Kanye West’s 2010 single, “Power,” includes a lyric in which the rapper claims, “I just needed time alone with my own thoughts.” What he meant was that he needed to isolate himself to rise above public criticism should he want to remain his creative self.
However, a study in the July 2014 issue of the research journal Science, “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind,”suggests West might actually have needed something more than just his own thoughts.
The 11-experiment study found that the participants did not enjoy spending time alone, which entailed 15 minutes of no cellphone usage and no sleeping, and were willing to experience painful electric shocks just to distract themselves from their own trains of thought.
“Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative,” stated the abstract.
This seems, at first, of evidence of the extent to which technology is rotting our brains and turning us into thoughtless zombies. Thankfully, the researchers included a wide demographic in one of the experiments, which demonstrated that people ages 18 to 77 all sought to distract themselves from their own thoughts, regardless of their extent of technology use.
So maybe we can’t blame this on technology, but surely it plays a role, right? Maybe it does, but probably not as much as we want it to.
More often than not, people turn to their cellphones or tablets to relieve them of any sliver of boredom.
For instance, when Angel Olsen opened for Iron and Wine at the North Carolina Museum of Art June 28, she failed to engage her audience, to say the least. Many people in the crowd turned to mobile social media apps to relieve their boredom. At least one couple even checked their LinkedIn accounts, if that illustrates just how boring Olsen’s performance was.
People can complain that social media neutralizes the life experience and that it takes people away from living in the moment. It’s a tired argument.
But could it not be the case that the ability to communicate with almost anyone in the world at any given time does not detract but enhances our human experience? We social creatures have never in our entire history been able to communicate with one another as modern technology allows, and this is only the beginning.
If we have the option to talk to a loved one thousands of miles away instead of some stranger or someone we don’t like, there is no good reason to choose the latter.
A new study from Boston University found Facebook use among married people to be positively correlated with divorce rates.
Even those who acknowledged this finding as a matter of correlation not causation, such as Anne Miller, who wrote the Ozy article, “Quit Facebook, save your marriage,” and those who commented on the article, inclined to blame the social media site for divorce rates.
Maybe an argument could be made that Facebook offers too easy an outlet for a spouse who would otherwise turn to his or her partner in an effort to communicate their relationship troubles.
But that’s a stretch. Facebook is not causing divorces, only offering an outlet for unsatisfied spouses to communicate with other, more enjoyable people.
In the same way, people didn’t want to be shocked because they couldn’t have their phones. They just wanted a distraction from themselves. Surely, if the shock study had occurred about 10 years ago, participants would have been denied books and would have yielded the same results.
Perhaps, it is against human nature to enjoy being entirely alone. Technology hasn’t changed us (yet), only how we deal with boredom.