Modern Life is Diseased (Series Part 1) The Missing Tribe - Some Personal Thoughts

Modern life is diseased. Our society is sick. I am sick. 

This series is my attempt to process what is wrong so that I can make changes to make my children's lives better. These are just my personal thoughts as a 30-something year old and are written in an invective style, so take it for what it's worth. 

The Loss of Tribe is a New Phenomenon

One of the most impactful philosophical ideas of the Materialist ideologies of the 20th Century is the idea that there is no inherent objective structure to existence, and thus no inherent teleology of man or society. This is the idea behind the "social engineering" that drove so much of Marxist and Post-Modern political action and theory. Society, indeed man in general they said, is a formless ball of clay, just waiting for those who desire it to mold a new image for man. Whether these ideas are as explicit or powerful as they were in the mid-twentieth century doesn't actually matter, because the exponential development of technologies which has swept over the world in such short periods of time is playing the same function of societal reshaping anyway. One of the major ways which we have been reshaped is through the isolation from family and the loss of any meaningful "tribe" to share our lives with. 

The False Promise of Digital Socialization

Think about it... one of the major promises of modern technology has always been that it will allow you to "be more connected" with people you care about. You can Zoom or Facetime or text or call any time of day or night. It promised to allow you to "reconnect with long lost friends" on social media and to build a network of hundreds or thousands of "friends". But in the last 15 years we have not become more connected. It has done exactly the opposite. People are more isolated, depressed, and somehow friendless more than ever before. 

The Baby Boomer generation does understand why Millennials, Gen Zers, and Gen Alphas are so unhappy. We are just weak, I suppose. We've had it too good growing up and we are soft. How many people have repeated the quote online that "bad times make hard men, hard men make good times, good times make soft men, and soft men make bad times." I often think to myself that "maybe I am just a weak Millennial" like I hear the Baby Boomer commentators say online. But that's not really the root cause of the rampant depression, at least I don't believe it to be. The reason why younger people are so unhappy is because we have no tribe. Humans are social creatures to the core, and there is a gaping hole in most of our lives in this regard. 

Isolation and More Isolation

Again, think about it... Most of us in the USA grew up with our nuclear family, very often away from any extended family. We then moved to a another state to go to college ... where we had no family. Then we either moved back home or to some random place to pursue a job; but our brothers and sisters did the same thing. And so, for most Millennials like me, our immediate family is also spread out over many states. We're not growing up as humans, seemingly, always have with generations of family members around us. Rather, it was the difficult choice of staying back in our hometown to be with family and friends or moving to a random location and starting over so we could attend that university or get that job. 

We are lonely in those new places, so what do many people do? We turn to digital interactions, thinking that digital interactions are actually "socializing," when in reality they are the junk-food imitation of human interaction. They satisfy for the moment but don't provide any long lasting stable sense of well-being.

If there is in-person socializing it either comes from one's coworkers at their job, or maybe some type of meet-up with friends (but one that must be scheduled days or weeks in advance, and requiring a 30-45 minute drive across town, and for a maximum of a few hours, and always with the looming ennui that one must be up early the next day for work or preparing things at home for the work-week). There is no having friends or family living on the same street anymore. There is no more just dropping in unscheduled. But what about neighbors? It seems to me that the society is so transient now that neighbors are changing all the time. People move in and out every year as their rentals or leases end. 

The only semblance of the socialization of former days is when the power goes out for a hurricane or natural disaster. Then we realize that "hey the internet is down, I'm bored, let me actually talk to the people around me. Let's play a board game. Let's go for a walk." There's actually a little time to spend with one another without the next pressing thing weighing on our minds that has to be done. 

Bring Back Extended Family Life

We need to have a tribe of people to go through life with. We need our mom and dad, our aunts and uncles, our cousins, grandma and grandpa nearby ... heck, why not in the same neighborhood? We need extended family in our daily lives so we can share our hardships and burdens with people who love us unconditionally, or at least more unconditionally than anyone else. How many of our problems could be lessened if we could randomly walk to grandma's house in the afternoon and sit down for some brownies and a glass of milk? (Am I wrong???)

It's like the large trees in California which interlock roots with one another. They aren't able to grow that tall on their own, and so their root beds aren't necessarily deep but go wide, and they all interlock with one another. This is what our lives should be like. If I am sad or depressed, or lose my job, or have whatever sort of bad thing happen, that pain should be spread through my extended family all around me. But instead we bear that burden alone so often today.

Career is Not a Substitute for Family

Even your career, which you work so hard for and spend so much time on... it's not a substitute. One year at a teacher professional development conference the speaker said how much she sacrificed her free time on so many weekends, not being with her kids, so she could make sure she graded papers quickly to return to her students. This was presented as wisdom and dedication to the job. Well, pardon my French, but ... fuck that. I'm not missing out on time with my kids for anything. Your job will replace you within days if something happens to you. I have seen it with my own eyes, even if you have worked at a place for 40 years, once you leave you will be forgotten with weeks or months. Your family, though, if something happened to you, would never be the same. They would never forget you and would mourn you the rest of their lives. 

So let's rebuild our tribes. Let's build large families and facilitate the possibility to live near extended family again. This is the path to healing a lot of the loneliness and isolation that is plaguing our culture right now. We are not formless balls of clay just waiting to be molded however the latest tech companies use us to make their profits. We have a nature, and it is a social nature which requires daily face to face interaction with other humans that love us.