There’s 3 key qualities that are ‘eroding’ society with increasing potency
- A lack of delayed gratification.
- Overstimulation
- Excessive Praise
Any sense has multiple ways that it interacts with the brain; initial, intermediate processing, lingerwing aftermath, memory after that, and so on and son on. All the electronics we commonly interact with have radiation, light, sounds, movement and a myriad of other stuff that get exposed to younger and younger people with increasing amounts of intensity.
We haven’t magically evolved better brains to process all that, so a lot of people end up addicted to over stimulating themselves; they’ll shoot up a bunch of sugars, substitute water with dehydrating fluids, lack nutritional balance, not get enough physical stimulation to match their diet, and then blast themselves with several electrical signals from multiple monitors, smart-devices, enclosed music etc etc.
All that stuff boils down to chemical reactions, hypes, withdrawals and insufficient reactants to clean it all up; people don’t take the time to ‘come down’ long enough to really recover, so they just learn to mire through life in this zombie-like state of partial processing because enough automation exists around them to get them through each day of that cycle.
When I was a kid, letter writing was still a concern. Communication took longer, so people had to put more time into thinking about what matters and how to convey it. Then, they had to anticipate a reply at some unknown date. They had to be patient.
Nowadays, texts are effectively instantaneous, so people don’t really think through what they mean, read through all of what other people post, and demand faster replies then they’d take to actually process. That’s part of why there’s a rise in ‘reactions’ as entertainment; it’s a form of simulated experience where people relate to others doing something, and just soaking that in. “Oh, I don’t need to hang out with my own friends, I can just relate to two people talking on a couch and borrow their experiences”
When people get used to being mired up with massive amounts of stimulation, it teaches them to really only react to lots of positive praise; either they get unwarranted compliments all the time, or they assume they’re being punished, or the world is out to get them.
Hopped-up people demanding more rewards for essentially nothing pushes them to polarized reactions and emotional impulses because they don’t develop enough restraints to not do that. People don’t “think” about communication or reactions, so they don’t learn there are “good” habits to have. It doesn’t occurs to them and of the times something may have tried to tell them about it, it was stimulating enough an experience (ya know, takes patience) that they just ignore it.
Furthermore, so long as such people have something else to blame, they cook themselves complacent in their catastrophic chemical catalysts until they crash and become catatonic. And I don’t really mean that figuratively; some of the occupants in my neighborhood literally try to run until they collapse on whatever surface they finally paused on long enough for their body to shut down.
As they repeat that cycle enough, it gets harder and harder for them to get going again, so they set louder and louder alarms, or drink bigger quantities of Monster/whatev to try to keep them meeting the demands and obligations of their daily lives (ie, work)
“English” is a pretty crummy language as is, but it’s more demanding of what people would ever really think about it to consider "what do you actually mean?
In an overgeneralized perspective of life, we’re transitioning away from a period of “Know-it-alls” (cuz google-experts) to “Know-nothings” instead: it takes too much time to actually be informed about something, but so long as people think they know, they’re not going to bother to consider anything else that doesn’t already agree with them.
So instead, they take a “my way or else” approach, and just dare anyone else to not agree with them; you get people offended by the prospects of losing “rights” they’re completely clueless about; people that think themselves the ‘best’ at games they don’t really play at even a basic level, or even ‘scientists’ and ‘doctors’ that spout quack conclusions that ignore how ‘science’ is supposed to work, but so long as they’re paid enough by the right people, the word gets out for any else to soak it up and believe it, because they don’t have good-enough communication habits to have a decent conversation that’ll take them out of that nightmare-bubble until it gets too late.
Some people like to think there’s a bit more distinction with anonymity with the internet and screen-lessness, but the evident consequences of ignorant, unobservant, anti-social tendencies is becoming far more pervasive in ‘real life’ and all those sorts of examples do the same thing in their game world too.
