This Is Why You're Lonely

How Big Tech is Destroying Queer Community

Before you keep scrolling, I need five minutes of your full, undivided attention.

I was doing my daily meditation today, and in the session, the instructor talked about three types of wisdom: heard wisdom, known wisdom, and experienced wisdom.

For example, say a friend tells you about a good restaurant (heard wisdom). You go to the restaurant and see the food, which makes a good impression (known wisdom). But it isn’t until you get your food and taste it that you know truly, sensually that it is good. That’s how you unlock experiential wisdom, the deepest, most intimate, and most important.

Experiential wisdom comes from fully experiencing the vibrant world around us.

But we’re doing less and less of this in real life, which is atrophying our connections and destroying our Queer communities.

Let me explain.

Our Digital Dystopia

For the past few months, I’ve been researching our ever-increasing digital isolationism and its effects on the Queer community.

I’ve been reading books about it. I’ve been trying to unpack it in my own life. I’ve been looking at all the ways in which my phone is making me a less kind, less intelligent, and less patient person. And not just phones, pretty much everything in our modern society is designed to siphon away our attention.

And in many of the books I’m reading, the resounding sentiment is that our attention is the most important resource of our age.

It’s also the number one thing that corporations are capitalizing on right now. With drastic effects.

Just think about it.

From the moment we wake up, we reach for our phones and are instantly bombarded with yanks on our attention. These lures, from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc all are scientifically and psychologically designed to exploit our weaknesses (most of which we’re unaware of) and make us spend as much time on each site as possible.

Then, we get out of bed and make some breakfast, but our food has also been designed to grab our attention. The packaging of our food is curated, so we pick up that box instead of a competitor’s. Then we go to work or leave the house, and are bombarded with billboards or subway ads (even though we’re probably still just looking at our phones).

Once we get to work, we’re constantly being interrupted by emails or Slack dings that derail our focus, making it so much harder to get back to what we were doing. Studies have shown that working with constant digital interruptions makes us so unfocused that our IQ ‘drops’ by double what it would drop if we’re drunk or stoned. So it’s more responsible to be drunk or stoned at work than to have your phone nearby.

When the work day is over, we navigate through the same sea of billboards and ads to get home. We eat the food the advertisers sold us. Then most of us watch TV, hopefully with people, but more often than not, families all go watch their own shows in their own rooms, further isolating us.

Finally, we get into bed, do one last scroll, remember that we shouldn’t, put our phones down, fall asleep, and start the whole process again the next day.

Now, this example may sound a bit extreme, but the reality is that the average American spends anywhere from 4.5 to 5.5 hours on their phones each day. So it’s not that extreme.

But it also isn’t our fault.

Fractured By Design

Every single thing on our phones and in the capitalist world that we live in right now is maximized to capture our attention so that we will see advertising, and our behavior can be tracked and sold.

Now, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Experts have been sounding the alarm bells about this for years, but for me, something feels different now.

Maybe it came from working two part-time jobs at the same time that fractured my ability to focus on anything, especially my writing. Maybe it’s the literature that I’ve been diving into that has exposed the countless ways that we are being manipulated without even knowing it. Maybe it’s the anxiety that I’ve been feeling more and more frequently. Maybe it’s the way my brain has more trouble winding down and completing thoughts than it used to. Maybe it’s been the sleep issues I’ve been having.

It’s probably all of it.

Because I hate knowing that outside forces are subliminally controlling what I do.

But what is radicalizing me now more than any of those above is my Queer community. When I look at what is happening to Queer folk in our country and around the world, the rapid descent into fascism and right-wing populism, I can’t separate it from the fault of the tech billionaires who have destroyed our focus and attention. It’s no shock to me that all of the biggest tech moguls have cozied up to Trump because they are literally the reason he got elected in the first place.

But on a more intimate scale, what affects me even more is the comments, DMs, and conversations I have with Queer people about the resounding loneliness they feel. Even folks who appear surrounded by loved ones with thriving communities have told me that they’re still searching for their people.

And I’ve felt it too.

For Me, It’s Personal

Casey and I have frequent conversations about how we feel our communities are shifting. We have incredible connections and friends, but our relationships are taking more effort and work to stay connected these days. Maybe it’s a natural progression as we enter a new chapter of adulthood, but it feels more insidious than that.

As a society, we’re losing our ability and familiarity with making plans or going to events. We simply aren’t as practiced with it anymore. Not because we don’t want it, but because we are rusty and any time we stop practicing something, it becomes that much harder to pick it up again.

And it’s hard because real-life connection is not as comfortable as being alone with our dopamine drips from our digital lives. Real-life connection takes an enormous amount of commitment and will, which is atrophying before our distracted eyes. Real-life connection is a skill that must be nurtured and cared for even on the days when you don’t want to get up from the couch.

But, This is Substack

Now, I recognize that I am speaking to you from a digital platform, and the irony of writing about connection while writing alone in my office is not lost on me.

But I love Substack because it asks you to focus on writing for a sustained period of time. Writing asks you to put aside your life for a little bit of time and enter flow state with another person’s thoughts. Writing does not need to hook you with exciting visuals in the first three seconds. Writing is an invitation to luxuriate and connect, which is why I love it. And Substack has gifted me some truly incredible connections that I am deeply grateful for.

Writing Gay Buffet has been the urgent catalyst to change my behavior, to become more focused, to curb my relationship with my phone, and to seek out real connection and build Queer community.

In the weeks and months to come, I will be talking a lot more about this. I’ll be exposing the many secret ways that we as Queer people are being manipulated. Give you actionable steps to counteract the lure of our dopamine society. And figure out how we can bring this community energy off the screens and into our real lives.

It’s time we start practicing our connection skills again, and sometimes all it takes is a simple yes to feel a lot less lonely.

Real World Wisdom

Right now, we are bombarded with heard wisdom. We have more information than we know what to do with, and all that information is warping our known wisdom; how we view the world. But we’re losing our experiential wisdom to our screens at an alarming rate, and that’s what I’m desperate to bring back.

I want to sit in peace in the sunshine and feel the grass between my toes. I want to sit and play games with my friends uninterrupted by dings and beeps. I want to get lost in a book and look up to find hours have passed. I want to meet new Queer friends over lunch and expand my life by learning about theirs.

Doesn’t that sound lovely?

I think so.

So, what do you say, will you come on this adventure with me?

P.S. I’d love for you to share your thoughts on this in the comments, and this is not a ploy for engagement; I really want to know who’s out there and make this community more of a two-way street!