Good morning.

Did you have a fun Saturday?

In today’s issue:

• One big thing. Star Wars ships use deflector shields to ward off enemy laser attacks. Your iPhone features a similar technology.

• You have to check this out. Talking to strangers in this antisocial century.

• Tools & tech. High tech napkins.

Need a coffee refill? Go ahead, get one. Once you’re back, let’s jump in.

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

iPhone social deflector shields.

Australians can be awkward with strangers.

I lived there for 10 years, from 2006 to 2016. For three years, I lived in the Sunshine Coast region of Queensland, famous for miles and miles of gorgeous beaches.

Australia is roughly the size of the continental United States, but only 27 million people live there—approximately the same population as Southern California.

Outside the big cities, you could walk for miles on the beach and pass just a handful of people walking in the opposite direction.

As someone approached, I would look their way to say hello. But over time, I noticed that most of my fellow beach walkers did not look at me at all. No smile. No head-nod. No g’day.

Instead, people would find creative reasons to NOT look in my direction. Oh my, is that the rarely seen Australian silver gull flying by? Wow, on the ground, there's the one broken shell I've been looking for all day. Is that a cutter in the distance?

On an average walk, one in four people would look at me as I passed and give some human indicator of hello. How do I know it was one in four? Because I was obsessed with this unusual cultural dance and kept a mental tally each time I walked. Silverback gorilla researchers had less robust observational data than I did.

This is the story of how I became a global expert on public greetings between strangers (or the comical lack thereof). OK… maybe expert is a bit much, but still.

Social interaction deflector shields.

Those Australian beach walkers used creative ways to avoid social interaction.

Today, we have far more technologically sophisticated tools for this task: our phones.

Star Wars and Star Trek both make regular use of plasma deflector shields. These shields prevent incoming laser blasts from hitting the ship or town (or Death Star).

“Shields up!”

After cutting my sociological research teeth on Australia’s beaches, I returned to larger civilizations well-prepared to observe the many creative uses of iPhone social deflector shield technology.

Walk down a sidewalk. If someone is alone ahead of you, observe as they pull out their phone for a suddenly urgent task just as you pass by.

Any situation that involves strangers waiting together… for an elevator, to buy groceries, checking in at a restaurant… take a moment and tally the percentage of people who reflexively pull out their phones.

Admittedly, after being oft denied a simple "g'day" walking Australia's beaches, there may be a dose of confirmation bias in my current field studies.

Another explanation for reflexively pulling out our phones is simple addiction. Americans check their phones between 144 to 205 times a day (once every five minutes we are awake). Phones provide an immediate cure for boredom, and our tolerance for even microdoses of boredom is nearing zero (a topic I will return to in a future newsletter).

But two things can be true at once, and some of this perfectly timed phone use is surely anti-social in nature. Most likely, this is more habitual than intentional. Habits have four essential elements: cue, craving, response, and reward. For a person standing alone on the sidewalk as you walk toward them, this looks like:

• Cue: a person is coming my way.

• Craving: to reduce the anxiety of an unwanted social interaction. Oh, the horror.

• Response: pull out my phone, stare at it as if it were revealing the secrets of the cosmos.

• Reward: oncoming person does not speak to me, anxiety dissipates. I am saved.

When did we get so scared of social interaction?

Mobile phone generations.

As Gen X, we are digital immigrants. We grew up without ubiquitous tech but were young enough as it emerged to seamlessly adapt to it.

Back in the day, mobile phone use was about status. The 1980s lawyer with the car phone (with the squiggly antenna) always had critical business to attend to. The doctor with the pager was too important to ever be out of reach. Michael Knight had one in KITT. Obviously, so did Sonny Crockett.

As mobile phone use expanded, more and more people could act out their own "I'm very important, I have to take this call" status play.

Meanwhile, our friends in younger generations are digital natives. Some are iPad kids.

Somewhere in this transition, phones stopped conferring social status and began fueling social anxiety.

Social anxiety disorder has long existed and affected people of all ages, but its prevalence is growing fast. A 2020 study found that 58% of Americans met the threshold for social anxiety disorder (and that was pre-pandemic). The study did not ask people whether they had social anxiety. It asked them to rank statements describing common thoughts and fears experienced by those with SAD based on how true certain statements were for them, including:

• “I get nervous if I have to speak with someone in authority.”

•  “I feel tense if I’m alone with just one other person.”

• “I feel I’ll say something embarrassing when talking.”

If younger generations are digital natives, you could also call them social anxiety natives. They grew up in technical and cultural environments that stunted social dexterity, as digital devices and social media enabled social connection without face-to-face interaction.

“With this shift toward virtual interaction during stages of life where we are developing our social functioning skills and abilities, the growing prevalence of social anxiety disorder in children and adolescents seems to be a natural consequence,” says Jordan Rich.

Gen X did not grow up with this curse. Who knew that playing outside with our friends and sitting around shooting the shit with cans of Coors in college would be such a blessing?

Importantly, this also suggests our current antisocial tendencies may just be recently formed bad habits rather than long-ingrained deficiencies.

The introversion delusion.

I am an only child introvert. So, I write this empathetically.

If you give me a series of options about what I want to do—talk to the person next to me on a plane versus keep to myself, go meet a group of new acquaintances for drinks versus stay home—I will almost always pick the antisocial option.

You’d think I make these decisions believing they will make me happy. After all, who knows me better than me?

However, as I discussed in my newsletter Miswanting the Future, one of the most consistent findings of modern psychology and behavioral science is that people are flat-out awful at accurately predicting what will make them happy in the future. The folks in the research lab talk about this as decision utility, which compares expected utility (the benefit you think something will give you) to experienced utility (the benefit you actually experience).

I want to keep to myself more often than not, but the net of these decisions over time does not produce the benefits of social connection that I logically understand will increase my well-being.

Our friends in Generation Z have taken to their favorite ways to communicate—TikTok and memes—to celebrate when friends cancel plans.

Plans are often canceled in the name of self-care. As an introvert, I understand there are times I need to recharge. But herein lies a slippery slope, and many people are sliding all the way down this slope, from self-care to isolation and self-obsession.

This “noncommittal trend” normalizes rude behavior, such as canceling social plans at the last minute, and self-care provides cover.

At least Gen Z hasn't canceled their sense of humor, as this perfect video explaining how to use therapy speak to get away with anything you want attests. “Hey, I can’t come to your birthday tonight. I need to honor my personal boundaries and conserve my emotional bandwidth. I’m at capacity right now.” 🤣

“Regularly canceling plans at the last minute isn’t ‘self-care,’ it’s just rude — and it’s eating away at our relationships,” bitches Melanie Whyte on the website Betches.

These are all problems of miswanting—errors in predicting what will make us happiest over time.

Avoiding social interactions and canceling plans trades near-term gain for long-term loss. It’s easier to stay in, you get to recharge, and you temporarily suppress the social anxiety monster.

I think most Gen Xers are more respectful and understand true friendships require time and effort, even when it’s hard.

But what about that stranger next to you on the airplane or train?

Rethinking small talk – strangers on a train.

The folks in the research department were talking one day about the errors of affective forecasting. They had an idea: Let’s ask people riding the L in Chicago to predict which of two scenarios—talking to a stranger or minding your own business—would make for the more positive experience while commuting to work on the train.

They hopped on the train and began their research. As expected, the overwhelming majority of people predicted that quiet solitude would make for a better commute than talking to a stranger. The team then created an experiment where some people were asked to keep to themselves, and others were instructed to talk with a stranger.

What did they find?

You can see where this is going. In surveys completed after the train ride, people who engaged in conversations described the train commute as more positive than usual. Even those who typically worked on the train said that conversations made the trip more productive.

“Commuters on a train into downtown Chicago reported a significantly more positive commute when they connected with a stranger than when they sat in solitude. Yet, they predicted precisely the opposite pattern of experiences. This pattern of results demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of the psychological consequences of social engagement,” explain researchers Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder.

This Chicago research has been replicated on the London Underground, buses, and laboratory waiting rooms.

“A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

Elevating small talk to medium talk.

Larry David hates small talk. In a 2017 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, he randomly asks his dinner party seatmate, “How’s your marriage?” And then, “How often do you have sex?” He explains his bold questions saying, "I'm trying to elevate small talk to medium talk.”

But even if small talk with strangers on a train is good, conversations with our closest friends is an opportunity for something deeper (medium talk, even large talk).

Engaging in deep conversations is one of the prime benefits of close friendship.

But a ubiquitous device is slowly degrading the depth of our most personal interactions… yes, it is our accidental yet consequential use of iPhone social deflector shield technology.

We have our phones with us nearly all the time. If you are out to dinner with a friend, does it matter if your phone is in your pocket or purse rather than on the table?

A 2014 study observed the conversations of 100 couples at a café and found that "the mere presence of a smartphone, even if not in use — just as an object in the background — degrades private conversations, making partners less willing to disclose deep feelings and less understanding of each other.”

This dynamic has been dubbed phubbing—snubbing the person you are with by using your phone.

Your phone’s impact on conversational depth works in several ways:

“First, it decreases the quality of what you talk about because you talk about things where you wouldn't mind being interrupted, which makes sense, and, secondly, it decreases the empathic connection that people feel toward each other,” says MIT professor Sherry Turkle.

More recent research finds that the conversational impact of having your phone visible is actually fading. People are just used to it now.

But the impact of your phone on conversational depth remains. You might still be phubbing your closest friends.

Even well-intentioned phone use degrades conversational depth. I’ve watched friends try to tell a longer story, something with a backstory, buildup, and important outcome—the kind of stories saved for close friends. But they never get past the backstory. Someone interjects when part of the backstory reminds them of a funny video to share. It makes someone else think of an old photo to show everyone. These are all fun interjections, but they keep conversations shallow.

In the realm of conversation killing nonverbal signals, there is no greater deflector shield technology than the iWatch. No one can resist looking down with every buzz, their present conversation be damned.

Conversations make you happy. Deep conversations are the primary fuel of genuine friendships. Social connections improve well-being and lifespan.

Lower the shields.

That’s it for today. Shields down.

See you next Sunday.