We are living through an era of massive social change as technology continues to advance and we struggle to adjust ourselves with the pace of change. The so-called information age, or digital age, was supposed to make us all feel more connected. However, more and more of us are feeling lonelier and lonelier. The writer George Monbiot has written about the age of loneliness and observes that it is loneliness as a social change that clearly marks out our time from other mayor changes that preceded it. The difficulty in assessing where we are with the technological change is that we lack perspective, such is the rate of change. This has been the case in other periods of huge change, such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It was only in hindsight that social commentators could properly assess the impact of what was really happening in the way individuals lived their lives and the actual implications of change.
Change invariably raises our anxiety levels. As humans we generally like to stick to routine and what is familiar. Learning to adapt to change can be beneficial for the maintenance of our emotional well-being.
One huge change occurring in our present time is how we find mates and sexual gratification. The immediacy for hookups offered by social media and mobile dating apps is a game changer in terms of how we interact with each other. The casualty of all this stimulation, freely available on mobile apps, may be emotional intimacy. We may be more connected electronically than we have ever been but we are more disconnected emotionally.
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