How Much Time Should We Spend Online?

It varies. 

For me? Not much nowadays, now that I'm retired. I don't have anything to prove blogging or on social media, and I've made enemies with my support for Donald Trump --- even among supporters of Donald Trump! Especially on Facebook, which is high school, sometimes literally (my old classmates are organizing for the 50th reunion, oh my). 

In any case, Tyler Cowen makes the case to be glued to your screens. 

At The Free Press, "The Case for Living Online":

How much should we be online? Is it crazy to spend the majority of your day in chat groups, answering emails, and scrolling X? Is posing 20 to 30 queries a day to the AIs consistent with having meaningful respect for actual flesh-and-blood human beings?

I say yes.

Perhaps you balk at that answer. Perhaps you think that’s akin to admitting a heroin addiction. So I ask you to challenge yourself: Don’t think about how you should spend your time. Think about how you already choose to. Be honest.

I suspect most people aren’t like me—spending hours a day with ChatGPT, Claude, WhatsApp, and X. But, whether or not those are your particular fancies, the online life attracts a great number of people. Just walk through an airport, where most people have idle time, and watch how many of them are on their phones. You must either think this is (mostly) justifiable, or you have a very low opinion of current humanity. In that case, you must think them incapable of creating meaningful, autonomous lives, centered around some notion of the good. (I am not so pessimistic—at least, not yet.)

I view many of these online time investments as a determined attempt to be in touch with the people we want to be in touch with. To meet the people we truly want to meet. And to befriend and sometimes to marry them.

Those goals are so important that they can justify our massive online presence. I will explain this view further, but first let us consider the strongest and most articulate argument against such an intense online life.

It comes from Ross Douthat, who, in a recent New York Times essay, made the case that the digital revolution—and AI especially—is presenting humanity with an extinction-level event, at least on the cultural front.

“The age of digital revolution—the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence—threatens an especially comprehensive cull,” writes Ross. “It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a ‘bottleneck’—a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs, and peoples with extinction.”

Ross calls for human resistance against these trends, calling upon us to embrace what tech partisans sometimes call a “meatspace” existence. He asks us to “sit with the child, open the book, and read.” We should seek church rather than YouTube, a sit-down restaurant rather than a WhatsApp group, and love and procreation rather than porn.

Surely “the real,” as Ross presents it, has value above and beyond its immediate utility. But it also, he argues, likely makes us happier in the long run, too.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Haidt, in his best-selling book The Anxious Generation, has called for far less online engagement and much more real-world play, most of all for our children. He has spent the year or so since the book’s publication advocating for cell phone bans in schools and age requirements for social media sites—all aimed at getting kids offline.

Ross and Jon do have a point, and indeed I do plenty of reading and also babysitting, including the conjunct of reading to babies. It is easy to see that many individuals spend too much time on their phones, as they might tell you themselves.

And yet Ross’s characterization of online existence does not recognize its true value, which I believe is deeply human.

Why do I spend so much of my time with email, group chats, and also writing for larger audiences such as Free Press readers? I ask myself that earnestly, and I have arrived at a pretty good answer...

Subscribe.

Jedediah Bila 'LIVE' (VIDEO)

On Twitter, I find myself agreeing with Ms. Jedediah more than anyone else, man or woman. She nails things every time. A national treasure.

Her new podcast, at Valuetainment, debuted June 8th.

Here's yesterday's show, on parenting and more.

WATCH:

Candace Owens on 'Full Send Podcast' (VIDEO)

While grading discussion forums today students mentioned "full send," so I checked it out. 

I can see why young people watch it, and in this episode, the bonus is 40 minutes with Candace Owens.

WATCH:

Glenn Loury, Brown University Professor of Economics, Was Addicted to Crack in the 1980s (VIDEO)

This is something else, at Loury's Substack, "The Only Professor in the Halfway House, With Jordan Peterson":

A few months back, the one and only Jordan B. Peterson invited me onto his podcast, and I’m happy to say the episode has just been released. Our discussion ranges from climate change to divorce rates to the Pareto principle. Jordan is a clinical psychologist, so we spend a lot of time with our social scientist hats on.

We also get into some more personal material. Jordan’s early research into addiction leads him to ask about the place of spirituality in my own experience with addiction and recovery. As you may know, in the 1980s, I became addicted to crack cocaine. I had a terrible habit, and it could easily have cost me my career, my family, and my life. I had the support of friends, treatment, and my late wife Linda to help me through, but I also found a kind of spiritual support from two different sources: Christianity and Alcoholics Anonymous...

And watch:

Joe Rogan Speaks the Way Men Do With Each Other in Private

And that's the fundamental basis of his appeal, which is gargantuan with 11 million viewers. 

Andrew Sullivan has thoughts:

No, the left is not calling all masculinity toxic. But they get pretty quiet when you ask for a definition of non-toxic masculinity that doesn’t end up sounding like being a woman. And, no, they’re not explicitly denying that there are biological differences between men and women — they just speak and act on the premise that there aren’t, that boys do not need a different kind of education than girls, that all-male groups are problematic, and that finding a way to direct masculinity to noble ends is somehow enabling the oppression of women, or gay people. The result is that men are subject to left derision, right machismo, and complete cultural derailment.

And that’s where Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson come in. They too, of course, are mocked constantly, demeaned as chauvinists or white supremacists, etc. But what Rogan does is speak and talk the way men do with each other in private, which, in this media era, is a revelation. He doesn’t entertain the woke bromides of gender theory because he’s lived a life, clearly loves being a man as much as Adele says she loves being a woman, and believes, as he once put it, that “bad men are just bad human beings who happen to be men.”

He lifts weights, watches fights, eats elk meat, smokes pot, dabbles in DMT, and asks the kind of questions normie men might ask of experts. Which is why they listen. They feel at home with him. Unlike so much of the MSM, he feels real: not a throwback to patriarchy but an opening to a kind of brotherhood that feels sane to many disoriented men in America — especially the majority who haven’t yet bent the knee to the doctrines of the successor ideology.

He’s in no way a bully or blowhard. Just listen to him: his tone is mellifluous, curious, amused. His masculinity is unforced, funny and real. He’s genuinely ingenuous — the way most humans are, possessing the kind of credulousness journalists are trained out of. But that’s why he has 11 million listeners and CNN has a little over 500,000. One of his most frequent guests is the brilliant comic Tim Dillon — openly gay and stereotypically male.

Rogan’s politics are eclectic, but they reflect a male concern with practical things, straightforward people, and solutions. The idea that he is a right-wing ideologue is silly and untrue. He readily admits when he’s wrong and often self-deprecates. He’s not afraid to show emotion and choke up — whether it’s over the triumph of female fighters or putting down a puppy or the death of Chadwick Boseman. Rogan is simply not the brutish caricature that left-Twitter and CNN would have you think.

The same goes for Peterson. The Canadian prof and clinical psychologist is cantankerous, yes, but also compassionate...

RTWT: "Between the World and Men Truckers, Rogan, Peterson and the revolt of masculinity."

Joe Rogan Experience: 'Stephen Pinker on What Has Happened to Being Rational' (VIDEO)

Stephen Pinker's latest book is, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

And at the Joe Rogan Experience:

'And it's just sometimes an excruciatingly heightened awareness of being, loving being alive..."

Caitlin Flanagan wrote "I Thought Stage IV Cancer Was Bad Enough" at the Atlantic in June. Not many people, myself included, know her story. It's riveting. 

Well, she did a podcast with Sully, and this short segment is so existential. She's such a graceful woman. It's really inspiring:

'I love podcasts too...'

A classic:

i would like to introduce you all to one of the funniest tik toks of all time pic.twitter.com/d2dYDlP9im

— rohan ramdin (@rohanramdni) November 19, 2020