Plain English BEST OF: The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality for the Worse
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What is the main topic of America's personality shift?
If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellany. I'm founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight, which streamer is on the brink of collapse, and which executive is on the hot seat. Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who will never eat lunch in this town again. Follow The Town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi everybody, Derek here. In December, my wife and I welcomed our second baby girl into the world. I'm gonna be taking some time off, but we wanted to keep the pod going through the holidays. So we're gonna be re-airing some of our favorite episodes from the last 12 months, a kind of best of compendium. And this list includes interviews that really stuck with me and others that really stuck with you and you had lots of feedback and thoughts on, including this one. I'll be back in the new year with fresh content, but until then, happy holidays and happy new year. Today, America's personality shift. Every few decades, it seems, the Western world seems to experience a social crisis in the face of new technology.
120 years ago, as I wrote in a recent Substack essay, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the US gradually made its way across the Atlantic. The doctor George Miller Beard called it neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Europeans at the time, in the 1900s, sometimes referred to it as American nervousness, or even New York-itis. According to Beard, the affliction was most common among, quote, the indoor classes of civilized civilizations, end quote. That is to say, the illness mostly affected white-collar workers operating at the frontier of technology, handling new, fast machines. And at the time, there were plenty of things in America that were fast and new. In 1875, there were no skyscrapers, no electric lighting, no Coca-Cola or basketball, few bicycles, no aspirin, no cars or sneakers, no cardboard boxes, no hamburgers or Kodak cameras or recorded music players.
By 1905, just 30 years later, everything I just named, from the skyscrapers to the Kodak cameras, was invented. In one 30-year swoop of history, the modern world was conjured into being. And throughout the West, people lost their minds. In Germany, the number of patients in mental hospitals rose from 40,000 in 1870 to 220,000 by 1910. Many of them suffered from this nervous disorder that contemporary doctors blamed on a world of vertiginous speed and nerve-shattering newness. As Virginia Woolf famously wrote at the time, quote, on or around December 1910, human character changed, end quote. The modern world changed our personality. 115 years later, it's changing us again. According to new analysis by the Financial Times writer John Byrne Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to America's personalities in just the last decade.
According to longitudinal tests that he'll describe in just a moment, we have collectively become meaningfully less extroverted, less agreeable, and more neurotic. But the most important thing Byrne Murdoch found is that measures of conscientiousness among young Americans appear to be in a kind of freefall. Today's guest is John Byrne Murdoch. We talk about the value of conscientiousness, what it is, what kind of behavior it predicts, and how the modern world might be scrambling our personalities by making us less interested in other people and more consumed with our own neurotic interiority. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. John Byrne Murdoch, welcome back to the show.
Great to be here.
You reported that in the last decade there's been an important change in Americans' personalities. Tell us what you found.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic of America's personality shift?
0:00–9:02
2
How has technology impacted social behavior in America?
9:02–22:29
3
What significant personality changes have been observed in young Americans?
22:29–42:51
4
How does conscientiousness affect behavior and life outcomes?
42:51–44:20