It is always a respite to return home. Body, mind, and spirit relax as one. The family patterns are familiar, even if we have outgrown them. The manners of our kin wash over us as assuredly as the smell of the vestibule. Doubtless, it takes years of social practice to habituate a family to itself, to say nothing of genetics.
Social rhythms have accompanied the rise of our species from quadrupedal brute to information-technology-embedded creatures of the present. And they have been so elemental to this evolution that they are seldom remarked. Just as a chemical compound must be isolated to be "discovered," so it is necessary for significant contrivance to unveil the primacy of social storage of information. At this stage, it probably makes sense to show rather than tell. But I'll first come to the point.
Humans are social creatures. We embed co-dependent regulatory mechanisms in interpersonal relations. As greater degrees of anti-social existence take hold in society, the individual and collective costs of self-regulation mount.
What I'm discussing is quite broad, so the anecdotes will be eclectic. Hopefully,that will help the point come across more clearly over a few iterations.
A wife knows that her husband tends to forget his wallet, so she puts it on the table by the door before he goes out. The wife dies, and suddenly the husband is checking out at the grocery store and can't pay. In fact, he's forgetting his wallet all the time. That is one cost of her passing, but the interesting aspect is that the widower doesn't have a way of knowing why he is suffering in this way. The wife was too charitable to ever mention the small kindness she did him in removing his wallet from wherever he left it and placing it by the door. In this sense, the widower lives a much less efficient life; and beyond that, he hasn't any "breadcrumbs" to lead him back to the source of his distress, never mind the efficient life before. He thus presents an increased individual cost of self-regulation.
Domestic terrorism has burgeoned in the United States in the years since Y2K. Mass killings by people most of us would consider civilians comprise individual failures of self-regulation. But the phenomenon of mass shootings stems in part from a collective increase in the cost of self-regulation. (Clearly, this topic deserves more space than I have provided it here).
An army recruit remains lean. A retiree gains pounds every year. The army recruit walks more at ease down the same city street without his/her shirt because the culture stores a measure of approbation or censure. It may be tempting to refer to such shame or constraint as "internalized," but this comfort is local, not universal. The retiree might get to know his community in Florida so well that his shirtless behavior becomes common. By the same token, the recruit would feel stressed baring her midsection at the retirement home's pool.
US citizens are more empowered than ever but they are in aggregate less happy than ever. How can it be that the freedom to freewheel through life and careers and religions and diets and friends leaves people less confident and feeling more overworked than they have ever historically felt?
Unlike the family that opened the article, a parent who has Alzheimer's disease is exhausting. The child in the relationship finds herself trying to remind the parent of all the things he is supposed to know or ask about her. Or about his own affairs. In addition the burden of a decrepit person's life, the child visitor struggles to fill in how they were known. The task is of course impossible, but they try over and over to restore the interface that has been lost.
It is perhaps too anodyne to refer to "efficiency" and "regulation" in circumstances deeply personal to us. But I believe the terminology dusts off an unremarked phenomenon. The general assumption for the past several decades has been that agency is wholly individual. But a key component of agency is not. The elements of action are stored in our social surroundings. As social capital dissipates, the cost of action increases, or--put another way--its efficaciousness decreases.
More dramatically, there will be more and more failures of self-regulation the less social our society becomes. The tautology is inescapable. When for whatever reason the capacity of communities to "hold" the intentions of their constituent members collapses, the intentions spill forth, much like condensation forms a rain cloud.
It is said that we are the function of our five closest friends. But fewer and fewer of us each year report having at least one close friend. More and more of us are less and less known to each other. By all accounts, we live in an era of information overload. Search engines like Google found a niche by profiling users and generating bespoke universes of information. But very little of what anyone with an internet connection "takes in" each day is familiar any longer.
Sometimes songs got it right and said it better than plain words ever could. Lean on Me comes to mind.
Social rhythms have accompanied the rise of our species from quadrupedal brute to information-technology-embedded creatures of the present. And they have been so elemental to this evolution that they are seldom remarked. Just as a chemical compound must be isolated to be "discovered," so it is necessary for significant contrivance to unveil the primacy of social storage of information. At this stage, it probably makes sense to show rather than tell. But I'll first come to the point.
Humans are social creatures. We embed co-dependent regulatory mechanisms in interpersonal relations. As greater degrees of anti-social existence take hold in society, the individual and collective costs of self-regulation mount.
What I'm discussing is quite broad, so the anecdotes will be eclectic. Hopefully,that will help the point come across more clearly over a few iterations.
A wife knows that her husband tends to forget his wallet, so she puts it on the table by the door before he goes out. The wife dies, and suddenly the husband is checking out at the grocery store and can't pay. In fact, he's forgetting his wallet all the time. That is one cost of her passing, but the interesting aspect is that the widower doesn't have a way of knowing why he is suffering in this way. The wife was too charitable to ever mention the small kindness she did him in removing his wallet from wherever he left it and placing it by the door. In this sense, the widower lives a much less efficient life; and beyond that, he hasn't any "breadcrumbs" to lead him back to the source of his distress, never mind the efficient life before. He thus presents an increased individual cost of self-regulation.
Domestic terrorism has burgeoned in the United States in the years since Y2K. Mass killings by people most of us would consider civilians comprise individual failures of self-regulation. But the phenomenon of mass shootings stems in part from a collective increase in the cost of self-regulation. (Clearly, this topic deserves more space than I have provided it here).
An army recruit remains lean. A retiree gains pounds every year. The army recruit walks more at ease down the same city street without his/her shirt because the culture stores a measure of approbation or censure. It may be tempting to refer to such shame or constraint as "internalized," but this comfort is local, not universal. The retiree might get to know his community in Florida so well that his shirtless behavior becomes common. By the same token, the recruit would feel stressed baring her midsection at the retirement home's pool.
US citizens are more empowered than ever but they are in aggregate less happy than ever. How can it be that the freedom to freewheel through life and careers and religions and diets and friends leaves people less confident and feeling more overworked than they have ever historically felt?
Unlike the family that opened the article, a parent who has Alzheimer's disease is exhausting. The child in the relationship finds herself trying to remind the parent of all the things he is supposed to know or ask about her. Or about his own affairs. In addition the burden of a decrepit person's life, the child visitor struggles to fill in how they were known. The task is of course impossible, but they try over and over to restore the interface that has been lost.
It is perhaps too anodyne to refer to "efficiency" and "regulation" in circumstances deeply personal to us. But I believe the terminology dusts off an unremarked phenomenon. The general assumption for the past several decades has been that agency is wholly individual. But a key component of agency is not. The elements of action are stored in our social surroundings. As social capital dissipates, the cost of action increases, or--put another way--its efficaciousness decreases.
More dramatically, there will be more and more failures of self-regulation the less social our society becomes. The tautology is inescapable. When for whatever reason the capacity of communities to "hold" the intentions of their constituent members collapses, the intentions spill forth, much like condensation forms a rain cloud.
It is said that we are the function of our five closest friends. But fewer and fewer of us each year report having at least one close friend. More and more of us are less and less known to each other. By all accounts, we live in an era of information overload. Search engines like Google found a niche by profiling users and generating bespoke universes of information. But very little of what anyone with an internet connection "takes in" each day is familiar any longer.
Sometimes songs got it right and said it better than plain words ever could. Lean on Me comes to mind.