Hi friend,

It’s been a minute! The last time I wrote to you here was __, and since then, it feels like so much has changed. The beginning of the year always leads me to be very introspective. My thoughts consist of:

What did I accomplish last year? What do I want to accomplish this year? What are some areas where I struggled, and where can I improve in ? What do I want to change this year?

During this period of introspection, I find myself learning a lot about my own thoughts, personality, psyche, and body. As someone with anxiety, it’s almost second nature for me to tamp down any introspection out of a sense of safety, but this is the one time of year I welcome it. There have been a multitude of topics on my mind, some I hope to share with you in a new video soon, and others I’d like to share with you in this newsletter.

The Loneliness Epidemic

I keep coming back to this central question in my head: “Why are we so lonely?” I remember distinctly having a conversation with a friend of mine about how I can count on two hands (I’m over-exaggerating here, but not by much) the amount of interaction I’ve had with my neighbors. Why are we so afraid of simply talking to others? Why don’t we have simple little conversations with those around us?

If you look online, there are tons of articles and blog posts about people from all over discussing how the pandemic ruined their social skills. And while I think there’s some backing to that, I don’t think that’s the whole story. In the absence of some esoteric bullshit about the state of society or poetic waxing about how we need to disconnect, I’ll spell it out plainly:

Social media commodified interaction and attention.

I wish I could say that I remember a ton from my early days on Facebook and Instagram, but I was too busy being a middle school student and posting cringe-worthy memes and lyrics on my Facebook wall. (I don’t think I’ve uttered those two words in probably 10 years…) But, what I do remember is that it felt more fun. It felt more interpersonal and socially engaging than the hyper-algorithmized platforms we have today.

As phones got better and bigger, slowly but surely, social media built up this metaphorical wall around us. Instead of socializing in public, we could post to our feeds about what we’re doing, when we’re doing it. What’s the point of meeting up with some friends to chat about your recent vacation, when you can post a 15-photo highlight reel instead?

This metaphorical wall makes it even harder to interact with others in our inner circle, let alone the stranger in the grocery store. And now that the wall is there, we can spend our time scrolling through feeds, interacting with content – creating a thinly veiled “connection” with the outside world.

But it’s all a mirage. You’re not interacting with the world – you’re interacting with a bunch of binary 1s and 0s on a data center server somewhere in the world. Sure, the 1s and 0s may represent real human beings, but is that really interaction? It’s definitely not interpersonal interaction.

Recently, Grace and I had an interaction with another couple at Half Price Books, albeit small, that I’ve thought about a lot. We were walking into the board game section (we’ve been on the hunt for Catan for cheap), and Grace says to me, “Let’s see if they have Catan.”

The woman looked at us and said, “Good luck, I think I’ve only ever seen it once. However, it is totally worth the full price! We love it and have so much fun.”

Following that, we shared a couple of moments of banter and a little bit of laughter. I had never met these people, and there’s a good chance I will never see them again. But interactions like this fuel me. And it became apparent that that’s what we’re so desperately missing in our modern, digital world.

What do we do when the world around us is so consumed by our devices and technology that our social skills degrade?

Smile and say hello or nod when you make eye contact with others, compliment the barista’s or server’s attire, tattoo, or hair. Help the short, old lady at the grocery store get something off the top shelf, ask someone about their hobbies. Get out of your home and interact with other humans and take the social fabric back from the hands of social media companies. It might just change your life.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m excited to share this next chapter of my life as it’s being written.

We’ll talk soon,

Drew