Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you like to be comfortable, this blog is for you (actually maybe it’s not, but subscribe anyway).
A few days ago I was scrolling through TikTok when the algorithm served me an ad for a countertop soft serve ice cream machine1.
I don’t know why the algorithm thought I’d want this, but in fact I do; I’ve always thought that if I got rich one of the few things I’d actually splurge on would be a home soft serve machine. The fact that there is now apparently such a machine that fits on your countertop and costs hundreds, instead of thousands, of dollars was really quite exciting. What a time to be alive.
But before I could actually buy this machine, I started thinking about when I actually eat soft serve. And I realized it’s almost always when I’m out doing something. My wife and I might stop by a soft serve shop at the end of a date. Or we’ll get cones as a family while on a walk. There aren’t many dedicated soft serve shops anymore, so now we mostly drive to a local grocery story that sells cones for $1. More often than not, the store workers see the kids sitting in the cafe area and give them stickers.
All of which is to say that infinite soft serve ice cream is now within my grasp. But getting a soft serve machine at my house would almost surely lead to a lonelier existence. I’d have fewer things to do for date nights with my wife, or on outings with my kids. I’d spend less time in “third spaces,” or those places that aren’t home or work but which provide opportunities to interact with other people. The simple flânerie of sitting with and watching strangers would be replaced with scarfing down 10,000 calories of soft serve by myself at 2 a.m.
I was thinking about this when I saw a tweet in which The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson speculated that the so-called loneliness crisis stems from waning face-to-face interactions.
His thesis was that loneliness in small doses functions as a motivator; you feel lonely so you go out and socialize. But that isn’t what’s happening now. Instead, more convenience makes it easier and easier to simply be alone. Thompson specifically points to “comfortable homes, ample entertainment, an on-demand delivery economy, and the dopamine-exhausting effect of non-stop phone use” as factors contributing to social isolation2.
I think Thompson is right. I think that many of the technologies that are making our lives more convenient — technologies like countertop soft serve machines — make a lot of sense on paper, but have the collateral effect of eroding social connections. And while I don’t expect the march of progress to stop any time soon, I suspect that the people who are least isolated have perhaps learned to tolerate (either by choice or circumstance) higher levels of inconvenience.
The soft serve machine is a silly and low stakes example of this phenomenon, but Thompson’s mention of “comfortable homes” captures this idea even better. Consider: Have you ever watched an old movie, or seen a clipping from an old newspaper, and noticed people watching TV on their front porch or stoop? I was not alive in the early to mid twentieth century, but my understanding from both fictional and nonfiction sources is that it was fairly common for people to consume media communally. If only one person on the block had a radio or TV and there was a big game, everyone crowded around together to watch.
Then standards of living improved and soon everyone had a TV in their own home. The family might gather in the living room, but the days of watching the World Series on the stoop were over. During my lifetime, technology became even cheaper and more ubiquitous to the point that many of us have multiple TVs in our houses. Today, I can watch news TikToks completely by myself while my kids watch a movie in the other room. The paths of family members, not to mention friends and neighbors, never need to cross at all.
Telecommunication technology is part of that story, but so too is other tech, perhaps most significantly air conditioning. The reason so many people were out on their stoops, and not in their living rooms, was in part because they lived in poorly ventilated apartment buildings with little climate control.
I actually saw this first hand as a Mormon missionary in Brazil. My two years in Brazil were spent on the southern edge of the Amazon river basin, so I experienced a mix of both jungle and savanna. But every Brazilian town I lived in was very hot, and few of the people I interacted with had air conditioning. As a result, many homes were designed with courtyards and indoor-outdoor spaces where we whiled away the hours talking, eating, and watching TV. The heat was not ideal, but the homes and culture adapted in ways that fostered sociability rather than undermining it.
I experienced this yet again a few years later as a backpacking traveler. At least in the early to mid 2000s, if you stayed in places that were sufficiently cheap — lower rung hostels, for instance — they wouldn’t have air conditioning. And so everyone would hang out in common areas, either because those spaces did have cooling units or because they at least weren’t as stuffy as the bedrooms. And those experiences ended up being some of my fondest travel memories, much more so than when I got a little more money and could stay in nicer but more isolating lodging. To paraphrase a quote I’ve heard from travel writer Rick Steves, spending more money often just puts up more barriers between you and other people.
I don’t begrudge anyone putting in air conditioning. I actually helped a few people install A/C units in Brazil, and when my own family moved into our current home (built in 1901) central air was the very first thing we added. Air conditioning is incredible, and a public health necessity in some places.
What I’m saying is that there are tradeoffs to having “more comfortable homes” and some of those tradeoffs have to do with social connection. If you had told me 20 years ago that I could get any food at all delivered to my house, my mind would’ve been blown. If you had told me I’d someday be able to access the entirety of human knowledge with a piece of glass in my pocket, I probably would’ve fainted. The fact that these things exist is wild. But if you had also said that the cost of that little phone-computer is never again going to a bookstore, I might not have been quite so thrilled. If the cost of limitless food delivery is fewer real restaurants and more chains or ghost kitchens, perhaps we’ve lost something along the way.
There are of course even more extreme illustrations of this concept. Last night, I was at a birthday party and a few of us were discussing our immigrant ancestors who lived in cramped and horrible tenements in places like New York City. In my case, I had one set of great great grandparents who came over during the Irish potato famine. I’m grateful for their sacrifices and have no desire to live the exceedingly difficult lives they led.
On the other hand, the silver lining of being crammed into those tenements was a rich social fabric3. My life is vastly more comfortable than that of my Irish ancestors, probably to a degree that would’ve been unimaginable to them.
But I also have fewer friends than those ancestors did, probably to a degree that would’ve been unimaginable to them.
No one wants to go back to the tenement days, and I’m not throwing out my phone or air conditioning any time soon. Once these conveniences are in place they’re probably never going away (or at least, they’re not going away in my household).
But I think it’s worth being aware that the pursuit of more and more comfort has costs. Yes, there’s plenty of writing on how cell phones are eroding social life. However, outside of Derek Thompson’s recent commentary I haven’t seen much discussion about the concept of comfort itself. In other words, perhaps the reason so many people are so isolated isn’t because of any single device or technology. It’s not necessarily the phones or the A/C or the soft serve ice cream machines. Maybe the problem is our desire to become ensconced in cozier and cozier little bubbles.
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This is definitely not an endorsement or an ad, but so you know I’m not making this up, here is the machine.
Thompson’s tweet is related to his recent cover story at The Atlantic about loneliness and isolation. I’d also point you to Patrick T Brown’s riff on Thompson’s piece, which I thought was great.
I don’t have a lot of details about my specific Irish ancestors, but the book The First Kennedys is a great dive into the Irish immigrant experience. Author Neal Thompson dug up some specific information about the first Kennedys to arrive in America, but also there are many gaps which he fills in with information about immigrants at that time generally. His point is that Bridget Kennedy — ancestor of JFK et al —was probably an archetypal Irish immigrant, to the point that he uses “Bridget” as a placeholder name for all similar women. As it turns out, my own great great grandma was also named Bridget, and I suspect that many of the general details Thompson presents apply to her and countless others.
Agreed! I think it's important to try to push yourself toward certain forms of "positive inconvenience." For instance, this year I did all my holiday shopping at local businesses in my town's little downtown area and mailed everything at the post office. Shopping online would have been faster and probably cheaper, but doing it this way meant having several little interactions with people in my neighborhood. Even waiting in line at the post office is essentially time spent in community. I try to mentally separate that type of "inconvenience" from true inconveniences that don't contribute anything of value to my life, like sitting in traffic.
So true! A long while ago, I was a bank teller and so many people, especially the elderly, would come in with small daily transactions just for a regular opportunity to chat. A friend was a teller at a different bank and there was one man who would come to our branch every day and convert cash into coins; then he would go over to her branch and convert them back.