When Digital Gets In the Way of Living

Since the advent of the internet, it feels like we've been warped to all things digital.

Yet for many of us, this brings a new kind of isolation, pain point, distraction issues, from life's fundamental dopamine bringing joy, being social. The catch is, social well-being is now known to be one of the most determining factors to health, longevity and holistic subjective-well being.

Does Digital get in the way of Social

The absence of positive social support can be crippling. In a digital era, are more suffering in silence?

Even in the digital office, we have new technologies such as Slack, video conferencing and others. However with a constant and the massive deluge of Emails, something is missing, we still don't solve many of our communication issues.

These technologies short-circuit many and much of the social aspect of actually developing corporate culture, rapport and human bonds that would promote workplace productivity.

Instead with the abundance of digital channels, social bonding is sometimes taken out of the equation, marginalizing our life-satisfaction. Let's uncover a bit of what's going on here, shall we: 

Social Media as Pseudo-Social 

Many Millennials who grew up with social media in the early 2000s were conditioned by social media to socialize differently. Thousands of text messages later, and having spent possibly hundreds (if not thousands) of hours on social media, our social lives were not necessarily better for it. There's some evidence smartphone addiction impacts our social lives negatively. 

Decline of Social Media

The decline of social media for SMS communication apps, has been widely documented. The rise of social video, otherwise known as Snapchat, is defiantly more pro-social, and that's why it wins.

No matter how seductive digital, mobile or virtual reality immersion may be, "reality" is still the social experience we have been primed by evolution to find most satisfying, salient and fundamentally important to our survival.

With the advent of mobile games like PokemonGo and dating sites like Happn, it's clear consumers want technologies that relate better to the real world...

Elon Musk, famously was quoted as saying it's probable our "reality" is actually some kind of simulation of universes. 

What Games and Online Dating Teach us

With the advent of mobile games like PokemonGo and dating sites like Happn, it's clear consumers want technologies that relate better to the real world, where location and proximity in space is appealing and seen as more valuable. 

Technologies that are rooted in the real world and help us connect, that is, have social value, seem to go more viral easier. 

In an era when video games are a billion dollar industry ($17 Billion in US alone), many of the most immersive games are popular and addictive, because they are social and facilitate simulations that require more human interaction. 

Advent of Digital is Bad for Our Sex Lives

There's also been some research pointing to the decline in sexual activity of young Millennials and GenZ as compared to other generations. In spite of 'hook up' apps basically being on-demand in the Tinder age of convenience.  

15 percent of 20 to 24-year-old Americans born in the 1990s have had no sexual partners after their 18th birthday, compared with just 6 percent of people born in the 1960s at the same age

One reason could be that the digital age's accessibility to porn, is "hijacking" the our sexuality in hyper individualistic DIY lifestyles of Millennials, where marriage and birth rates are set to decrease for arguably, the most lonely generation in history. 

The Modern Woman & the Pressure to Succeed 

In a hyper competitive job market and stagnant economy, young people who must make the grade, are hyper communicative on mobile, but may be less identified with their biological instincts.

With more competition and more varied digital forms of entertainment, more friction to our attention, the recreational aspect of sexual expression is reduced and the idea of early family planning is put off (often until the mid 30s or later) creating increasing fertility issues when the pieces of the puzzle are finally in place.  

The decline of sexual expression may also be a result of the digitization of society's impact on less face to face social opportunities for intimacy, or some other reason of why Millennials are having less sex.

This trend if it continues years down the like, will likely to result in more unmarried Millennial women who will go childless than ever before, with huge repercussions on consumer spending and our economies. 

New Convenience Economy

The Uber-Amazon level of convenience afforded by the on-demand economy and the rising peer to peer economy means materialism has reached a new sense of urgency catering to our desires, like 2-day shipping or Amazon prime, where the subscription reciprocity model is the most lucrative and valuable to the consumer. But does it dehumanize us further?

With the rise of shopping is done online, and there is increasingly less incentive for us to truly be social in order to survive & thrive, what happens to our social life in an increasingly digital world? Please share this article on Facebook if you think it's a conversation worth having. 

How do you see the advent of mobile, VR and video as impacting your social life? Is a digital economy detrimental to making authentic connections?