The Great De-Teching Of Our Lives - Undividing #15
Plus My Brother's Regret-Killing Advice, And A 17 yo Fighting Loneliness In Young Men.
Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world
Hey there everyone,
Another 3,000 folks have joined Undividing since last week. This is amazing. It tells me there’s so many of us who want to do something about all these divisions we see around us.
I’m thrilled that 38 of you are recommending Undividing in your signups; substacks on religion, men’s healing, philosophy, and even tarot. Again, I think we all the same thing. A world where everyone has their rights, health, food on the table, and are making better futures for their kids.
Also, huge thanks to the folks who have voluntarily started paid subscriptions. The six of you, and the twelve who’ve contributed to the Buy Me A Coffee, have allowed me to take out a subscription to Unsplash. It’s the stock shot company I’m using to make Undividing look better and pay photographers.
Enough talk about tech. Because this week Undividing is all about people de-teching their lives… despite the fact that we are all connected here on Substack, a technology platform.
But we’re on some kind of tech overload. We’ve become addicted to these objects in our pockets, that force us to process more conflict than we were ever designed for. We’re wired for connection. But there’s a change happening. I see us ejecting it from our lives in many different ways.
I’ll tell you a few stories of what I’ve seen, and tie it together with what I think it means.
In Undividing #15 we’re diving into:
Undividing Our World - People are de-teching their lives everywhere, and how I think that’s going to change the internet.
Undividing Ourselves - I got a massive lesson about regret from my big bother on a road trip. If you’re wrestling with regrets, let my brother sort them out.
Undividing Extras - A 17 yo entrepreneur who’s finding a solution to loneliness in young men.
Let’s get undividing!
Undividing Our World: The Great De-Teching
The first time I got a sense that there was a growing dissatisfaction with modern tech life was in 2017 when a young art director called Marian who I was working with in an advertising agency walked in wearing a t-shirt from the TV show “Friends”—only it said “Enemies”.
I thought, oh yeah, I remember when I used to wear ironic t-shirts.
“Cool t-shirt, Friends right?”
“Oh My God,” Marian exclaimed, “me and all my friends looooooove this show!” My first reaction was that she was making a joke at my expense. At the time I was in my late 40s and she in her late 20s. And there’d been a lot of recent articles and talk about how if Friends was made today, there would be no way that it would be six white heterosexuals in a 15K a month loft apartment in NYC.
I asked her, what was it that she liked about the show so much. Marian said that her favourite scenes were the ones in the cafe, Central Perk. Because all of them were just sitting there talking to each other. No one had a phone in their hands, no one was texting, posting, googling. Nothing.
“They’re just so, ‘there’ with each other.” She said it wistfully. This young woman, whose command of technology at work scared techno-crap me, had nostalgia for my 20s.
I don’t blame Marian, it was good. I didn’t get my first flip phone till I was 26, and my first smart phone till I was 33. I’d had a whole life of being ‘there’ with my friends.
Fast forward to 2024 when I was on tour promoting my book, How To Burn A Rainbow. I was in a record store in San Francisco stocked to the ceiling with vinyl, and three of us struck up a conversation—a twenty year old guy who’d just graduated college, the shop owner in his mid thirties, and me. We talked about music, favourite albums, and when we discovered them.
I told them about how I’d been hunting a vinyl copy of Kick by INXS. I’d first heard it in high school. A friend had bought it and so a bunch of us went to his house after school, sat around listening to the album on his lounge room floor, reading the liner notes, and talking about the music.
The two of them stared at me. The twenty year old broke the silence, “I’ve heard that used to happen, you really did that? Man, I just feel like we missed out on all the good stuff.”
Even the shop owner had grown up with iTunes, Pandora, and Soundcloud. I’d grown up with friend recommendations and favourite staff at record stores.
And again, it felt strange that they had envy for my youth. In particular, the connection I had with my friends—the way we discovered and went through life together, with connection and communication.
Smile for the (very old) camera
A few weeks ago, my partner Erik and I were at the Botanical Gardens on a rare sunny day in late winter. What surprised me was the number of friends in their 20s walking around together. Turns out we were all craving some nature. And some escape from technology.
Because I saw two cameras that weren’t embedded in phones.
I got chatting with two young women who were taking photos of themselves on a disposable, single use camera. With film in it! I was so shocked I had to ask what it was all about.
One of them went on to explain that she was bored of all the perfection and filters online, “…and that we have to take photos a dozen times before everyone’s happy with them.”
They loved the not-knowing with this disposable camera. That they had to turn it in to a camera store for processing. That they had to wait a week to see the photos. And that whatever they got was a total surprise, “It’s beautiful because it’s so imperfect and uncontrollable.” “And unpostable,” the other woman added.
The second couple had an old Olympus 7.1-Megapixel slim digital camera. Their take: they were tired of all the photos they see looking the same. The most popular camera in the world is on iPhones. And while we were all amazed by that billboard campaign years ago “Shot on an iPhone” our lives are all visually starting to look like stock shots. Same lenses, same IG destinations, same filter trends.
They liked that the photos they took with their Olympus looked, “fresh”. Fresh photos taken on a nearly 20 year old camera.
A woman I met in a cafe last weekend also had an old compact digital camera told me she loaded up her photos to her laptop, then beamed them on the wall so her and her friends could look at them. “Oh,” I said, “like a slide night?”
“My Mum said that too,” she replied.
All of them were hunting for an originality that can’t be found in modern technology. To be surprised with the unpredictable. To wait in a world of instant gratification. They were getting more by working with less. But like the Friends woman Marian, and the guys in the record stores, a sense of wanting to be rescued from a world that was losing itself in a descent into technology.
And the big takeout in every case: it was private. Something that couldn’t be commented on. Or harvested for data. And was done with friends. De-connecting from tech, to reconnect with people.
Substack - the social media life raft
As we all bloomscroll through Substack, you’ve probably also noticed a lot of people here loudly declaring, with relief, that they’ve left the other social media platforms.
It’s not just the tribalism that platforms like Threads and X have descended into, it’s the fact that we just have no idea if we’re reading things from humans or bots.
Facebook and IG used to be places where you could see what’s up with your friends, what’s on in your neighbourhood and city, and news and trends from around the world. But now both feel like rage factories with puppy memes presented by the home shopping network.
The theme I keep seeing is that people are tired of eating anger and division as their emotional foods. We’ve gorged ourselves on them and now feel like we have some kind of cancer from them all. While our data gets collected.
Despite the changes here in Substack in recent weeks with the big push to video, this platform remains about words and original thinking—written and spoken by humans.
It’s become an oasis for people who actually want to connect again. And ironically, it harkens back to the original mid 90s days and spirit of the blogosphere and MySpace.
This, coupled with everything I’ve written about in this edition of Undividing has led me to a prediction about our next few years here on the internet.
A two tiered-internet
wrote a fantastic article about Google, about how the search engine doesn’t want you to search anymore. They want you to stay in their ecosystem for your data. He points out the new AI beginner-level summations pinned at the top of your search results:The search engine once gave us access to many viewpoints, diverse opinions, and alternative approaches to every topic. Now it serves up a single response and gives that ‘official’ opinion precedence over all others.
Even worse, the quality of this ‘official’ response is just slightly better than a high school term paper, and far worse than a human-written encyclopedia entry.
Same in Amazon, we’re all guilty of clicking the Amazon recommends. Recommended by who? And why? Bots? Biggest advertisers? Who is it?
Deep fakes. AI generated art. Bots. Fake news. Impossible visual standards. AI summations of complex arguments and viewpoints. The internet has become a place we no longer trust. It’s where we go because we don’t know where else to go, and at the same time we don’t want to be there.
But I think the attraction of Substack points to an evolution in the internet, and the emergence of a second tier. Where people are actively seeking, to read and view works (not content, works) they know were generated by a human. A human they grow to trust over time.
The internet of trust is the second tier. People connecting with real people again.
If you follow the Notes I post, they’ve been on a theme of unplug and get outside:
(If you like this you can restack it here)
When we do come back to our screens though, more and more of us are looking to be here on the second tier. The human tier.
However, my years in advertising tell me that it’s not something we can take for granted. Where our eyeballs and wallets go, advertisers follow. And they will try to monetise this new human-to-human sphere.
We can protect it though. We vote everyday with our attention and our dollars. If you smell a company or a bot here on the second tier, run. Let’s keep it human.
My father owns this t-shirt with a graphic of the descent of man. Basically it’s the ascent of man that finishes with a guy at a computer with the title “Something has gone terribly wrong.”
I think we’re at the next stage though, where we could add a final graphic of a person shaking someone’s hand through the screen, or better yet, in real life.
A quick break…
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Back to Undividing …
Undividing Ourselves: Regret, A Self-Made Emotion
I’m going to share a passage with you about regret from my book. I had to deal with a lot of emotions when I went through my divorce with my ex-husband. And one of the loudest ones, was regret.
Regrets for staying so long, for ignoring my instincts, for all the things I didn’t do while we were together that I wanted to. And how much better my life would have been.
On a road trip with my brother across the States, as I listed all my regrets one by one, I got a lesson and a half from him. And if you’re wrestling with regrets, hopefully this big brother wisdom will land for you like it did for me.
These thoughts had spent a lot of time in my head but hearing them all come out over one long stretch made me realize just how many I had. I was a walking pile of regret.
Toby had an interesting perspective on it all. “You know regret is totally made up, right?” he said.
“Feels pretty real, mate,” I said, staring back at the cows in the fields.
“Yeah, but that’s because it’s all based on a fantasy, that if you’d only done this other thing back then, today your life would be infinitely better.”
“It would have been,” I said, turning my head back toward him.
“Karl, you have absolutely no clue if that’s true. None! That’s what I mean by regret being totally made-up garbage.”
He went on to explain that I could have made a fortune on the stock market if I’d just bought that stock back then, sure, but imagine the kinds of friendships I would have made. All born from comfort and not adversity. Or I could have stuck with screenwriting and been a forty-seven-year-old washed-up writer who’d never got anything made.
I nodded. I was catching on.
“Maybe you would have been hit by a car on that holiday you never went on. Put all your money into an industry that crashed, or left Gunnar earlier only to do exactly what you did with him with some other big, hairy dude with a beard.”
“You’re right, mate. I definitely would have.”
“Like it or not, Karl,” Toby said, slapping his hand on my leg, “you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
Regrets are totally made-up. They presume the other thing you did would have worked out. It’s a total fantasy. Forget regret.
Instead, ask yourself why you aren’t doing something you want to do? That may be even a good prompt for all of you doing the Emotions Diary. Toby has spoken.
Undividing Extra: A 17 Year Old Working On A Solution For Loneliness In Men
Ageism goes both ways. Older and younger people are thought to be not capable of things because of the amount of time they’ve spent on earth. No so with
who I’ve been reading here on Substack for the last few weeks after a recommendation from a reader.
His byline caught me immediately: 17yr entrepreneur fighting to reduce loneliness in young men by sending them on adventures with strangers.
Reuben has a fantastic theory on why friendship apps like Meetup don’t work, he believes the emphasis shouldn’t be on forcing people to make friends but rather, use the “weak ties” as he calls them for the glue.
As he writes about in his article Why Friendship Apps Are Failing - And How To Fix Them:
Many people think the goal of social apps should be forming deep, lifelong friendships quickly. But deep friendships aren’t formed overnight. The first step is creating consistent, low-effort social interactions through weak ties–casual connections that don’t require major emotional investment but still provide social fulfillment.
Reuben’s writing fresh perspectives weekly on what is happening to young men, and he’s an expert because he is one. The ramifications of his work touch on not just mental health and dating, but also voting and birthrates and more. What’s happening to some of us is happening to all of us.
I think his app idea is brilliant, and I know that Undividing has a following in Cupertino and Bangalore. Any tech folks reading, reach out to Reuben re funding.
Follow or subscribe to Reuben to read his work and get insight into what’s happening with young men today. And what Reuben wants to do about it.
Till the Emotions Diary on Thursday… let’s keep undividing, and see what this planet can do.
Karl
The pendulum is starting to swing back - our pattern as a society seems to be to swing from one extreme to another. I also feel like I have experienced life in another era being in my 50's now. I feel like I have gained wisdom just from living. That also reminds me that we can gain wisdom by consulting with people who have lived different lives from ours. That's why we love stories. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us!
So many great points! This one stood out most to me:
“Regrets are totally made-up. They presume the other thing you did would have worked out. It’s a total fantasy. Forget regret.”
As someone who has endured a lifetime of trauma, I often live in the past. This gives a great perspective!