John Burn-Murdoch

You have your attention muscles, you have your focus muscles, your conscientiousness muscles.

And if digital technologies, digital distractions start pushing aside our sort of conscientiousness workouts or intellect workouts, those things could atrophy.

So that's the framework that I think is maybe useful for understanding what could be happening with both of these.

I think we can just think about this quite mechanistically.

Extroversion is related to one's capacity to make new friends or relationships.

Think about all this just as a funnel.

Less goes into the funnel, less comes out of the funnel.

If people are spending less time going out either physically or just going up to other people and talking to them, that is going to reduce the size of friendship groups.

It could be playing a role in the decline of relationship formation that we've seen.

Conscientiousness, similarly, if people become less reliable, less dependable, they're going to find that those friendships start getting weaker.

Maybe people end up, people talk about this a lot with the internet, right?

It can be better at getting you more sort of shallow friendships.

but it might not be brilliant at making or certainly maintaining those strong ones.

So those two you can see going in that way.

Again, neuroticism, anxiety, social anxiety.

People might be all ready to go for that night out, go to that house party, and at the last minute they think, I don't know, what if this happens, what if that happens?

But overthinking that worrying, again, can erode that social connectedness.

So to the extent that we are a social species, to the extent that people get meaning from

from their shared experiences with other people, and this is a very well-supported framework for thinking about things, more anxiety, people being less reliable, people being less likely to go out and make friendships in the first place, you're going to get more atomization, you're going to get more loneliness.

And again, these things are all very well established that loneliness, more social isolation leads to measurably worse outcomes.