Man Disconnected Quotes

“Everyone must choose one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. – Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and motivational speaker”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“While 76 per cent of Americans said they watched, read or heard the news on a daily basis, only 41 per cent said they went beyond the headlines.4 So there’s this potential illusion of knowing. It is the danger of having a superficial level of knowledge about anything, but believing you know everything.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. Our concern is that when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man's ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. Multiple problems, including obesity, violence, anxiety, lower school performance, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity and depression, have all been associated with excessive gaming. The variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle...”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men are Struggling & What We Can Do About It

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again. – Abraham Maslow, humanist psychologist”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. – Frederick Douglass, African-American social reformer and a leader of the abolitionist movement”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what’s happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a ‘soft language’ to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, ‘toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“You walk around the world and you see people multitasking. They’re playing games and they’re reading email and they’re on Facebook, etc … On a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once … Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is, You know what? You’re really lousy at it! It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we’ve done suggests they’re worse at analytical reasoning. We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.15”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“Western societies want men to be upstanding, proactive citizens who take responsibility for themselves, who work with others to improve their communities and nation as a whole. The irony is that society is not giving the support, guidance, means, or places for these young men even to be motivated or interested in aspiring to these goals. In fact, society - from politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families - is a major contributor to this demise because it is inhibiting young men's intellectual, creative, and social abilities right from the start. And the irony is only compounded by the fact that men play such a powerful part in society, which means they are effectively denying their younger counterparts the opportunity to thrive.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men are Struggling & What We Can Do About It

“In 1969, the Rolling Stones sang the song, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, but, they assured listeners, if enough effort was put in, a person could get what they needed. The song was a hit. Today a song like that would never get made. Hard work appears to be for someone who doesn’t know how to work the system – a sucker – and young men no longer have the patience or desire to learn how to build the foundations for success, nor are they inclined to expose themselves to ridicule if they were to fail along the way.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“Though the act of making one’s own bed is simple and mundane, it reiterates that the little things in life can have a significant impact. ‘If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right,’ he said.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“While the entire US population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate – by almost 800 per cent. It’s still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 per cent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 per cent of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“These days, it literally is all about ‘me’. In an analysis of over 750,000 books published between 1960 and 2008, Jean Twenge and her colleagues found that the use of first person plural pronouns (i.e. We, Us) decreased 10 per cent, while during this same timeframe, the use of first person singular pronouns (i.e. I, Me) increased 42 per cent, and second person pronouns (i.e. You, Your) quadrupled.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“But that meaningful respect needs to come from doing pro-social things that make life better in some way for others. It should not derive from out-drinking their buddies or doing some stupid shit better than them.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“Our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrast, also of varying tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked one sort only, what effect would he make? He must be able to employ them together and blend them. And we too must accept the good and bad that coexist in our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one side is no less necessary to us than the other. – Michel de Montaigne, sixteenth-century French writer”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“The pseudo-scientific myth that all women are naturally predisposed toward sexual restraint and all men toward promiscuity isn’t only inaccurate but dangerous, leading directly to the notion that women who differ from that norm are unacceptable, need to be corrected or deserve to be mistreated,’ says Zhana Vrangalova, professor of human sexuality at New York University.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“One reason the jobs men hold pay more is because they are more hazardous … Just as the ‘glass ceiling’ describes the invisible barrier that keeps women out of jobs with the most pay, the ‘glass cellar’ describes the invisible barrier that keeps men in jobs with the most hazards. – Warren Farrell”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“[The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth … One way that this is accomplished is through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such ‘self affirmations,’ by fulfilling the need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening events and information without resorting to defensive biases.2”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

“Many males who we have surveyed said they felt most like a man when they were honest about who they were, confidently made decisions and actively pursued their dreams.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male