Five Maddening Things About the Modern World

In this week's podcast we discuss five different problems facing the modern world, including the decline in critical thinking, political polarisation, the overreliance on technology and more, and how they are contributing to a rise in mental health problems. 

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant general adult psychiatrist with a sub-speciality in addictions who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

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Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Many of the podcasts and essays I've made tend to focus on individual responsibility, and how someone can make sense of and improve the psychology, ultimately to improve the quality of their lives. And this in general is how I would tend to work with my clients one on one. It's a major theme within most strands of psychotherapy. In one way or another. Psychotherapy 101 usually involves getting the client to think about how they can take more control or responsibility over their life, how they can change their approach, their mindset, their behavior in some way, and to see how that improves the quality of their life. I've spent my 20s and early 30s in a time where these kinds of notions have actually often been pretty unpopular. Ideas within self-help and self-development, while often having devoted cult like followings, are frequently demeaned by the mainstream as corny, unrealistic, a scam. People who subscribe to these schools of thought are seen as tryhard, or as people who don't actually change anything about their lives. It's been far more in vogue to criticize our circumstances, our governments, our societies, or our histories as a way of explaining the problems and discontents we might feel. I've always been uncomfortable with this way of looking at things because firstly, many aspects of living in modern society are frankly amazing and totally unprecedented in human history. And we would do well to spend five minutes a day just reflecting on that. And many people who indeed do criticise our society and culture do so without applying any historical context whatsoever, but also because taking a lens like this on the world can rationalize not taking responsibility for your life. The line of thought being something like, why should I try and improve my life if the game is rigged, if it's only cheaters and evil rich people who succeed? And I'm exaggerating here a bit for a fact, but these kinds of arguments are extremely common and dangerous. All of that being said, I'd like to discuss a few ideas on today's episode highlighting five aspects of the modern world and modern Western culture specifically, which are truly maddening and which could potentially be contributing to the rise of mental health problems within our culture. So, compared to other podcasts I've made, which are focused more on personal responsibility, this will hopefully feel a bit more cathartic and in a strange, dystopian kind of way, even a little fun. Because ultimately, what's the point in making podcasts about mental health problems if you can't have fun? And lastly, I wanted to make this podcast to exercise something I've decided to call historical humility, by which I mean the idea that contrary to how people may feel, we're not at the end of history. We're not in the utopia hundreds and thousands of years from now, assuming human society persists, many things about our time will stand out as absurd, and our time has many problems and flaws which are worth examining with this kind of objectivity, the kind of objectivity a historian might have to the extent that that's possible. To be honest, I came up with a lot more than five things about the world, which are maddening. Originally I was going to do ten because, in the words of the late, great George Carlin when speaking about the Ten Commandments, ten is a psychologically satisfying number, but I could actually only explain five aspects to the degree I'd like to without making the episode too long. One thing I'd like to mention again, I'm focusing on the Western world specifically. Not because I think it's more important or relevant necessarily, but it's because it's the part of the world I know the most about and feel the most qualified to make observations about. And lastly, I'd like to caveat this and say these are largely my personal observations I've made from looking at the culture, including journalism, politics, mainstream television and film. Some people in my personal life, a lot of the observations I make are not conclusively provable, although there is some compelling evidence for some of what I'm going to present. I would, of course, always welcome any and all feedback, including vehement disagreement. And you can do that via social media or as usual by emailing thinking my podcast at gmail.com. And if you're interested in having me speak as your team and your organization, as I have been doing recently, you can also use that same email address and just put speaking inquiry in the subject line, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Okay, so here we go. Five things about the modern world which are maddening. One, we have no unifying story. Since the decline of major religious institutions began to really accelerate in the 19th and 20th century. We have become, as a culture, increasingly disconnected from any unifying grand narratives or transcendent morality. Regardless of your stance on religion or religiosity. Major religions around the world like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so on are incredibly sophisticated systems of belief. They bind cultures together and they help people deal with the incredible difficulties of life. They are also responsible for ideas which have really helped our societies move forward, such as notions of forgiveness, the divine spark in everyone, the dangers of excessive attachment, just to name a few. Religion also provides, as I said earlier, a kind of transcendent morality. When people think of morality, they often think of restriction, of being told what to do, of their mother or father, shaking their finger at them in anger. But one of the really useful things about morality is it serves as a kind of behavioral filter. It takes an infinite quantity of possible actions and distills them down to just a few. For example, rather than lie about a difficult situation to your friend and there are an infinite amount of possible lies you could tell, just tell the truth. Life is complicated enough without having any kind of map as to how one should conduct themselves through the ethical dilemmas of life. And there are so many. A system of morality simplifies life. It carves out the relatively narrow road you should take towards a more positive outcome, and even helps us conceive of what a positive outcome in life might look like. What is an ideal worth even striving for? Whatever you think of religion, its place in providing grand narratives has been increasingly taken up by politics, activism, science, capitalist incentives and popular culture. There is an increasing sense. For example, there is an increasing sense, for example, that anything that has not been conclusively scientifically proven is no longer worth believing. Therefore, there is no more room for magic in the human experience. People don't worship at the altar of the local church. They instead worship at the altar of their favorite movie franchise, quoting it like someone else might quote the Bible. Various political movements, such as Nazism and Communism in the 20th century, and more recently, the so-called alt right or the more extreme social justice left in the 21st century, attracts followers with a kind of religious zeal. Using these examples is not to say there is a problem with politics, capitalism, popular culture, or science per se. The problem is these systems are taking the place of our transcendent belief systems. Capitalism and science, for instance, are engines of economic or intellectual progress. They are not intended to provide systems of belief or behavior for people to use across their lives. But in the absence of grand narratives, they and the other factors I've mentioned appear to have filled the vacuum, and this moves us swiftly to point to we are in a cultural civil war. Because of the absence of religion, political and social movements have ceased to merely be about what could be the best ways to run our society or improve people's quality of life. But now they've become existential struggles between right and wrong, between good and evil. The debate is no longer just about building better roads, or making economic progress, or having a sensible foreign policy, but on how we can achieve a righteous society. How we can potentially right the wrongs of the past. How we can defeat the forces of evil. And typically the forces of evil, are the people on the other side of the political aisle. Ideally, the political right and left would serve as rivals who are, of course, competing with each other, but who are also speaking to each other while hopefully working towards the same ends. The good of society. The system can work well because the right and left can provide different perspectives, often complementary perspectives on the same problem and each faction can keep the other in check and prevent it from going too far out of balance. Nowadays in the West, especially in countries like the US, the right and left appear to view each other as working towards fundamentally malicious aims, and therefore they see each other as enemies to be destroyed. Moreover, it now appears that everyone must hold a position on all political topics, whether it's Israel and Gaza, the US election, or abortion or climate change. Not having a strong political position on any given topic is seen as further evidence of your moral culpability. All of this seems to have generated a high level of paranoia and distrust within society, not just at the political level, but even between families and within friendships and relationships. Nowadays, it is common to assess someone's moral value based on their political beliefs and to disavow someone in your life if they hold an opinion which is deemed beyond the pale or outside the Overton window. And of course, all topics are now political. For example, your opinion on companies like Tesla or SpaceX, or on what diet you think people should eat and how easily transfigured into a political position. If I could take an interesting tangent. Yuri bismuth, a former KGB agent who defected to the West in 1970, actually said much of what is happening today is part of a strategy initiated by the Soviet Union to destabilize and weaken Western societies like the US. In interviews and lectures he gave in the 80s. He said ideological division could be used to damage a society through a process of demoralization and destabilization. He said, quote, it takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many is because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism or American patriotism. The result? The results you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the 60s, dropouts or half baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power and government, civil service, business, mass media, education system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you cannot change the basic perception and illogical behavior. In other words, in these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To rid society of these people, you need another 20 or 15 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of US society. End quote. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying necessarily that all of what's happened is part of some intentional plan put out by the Soviet Union. But what this example does highlight is just how much ideological division. And we are seeing this division nowadays can be so destructive to society and even cause a society to self-sabotage, just like a person can serve sabotage. Moving on to 0.3. Critical thinking is becoming taboo following from point two, because politics within our culture is increasingly seen as an existential struggle between right and wrong. It is becoming increasingly reprehensible to think critically or to look at things from a first principles point of view. Critical thinking is so refreshing because it involves questioning long held premises, reexamining and updating fundamental assumptions, and keeping in mind big picture goals. It is also, if executed correctly, a way of thinking that can ground when in reality rather than what one would wish reality to be. For example, if someone has social anxiety and difficulty making friends and they were to think critically about their problem, they might ask questions like why is it important for me to socialize and bring good friendships into my life? To what extent have I managed this in the past and what have I done previously? That's worked where the people make friends. How do people make friends? What could I do to lessen the amount of anxiety I feel in a social situation? What kind of help could I get to assist me with this problem and so on. If someone were to think uncritically about their problem, they may have thoughts like nobody likes me. Nobody will ever like me. I'm too afraid to go meet people. It feels too overwhelming to leave the house. It was always meant to be this way. Of course, these kinds of thoughts are extremely common and understandable, and they are most people's default thought patterns, often in response to common emotions like shame and embarrassment. But what's refreshing about first principles thinking is it can help us to cut through some of these more disabling emotions in the moment and look at the problem from a more objective and flexible stance. Because of this, critical thinking is generally antagonistic to dogmatic thinking, because dogmatic thinking usually relies on presenting people with a simplistic, incomplete, but also intriguing and emotionally evocative ideology to explain a complicated problem. And it rejects the re-examination of any fundamental assumptions or premises. For example, Marxism is rooted in the idea that history is driven by class struggle between the haves and the have nots, and that capitalism inherently leads to inequality and exploitation of the working class by the ruling class. An overly fanatical Marxist might see all social and political issues through this lens of class conflict, interpreting any economic inequality as the inevitable result of capitalism. For instance, they might argue that any economic crisis or unemployment is the direct result of capitalist exploitation. Without considering any alternative explanations like technological disruption or bad government policy, there would be unable to explain any of the benefits of capitalism, such as the rise in wealth globally, widespread technological innovation, improvements in hygiene and sanitation, improvements in general, quality of life. So you can see how limiting it can be to think dogmatically and through an ideology. But as we become a more moralistic and devoutly political society, as I explained in point two, critical thinking necessarily is becoming less acceptable and increasingly being viewed as either indecision, its own form of oppression, overly intellectual, or indeed just another form of stupidity. There are many examples of the diminishment of critical thinking in our culture, such as the rise of conspiracy theories around any and all topics, the dumbing down of our political dialogue, and falling educational standards, just to name a few. This problem is, of course, amplified by social media, which in its various formats like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok have algorithms which serve people what they are most interested in, which, due to certain aspects of human nature, tends to be highly negative. Emotionally provocative, relatively simplistic information. For the criticism of men, women and families. The relationships between men and women, and the formation of stable family units seems to be under constant cultural criticism. Mainstream Western culture does not offer men a clear path to recognize, develop, and integrate their aggressive impulses in a healthy way. Men are being told, as a result of historic injustice against women, that to be good moral men, that they should switch off or disconnect from their aggressive impulses to minimize or eliminate what could be called toxically masculine behavior. The problem is speaking psychoanalytic. Highly aggressive impulses are not just responsible for toxic behavior, which no doubt is and has been a problem, but is also necessary for basic tasks of life like building a career, defending those close to us, or becoming romantically attractive options to the opposite sex. All of these need the integration of aggression. Moreover, this approach of cultural shaming of aggression or assertiveness disproportionately affects men who are agreeable and men who aspire to be morally good. These are the kind of men who would be least likely to be a threat to women in the first place, and to stand the most to gain in their personal growth from an integration of their aggressive impulses. Such integration would also benefit the people around them, because men with a healthy, integrated aggression are stronger, more reliable, and better partners. Conversely, the minority of men who have a more psychopathic on empathic disposition may be 1 to 2% of men, and who are disproportionately responsible for loss of the harms against women and society, are less likely to be affected by shifting cultural norms and continue the same dysfunctional behavior, usually cloaking themselves with deceptive behavior or relying on the silence of others. Women, on the other hand, are being told by mainstream culture to prioritize career and independence above all else and that relationships and family should only be thought about once the former have been established. This kind of dynamic is understandable again in the context of historic injustices against women, and it's exacerbated by economic pressures which increasingly demand households have two incomes to survive financially. Extreme forms of feminism would even suggest that prioritizing having a family is, in fact, a regression to the injustices of patriarchy. This means that many women get through their 20s and 30s without a lot of relationship experience, and without a clear idea of what they want from a long term relationship. As a result, many women end up in difficult situations in their 30s and 40s when for different reasons, ranging from ongoing problems with dating to infertility. Women can struggle to have families. Women I know have told me they are almost ashamed of, or feel the need to suppress their desire to have a family in favor of conforming to the culture in some way. And this is all exacerbated by dating apps, where something like 60% of couples are actually meeting, and dating apps, which, aside from contributing to the degeneration of people's social skills, has created a new kind of dating inequality. While in the beginning we thought dating apps would be an easy way for everyone to find their perfect match, stats released by dating apps consistently suggest that something like the top 60 to 80% of women tend to match with the top 15 to 20% of men. This dynamic means the bottom 80 to 85% of men feel dating is very difficult or impossible. While most women can date easily enough, but are in a perpetual struggle to get into a committed relationship, to get the satisfying relationship they really want. Overall, this dynamic doesn't really benefit anyone except a small proportion of men who are particularly successful at dating in public. Discussions about gender routinely have men and women pitted against each other. Online movements, like the so-called red pill, often consists of men talking about women as the enemy in some way, as sexual objects to be manipulated or as judgmental adversaries. Political movements like feminism often portray men as unjust, power hungry, and tyrannical, typically taking examples from that minority of psychopathic men and over generalizing to all men. Current mainstream movies often present men as bumbling idiots, while women are illustrated as self-righteous beacons of morality similar to what's happened at the political level. We've forgotten that men and women are on the same team and are supposed to be working together, that men and women have strengths and weaknesses which complement each other. Instead, men and women are being pitted against each other in some kind of moral struggle at best to be distrusted or at worst defeated. In terms of family life, many films and television shows over the past two decades have portrayed families as stifling, restricting systems which suppress an individual's growth and freedom. And while it's no doubt true that having a family requires immense sacrifice of freedom. What these portrayals often leave out is just how fulfilling family life can be, how often it's an immense source of meaning for people, and how difficult and empty people often find life without the support or closeness of a family. I can hear that this sounds all a little extreme, but there is quite a lot of evidence that suggests there is something deeply wrong with how men and women are relating to each other. Marriage rates are declining generally in the West. The average age of first marriage is increasing. Young people are reporting being in relationships less and less, and are reporting progressively that they're becoming less and less sexually experienced. In terms of birth rates, the US birth rate has been in decline for several decades. In 2022, the birth rate was 11 births per 1000 people, a significant drop from previous decades. The US fertility rate in 2022 was around 1.6 children per woman, which is below the replacement level, which would be 2.1. Europe has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 2021, the average birth rate across the European Union was 9.1 births per 1000 people, even lower than the US. Contrary to what people thought in the 90s, where we were primarily concerned with overpopulation, there is now a serious concern about how Western countries are going to continue with such declines in birth rates and an ageing population. This dynamic puts serious pressures on a country with things like labor shortages, increased healthcare costs and the sustainability of social security. With dire consequences like this looming on the horizon, you can make a strong argument that it's important we move away from seeing issues around gender as merely a power struggle between men and women because, after all, any healthy relationship between a man and a woman you can think about is not fundamentally characterized as a power struggle. But instead, we should try and figure out what's the best way for men and women to relate to each other, and what's a way that's beneficial for both, but also for children and for families. Five. We are living in a simulacrum. When I interviewed Ian Gilchrist, the psychiatrist and the author of the book The Master and His Emissary, which is a book about the differences between the left and right brain, he said, we are living in a simulacrum. The definition of the word simulacrum is something like likeness or semblance. It's a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word first surfaced in the English language around the 16th century. Used to describe something like a statue or a painting. But by the late 19th century it gathered the secondary association of inferiority. Now it's an image without substance or qualities of the original. Our various technological innovations have created a world which is full of simulacra. And here are some examples. Chatting with people on dating apps instead of going on a date. Socializing on Instagram or WhatsApp threads instead of hanging out with friends. Teleconferencing instead of going to the office. Using pornography instead of having sex. Using drugs instead of going on a real adventure. The problem with these various simulacra is complex. While clearly not the real thing, they are generally just about close enough and often succeed in achieving the basic functions of what they're trying to imitate. You can indeed get a work meeting done online well enough, and you can communicate with your friends, and you can get some kind of romantic or sexual experience online. Moreover, these simulacra are often taking the most exciting part of the real life experience and amplifying it a thousand fold, while at the same time minimizing the investment or the patience required on the part of the consumer. For example, with drugs like cocaine, you can get a dopamine high immediately. You might need to run for an hour or walk up a mountain to get a high like that, not artificially. Similarly, with pornography or dating apps or websites like OnlyFans, you can have some kind of sexual contact with far more people, far more rapidly than you could in real life, but again with much less effort or investment. So much like junk food is a strange distortion of normal whole food. These technologies can simultaneously amplify the excitement of an experience while minimizing the friction that would normally be required to get that excitement. But just like with junk food, we can feel after using these technologies too much for too long, that there is some really important nutrition in real life experiences that we're missing out on. Not only that, but we are learning more and more that excessive use of technology can lead to something called dopamine desensitization, which means you actually become less able to get happiness and excitement from real life experiences. And if you want to learn more about that, you can read the book Dopamine Nation by Anna Lemke. We actually had on the podcast last year. Humans have a habit of building things without really anticipating what the consequences will be. This new world we've built is extremely comfortable and frictionless, yet we did not anticipate just how much friction and the ability to deal with discomfort is a necessary component of human sanity and thriving psychologically. Being ensconced in comfort is making us increasingly disconnected from reality, and consequently, our emotions are increasingly volatile and un calibrated. Again, this sounds extreme, but the best evidence for this appears to be the rise of mental health problems in young people, as shown by the work of people like Jonathan Haidt and others, including mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, but also video game addiction. Pornography addiction. The rise of so-called deaths of despair, which are often due to things like drug overdose, alcoholism and suicide. The rise of loneliness in the UK, loneliness is seen as such a problem that we've actually had a minister for loneliness since 2018, and also the decline in relationships, sexual experience, marriage and birth rates. As I mentioned in the last section. So those are the five aspects I'd like to discuss in depth today. There are a few honorary mentions I might explore in a later episode. Things like the fact that our work is becoming increasingly abstract and bureaucratic, and people feel like they have less and less meaningful impact on the world. The advent of AI, which has a demoralizing impact on the human spirit, the fact that our unprecedented ability to communicate has meant we now also have an unprecedented ability to receive bad news on a scale which is kind of incomprehensible. And the problems with our food landscape, the obesity epidemic and metabolic problems. So to conclude, this was actually a lot less fun than I thought it was going to be. This talk, as I mentioned in the beginning, is not intended to show our time as uniquely bad or difficult. As I said at the beginning, there's much to be grateful about. Neither is it to serve as a justification to abdicate responsibility for your life. But it was intended as an exercise in so-called historical humility to show that we are in a particular time in history that any time in history has the weird and wonderful things about it, but also the idiosyncrasies and the huge problems and flaws. I'm not going to be offering any concrete prescriptions for the problems I mentioned today, but I do think that understanding the problems of our time is the crucial first step towards managing them, at least in the life of any particular individual, but also on the scale of a culture or society. This is the overarching principle that reality orientation is very important to mental health. The more you become disconnected from reality, the more likely you are to have mental health problems, which then further disconnect you from reality and so on and so forth in a vicious cycle. I don't believe any of these problems are irreversible, but they do require a clear understanding, strong intention and consistent action. And perhaps we'll discuss some solutions in a future podcast. I hope you found the descriptions of these problems useful, or at least thought provoking. And as I said, you can send any and all feedback to Thinking Mind podcast at gmail.com. And if you'd like me to speak at your organization or for your team, as I've been doing more in person talks recently, you can use the same email address, but put speaking inquiry in the subject line and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for listening.