What Happens to a World when Society?: A Questioning of Digital Grief and Screen Dependency
Wouldn’t it be so nice if life carried us around gently, ensuring we were to never mark or fall? If everywhere we went hung us to a wall as though we are something to be seen and cherished? What if life discarded us to the side like a pile of rubbish, not knowing the value that we hold?
What happens to a world when sitting alone with a screen amongst people who want your money becomes more pleasurable than sitting together within reality amongst people who love you?
What happens to a world when the extent of most conversations doesn’t expand beyond the content that has been designed to elicit our most primitive emotional responses and take our money, that was seen when sitting alone with a screen?
What happens to a world when children develop closer relationships with those they watch when sitting alone with a screen rather than those they see in their reality?
What happens to a world when children no longer want to play outside, but they would rather watch someone else play outside while sitting alone with a screen?
What happens to a world when instead of talking to the people who happen to be around you at whatever location you are at, you would rather sit alone with a screen?
What happens to a world when sexual gratification can be received instantaneously when sitting alone with a screen?
What happens to a world when your perception of an entire gender has been formed not through your real-life experiences, but from what other people have told you when sitting alone with a screen?
What happens to a world when you walk around stuck in a perpetual state of fear when you have not experienced a real-life count events that would actualize in that same magnitude of fear due to experiences that you have mentally accumulated when sitting alone with a screen?
What happens to a world when one second you see live footage from a catastrophic event with a massive death count, and then the next you see a dog rolling around in mud, and then the next you see hateful opinion towards a quality that you yourself possess, and then the next you see someone showing you their favorite summer lipstick, all viewed when sitting alone with a screen?
What happens to a world when you cannot go into any building without a constant, primitive emotional response eliciting music playlist playing in the background?
What happens to a world when boredom seems like a curse?
What happens to a world when quick dopamine hits fuel the daily activities of the majority?
What happens to a world when the opinions being formed on political events that will shape the trajectory of international society become something formed through two-sentence posts and one-minute videos that are fueled by various individuals’ egos, set on proving others wrong?
What happens to a world when individuals refuse to speak or engage with individuals who hold differing opinions from them on a singular four-year presidency, regardless of how long their relationship has been upheld in their lives?
What happens to a society when being right is more important than being informed?
What happens to a society when being right is more important than having critical thought thought-provoking conversations?
What happens to a society when being right is more important than recognizing where you might have gone wrong?
What happens to a society when being right is so important that you will refuse to surround yourself with anyone who might prick the idea within your mind that you are, in fact, not right?
What happens to a society when being right is so important that you will shut down any opinion that differs from yours with bluntness, harshness, and immediate necessity?
What happens to a world when those who try to bring attention to such downfalls of society are marked as crazy and going through psychosis by the average human, who is, unbeknownst to themselves, a current victim of said downfalls?
Digital grief is a term that I have coined myself to describe the phenomenon that society is currently under, where the lives that we are living through our personal technological devices are quickly becoming more real than the worlds we are actually living in.
When complaining becomes easier than fixing, when scrolling becomes easier than speaking, when viewing becomes easier than doing, the companies end up having a painstakingly high amount of control over our lives. We no longer operate with the God-ordained rule we have over this land. Rather, we become monopoly pawns for fictitious entities.
What benefit do we as individuals actually receive when we see what someone halfway across the world is doing at ten am on a Friday? Is the benefit the recognition that we hate our lives, so we choose to go on to change it? Is the change that we decide to embark on one that is rooted in actually receiving what we feel is lacking in our lives, or is it what a different individual on the other side of half way across the world said would be the band-aid over the hatred? Or, is the benefit the recognition that we hate our lives but our dopamine receptors have been fried to the point of being unable to do anything that takes effort beyond what our current version of reality necessitates, so we do absolutely nothing other than move our thumb an inch down and an inch up to move on to the next post?
Now, I would really rather not generalize an entire planet, so let me be a bit more specific. When I say these are marks of society, I want to emphasize the age and socioeconomic status of the individuals who are engaging in these behaviors at shocking rates. While the behaviors are fluid between groups, you will mostly see the digital immersion appear in these classes of humanity:
Ages 18 to 35 who reside within or below the precarious middle-class income bracket
Ages 0 to 18 who reside within or below the traditional middle-class income bracket
When reaching the upper class income bracket, digital dependency becomes more of an interconnected area to explore, with a need to consider all three of the aspects of one's socioeconomic status, being income, education, and occupation. Aspects such as the means of one's wealth acquisition, the social hierarchy they stand upon, how long their family has held their wealth, and the opinions of those they surround themselves with through friends, family, and occupation come into play more than the two basic generalizations I gave above.
I also would like to note that these observations are fully and totally derived from my personal life experience. I have not done a funded study to come to said conclusions.
For adults who reside within the precarious middle-class income bracket or below, they have come to accept a life where holding a position of institutional power seems far too out of reach. They have given up the sense of any power or creativity over the world they reside in; thus, the power has now shifted into the hands of systems the individual has absolutely no control over, such as media, politics, and technology companies. Entertainment and escapism through screens becomes a coping mechanism that is easily within reach to drown their distress of dealing with economic instability. Disengagement from real life becomes a whole lot easier for those individuals whose real life is marked by struggle and strife.
For children who reside within the traditional middle-class income bracket or below, the entirety of their lives has been actualized through technology. Learning is done through YouTube, which so happens to show them attention-grabbing material the second they go to look for a video to assist them with their physics homework. Socialization with their real-life peers increasingly becomes dependent on the online persona they have managed to build. Real-life conversations become hinged on fragments of the exciting pieces of each person’s life, as well as the most recent trending topic on whatever social platform the group has decided to focus on for the time being.
If I were to attempt to answer my questions above, I must be honest and say that I do not have the answers. However, if I must make assumptions, I could go in a pessimistic or optimistic route.
For the pessimist, they will see a future of declining birth rates with the few who do produce raising children who are emotionally unprepared for life outside of algorithmic validation. Humans are no longer humans, but rather, they become behavioral data sets for a few oligarchs in a few industries to own the attention, wallets, time, and dopamine of. Friendships become akin to who liked whose post. Critical discussions become akin to who can tell the other off the fastest. Joy becomes akin to something you must pay for via a subscription model. Human touch becomes something to fear. Silence becomes something unknown. Boredom becomes someone's worst nightmare. Eventually, no one remembers how to feel.
For the optimist, they will see a future dependent on a necessary, rock-bottom awakening before the breakthrough. People become tired of walking through life stuck in a digital media-fueled brain fog. They no longer want to exist in a constant state of simultaneously being overstimulated yet lonely, so they reach for a real connection that can exist with silence. A need for autonomy over self is discovered, and leads those to crave boredom and slowness. The simple act of breathing without someone telling you how to breathe correctly becomes cherished. The phase of counterculture that we have seen pop up throughout history becomes one of moving through life with full and total embodiment. People detach from the artificially fast, yet realistically slow digital timelines, and step back into the timelines of reality. Their social circles become dependent on those who are hyper-local to them. Perfection and performance become something to fear. Measuring one’s sense of self through capitalistic output becomes something unknown. Burnout becomes someone’s worst nightmare. Eventually, everyone remembers how to feel.
They remember societies that are driven by art, mysticism, and honest emotions.
They remember how to hold space for grief, slowness, and joy.
They remember how to raise their children with deep intention.
Which timeline would you rather reside in?
For a neuroscientific description on how digital grief is actualized in an individual and can result in those with high screen times displaying more symptoms of PTSD than those who actually experienced a traumatic event, see the article titled, “Rewired for Fear: An Introspective Questioning on Trauma, Technology, and the Nervous System”.