No. 62: Is Everyone Getting Dumber?

The Question We’re Not-So-Secretly Asking

I hope not, but I’m afraid so.

That’s the answer to the question a slew of magazines posed recently — to which the consensus is YES, with a resounding amount of data.

But evidence aside, I’m skeptical of the conclusions. We might be less intellectual as a global culture — worse at reading, math, fact-learning — but the rise of artificial intelligence compensates for it. All of us are as smart as the genius of our phones, as long as we learn how to ask the right questions. (It should be a required class from 1st grade on: “How to Ask.” Without it, you’re utterly ill-equipped for the future.) But with that skill intact, there is the sense we don’t need to read and memorize and think the way we used to. At least not to be generally functional in a future society.

I don’t think we’re ‘dumber’ now, then. Not if we consider smartphone brains an extension of our own. Yes, we are most certainly lacking in attention and reasoning skills. Which is, on the one hand, rewarded by quick-clip and bullet-point culture, but on the other is slowly snowballing us towards disaster. I think of lifeguards, cops, air traffic controllers, safety inspectors, security guards, all checking their phones just a little too often, and the sum effect of these millions of seconds of attention lost will be a number of catastrophic accidents that could have been preempted. This, I think, is assured.

But “dumber” to me means something different.

Two things we used to have in abundance, now depleted:

1) Experience

2) Self-esteem

Starting with #1. And let’s use sex to talk about it.

Growing up, bodies were bodies. Like real ones. But now, everything is digital sexiness. My phone, no matter how much I try to reconfigure the algorithm, throws me nothing but hot guys, all of whom look the same and are selling online fitness packages but are really trying to sell their OnlyFans, with the expressed intent of making you feel like their beauty is accessible to you. At least in Phone Land. From what I can tell, most even offer to respond to your DM’s for an extortionate fee each month, with these messages back to you generated by an artificial-intelligence bot that scrubbed all their old text messages to learn their tone.

In other words, a ‘crush’ to a modern teenager might be on someone who they pay to answer their messages with ghostly shadows of that person’s real relationships that have since been discarded.

Echoes of bodies, romance, sex, instead of the real thing.

My friend Memo pointed out something at once obvious and so remarkable I made him explain it twice. When we were young, we knew beauty was rare. And this was because we learned that law of nature first-hand. In a class of 100 kids at school, there might be 3 beautiful girls everyone wanted, Memo noted — but there was an understanding that competition was fierce and those girls weren’t for the rest of “us”… meaning basically everyone. They simply weren’t accessible to 99.9% of the population. And you accepted it, the way you accepted not being able to get a pony for Christmas or the fact you might shoot a few hoops on the weekend with friends, but that didn’t open a path to being in the NBA.

If you did end up getting a girl to date, though, any girl, you were relieved and honored that you’d survived the true Hunger Games, and yes, you might wish you were the rarified guy who could attain impossible beauty, but reality was real and you were happy with what you had.

Until you got a smartphone, circa 2010.

Then even if you had a girlfriend, your phone told you over and over that you were surrounded by an abundance of perfect faces and perfect bodies and if you just worked hard enough — bought that online training package from the sexy influencer, got that nose job from the Turkish surgeon, jacked up your body with steroids and peptides and silicone — you’d cheat the Law of Nature and join the land of perfect 10s.

This is the world Suzanne Collins imagined: a Capital where everyone looked warped because beauty had become too accessible, so the standards changed to keep it rarified and the cycle continued until the snake started eating its tail.

The result, of course, is resentment. Whether you find a mate or whether you don’t. Because your phone is always telling you that you can and should have someone better, hotter, younger — meaning the experience of romance, the fumbling messiness of learning to engage with real bodies, real people is replaced by a strange, restless, digital yearning.

Which brings me to that #2 we seem to be missing — self-esteem.

My partner mentions an ex-basketball coach who coached for decades, before he started to see an alarming trend of parents interfering in what had been a tried-and-tested process. The main thrust of this being that parents wanted to protect their kids from hardship, disappointment, and failure and sugarcoat and shortcut their path to success. As the coach put it, the parents insisted on building “their child’s self-esteem”. The equivalent of a participation ribbon having as much value as the champion’s trophy.

But this is where getting dumber comes in. Because if we do shortcut the path to self-esteem by trying to ‘mandate’ it or artificially pump up a kid, without actually making them build the skills behind it, that self-esteem actually causes anxiety. They’ve been told they’re amazing, awesome, special but when they realize they’re not even good, they panic even more, afraid to fail at the deepest, most existential level, because now it means everything their parents and teachers and adults told them about themselves might not be true. Trying to shortcut that child’s challenges just made those challenges 100,000x worse.

Worse still for the parents! Because the parents faultily believe the hallmark of good parenting is to snow-plow obstacles out of their child’s path and make their kids’ lives better, happier, easier. This might give the parents a fleeting hit of self-esteem — but it ends up robbing the child of their own. Day by day, the result of this self-esteem trade-off is both the child’s and parent’s lives get harder: the capabilities, confidence of the child plummet, replaced by anxiety, which then feeds the parent’s anxiety and desire to snow plow even more.

Are we getting dumber? It’s more like we’ve forgotten what makes us good at being human. Doing. Experiencing. Failing. Living!

Confidence, self-esteem, the feeling of inner and outer sexiness, all the things we want as adults, comes only by setting goals for ourselves, big and small, and going after them. Yes, we bomb miserably a whole lot of the time, but even that builds mettle and toughness, and eventually when we do score a few wins, our inner self-reflection looks a whole lot more beautiful in the mirror. So beautiful that when those digital beauties come calling for you, you
can roll your eyes and say “Sorry, I’m out of your league.”

YOUNG WORLD is my manifesto to building self-esteem and experience — not just in teenage readers, but every reader who feels like they had their experience shortcut. Maybe that’s why I was so messianic about the book in the nearly 3 years it took to bring it to life. It was my secret way of filling in the holes of my own self-worth that I was missing. Writing the book healed me along the way and I can only hope will heal some of you too.

In the meantime, next time a Hot Guy or Girl shows up on your feed without your permission, asking if you want to know their secrets, just hit the settings on the post and look for the button that says… ’Not Interested.’

Your turn.

Are we getting dumber? Smarter? In what ways?

Until next week —