Cards with the Fam

The other night, the family was playing a card game that would prompt you to tell a memory: “The time I felt most at ease was…” or “one taboo in my family is…”

I don’t remember the exact prompt, but somehow dad started talking about his childhood, in the suburbs of Chicago, and how different society was back then. The lack of technology forced kids and people to go outside and converse. The population density made it so that there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of people, and you really did have to make connections with the folks in your community. The economy was at a place where a middle class family could support seven kids and a stay at home mom in a massive house with one income from the father.

I started doing population math, recalling at 1980, when he was 20 years old, there were 4.4 billion people in the planet; 1 billion in China, another 700 million in India. Most people were spread out over the Asian continent. In the US there were 225 million. That difference in population density between then and now makes a huge difference toward how we interact with our neighbors; coupled with the tech revolution that has turned us away from face-to-face interactions, creating dopamine addiction and serotonin depletion, creating expectations for instant gratification with our food, love, porn availability (“I want it now!”), and ruining people’s attention spans.

There are so many factors that contribute to the change in society between when he was twenty and thirty years later when I was twenty. It’s an impossibly complex system, and focusing on just one aspect of the change could paint an entirely different picture about why we are the way we are today.

What I find most fascinating is the effect of population density. There has been such a mega population boom since 1960 (when he was born: 3 billion) to today (2024: 8.2 billion). For thousands of years the population was on a slow increase, but has nearly tripled, by the billions, in the last sixty years. That sort of change has revolutionized society in a way that doesn’t seem to be talked about much.

It reminds me of how I react to strangers on the trail when hiking. I remember hashing out this aversion to strangers when hiking Black Butte once. I was hiking solo, enjoying the peace, blood pumping, profound thoughts churning, and I started to recognize the feeling anxiety whenever I would see a stranger on the trail ahead of me, coming my way. There was something primal about that fear, like “I don’t know what this creature (human) is going to do.” Of course, most interactions are cordial, a smile and a “hey”, but there was that deep underlying fear of social anxiety. Humans are the apex predator. They can be dangerous. They can be unpredictable. Perhaps it was a deeply rooted sense of caution to be skeptical of a human from an outside group, even though strangers get along in almost every interaction.

But couple that deep social anxiety for strangers with the fact that there’s now profoundly more of us walking around. We see strangers everywhere. Especially in major cities. It’s so exhausting to have to address every one of the strangers we see on the street with a smile and a “hey”, that we have to be more selective about who we address, thereby giving the cold-shoulder to most of the people we see. Then, giving the cold-shoulder becomes the normal form of interaction between strangers, changing the dynamic of our entire society.