Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal

by Ben Sasse

We found that the more you use Facebook over time, the more likely you are to experience negative physical health, negative mental health, and negative life satisfaction,”

This spiral, which app designers are eager to prolong and intensify, is tearing us away from our here and now—which is maybe not the “perfect” life we imagine in our Walter Mitty moments but which is the only life that has any chance of fulfilling us. Here’s the immutable reality that neither today’s scrolling nor tomorrow’s neural lace links will fix: We can’t be in two places at once. We can’t be on the beach in Cancun and also courtside with the kids at practice in Paducah. We have to choose. And having flown more than a million miles over the past few years, let me say: Skype can take a bit of the sting out of missing another Little League game, but there’s no substitute for a place and a people to call home.

Like us, Sandler never made one grand, once-and-for-all decision to escape his time and place. But with a little tool in his hand, he ended up making lots of individual decisions that collectively put his life on autopilot.

We don’t primarily lack technology, we primarily lack wisdom. We lack habits for navigating this digital revolution. Healthy people will figure out a way to be rooted even amid the proliferation of tools allowing us to be rootless.

Newport doesn’t claim Facebook and Twitter are evil. He allows that “some of them might be quite vital to your success and happiness.” But he argues that the vast majority of us, the vast majority of the time, are pretending we are using them as tools when we’re really using them as distractions. “The threshold for allowing a site regular access to your time and attention (not to mention personal data) should be much more stringent,” he suggests.

How many of us use our phones as our alarm clock? (Don’t. Buy a $4 alarm clock, and get your phone out of the bedroom.) For many people, checking email is the last thing they do before nodding off at night. A simple shift in our habits, by maybe thirty minutes a day, can make a big difference.

“We are designed for a rhythm of work and rest. So one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year, we turn off our devices and worship, feast, play, and

rest together.”

We don’t want to say it out loud, but most of us know deep down that it’s a kind of drug. It’s a way of escape. It’s an addiction.

most people misunderstand what stress is. We typically think that it is having a lot to do. He thinks that’s wrong. When someone has a lot to do, but they’re making consistent progress on the most important thing, they’re not stressed. They’re satisfied. They often find themselves feeling that they’re in a productive “zone.” On the other hand, if there is something important that they ought to be doing but on which they’re not making progress, that’s when stress peaks.

But you don’t have to choose all-or-nothing. There is a middle way. But only if we build guardrails against technology’s tendency to swallow everything.

In everyday life, thinking about audience means asking: Who’s on my mind as I go about my day? Who am I putting in front of me? When we’re constantly online, it means that the people who are literally, physically, in front of us—our spouse, our kids, our coworkers—are being sidelined in favor of people who are far away (some of whom we’ve probably never even met).

When we prioritize “news” from afar, we’re saying that our distant-but-shallow communities are more important than our small-but-deep flesh-and-blood ones.

If the ancient Greeks were to anthropomorphize social media as a deity, it would come as the temptress Immediacy.

Socrates never had an iPhone, but he was right about this regardless: “Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

People faced with more flavor options experience decision anxiety and regret. They’re afraid of not getting it right.

Researchers describe people who want to exhaustively evaluate their options as “maximizers.”

Was rushing a smelly, deeply unhappy child to the bathtub sexy? Was carrying dripping sheets to the washing machine blissful? Definitely not. But how extraordinary it was (is!) to have someone by my side for that—to have a partner and a friend.

Marriage offers the opportunity to experience genuine, deep friendship. But that takes work. So much love, sweat, and tears go into building a family. You’re constantly learning what it means to “die to self.” But it’s so much better than any two-dimensional counterfeit.

We’re tempted to pass on the hard work of community-building for similar reasons. Community can be difficult. It can be messy. It doesn’t fall into place, like on the sitcoms. But—in community, unlike on Netflix, you can put down the roots that will help to give life meaning and richness.

The only community that exists is this one, here and now. But we have to choose to embrace it.

“the Devil preys upon those who believe happiness is just out of reach,”

Contentment is a condition of the soul, and it does not come with getting what you want, but in giving thanks to God for what you have been given.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

According to the 1940 Census, fewer than 8 percent of U.S. households consisted of one person living alone. Times have changed, we’ve grown historically rich, and our expectations about housing structures and about “normal” have ballooned. More Americans live alone today than at any time in our history, by big margins.

leaving childhood and becoming an adult used to be conceptually clear. It was a gift that older generations gave to the younger. No longer. We have upended almost all the coming-of-age rituals—moving out of one’s parents’ home, leaving school for the final time, getting a full-time job, becoming economically self-sufficient, getting married, having children, establishing an independent household, etc.

He observed that in town after town after town, people discovered something they needed or wanted to do, and they didn’t wait for the government to give them permission, or instructions, or funding. They just got together and did it. In the great book he published about his travels, Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote: “Americans come together to hold celebrations, to build hotels, to erect churches, to start libraries, to send missionaries to every corner of the earth; they create hospitals, prisons, schools. They wrestle over difficult questions.” He made a pointed comparison: “Every job that in France would be done by the government or in England by some great noble, in America you can bet is being done by a group of volunteers.” At the heart of America, he observed, was a twofold spirit: of self-sufficiency and of neighborliness.

We are in a period of unprecedented upheaval. Community is collapsing, anxiety is building, and we’re distracting ourselves with artificial political hatreds. That can’t endure—and if it does, America won’t.

You’ll never start building community until you start building community.

America would be a healthier and happier place if we all agreed to set aside those superficial differences more of the time, and instead struggled together for three critical cultural inches.

A good rivalry requires a good deal of similarity.

What if those people we dislike so much are more like us than we care to admit? Or, perhaps more accurately, what if there’s a higher-order bond that connects us that’s prior to and more important than the lower-order schisms that divide us?

Saying that “civility matters” is too simple—and too boring. What we need is something bigger: We need to believe that both the dignity of our opponents, and the character we aim to model for our kids, require some basic rules for public debate.

Accountability starts at home, and “what-about-ism” is an intellectually vacuous way to live a life—not to mention being a morally bankrupt way to raise our kids.

a democracy depends on shared facts. Real journalism isn’t a “game”; it’s not about the quippiest hot takes. Journalists do not exist to entertain you, confirm your opinions, or support your candidate. In a democracy, we count on journalists to ask hard questions. So when we hear anyone powerful, in response to questions about their behavior, attack the media in general—as opposed to merely pushing back on a biased question—we should look more critically at them and their behavior.

One of the core problems with our public life together is that we’re constantly failing to distinguish between politics and civics. Politics is about the use of power—how it is acquired and who wields it. Obviously, politics matters. But civics matters more. Civics is about who we are as a people.

Inverting our loyalties—putting politics (the means) before civics (the ends)—makes certain that we don’t get either: We sacrifice the fundamental bonds that should unite us across our differences, and we don’t get sustainable political or legislative output either.

But for us, in an America going through the digital revolution that is undermining local community, this is anything but a normal moment. It is a grave threat.

It doesn’t require a diabolical imagination to see the ways in which this technology might be used to disrupt our politics—by our adversaries abroad, or by

I talk regularly with generals and intelligence-community leaders, and I always try to ask them what is keeping them up at night. For more than two years, nearly every single person I’ve spoken to has told me that they’re worried that foreign governments and terrorist groups are going to seize on the extraordinary technological capabilities of our day not to launch an invasion (although there will be plenty of fighting in cyberspace) but to quietly exacerbate the fractures that already divide America internally.

“If destruction be our lot,” he remarked, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

This is what Vladimir Putin has done to great effect over the past three years. Russian “bots” regularly fuel outrages on social media. More than 50,000 Russian-linked Twitter accounts posted automated election-related messages in 2016. Facebook estimates that 126 million American users were exposed to Russian-created material on its site over the same period. Last year, during the

debate over many NFL players’ decision to kneel during the national anthem, the viral hashtags #takeaknee (in support of the kneeling players) and #standfortheflag (against them) were both boosted heavily by Russian-backed accounts. Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks (his off-the-books disinformation operation), and many other foreign actors see an America that is perilously divided, and they are looking for ways to exploit that vulnerability—not chiefly to help Republicans or Democrats, but to hurt all Americans.

We have plenty of actual enemies looking to harm us. We don’t need to add to their ranks. To quote Lincoln once more: “We are not enemies, but friends.”

Imagine if just 10 percent of the time we spend angrily tracking national political news were redirected to volunteering at our kids’ or grandkids’ school, serving at a soup kitchen, visiting a nursing home. We’d be community-rich.

Our national experiment is about defending the individual, with his or her inexhaustible dignity—and protecting his or her right to freely speak, worship, publish, protest, and assemble. The District of Columbia is not the center of American life; it exists to maintain a framework for ordered liberty—so that your city or town, the place where you live, can be the center of the world.

We don’t need to agree on everything; we simply need to allow the space for communities of different belief and custom to flourish.

The American response to speech we don’t agree with is not less speech but more speech. We try to persuade each other, not silence each other. That’s how people committed to dignity treat each other.

even as we debate these contentious issues passionately, we have to maintain the republic that allows us to do so. And so even on these absolutely essential issues, we must approach our opponents in these debates as people created with dignity—and we must demand that both we and they dig in as sincere, fellow countrymen, rather than as enemies to be trolled.

The answer is not for everyone to start waving white flags, for faux unity is no unity at all.