Davey Morse's Shortform

Davey Morse

This is a special post for quick takes by Davey Morse. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

the core atrocity of today's social networks is that they make us temporally nearsighted. they train us to prioritize the short-term.

happiness depends on attending to things which feel good long-term—over decades. But for modern social networks to make money, it is essential that posts are short-lived—only then do we scroll excessively and see enough ads to sustain their business.

It might go w/o saying that nearsightedness is destructive. When we pay more attention to our short-lived pleasure signals—from cute pics, short clips, outrageous news, hot actors, aesthetic landscapes, and political—we forget how to pay attention to long-lived pleasure signals—from books, films, the gentle quality of relationships which last, projects which take more than a day, reunions of friends which take a min to plan, good legislation, etc etc.

we’re learning to ignore things which serve us for decades for the sake of attending to things which will serve us for seconds.

other social network problems—attention shallowing, polarization, depression are all just symptoms of nearsightedness: our inability to think & feel long-term.

if humanity has any shot at living happily in the future, it’ll be because we find a way to reawaken our long-term pleasure signals. we’ll learn to distinguish the reward signal associated with short lived things–like the frenetic urgent RED of an instagram Like notification–from the gentle rhythm of things which may have a very long life–like the tired clarity that comes after a long run, or the gentleness of reading next to a loved one.

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so, gotta focus unflinchingly on long-term things. here's a working list of strategies:

writing/talking with friends about what feels important/bad/good, long term. politically personally technologically whimsically.
inventing new language/words for what you’re feeling, rather than using existing terms. terms you invent for your own purposes resonate longer.
follow people who are deadset on long term important things and undistracted by fads. a such people few on substack:August Lamm’s guides to detaching from your cell phone and computer,Henrik Karlsson‘s insights about what it takes to stay locked in on long term cares,Sarah Kunstler’s steadfast focus on global values/justice in the face of volatile news cycles
note the places in the past in ur life where good stuff accumulates. for example: thoughts in ur notebooks, conversations at ur dinner table, bricks in a house ur building, graffiti on a city block, art in museums, songs u know on guitar
note correlations between the quality of decisions uve made and the texture (short vs long term) of the feeling you acted on in making it
note the locations in your body where long vs short term feelings arise. for ex, when i feel an instinct to say something that comes from around my belly button, its usually long term, something i’ll stand by for a while. when the words come from the top of my throat–my conviction in them usually crumbles just as they’re spoken.
do activities that require u to get in touch with long term parts of yourself. decide whether to sign a lease. make a painting. walk around a museum and wonder what it’d take for something u make to end up there. schedule send predictions abt your life to your future self.
pay attention, in the people around you, to their longest-term feelings. in other words: to their dreams
make spaces that value people for their thoughts more than for their consumption. not auditoriums, lecture halls, or manuscripts—but cafeterias & common rooms.

looking for more strategies, too.

3Davey Morse1y

In the past we weren't in spaces which wanted us so desperately to be single-minded consumers. Workplaces, homes, dinners, parks, sports teams, town board meetings, doctors offices, museums, art studios, walks with friends--all of these are settings that value you for being yourself and prioritizing long term cares. I think it's really only in spaces that want us to consume, and want us to consume cheap/oft-expiring things, that we're valued for consumerist behavior/short term thinking. Maybe malls want us to be like this to some extent: churn through old clothing, buy the next iPhone, have our sights set constantly on what's new. Maybe working in a newsroom is like this. But feed-based social networks are most definitely like this. They reward participation that are timely and outrageous and quickly expiring, posts which get us to keep scrolling. And so, we become participants that keep scrolling, keep consuming, and detach from our bodies and long term selves. So, I think it's cuz of current social media architectures/incentive structures that individual humans are more nearsighted today than maybe ever. I need to think more about what it is abt the state of modern tech/society/culture that have proliferated these feed-based networks.

5kaiwilliams1y

That seems like a reasonable distinction, but I'm less sure about how unique social media architectures are in this regard. In particular, I think that bars and taverns in the past had a similar destructive incentive as social media today. I don't have good sources on hand, but I remember hearing that one of the reasons that the Prohibition amendment passed was that many saw bartenders are fundamentally extractive. (Americans over 15 drank 4 times as much alcohol a year in 1830 than they do today, per JSTOR). Tavern owners have an incentive to make habitual drunks (better revenue). And alcoholism can be a terrible disease, which points to people being nearsighted ("where's my next drink"). I agree that social media probably hurts people's ability to instinctively plan for the future, but I'm unsure of the size of the effect or whether it's worse than historical antecedents. (There have always been nearsighted people).

I think you are right about the bad effect of bars and taverns, but at least the bad parts were clearly separated from the rest. If someone spent 5 hours every day in a bar, they were clearly a low-status alcoholic. You won't get the same social feedback for spending 5 hours a day scrolling on smartphone, especially if you do a large part of that in private. (With alcohol, drinking in private gave you even lower status than drinking in the bar.)

Davey Morse's Shortform

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Davey Morse's Shortform

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