Most would scoff at the idea. Too social? Nah, if anything, we’re not social enough!

It doesn’t take much to remember the shock of staying home in March of 2020. There were so many questions. About the present. The future. But one question was truly universal.

What are we going to do if we can’t see people?

Even as we turned to technology to connect us, the definition of being together with other people just kept shifting. Zoom meetings didn’t seem like enough. And besides, they are strangely disorienting. We need to be in the same room, don’t we?

The pressure to be around other people is intense anyway. Throw in the inability to be in the same room with anybody, and that intensity went through the roof.

But from the beginning, something about this always hit me wrong. It brought to mind an experience with a late friend who would come to weekly Bible studies and book groups and tell us how she didn’t have any friends.

I’d gently remind her that we are her friends. That we care for her and pray for her. That we’d be by at the drop of a hat if she needed us.

But there was a disconnect in it for her. She wasn’t saying she didn’t have enough friends. She was saying she didn’t have any.

It would be easy to label this as mental illness or dismiss it as mere loneliness. But it always struck me as that kind of willful blindness we can have. When we have the evidence before us, but we don’t see it, because it doesn’t fit the conclusion we’d already come to.

In other words, she felt lonely. And she felt comfortable enough with the group to share intimate and personal things with us. In short, we were friends. But this didn’t square because surely one can’t be lonely surrounded by friends! Therefore, she must have no friends.

Or perhaps she has a lot of friends and is also lonely.

What if we’re being too social?

I’ve thought of this experience often. Especially as this friend died during the pandemic. Alone.

The physicality of being with other people is an obvious necessity. Our hunger for it is undeniable.

What we have a ridiculously easy time denying, however, is literally everything else.

I spent more time talking on the phone in 2020 than all my teenage years combined.

Like billions of others, I turned to social media for connection, investing in relationships all over the country (and world!).

And I spent hours upon hours every day curating other people’s ability to connect: with themselves, their church or faith, and with other people.

We spent the better part of two years saying we were lonely, unconnected and what we needed more than anything was to get together with other people.

And then, when we did, we couldn’t figure out why we were so tired.

We aren’t just doing it wrong.

It’s because we’re being too social.

How can we be too social?

Especially when we feel this lonely?

Doctors have warned us of an epidemic of loneliness for years now. Particularly as we age. This has led to popular hypothesis about the modern age—which has allowed people to achieve an advanced age beyond previous generations.

But the actual contours of loneliness reveal the opposite. Today, older generations are less likely to experience loneliness. Loneliness is primarily a young person’s epidemic.

And, while it has been easy to link it to the advent of the smart phone, this reveals a correlating relationship, not a causal one. Because all of the evidence points to over stimulation rather than under.

And for all our demonizing of technology, we are increasing our use of it and raising our demands on each other.

Why a digital detox is not enough

I took a social media sabbath this summer, and it was great. I didn’t get caught up in other people’s nonsense. There was no yelling at people for being wrong on the internet. But mostly, I wasn’t privy to all of the things going on in everyone else’s life.

This was what we were promised. And what I championed for years. When I had 40 or so friends on Facebook and they were all people I knew from college, I loved keeping up with them.

But the networks grew.

And not just out of a desire to connect with other people as friends. Or because everything was novel and new—because we actually could! And let us not forget the pressure to be measured by our number of friends like its middle school all over again. These all factored in.

Something else came in, too. I needed to network. For work. Social media wasn’t just fun socializing. For millions and millions of us, it also became work. From keeping tabs on all of these friends to producing content for them.

Social media also became a necessary resource for research. I had to expand my list on every platform to keep up with my industry. Multiple industries, in fact. And news.

And it wasn’t only intake, but output. I had to produce precious content on all of the platforms and pitch my blog. And then I had to do the same for others to amplify their work.

And when I watched all of these people share their innovative things on Facebook during the pandemic, I didn’t feel FOMO (the fear of missing out). I just felt exhausted. Failed. Like I didn’t want to hear about someone else’s accomplishments.

I literally felt like I’d spent all day talking with people and just needed to go home to veg. From home.

My mind was trying to tell me the truth: I had spent the whole day being social. And I was exhausted. Because, during that time at home, I was social all day every day.

Too social: like centripetal force

That nagging sense we all felt to be with people isn’t really about being social at all. I think it is more about slowing down, being known, and knowing more deeply. We want connection and contact.

We have too much social time as a measure of volume: and not enough intimacy.

Social media has amplified the speed of connection and contact. It allows us to multiply the volume of connection without the burden of actually doing anything to have it. We literally connect with people while waiting in a drive-thru line or sitting on the toilet.

It also has revealed the hidden thoughts of people we’d prefer not to know. It has democratized oversharing. Which, as novelty, was fun. But as constant and all day—it is something else.

How often have we said “I wish I didn’t know that” about a friend after reading a Facebook post? This escalates when we see the posts pile up during a stressful period in their life, like during a pandemic.

All of this usually leads us to say “just drop social media.” But we can’t. It is work now, too. It really is how and where we socialize.

And as we’ve shifted into the attention economy, it is hard to participate in an economy when we refuse to trade in its primary currency.

Taking account

The world’s central thesis, that more is better, has long been proven false by the evidence. Yet it retains rhetorical weight in the imagination.

Nowhere is this more evidentiary than with our desire to socialize. From an early age, we’re conditioned to believe that having more friends will make us happier. High school popularity contests are the popular trope, but they inform many adult interactions. From amassing a professional network to keeping up with the Joneses.

And now we’ve monetized popularity by connecting likes with income.

Publishers determine whether to sign a writer based on their follower counts—expecting the writer to build their own advance team and coordinate marketing.

And we have to curate these friend lists. To keep them happy and healthy.

Any teenager can tell you that one’s friends get jealous if they’re “caught” talking to someone else. A place where “best” friend is another source of social competition. It’s hard to keep a lot of friends happy when each one also wants to be a better friend.

And yet, millions of Americans report having no close friends at all. Millions more, just one ore two.

What we’re doing is building a framework that reinforces an existing cognitive distortion. One in which our worth is built around the volume and quality of our personal contact. And one in which we define particular kinds of contact as “counting”. While disregarding the bulk of daily impressions which our brains imprint as being social.

What we’re not actually doing is taking an accounting of just how social we are. Nor are we accounting for how social anyone else is.

Its a both/and thing

Many cataloged their experience in the pandemic as having a wrong kind of social experience. That it was too online. Or too sterilized. Or not deep enough. That what they needed was to have more personal contact. All of this is absolutely true.

But we were overstressed in 2019 and struggling to communicate with our friends and families. We had broken relationships and experienced loneliness in crowded rooms.

A two hour face-to-face meeting is as exhausting as a one-hour Zoom. And I had to commute to it.

We have clearly identified the trouble with social media. And we all know it is less effective than in-person experience. What we’re refusing to admit is that more social time is, in fact, draining us and reducing the quality of our social time.

When people keep up with you throughout the week, they don’t need to sit with you on Sunday. So many of our in-person conversations are built on assuming we’ve seen the posts.

We’re pushing our limits and breaking our brains. We don’t need to just get together more. We need to change our social lives and cut back on the social time that doesn’t work.

Striving to be less social

Once we realize that we’re actually being too social, that most other people are being too social, and that some people could actually use different social time, we can start to create avenues for social connections that work.

And these all must start with accepting that, for all the stuff we claim doesn’t count as social time, our brains have other ideas. So we better start treating everything for what it really is: being social.

We can audit time spent with other people. And also time spent around people in an office or coffee shop, scrolling facebook or twitter, reading and exchanging email, writing or developing presentations. Even counting up all the time spent on the articles and news we consume to be good citizens. Catalog all of that. Not as if it is all the same. But so as to recognize that none of this has zero social impact. It all has some.

And once we realize that many of us are social all day long, we can start to reorganize and reprioritize types of social engagement. Figuring out what needs our attention most and what needs to be cut back. And where we can help others cut back, too.

• Cutting back on social media is a given. But do the same with email. Include newsletters.
• Silence almost all notifications. That email can wait. As can the notification that a famous person has died.
• Reduce the number of emails you send others. This always reduces the number you get back from them.
• Batch contact. Put all of the contact with a person into one meeting or email. Organize your internal noise and reduce the noise you offer others.
• Shorten minor meetings while resisting the urge to make more of them.
• The meeting that could’ve been an email? It might not be worth emailing.
• Treat your connections like a minimalist. With intention. Minimize the volume, maximize the depth, and curate your time ruthlessly.

Less social and less lonely

The reasons we want to blame technology, and particularly social media, for the loneliness epidemic are legion. And because of these, we think the answer is to shut off screens and just be with people.

But this isn’t a solution to our problem. It’s a band aid for one person’s loneliness. And only helps them until they are forced back into the communication streams that we are all stuck in.

I also suspect it is coming to something that only looks like the right conclusion.

Technology didn’t create the problem—it amplifies it. For many of us, the problem of loneliness is not lack or quality of contact; it’s how much we’re receiving. From every direction.

We are receiving pressure to be something that many of us can’t be. Our interactions are competitive, rather than empowering and restorative. And our values are so ill-expressed by our actions.

This a problem with our culture. And what it’s doing to our brains.

Boredom introduces creativity. And it has a moderating effect on our sense of isolation. We literally enjoy everything more when we’re bored.

Less social and more happy

Once we get over our more is better delusion and recognize that we are being too social, take our time inventory and account for how social our lives actually are, and begin to change our priorities for using time, there is an obvious tangible result.

Happiness.

The very thing we sought through our social interactions. The thing our loneliness told us we couldn’t have without more social time.

We sought happiness through trumpeting our social experiencing, turning it all the way up and saying to ourselves that this will cure our loneliness. This will cure our boredom. But what it does is numb us, distract us, and prevent us from living. It breaks our brains and reduces our happiness.

We need boredom for the sake of creativity. For the sake of joy.

This doesn’t just mean shutting off our phones. It also means preserving more time free from being social.