Connection Is the New Exercise

We removed the friction that used to do it for us. Now, like exercise, we have to put it back on purpose.

On social media there are these videos that rack up millions of views with people transfixed by what they’re watching. With comments flooding in on what they’re seeing. It’s a video from some random high school in the 2000s.

There are no phones, no performative playing for the camera to try to go viral, no random dances, just lots of awkward and silly faces. There are kids conversing in the hallways at their lockers, killing time talking before class starts. People are present. Sometimes a little bored. But they are there in the same room as everyone else.

There’s a bit of nostalgia pulling on us here. And surely those rose-tinted glasses colors our thinking. But there’s also something far deeper. A realization that you’re looking at one of the last times we were all immersed in the same reality, allowed to experience and live life instead of perform at it, or be a passive consumer of it.

We’ve traded something real for a filtered version of it. And I’d argue we’re paying a steep price. But let’s put down the glasses and look at the story the data tells.

From Local to Global and Outside to Inside

It just so happens to be that the American time use survey started in the early 2000s, where researchers assessed how we live our days in all of its glory and mundanity.

Consider the following:

• Time spent alone has jumped from ~5 hours a day to 7 from 2003 to 2024.

• Time spent at home: 7.7 to 9.1 hours.

• Socializing and communicating has dropped 24% overall

• For young people, it’s plummeted from an average of 60 minutes a day to just 35.

• Share of people who socialized at all during a given day dropped to 30%.

• Reading for personal entertainment is down 35%

• The share of Americans reading 5 minutes or less per day is 84%

• TV use is flat, but computer and video game use is up, and of course phone use has skyrocketed.

In short, we spend more time alone, in our houses, looking at screens. This isn’t news to anyone reading this. You’re doing so alone, on your phone or computer, most likely.

But the shifting world has led to two things that have had a striking impact, and that we haven’t found a solution to yet:

1. We’ve moved from local to global.

2. We removed the constraints that naturally made us engage with the world and others.

A Local Society vs. A Global One.

Those videos of high school in the 2000s give us a glimpse into how our environment was set up for much of modernity. It was local. Yes, every high school had similarities, just like every workplace did and we could satirize them in movies like Office Space. But they represented their own local community.

You found your place in that environment and were forced to learn how to engage with it. That meant seeing if you belonged on the track or football team, dance or theater, math club or band. Your relationships, drama, mentorship and more importantly comparison points were all real and right in front of you.

This is how we evolved to live, in local communities where it was much easier to find a place where we belong, are good at something, can contribute, and feel significant. That’s easier to do in a community of hundreds or thousands. Not so easy to do when your comparison has shifted to the entire freaking world.

As we’ve moved to less socialization, more time spent at home, alone, and on our tech, all of that pushes us to see the world through a global lens. We no longer ask am I the fastest kid on the block, we see that some 8 year old somewhere would smoke us. We no longer ask for advice from the handyman down the street or that old lady who can cook, we go search for the perfect answer online via the latest mommy influencer.

We fool ourselves into thinking that having more answers makes us happier and healthier. It doesn't. It mostly makes us miserable.

When researchers studied over 100,000 teens across 26 countries they found that when faced with a strong academic comparison, an individuals self-concept drops. Your sense of yourself comes from your reference group. We were meant to compare. It’s just in 2003, that initial reference group was a pond. And now, it’s the ocean for everyone.

That’s not to say we want to be the big fish in the little pond forever. It’s just that for most of life, we had a scaffolding mechanism. You compared locally and gradually expanded that as you showed your stuff. You were the school champion, district champion, state champion, and on and on. Now, we’ve thrown everyone, adults and kids, into a giant ocean and said good luck.

And to make things worse, you used to be able to fail in private, or at least in a pond so small no one cared. You had the freedom to make mistakes, learn from them, and grow. History is littered with teenagers doing absolutely idiotic things and then growing into functional adults. Yet, now, the dumb things you would have said to your friends in generations past are now preserved on social media, to haunt or at least embarrass you years later.

And it’s not just that, the public nature of it all is what causes pressure and choking. In a study looking at sports, it wasn’t money or increasing the incentives that caused athletes to choke, it was being watched. Choking is a self-presentation problem.

Which is why practice largely occurs in private or among trusted teammates. We need to struggle and potentially fail in private or small groups because the struggle is what eventually leads to growth. Instead, if we’re always on a stage, always feel like we’re in public, we never get to the point of struggle that leads to growth. Which is why so many of us adopt a performative sense of living or working, instead of being. The performance protects us in a world where everything is in front of a crowd.

We’ve made failure more costly.

Is it any wonder why people increasingly feel insignificant and without meaning? We’ve rigged the game.

We Removed the Constraints that Kept us Sane

If you wanted to talk to your friends, ask someone out, or plan anything, you had to pick up the phone at home, call someone, know that their parents were going to answer, fumble through an awkward exchange with them, and then talk to them. You were forced to work through some initial discomfort.

If you had a problem with someone at track practice or school, you couldn’t text or DM them. You had to talk to them face to face and work it out.

And in between classes, or waiting in line during your lunch break at work, you had nothing to pull out and distract yourself with. You had to either sit with the boredom or engage with others around you.

The constraints we once had pushed us out of the house or into conversation. They made it hard to hide away and nudged us towards talking or doing things with other people because there was no way around it. Those constraints were helping us live an active life.

This isn’t to be all doomer. Of course, the convenience of being able to text your friends whenever, or finding the answer to just about any issue online, can be beneficial. But, when we remove all the friction, a life of ease becomes a kind of default state that we have to overcome.

It’s no different from why exercise was largely popularized. For most of humanity, exercise wasn’t a thing. Why? Because we spent our days doing physical labor, walking for miles, lifting heavy objects, and so forth. You didn’t need to exercise, living life took care of it. But then, we removed the friction of life. And if you didn’t replace that with exercise, well, you were screwed.

It’s much the same here. We removed all of the friction and constraints that used to push us to go live and engage with real people in the real world.

So What Do We Do?

1. Train Your Mental Muscle

In 2020, psychologist had 200 people reconnect with an old friend, except they split the group between doing so on e-mail or phone. Over 2/3rd preferred to do it over e-mail, even though they thought phone would be better, because they thought e-mail would remove the awkwardness.

They were right and wrong. Right that the phone call produced significantly higher bonding. And wrong that there would be any awkwardness. They reported feeling the same level of awkwardness either way. The feeling they feared was misplaced.

It’s similar to exercise, from the outside looking in, it seems like it must suck. But anyone who’s ever run, cycled, or swum knows that you strangely look forward to the effort. You learn to love it. And research backs this up.

Too often, we fear the feeling, even though that fear is overblown. Knowing this helps, but more so it’s building the mental muscle to get used to it.

There’s a reason why many young people hate phone calls, they never had to develop the mental muscle of having no other option. Think of your discomfort tolerance like a muscle. Train it up. Even with small bites of work.

2. Bring Back Local

Your sense of self is derived from your reference group. We can either have that foisted upon us and get stuck comparing to the mom, dad, athlete who seems to have it all together always on Instagram. Or we can define it with something real.

It’s not just that our reference group is global, it’s that it’s filtered into the best parts, leaving out all the messy parts. Go local. Find a mentor, a training group, a community gym, a baking class, a writer’s group.

We can’t escape comparison. It’s in our nature, but we can make it against real people, with all their foibles intact.

And once you go local, try to make an impact there. Instead of striving to be the influencer online, try to be the person your neighborhood calls for advice on plumbing or training or baking or whatever it is you’re good at.

3. Bring Back Constraints

Whenever we talk about topics like this, it’s easy to blame it all on the phones. And they certainly play a role. But more so, I want you to think about how to build your environment so it nudges you towards doing the hard or meaningful thing. Or at least getting out of the house.

Again, think about it with exercise. People who work out consistently don’t have some insane willpower. They set their life up to where it nudges them out the door. They join a running club so their teammates hold them accountable. They find trails or paths nearby so they can run from their front door. They lay out their gym clothes the night before or leave a packed bag in the front seat of their car.

They engineer their life to make it slightly easier to do. We need to take the same approach to our lives. Something I’ve been doing more often is whenever I’m alone in my car driving somewhere, I call someone I haven’t talked to in a while. I just go through my contacts and dial until someone answers. It’s become a hard-set rule. Off to the grocery store or pick up dinner? Call someone, even if it’s just for 10 minutes.

We need to build in constraints that push us to communicate and engage. And as an introvert science nerd who'd rather just read a book, I don't find this easy. But we’ve removed the in-between times when this used to naturally occur. The waiting for food, standing in lines, killing time between classes. We can see it right there in those nostalgic videos of 2000s high school. We removed everything that pushes us to be in the room with someone else.

So pick up the phone and make the call. Rig your environment to make it where you have to engage. Change your comparison point to real people living instead of filtered people cosplaying. That’s the antidote.

-Steve

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game