Selfish & Vicious?

A few weeks ago, my dad said something very interesting to me. I don't remember the quote verbatim, so I'm paraphrasing a bit here... "you know, I really feel like the world is becoming a more selfish and viscous place." In context, we were talking about the demands we've been finding on our time, and recent dealings with people in general.

At first, I agreed with my father's sentiments as they to a large degree sum up my feelings lately. Living in New York City, I'm constantly faced with a deluge of people that either rude, ignorant or both. Yet, I found myself contemplating what he said for the better part of the last week. There's a lot implied by a simple sentence like that, and I think there's a lot that lurks under the surface that deserves a lot of attention. It's more of an emotional reaction than a factual statement, and I surprised myself at how much my perceptions changed as I dug deeper into it.

So I looked into this thought, and asked myself "is the world today that much more selfish and/or viscous today?". I think in large part, the statement depends on context...too often, people (myself included) tend to be short-sighted on this very notion of context. Yeah, I think it's easy to say things are a lot more selfish and vicious feeling today if the sample size is narrow enough. For me, the world was a lot simpler and easier when I was a kid. Now that I'm in my late 20's and playing the role of "adult", this statement is easy to justify. Even trying to step into my dad's shoes, it could be very easy to justify that the world was a much saner and comfortable place. He's surrounded by different people, different situations (he's only got 1 kid still in the house instead of 4), a lot more responsibilities, risks, experiences, not to mention now that he's hit 50 there's an increased possibility of (knocking on the proverbial wood) health issues, increased insurance premiums, retirement, (as good a place as any to throw the words massive recession out there). So yeah, trying to put myself in his position, it's EASY to make that statement and honest-to-goodness believe it. However, I felt like I was taking the wrong approach, I don't think the comment was meant to reflect on our own personal lives, but rather as a broad brush on today's society.

Has "modern society" given in to feeling justified as selfish and self-serving as everyone else; "Damn the masses, I'm going to get mine come hell or high water". My initial reaction is to say that soooo many people in this day and age have come to this conclusion, it's easy to see it everywhere. But, is this feeling more prevalent now than it was in the past?

I think what underlies all of this is technology - the major driving force behind the majority of societal change. My personal experience with the effects of technology has been the "coming of age" of the Internet. I was born in 1982, so I basically grew up as the Internet did. By the time I was in high school, its true potential was being realized. I got my first cell phone at 17 and being heavily involved in technology since my youth I've been intimately intertwined with the amazing amount of technology advancement in the past 2 decades. I think it's relevant to mention all of this, because with these advancements in communication and information technology, it's fundamentally altered how we communicate and interact. Our world today has become one where we're literally bombarded with information on a regular basis, and one where it becomes very easy to feel like an insignificant cog that's got to fight to get above water & get what's ours.

We're plugged in pretty much every minute of every day, always anxious that we're going to miss out on something. We're forced to digest the myriad of information thrown at us so fast, that we've all become extremely adept to filtering it in quick little parcels, easy to throw it in the trash or hit the delete key. "It's not worth our time". I think this has made us more attuned to quick bits of information rather than longer, thoughtful transmissions of ideas. This anxiety doesn't allow us the freedom to sit with a particular issue/item/experience long enough to seek its true breadth. We're constantly looking forward to the next e-mail/issue/entertainment/item/etc... long story short -- we make ourselves this busy for fear of falling out of "the know".

Bringing it back to the comment at hand, I think everyone's got a lot more built-in excuses for being selfish. We spend less time meaningfully interacting with people because we're "busy". The pace of today's society is such that it takes a larger and larger percentage of our time, energy & resources to maintain our status, that often we resort to quick facebook updates or text messages to maintain contact. We feel comforted that we have hundreds of facebook friends, or e-mail "contacts" -- but how many of those people have you just sat down and had a real experience with in the past 6 months? a year?

What I'm trying to get at is that all this time being "busy" makes us seem selfish and self-absorbed. It's not completely true though, we're simply absorbed in all of our technology. It's a surrogate, not the real experience. I find myself more and more cherishing time spend around a board game with friends, a beer with a buddy, walks in the park, etc...than I spend checking my RSS feeds, filtering through friend's status updated and FarmVille accomplishments on Facebook (which I can't stand by the way), and I haven't touched on work e-mail yet...

So I don't think it's so much that we've become more selfish and viscous towards each other - I just think that the pace of life has blurred things so they seem that way. For as many burdens as technology may place on our time, it also opens up so many more opportunities. Access to knowledge and information is always becoming easier and easier, the spread of ideas are wider and quicker. For as much as this technology has added to our responsibilities and invaded into our personal time, it's also done much more to improve humanity on a global scale - the exact opposite of making the world more selfish and vicious.

I feel that the world has a way of self-balancing - writing, printing presses, radio and television have all had fundamental influences on humanity...and the internet is just the next stage in that evolution. Humans are still left with the fundamental choice on how we react within the situations we find ourselves in: situations that are increasingly infused with technology. I feel that the majority of people don't intend to be selfish or vicious, but we need to put in additional effort to get through the noise those technologies add to our lives.

- Chris