Morality in the 21st Century: The ‘Selfie Generation’

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 4: The ‘Selfie Generation’

"‘We thought that this exposure to the entire world through the computer or phone screen was going to make kids grow up much faster. And in fact, paradoxically, it's having the opposite effect.’

‘Yes. Although I think it's important to point out that that trend of growing up slowly began long before the smartphone. The smartphone probably accelerated it. But that trend dates to the late 1990s. It's part of a bigger cultural story, that when we live longer, we expect education to take longer, people have fewer children and nurture them more carefully. It's called a slow life strategy. And it ends up meaning that children and teens just take longer to grow up because they're more carefully protected for a longer time.’

‘Let me ask you about what social media does for your sort of sense of self, how does it affect the sense of self.’

‘So there is some research to suggest that you get the biggest negative effects from spending time on social media if you're comparing yourself to others, and it's especially tempting for teen girls, that they're looking at other people's profiles. Everybody else looks like they have a much more glamorous life, that they're prettier, that they're having a better time. And they're not processing that that friend of theirs, she looks so great in that picture, may have taken 250 pictures to get just the right one. Or that she probably had a really bad day but she posted the one good thing in it. Or that your vacation with her family, everybody fought or you know was looking at their own phones the whole time but they posted the couple pictures, you know, when they were all together and happy and the sun was out.

So this is the problem is that social media is curated and it doesn't give a true picture of other people's lives. It just highlights the good things. So the paper that found this link to depression is that when people compare themselves, was called seeing everyone else's highlight reels, and that really captures it.’...

[Member of iGen]: ‘I think it definitely is addictive and I think is really dangerous. Because for example now even if I, when I meet up with my friends, we can't sit and have a conversation for an hour, they've always got to have their phone. So now when friends come to my house, I confiscate their phones from them, because we're sitting around all looking at things or messaging other people and I'm thinking, well, if you weren't with me you’d be messaging me and you're with me now’...

'These big surveys of teens and they're asked about their values and their life goals and what they think is important. And the importance of quote, becoming very well off financially, is at all time highs. And this survey started in the 1960s. Yet the importance of things like developing a meaningful philosophy of life, or in another survey, having meaning and purpose in life, those have steadily declined.'...

‘If you give off the hint of being what university students call thirsty, like you want something or you want somebody, that that's considered pathetic’

‘The hunger for love, friendship, that kind of thing. That's, that's being thirsty.’

‘Yes. Another phrase that captures that is, there's a trend on university campuses toward hooking up, which is some sort of sexual activity without commitment. And what's happened sometimes, of course, because people are human, is when they have sexual activity, somebody else, they might start feeling for them.

And the phrase for that is catching feelings as if that were a disease… this is a pervasive attitude, especially on university campuses, that the best way to go is to have no strings attached, no commitments. That you need to establish yourself first. That it's a bad thing to get, you know bogged down in a relationship. That that needs to be put off until much later.’...

‘I've never met anybody who didn't want to lead a good life. Who didn't want to feel sanctified in some way. And we yearn for something that approaches goodness. Some sense that we're serving some ideal and some purpose. And when we don't have that sense, our life falls to pieces, then the little setbacks are crushing. And I notice this among my students who have not given them moral vocabulary. And so I'd say our life is oriented by the desires of our hearts and our souls toward moral joy. And to me, that's when you lose yourself in something, something outside yourself.’

‘So that's the difference between the modern self and the traditional soul. That the soul was outwardly directed and the self is inwardly directed? Is that how you put it?’

‘Well, the self thinks it can be self contained. And one of my problems with the happiness research... they call people up and they say, are you happy?... they can measure when people are happy, which activities correlate to happiness. But the thing they don't do is they don't qualify different kinds of happiness, different qualities of happiness.

To me, there are many different qualities of happiness. If I'm having a good pizza, I'm happy. If I have a good car, I'm happy. There are certain material things that yield happiness. But would I say that's the same level of happiness as I feel when I'm involved in rapturous love, whether it's the same quality of happiness that I feel through giving back to community.

Would I say it's the same feeling of happiness of a feeling of transcendence of oneness with creation? No, it's clearly not the same kind. And what our souls yearn for, I think, is to rise up the ladder of loves to higher forms of happiness…

When I asked people, what are the activities in their life that really made them who they are, or what were the moments that really formed them and formed their character. No one ever says, I had a great time on the beach in Hawaii'...

‘One of David Brooks’s discoveries is how the older we get, the more our life goals become moral ones. He calls this the second mountain’...

‘The longer life has given us, created extra periods of life, it's created a period of uncertainty in the 20s, which I call the Odyssey years where people just sort of wander out what their life is for, and they take a good long decade to do that. But when I talked to people over 70, in particular, I, not all the time, but often I noticed the following phenomenon. They graduated from university or wherever, and they thought they had identified the mountain they were going to climb in life. And it tended to be about their career and their family. Tended to be about building up the identity, building up the ego.

And oftentimes, they achieved that mountain and yet somehow found it unsatisfying. Or maybe they got knocked off that mountain by some failure, or maybe something terrible happened, like the death of a child. And they found themselves down in the valley. And there they realized that first mountain of building up a career and the ego and the identity was not their real mountain, there was a second mountain ahead of them. And if the first mountain was about building up your ego, the second mountain tends to be about giving it away, pouring forth. Pouring back into community, pouring back into something spiritual.

And so if the first mountain is external accomplishment, the second mountain tends to be more internal. And sometimes it manifests in the form of going off to Tibet to meditate, sometimes in the form of surrendering yourself to some cause, giving back to your some community, devoting yourself to some charity, to some group of young people.

But the second mountain tends to be the bigger mountain. They, people come to a certain age and the yearning for righteousness takes over. And they they just say I want to do something really good with my life. I want to do something which is, which is really giving yourself away.

And that ability to give yourself away, is prac, maybe only achieved after you've built yourself up after you've established who you are. And that gift of surrendering the ego turns out to be a much better joy than building it up and earning the lower forms of happiness.’"