The Great Disconnection

How modern life has made empathy atrophy

As many of you know, I have been on the road for the past month.  It has given me a chance to see how life is in other countries, how it compares to what I know about life in America, and to think a little bit about some of the salient features of how we all, in the West, live today.

I was struck by how often I observed what I am going to call “disconnection”  – something standing between two people engaging with each other.  I am coming to think that this disconnection is deeply problematic, for many reasons, but most importantly because it discourages empathy, and less empathy leads the world to a very bad place.  (H/T to JA and DH for helping me think about this post.)

The picture above is a ChatGPT generated image based on Rodin’s famous sculpture LE PENSEUR (“The Thinker.”)  It was originally created for his masterwork THE GATES OF HELL based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”  At the Musee Rodin in Paris they suggest that it is Hades contemplating his domain.  It struck me that in modern times, Hades might be distracted by his smartphone.  Hence my prompt to ChatGPT.

The rise of the digital world has fostered or at least accelerated much of the disconnection in modern life.  For example, in the Gilded Age, wealthy people were supported by a large staff.  They had cooks to feed them.  Chauffeurs to drive them.  Porters, gardners, nannies, secretaries, etc. to help them with the details of life.  They employed all these people as their household staff.  Many of them lived in the household with their employers.  They had a direct, in-person, relationship with their service providers.  

This in-person contact made for a very different relationship with service providers than we have now.  Today, we have an app for most of this.  We are driven by Uber, fed by Grubhub, helped by Task Rabbit, and supplied by Amazon.  We see our children’s teachers a few times a year. ¹

You see the difference.  For us, today, service providers are utterly faceless.  We engage them with an app mostly on a one time only basis.  These aren’t people who we see every day, and live in our house, and whom we have a relationship with, and perhaps a sense of responsibility for.  We are utterly disconnected from them as human beings.  And as a result we feel very little empathy for the Uber driver, or the Grub Hub delivery person, or the people at the restaurant that make the food that Grub Hub delivers, or the Amazon warehouse worker, etc.

Another example.

I came across this graphic, showing how people spend their time has changed over the years 1930 to 2024. Click on the Video below.

Assuming this is accurate, as online time has grown, time spent with friends and family has shrunken.  While on the one hand we are highly connected to each other through apps and social media, on the other… we are not physically proximate.  It is very different.

As any salesperson will tell you, getting together with someone in-person, is very different than a message or even a phone call.  We get far more information from each other and are far more polite to each other, when we are in person.  Body language; Facial expressions;  Tone of voice;  It is well documented that people are far less empathetic online, than they are in real life.  This makes sense,  It is hard not to think of someone as a human being when they are in the same room as you, easy when they are just a handle posting something online.  I often see people of a certain generation together, but all on their phones.  Sometimes they share tidbits from Instagram or TikTok with each other by holding up their screens.  Sometimes they are alone together, focused on their phones and not the real world around them.

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, we all began to do more work from home.  My career was nearly entirely an in-office experience.  Work was work, but it was also social.  Many of my closest friends are former colleagues.  While Zoom is better at conveying some of the non-verbal information we lose from email or messaging, it is still a pale imitation of being in the same room together.  But remote work is definitely here to stay.

When we are together, the trend towards open office plans makes intimacy very difficult.  Again, I, and most of my colleagues, had offices, big and small, during most of my work years.  It allowed me to come to them, close the door, and talk about things that I could never bring up in an open office plan.  Or vice versa.  It is why we are still so close.  It isn’t clear to me that the current in-office experience encourages that kind of connection now.

The business world is disconnected in its very function.  Before Milton Friedman convinced everyone that a corporation’s only purpose was to increase shareholder value, companies considered various stakeholders: employees, local community, customers, etc. in deciding how to operate their business.  These are all people!  But shareholders?  They are essentially faceless, and often investment funds.  Now of course if you trace it all back, it is people, but management is pretty disconnected from many of them.  It’s all about numbers and share price.  The analysts who influence share price are real people, and management makes an effort to stay connected to them.  But they are a very limited and idiosyncratic population.

I often wonder how some Private Equity companies essentially loot their acquisitions, loading them up with debt, paying themselves fees and dividends, taking out sufficient cash for a great ROI, and then walking away when the company goes bankrupt.  I think the answer is that it is just numbers on a spreadsheet and they are disconnected from the actual human impact.

Another example.  (H/T HTM) Entertainment.  Netflix and the streaming services are clearly an alternative to going to a movie theater, or really any theater.  Movies in the theater are a social experience.  Movies at home… less so.  We all know someone who doesn’t go to sporting events or movie theaters because they prefer watching from their living room couch.  Maybe that someone is you?

All of this disconnection serves to undermine our affective empathy, our ability to feel what others feel.  I think it’s why many support Trump’s, in my view, heartless policies, to cut health care and food assistance for the poor, to split families up with deportation, to reduce overseas medical aid that will result in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, to… nevermind, you know.  Indeed, it does seem like Trump and Musk think empathy is for suckers.

I disagree.

Empathy is the core of civilization.  If we cannot feel for our fellow humans, if we cannot both understand them and care about them, we are living in a pretty horrible world.  Lives will be “nasty, brutish, and short.”  

The fix is simple.  Spend more time with people.  Stop bunkering down with your phone, and get out in the real world.  Connect!  Embrace the diversity of culture, life experience, and perspective that you can find out there.  You may not agree, or even like everything you find, but you will be engaging with real people, and when you do that you will be building empathy skills for yourself, and them.  Clearly we need more of that.

1. Nannies are still an in-person gig..