How Silicon Valley breeds boredom, loneliness and vanity - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...eeds-boredom-loneliness-vanity
boredom loneliness vanity character solitude humility crisis
shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 19
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Well before smartphones, new inventions shaped our culture and our emotions, and changed how we feel about vanity, loneliness and boredom. Today, Silicon Valley is the latest to exploit these feelings in an effort to keep us harnessed to our screens.
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For centuries, moralists preached that pride and vanity were deadly sins. Humans shouldn’t boast or think too much of themselves because they were fallible. Likewise, Americans were taught to regard their accomplishments as hollow and fleeting because life was short.
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these technologies helped to alter attitudes about self-presentation and self-promotion. They trained Americans to focus on themselves, perfect their images and present themselves to others in words and pictures.
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The spread of mass-produced mirrors in the late 19th century had a similar effect, enabling rich and poor alike to study their images, and try to perfect them.
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After photography was introduced to the United States in 1839, it took off quickly, and Americans flocked to photographers’ studios.
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technology companies promised consumers that if they purchased telephones, radios and phonographs, they need never feel lonesome again.
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By the 1930s, editorialists were declaring that “Vanity is Sanity,” for well-adjusted individuals should care about their image and try to look their best. Lack of interest in one’s appearance signaled psychological problems
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Being lonely wasn’t pleasurable, but it wasn’t surprising or particularly worrisome, either. And like Henry David Thoreau, many even celebrated it, recasting it as solitude
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Over the course of the 20th century, however, Americans gradually pathologized the experience of being alone
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they increased the pressure on Americans to publicly celebrate their appearances and accomplishments.
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the term solitude fell out of favor while the word loneliness came into wider use, reflecting a growing consensus that there was something wrong and even shameful about being alone
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We are also obsessed with our phones because so many of us regard loneliness and boredom as pathologies with potentially negative consequences for our health
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Before the mid-19th century Americans never experienced boredom, for the word didn't exist in English
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, after the word boredom was coined, it spread, and during the late 19th century, it was increasingly used to describe the inner experience of empty moments
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By the mid-20th century, psychologists were suggesting that boredom was a measurable problem and that individuals were entitled to diversion in daily life, a message which movie studios, radio producers, television tycoons and merchants eagerly took up
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Americans soon began to regard it as a dangerous emotion that ought to be stamped out as quickly as possible.
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the people who were pushing photography, telephones, radios, movies and other consumer goods did so by exploiting shifting mores around vanity, loneliness and boredom
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they also exacerbated them, reinforcing the belief that people should present their best faces to the world and the conviction that they should always be in contact, and never be bored or unstimulated.
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these ideas have become central to our daily lives. We harbor fewer reservations about vanity than our ancestors
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We turn to our phones because we have become accustomed to celebrating ourselves, and to seek out the affirmation of others.
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Radios and phonographs, likewise, came to fill the silences in American homes, creating a sense of companionship at all times.
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because we worry more about loneliness and boredom than our ancestors did, we’re more apt to turn to our phones since they promise to relieve these afflictions.
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it’s important to remember that the vulnerabilities Silicon Valley exploits are far from inevitable and are instead a result of culture and history
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The way our culture trains us to experience vanity, loneliness and boredom can be changed. We can shift our thinking to recognize the value of humility, of solitude and of empty moments