victorian bourgeoisie, parenting has shifted bizarrely towards risk aversion. With the one ironic caveat that Haidt notes, without taking proper protections for online risks, physical risks are minimized, digital risks are ignored.
It's an unbelievably stupid way to parent or exist.