Matt Kushin, Ph.D.

But in general, the deal is you give up high standards and in return you get flexibility and an overall easier, more laidback life.

Dr. Manos said the ever-changing environment of TikTok doesn’t require sustained attention. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast,” he said. 

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009

The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.

Research tells us that we’re happier if we prioritize having time more than things, giving more than getting, and appreciating what we have more than trying to get what we don’t.

Dumbphones are continuing to enjoy a revival. Google searches for them jumped by 89% between 2018 and 2021, according to a report by software firm SEMrush.

And while sales figures are hard to come by, one report said that global purchases of dumbphones were due to hit one billion units last year, up from 400 million in 2019. This compares to worldwide sales of 1.4 billion smart phones last year, following a 12.5% decline in 2020.

The importance of increasing macro-level productivity remained, but the way we pursued these increases changed. Instead of continuing to focus on optimizing systems, the knowledge sector, for various complicated reasons, began to shift onto the individual worker the burden of improving output produced per unit of input. Productivity, for the first time in modern economic history, became personal.

We should not underestimate the radical nature of this shift.

“But, sir,” I said, “there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the jungle room. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.” I waved my hand, and the fake green leaves rustled a little. Their eyes returned to their screens. “Look!” I said. “Don’t you see? We’re actually there. There’s no need for your screen. We are in the jungle room.”

If you see members of the opposing group as human like you, you’ve failed as a tribalist.

Why would I want to do that?

Soon brands will be able to augment physical experiences with virtual ones. For example, say you’re at your favorite store, browsing through a collection of this season’s jackets. Instead of just trying them on, you could pop on a pair of glasses and see how your favorite influencers are wearing the jackets or what they will look like on you, modeled on your avatar.

This question has been on my mind, too.

The fantasy is bigger, though. CEOs in tech know that billions of people still live much of their life beyond computer screens. Those people buy automobiles and grow herb gardens. They copulate and blow autumn leaves. Real life still seeps through the seams of computers. The executives know that no company, however big, can capture all the world. But there is an alternative: If only the public could be persuaded to abandon atoms for bits, the material for the symbolic, then people would have to lease virtualized renditions of all the things that haven’t yet been pulled online

: a small minority (10 percent) of highly active Twitter users generate 80 percent of the total Tweets on the platform, whereas the rest of the Twitter user base (90 percent) creates only 20 percent of total Tweets on the platform.

The metaverse essentially is a massive virtual world that can be accessed in real time by millions of people using avatars, who can use it to hold virtual meetings or buy virtual land and clothing or other digital assets, often paying with cryptocurrencies.

More and more people have come to see that defining ourselves by our résumés, and chasing an idea of success based solely on the metrics of money and status, isn't sustainable. It's like sitting on a two-legged stool -- sooner or later we're going to fall off. What we're seeing is a shift to living lives based on a more fulfilling, intrinsic, and sustainable definition of success that adds to the first two metrics the third metric of well-being -- which includes resilience, and being able to tap into our own inner peace,

In other words, you don’t need to feel good to get going, you need to get going to give yourself a shot at feeling good.

Finally, in general, viewers and readers of traditional news media must proactively choose the content they consume — whether that’s a show they choose to watch or a column they choose to subscribe to. Social media users, on the other hand, have almost no control over the content they see. Instead, platforms use complex algorithms to serve content they think will keep users scrolling, often exposing them to more radical posts that they may never have sought out on their own.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run,” Thoreau writes.

Usually, we look away when we see someone suffering. Their pain brings up our fear or anger; it brings up our resistance and confusion.

We must acknowledge that productivity has its costs, as does too our fetishizing of busyness.

worn down for so long can feel more like something that’s already happened instead of a clear moment in time that separates past and future.

"You've gotta keep control of your time and you can't unless you say no. You can't let people set your agenda in life."

The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problem of how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes, and effects.