Oh dear, what have we done? According to today’s Times (of London) newspaper there is an extraordinarily high level of unhappiness in the UK, and kids are the unhappiest group of all.
How’s a chap to write a Happy Friday when there’s all this gloom around?
As it happens, just a couple of days ago I put up a piece in my Notion of Customer series in which I quoted an academic who, in a 2002 book1, suggested that the fate of the Soviet system was sealed, in 1989/1990, by new communications technologies and their ability to make people aware of extreme lifestyle differences.
I made the point that it wasn’t just the Soviets who were exposed to the extreme differences between the West and the Rest. Given the ubiquity of the smartphone, the whole world saw them. And it gave rise to the largest ever migration of humans, that continues to this day.
And then I started thinking …
One day back in the mid-1980s, when I went with a bunch of friends for lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club, someone pointed out that Laurie Lee was sitting at the bar. Emboldened by umpteen glasses of wine, I ambled over and said how much I enjoyed Cider With Rosie.2 Softened by umpteen drinks he didn’t tell me to get lost and we talked, consuming several more libations the while. The key point that came out of it was the fact that, in his childhood, his Cotswold village, Slad, was the world. Not everything was happy. Far from it, as the story relates. But the microcosmic world was comprehensible in and of itself: within its confines great pain, great joy, and everything in between were experienced and processed.
I think we sense the same when we are transported back by Dylan Thomas to his auntie and uncle’s 15-acre farm, immortalized in Fern Hill3:
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
It is a world. Sufficient and complete within itself. For a space and a time, there was no other. And, above all, it is comprehensible and manageable, physically and mentally.
But now, a child’s world is The World. And, for a young mind, it is too much too soon. Our children are now served up with the whole world and, in the process, risk losing the small piece of the world where they actually live and where they must learn the basics of life.
I know, I know, I run the risk, here, of being accused of being the old git with the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia. But it’s not that. My concern is that we have created a world where, because too much is accessible too soon, many young minds are not able to process many of the things, and skills, that matter. Rather, by being over-loaded and over-stimulated with ‘detached’ information, the natural reaction is incomprehension or, worse, a kind of universal fear.
Indeed, in the Times article, Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the director of Oxford University’s Wellbeing Centre is quoted as saying:
To think that, in some parts of the world, children are already experiencing the equivalent of a mid-life crisis demands immediate policy attention.
The causes of this malaise are, no doubt, various but I’m sure that online communications figure in there somewhere - probably quite high on the list in terms of their impact on individuals.
Some time ago, my colleague Dr Olaf Hermans clarified the fact that social platforms were a complicated and complicating factor in human communications:
Social platforms have systematically confounded ‘social’ with ‘relational’: social friends are not necessarily relational friends. Social communication does not necessarily improve relationships. The ‘social friend’ and the ‘relational friend’ both are personally relevant, contribute to identity formation and create a sense of belonging. They differ in that social friendships are open whereas relational friendships are closed; social friendship live in the here and now, relational friendships live both now and in the future. And, in contrast with relational friendships, social relationships can still be subject to power and information asymmetries.
We really do need to get to grips with this issue, and the whole tangled web of issues that stem from it, if we are to get any kind of peace back into the minds of everyone, especially the younger generation.
I suspect that, if and when we discover another inhabited planet, the people of Earth may be able to find common cause. Unless and until that happens, however, we need to behave as we always have - mistrustful of “Those other guys. You know, the ones over there.” After all, that’s human nature.
A final thought occurs, too. I wonder whether the massively increased incidence of neuro-divergence is one reaction to all of the above? I’ll be following up on this, not least because I have a very personal reason for so doing.
Thanks for reading.
Bobbitt, Philip. The Shield of Achilles (2002)
Lee, Laurie. Cider with Rosie (1959)
Thomas, Dylan. Fern Hill (1945)
"My concern is that we have created a world where [...] too much is accessible too soon"
I share your concern and think you've put it very succinctly in this piece. If I were to try to sum up my own position on the digital 'superstructure' we live under: T'internet is a wonderful piece of technology (I'm not a neo-luddite, despite appearances :-) -- a gigantic library accessible to every man -- text, pictures, music! Social media seem to be, to a greater or lesser extent, detrimental to the wellbeing of most adults. It seems highly addictive, steals time and focus and makes people shallow and narcissistic, so the women love it. The online lifestyle as practiced by the young is, I fear, soul-destroying. I have no children of my own, but I can tell you for a fact that my niece and nephew have grown up to be Americans, for all practical purposes. The contemporary, American online world is their whole frame of reference and it makes me very sad each time I realize what a mental prison that is.
How funny you should mention 'Cider With Rosie' and that you've propped up the bar with L. Lee! I read that wonderful childhood memoir less than a month ago (and followed through with his walking-through-Spain sequel. Leigh-Fermor next, after I've chewed through a stack of Russian WWI & bolshevik/revolution stuff ... don't ask!) but I cannot remember what put me onto it. Have you mentioned it in one of your previous pieces that I might have read? There's also a beautiful, rather impressionistic film-version (albeit uploaded in fairly low-res : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60VzhmKpYWg) that I've enjoyed.
I liked 'Cider With Rosie' because it told not only of idyllic bucolica, but also of the less ... agreeable aspects of village life. The tale of how the young men of the village slipped quietly out of the pub, one by one, when the 'prodigal son' spends his first winter evening back home in the village, boasting at the bar, paying for rounds with gold coin ... how they meet him up the road, when he's stumbling back to his parent's old house, never getting that far. How the village closes ranks and keeps schtum. The village can be ruthless. I can believe that. Warts and all as they say -- 'Cider With Rosie' is no pastoral idyll.
Then there's the time the boys planned to rape the slightly daft, Christian girl on her way home through the forest. And L.L playing doctor with that lass down by the river. And the portrayal of the Mother ... loving, silly, loyal ... And then there's Rosie. I hope every boy meets a Rosie in their life, because she closes one part of your life and opens a new one. In real life, not online. A boy and a girl, fumbling excitedly, finding out. Leave them alone!
Slad, in the Cotswolds ... it's a very beautiful landscape -- quintessentially 'English'. Don't you live round those parts?
Memories of "galloping" around the woods with a Mac buttoned round my neck. Parent free days at Butlins. You've made me think David, thanks.x