Digital Wellness: Monks in the Casino

"In the last few decades, the pro-social life script for many young people—date, marry, buy a house, have a kid—has become more expensive. Meanwhile, the anti-social life script—e.g., posting, porn, parlays—has become easier, cheaper, frictionless. #Digital Wellness 📱🧘 This has created an unusual inversion of risk. Today's young people—and young men, in particular—have become more risk averse in the physical world and more risk-seeking in the digital world. They date less, and gamble more. They find intimacy scary and betting exciting. They furnish their rooms like high-tech monasteries and gravitate toward media that works like a slot machine. I don't think young men suffer from a "loneliness crisis." I think the problem is bigger and stranger than that. They are choosing to be alone, because economics and technology have made aloneness feel easy and togetherness feels anxious. The result: A generation of monks in a casino." https://www.derekthompson..