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Notes -
Maybe better suited to a Wellness Wednesday post, but I think there's a significant culture war angle here too.
To what extent is the current competency crisis in government, academia, etc. caused by an inability to spend time by oneself and actually put in the work? I've lamented in the past the decline in the social landscape, at least in the United States, but among the social environments that I have been finding recently in Baltimore, there seems to be almost a pathological fear of spending time alone in order to put in the work to actually improve at the thing that we're supposed to be doing together. For example, I've recently been going to a Spanish Happy Hour group at a brewery Thursday evenings after work. There are usually at least a few native speakers there, but aside from them, most people are at a quite elementary stage with the language, and aren't doing anything outside of the happy hour to improve. For some people this makes sense: they're mainly there to socialize not to learn, but for others, like the guy who organizes the group (Alex), the lack of progress is baffling to me. Alex started the group to improve his Spanish so he could communicate better with his girlfriend's family. And yet he seems unable to find the time to practice outside of happy hour (with reading/TV/shows/flashcards). I see the same thing with my new roommate, who is absolutely in love with the country and culture of Spain, and goes to happy hour with me, but won't put in the solitary effort to actually improve at the language. I see the same thing with running: people only going to run clubs to socialize and then expecting to run fast when they don't put in outside mileage on their own time, and even within the philosophy book club that I run where people seem unable to do the 30 pages of reading we discuss every other week.
I see this with myself as well, especially in my PhD. I know what I need to do to be successful: read the papers and do the experiments I have planned, but instead I find myself goofing off with labmates, texting/calling friends while I do busywork, or on this forum posting. Phones may have isolated in some ways, but at the same time, the current media environment seems to have created a constant yearning for companionship that I don't think is conducive to actually growing in competence and skill in areas outside of socialization.
I think a big part of this perception is that the bottom 80% were invisible in the past. I'm not saying these people's behavior has changes, I'm saying the median person in 1990 wasn't putting in much self-study effort to learn Spanish either. It's just that this person's behavior, habits, and life is invisible before social media and smartphones, unless he's in the army or some other unusually well-documented lifestyle- which is probably documented because it's unusually regimented, not because it's average.
I think, sure, there might be legitimate criticisms of smartphones- almost assuredly, there really are- but a lot of what gets blamed at them is very much not new. It's simply visible. Bush era Alex wasn't making much progress on communicating with his girlfriend's family(and Hispanics love it when gringos try to speak Spanish and are usually eager to help). He was just able to politely lie about it in a way nobody could call out.
It seems like this 'polite, public facing fiction' is the victim of social media and smartphones. How much of the recent decline narrative is driven by the destruction of these little white lies by instagramming everywhere?
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