What Happens When A Society Has No Memory?

What happens when a society has no memory? When every issue feels just as important to every other issue? When we are so over-saturated with conflict and controversy that we lose the ability to discern real problems from surface-level irritations? In this episode of The Reality Check Podcast, I break down how technology, the news cycle, and social media is warping the social fabric of our society and creating a never-ending roller coaster of conflict - all for profit.

Transcript

Welcome to the Reality Check Podcast.

I'm Zachary Phillips.

What happens when a society has no memory?

When big issues are given the same weight as small issues?

When we frit around between the next thing and the next thing and the next thing without ever really fleshing out or dealing with or addressing anything?

I fear that that society is the one we're living in right now.

I remember when I was younger and 9-11 happened.

It was a catastrophic,

Terrible and momentous event that shaped the world for literally 20 years,

Right?

Longer.

It's going to continue,

Obviously,

Ongoing.

But it was a major factor.

I remember when I was younger,

Things would happen.

Controversies.

Leaders would be caught out doing things.

Business leaders,

Political leaders,

Famous people,

Whatever.

There would be consequences for actions.

There would be issues that need to be addressed.

Things.

Society and people seemed to care ongoing about things.

But the problem is,

Or it feels like it at least,

That that no longer happens.

If we think recently,

There's just been the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

By almost all accounts,

It was botched terribly.

Before the US went in,

The Taliban was in control.

The US spends 20 years,

A trillion dollars,

And countless lives lost.

The Taliban is still in control.

It's a catastrophe.

The evacuation was a disaster.

People are falling off planes.

It was terrible,

Right?

But flash forward a week later,

Just a week,

And no one seems to care.

Sure,

There's patches of people.

The historians,

The people that are a bit into politics,

The humanitarians,

They all remember and they all care,

But in general,

The population just couldn't care less.

We have,

As I addressed a little bit in the previous podcast,

The Dave Chappelle controversy,

Talking about trans rights and speaking out and the Netflix and all of that sort of stuff.

That seemed to stay in the news cycle for longer.

That's sort of shocking to me that a literal war with people dying,

Families pulled apart,

A trillion dollars spent,

Countries disrupted,

Thousands,

If not millions of people directly involved,

Right?

Cross countries.

It's already out of the news cycle.

A comedian with a controversial Netflix show stays in the media cycle for longer.

Now,

Don't get me wrong.

Both of those issues that are raising are important.

War,

Death is very important.

Trans rights,

Minority rights,

Free speech,

All of the stuff that the Dave Chappelle controversy has brought up are also very important.

The thing is,

Give each of these issues a couple of weeks and they're gone.

It feels like the only thing that has stuck around has been COVID.

The reason it's stuck around is because it's continually attacking people,

But even with COVID,

It's dying down,

Right?

I just fear that we're sort of moving to a place where we have no collective memory,

Where things can happen.

It's this flash in the pan moment and then it's gone.

I used to be surprised at the Trump phenomena.

How could a man that's always putting his foot in it,

Always saying highly controversial things,

Things that 20,

30 years ago,

One of them would have just gotten him completely out of the race.

His own party would have shunned him.

It would have just been an absolute just shutout.

Nowadays,

He can just continue or was able to just continue.

It didn't really seem to matter.

Even the Jan 6 march on the Capitol,

The Capitol protests,

All of that sort of stuff,

The insurrection or the however you want to frame it,

Right?

It's come and gone.

Someone like a Trump can say and do what he's done nowadays because we just don't remember.

He says something,

It flares up,

And then it disappears.

Then we look on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

It's like as a society,

We've all got ADHD.

We've got an inability to focus or we've got a selective point of focus.

It's like,

Yes,

All of that stuff is happening,

But I'm just going to stick in my lane and look over here and just focus on this thing.

Oh,

There's controversy.

Cool.

That sucks.

Now,

Back to my focus.

We've never as a species existed with such technology.

The technology that we're using to listen to this podcast right now,

Social media in general,

It's so easy to feel like everything will be okay or fine or just continue as normal,

But how can that be true when we've got an abnormal introduction of technology?

Now,

By abnormal,

I don't mean necessarily bad.

I just mean it's abnormal as indifferent from the normal.

As a species,

As a society,

We've never in our existence been this connected.

We've never had this much access to instant communication,

To instant gratification,

To the ability.

We've never had such an ability to eliminate all forms of contemplation or thought.

It is possible to wake up and just flit around between social media,

To chuck a podcast on,

To listen to music,

To watch a YouTube video all day,

Every day.

It's possible to go days,

Weeks,

Months without any prolonged silence.

Boredom comes,

Bam,

We run from it.

Why?

Because the technology enables us to do so.

We didn't evolve to exist in a world with such temptation.

I'm just wondering what that does to us.

I think it's fairly obvious.

It's obvious based – it leads back to what I've started this podcast with,

This idea that we don't really have a collective memory.

We don't seem to care.

It's things that are bad,

Quote-unquote,

Get highlighted.

People make some clickbait dollars,

And then it's forgotten.

Then the next thing comes up,

And the next thing,

And the next thing.

We're simultaneously living in this rollercoaster ride of up and down,

Up and down,

Up and down.

This thing is the worst thing.

Then the next thing is the worst thing,

And then the next thing is the worst thing.

We're almost simultaneously apathetic and overly empathetic at the same time.

It just blows our ability to realize the importance of anything because everything seems like the worst thing in the world.

Everything seems like the worst thing ever.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan,

That's bad.

It's just as bad as Dave Chappelle's comedy special,

Which is just as bad as a politician's sex scandal,

Which is just as bad as global warming,

Which is just as bad as a sports player cheating on his wife,

Right?

Whatever.

Put simply,

Some things are worse than other things.

Obviously,

It depends on how you define worse,

But a war that rips families apart,

Destroys societies,

That goes on for years,

Has a different impact than a cheating sports player,

Which has a different impact to the impact of trans rights,

Which has a different impact to a politician's statements.

That's undeniable,

But it doesn't feel that way.

I think it doesn't feel that way because everyone has the ability to scream and yell and cry as loud as they like on social media.

The social media algorithms and the people making money off websites and clickbait articles and selling products,

Including the social media companies,

But everyone that's on there,

Myself included,

We all benefit from engagement.

We all benefit from connection.

It's in the interests of the social media companies to push and push and push and push controversy.

This,

Everything,

The next thing,

The next controversy is the worst thing ever.

When COVID was just coming out,

It was the worst thing ever.

Now,

We've gotten used to COVID,

Quote-unquote,

But it's all about the conspiracies and the anti-vaxxers and the left versus the right and all of that sort of stuff.

It's all a game.

It's all a mirage.

It's all just a trap.

It traps people because we think about it,

We talk about it,

We post about it.

Those posts cause more conflict,

More thinking about it,

More talking about it,

More posting.

It spreads.

It literally is viral,

Probably more viral than COVID.

We're so trapped by this that we don't even realize how trapped we are.

There's suggestions that our phones are listening to us or that they're tracking where we are and what we purchase and comparing that against the people that are close to us and what they're purchasing and what they're talking about and what we're talking about.

If you share a post online,

If you take a picture and share the picture online,

If you write something,

If you comment,

If you just look over an image for a long time,

If you screen capture it,

All of this is data that is being collected,

Fed into algorithms,

And then pushed back at you and the people near you.

The feeds that you're getting,

What you're seeing on your social media every day is uniquely geared to you.

It's uniquely designed to attract and attack you,

To make you feel obliged to comment and connect and just keep coming back.

There's the anecdote that the only people that call their customers users are drug dealers and social media companies because it is like a usage.

How hard is it to not check your social media when you wake up and in between activities and just before you go to bed?

It's so tempting.

I struggle with it.

I'm talking this and I'm the biggest hypocrite ever because I'm all over social media and I engage with it as well and I hate myself for engaging with it because I look at it and I'm like,

If this was a cigarette,

Just play the game in your mind.

Imagine that every time you touch your phone to go on social media,

You're instead having a cigarette or taking a shot of alcohol or shooting up or whatever your drug of choice is,

Eating a chocolate.

How much of an addict would you feel?

Then the next step is if you were using that drug all of those times,

What would that do to your mental and physical and social and financial health?

What would it do to your mental state and your thought processes?

Then the obvious conclusion to that is what does social media,

The amount of use that you're using do to your thought processes?

What does it do to your social connections?

It's worrying on a deep level because not only is there nothing we can individually really do about it,

But it's technology shaping behavior.

It's corporations shaping behavior.

That to me,

It's like there's no one with a soul.

There's no human.

There's no benevolent person behind it all.

It's driven for profit.

Profit doesn't care about your feelings.

Profit doesn't care if you show something online,

If you're showing something online and you comment and then a friend of yours sees that comment and the friend of yours sees it,

Not every friend of yours will see it,

But only the people that care about that issue will see it,

That have engaged with you in the past.

The algorithms think that you're going to engage with your comment.

They see it.

Now,

You've probably had this happen.

You make a comment and then two or three or four friends jump in and they're arguing in response to your comment.

Some of them are agreeing,

Some of them are disagreeing.

Fair enough.

It seems like we're just having a lively discussion.

What does that do to your relationships?

Part of me wonders whether it's a good thing to have such ability to communicate and connect.

Now,

I want to caveat this.

I believe in open and honest communication with the people around you,

The people you live with,

The people you want to work with and be partners with and all of that sort of stuff,

Your family,

Your close friends.

I believe that it should be done as much as possible face-to-face,

Spoken language with tone,

With body language,

All of that good stuff.

If I post something online and I just use my text response,

It's very hard to get a nuanced response.

I post something,

This is my reality.

When I post something and someone disagrees,

I instantly feel a bit attacked.

It's like,

Hey,

I feel attacked and then I think about that person,

That person is attacking me.

Now,

When I respond,

Am I responding with the kindness and appreciation and love and all of that stuff that I would in person or am I just responding offhand based on what they said?

We don't always respond to social media comments and we don't always post with our best selves in our best foot forward.

We might just respond flippantly.

The problem is those comments are now up forever and they're being read.

They're being read by multiple people.

If I was going to have a discussion with you about a controversial topic,

One that we're both not 100% sure on,

One that you might have strong opinions on or you might not,

Whatever,

I would want to have it with you in person and with the ability to clarify and discuss in real time.

Importantly,

I wouldn't want to have it with hundreds or potentially thousands of people eavesdropping,

With them having the ability to jump in and yell support from my or your point of view.

Think about it.

Let's say you're in support of leaving Afghanistan as it happened and I'm not,

Or you absolutely love Dave Chappelle and I hate him and I'm on the side of the trans or whatever.

It doesn't really matter,

But you've got a strong opinion going one direction.

I've got a strong opinion on the opposite direction.

It's feasible and believable and it has happened that in real life,

You can have these sort of discussions and a resolution is made.

We both learn.

We both grow or we agree to disagree and our feelings aren't hurt.

We leave and go,

Yes,

That was a lively discussion.

I agree with Zach,

But I don't agree with him on these points and we can continue that later on.

What would happen if I was to scream and yell and then the next person and all the comments and all those sort of things were to scream and yell at you as well?

If I made a point and then five people jumped on board with my point and then you were to respond and five people jumped on board supporting your point,

Eventually it becomes this screaming match between us all and there is no resolution.

You go down more your side,

I go down more my side.

We both polarize.

What does that do to our relationships?

Then I'd like to sort of just consider the extrapolation of that.

That's happening between you and me,

But then that's happening between you and everyone else and everyone else and everyone else globally all the time continually.

When the next thing pops up in the news media,

It pops up,

We talk about it,

We yell about it,

We disagree,

Ruins the relationships,

Earns the people making money off it some money and then it falls away and then the next one comes back up and the same process happens again and again and again and again.

What does that do to society?

I guess we're going to find out and I don't know.

It's a terrifying proposition.

Anyway,

Yeah,

Cheers.

Okay,

So I was just about to post this podcast and upon re-listening,

I realized I didn't really leave any options of how to combat all of this.

I didn't really give you any ideas of what I do to manage this.

Part of it is just an awareness.

If we can be aware of the impact of social media and news cycles and all of that sort of stuff on our mental state,

That's a start because once you start seeing the trap,

You can start taking steps to avoid it or escape it.

Just do yourself a favor and take a step back and rather than just instantly engaging and posting and sharing and writing,

Just scroll through your Facebook like it was a discovery,

Like it was you found this artifact from an alien species or another animal or some sort of other person that you're sort of snooping around with.

Just take a look at what pops up.

Remember,

It's not yours.

It's not someone talking to you.

It's not things being projected at you in this sort of little game you're playing with yourself.

It's just something to look at.

What hopefully that will do is it'll help you to detach.

It's no longer your feed.

It's a feed to observe.

That detachment will show you what you're being seen.

You're not to respond,

Not to act,

But just see what's being shown.

Have a look through the comments.

See the sponsored posts.

See the recommended posts and just look at it.

Just think to yourself,

What does this mean?

That's one response.

The second response I would suggest would be to practice meditation,

Mindfulness.

I meditate daily.

The reason I do that is multiple reasons,

But it helps put you into the present moment,

Being here right now.

What it also does is it causes you to have to spend time in silence.

Honestly,

It's a lifesaver because it gives you some time for your brain to settle.

It puts you back into a state that we may more naturally have evolved to live in.

If the prospect of sitting in silence scares you or you think you couldn't do it,

Those feelings are something that you need to investigate.

What does it mean that you can't sit in silence?

What does it mean that the potential idea of a couple of minutes,

Five,

10 minutes alone with your thoughts will be terrifying or overwhelmingly boring or completely confronting or just intolerable for whatever reason?

What does that actually mean for you?

That to me is something worth investigating.

Like I said,

I meditate every day.

I've written a book on meditation.

I'll put a link down below.

It's called Mindfulness,

A guidebook to the present moment.

In that book,

I share.

It's basically an introduction.

A lot of meditation instructors go quite deep quite quickly,

And it can make the beginner meditator become overwhelmed or feel bogged down in mumbo jumbo.

With that book,

It'll give you a good introduction.

I'll put a link to that,

And I'll put a link to my Insight Timer,

Which is a meditation app profile.

From there,

It's like,

Once again,

A basic introduction that's sort of audio instructions.

I'll chuck a link to my Skillshare courses on meditation as well.

My hope is with those resources,

You'll be able to get started and basically feel comfortable sitting in silence because the more you sit in silence,

The more you see the present moment as it is for what it is.

The more you start seeing your emotions,

Not as something that takes you and has you,

But as something that is just appearing,

Just like another sound or a sensation or an object outside of you.

Then we'll relate that back to our social media use or our online presence or even our responses to big or small things.

It allows us to not get fully involved in our emotionality.

We might get angry with a comment,

But we can see that anger is something separate from us.

Then we take it right back and we look at the overall problems.

What is a big problem here?

Okay,

Well,

A big problem might be the Afghanistan thing.

A big problem for us might be the Dave Chappelle thing.

A big problem might be the politicians or the cheating sports star,

Whatever it is for you.

The point is is when we're no longer as attached to our emotions,

When we're no longer as trapped by this up and down rollercoaster ride that's being pushed by social media just to make a dollar off our rage,

We will start to see the things that we actually care about.

Then we can start taking action on those things we actually care about.

There's this term that I just want to finish off discussing is called compassion fatigue.

There's so many things that we need to care about in the world that it's hard to be compassionate for anything.

It's hard to care for anything because all of these sources,

All of these causes,

All of these everythings need attention.

They rightly do,

But if we were to split our focus and our resources,

And by resources I mean time and money and focus,

If we were to split all of that between them all,

Nothing would get done,

At least in our little world.

Nothing would be accomplished because there's just too much and we have too little of all of those things.

But if we can detach and step back and mindfully observe all of the different problems and find one that we both care about and that we can address in some way through our time,

Through our activism,

Through our presence,

Through our money,

Whatever it is,

If we find something we care about that we can impact,

Then we can push for it.

The only problem is we need to then consider mindfully a better way to push for that activism.

I was talking to my mum and she watches the news quite often.

I don't.

I tend to avoid it.

I just don't like those updates.

It's the same thing,

This exact discussion,

Right?

And she was sort of saying that given the fact that I have a growing audience with my writing with the podcast,

Surely I should be up to date with things.

Surely it's important that I comment.

And I highlighted this argument that everyone's commenting on everything and it sort of gets whitewashed.

What I care about is the meta issues,

What the platforms are doing to us,

What the cycles are doing to us,

What the money and the clickbait and all of that stuff is doing to us as a society.

And she understood.

But she did highlight something.

She does listen to the news,

But in listening to the news,

She also listens to local news.

And there was something that came up in her local area,

A conservation project that she was passionate about.

And she got on board and she wrote the local members and sort of lobbied and all of that stuff and actually made a change so that the conservation effort that she cared about went through.

And it made me think,

Okay,

Maybe I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater,

Right?

Maybe I'm,

By trying to avoid all of the news and sort of get out of this whole cycle,

I'm actually missing something that I can do.

My local area,

The place that I live does have issues that need addressing.

And because I'm living in it,

I can directly see it and influence it,

Right?

If you go back to a sort of an evolutionary perspective,

It's very hard to imagine the impact on billions of people around the world.

It's very hard for me to imagine the plight of someone in a country across the other side of the world that speaks a different language that I've never visited and I never plan on visiting and I don't know anyone from,

Right?

It's very hard to put myself in those shoes and think globally.

We evolved as monkeys in a tribe of 150 members or whatever.

The idea of civilization and megacities and all of this sort of stuff that we're dealing with right now,

The technology is new.

It's so new that we haven't evolved to adapt to it.

But we can still make a difference and care and connect in our local world because we can see it.

If you go outside and you see people littering,

That's your home they're littering on,

Right?

That's a way that you can connect and start caring about the environment and make a physical,

Tangible difference.

Now,

I'm not saying not to push for global change in climate or anything like that.

On the contrary,

I think we should.

I'm trying to highlight that if your big issue,

The thing that you're going to focus on isn't the climate,

If it's something else but you still care about the climate,

It's one of those things that you have compassion for,

As I do,

Start making a change in your local place.

Start looking at local conservation.

Start local and then build up from there.

Speak to real people in real life,

Right?

There's a risk of stepping back,

Detaching,

Realizing a problem,

And then just going back onto social media and becoming another screaming person to be slotted around by the algorithms.

I'm not 100% sure of the best way to address this,

But I feel that it has to do with long-form conversations,

Either in real life or if we can manage it digitally.

This is why I like the Longer Form Podcasts because it allows people to discuss either individually like we're doing here or between two people,

A host and a guest,

An in-depth issue.

Because it is long-form,

Because they're talking for an hour or two or three,

You really get a full sense of it.

You compare this to a social media post with the comment section or you compare this to a news bit where people are just stating their point in 20 seconds and then having the counterpoint stated in 20 seconds and then the news reader summarizing it in 20 seconds.

I possibly hope to have a discourse on anything important.

Imagine trying to solve climate change or famine or war or coronavirus or anything that's actually impacting the world vitally.

Gender issues,

Everything,

Right?

Anything that we talked about.

I'll tell you what.

If we go down the Dave Chappelle thing,

That issue won't be solved by people screaming and posting online.

He did a long-form conversation and if you listen to it,

He's expressing himself.

Agree or disagree,

It's not my place to suggest my opinion here,

But he spoke long-form on the topic.

To come back and scream in a tweet and have that tweet as the response to a long-form comment isn't going to make any real change.

It'll make the person tweeting and responding to those tweets weirdly feel good because it's like,

Oh,

I'm standing up for my team,

But what change will that really make,

Right?

There's this feeling that you get,

This sort of,

I say good because it feels positive,

But I'm not convinced that it actually is positive that you get when you jump on board and you start screaming your point and saying,

Hey,

This is what I believe and let's do it,

Right?

You get this good feeling,

But the problem is that it doesn't really make any change.

It might just be building up the ego a bit.

It feels good to bash someone digitally like,

Hey,

You suck.

You disagreed with my team,

But does that change anything?

Does it help convince anyone or are you just breaching to the converted?

Is it just everyone getting in a digital space and saying,

I agree,

I agree,

I agree,

I agree,

That person sucks or they should be canceled?

On the other side,

I agree,

I agree,

I agree.

Look at all those people with,

Can't handle a joke,

Whatever it is.

I'm not convinced that that will change anyone,

But what I am convinced is that if people are seeing the controversy with Dave Chappelle and then they do what you're special all the way with an open mind,

He might change people to their opinion because from the external perspective,

If you don't care about that topic that much,

If you're neutral to it or you're unsure,

Watching a long-form thing is far more convincing than people screaming and yelling.

People screaming and yelling seems like someone having a baby's tantrum.

On the other side of things,

If you were to watch a long-form discussion,

His piece,

And then watch a long-form discussion about it on the other side and then watch the long-form discussion back,

You will start to see the issue in real depth.

Ideally,

If you can get the main people involved having long-form discussions,

Then you'll really see how they really feel about the issue,

About each other,

And their ability to have a discourse.

Does that make sense?

So what I would suggest would be,

If possible,

Take a step back.

Look at your social media feeds and online presence like you were looking at an archaeology find,

An alien find.

Take a step back.

I would also suggest having the long-form discussions as much as possible.

I would suggest taking action in your local communities.

If you're going to go big,

Figure out one area in the world that you can go big in and go big.

Just make sure you're not contributing back into the same cycle.

Work out a way to project the need to help your issue in a way that won't go down the same path.

Finally,

Practice mindfulness meditation.

I'll check the link down to my book,

Insight Timer and Skillshare courses below in the show notes so you can get started.

There's a lot of access to all of those resources for free,

By the way.

I release everything I do for free as much as possible.

You can read a bunch of chapters of the book and get started on the courses and stuff right now.

Anyway,

If you're going down the algorithm gods,

If you have anything you want to add to this or say or address,

Message me on social media at ZachPPhillips,

Email me,

Zach at zachary-philips.

Com.

Just connect and we can have a discussion back and forth on this one.

Anyway,

Cheers.