Isolation

A New York Times article explored how our world has changed in the aftermath of the pandemic.

At first, the solidarity was breathtaking. Out of concern for ourselves and one another, we suspended nearly all interpersonal activity for months, wiping our lives almost entirely clean of the very people we were trying to protect. But, perversely, that solidarity destroyed our social fabric… For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their nuclear unit and their phones and televisions and computers. Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real… Politics started to look more like a zone of virtual reality, too, and many Americans came to see their fellow humans as mindless drones.

It was deeply unsettling to realize that our modern, wealthy world was no fortress against contagion, mass death and pandemic hysteria of various kinds. The end of the end of history has been declared countless times since 2001, but no event punctuated the point as clearly as Covid-19.

The emergency began at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, but it ended in an unmistakable polycrisis: beyond Covid, its supply shocks and inflation surge, there was a debt crisis and an ongoing climate emergency, wars in Europe and soon the Middle East and renewed great-power conflict with China…

It looks like we finally got those Roaring Twenties we were promised. In 2020, the phrase was used to suggest an age of parties and sex and social recklessness was on the way, as 330 million cooped-up Americans let off some steam. [But] in 2025 … the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

Researchers find one in four people grapple with compulsive overspending during the holiday season. An overwhelming 56% of respondents feel pressured to spend money during the holidays, with family emerging as the primary source of financial strain.

More than 75% of respondents experience what researchers call “money wounds” — emotional difficulties stemming from financial challenges that cut to the core of personal well-being.

The study reveals that low self-esteem, compulsive overspending, and shame from past financial mistakes emerge as the most common “money wounds.” The financial stress takes a significant emotional toll. 68% of those experiencing money wounds report that these challenges hold them back from feeling fulfilled and successful.

Many of those with money wounds admit to avoiding their financial troubles during the holidays. This avoidance manifests in various ways: refrain from buying gifts (37%), declining party invitations (33%), and avoid checking their bank account balances (29%).

Perhaps most heartbreaking is the social isolation that follows. 42% of respondents say they’ll become distant from others to avoid experiencing spending pressure. This distancing comes at an emotional cost, with participants reporting feelings of shame, guilt, and loneliness.

There is a glimmer of hope. 61% of respondents are actively trying to embrace the philosophy that “money and spending don’t equal happiness.” However, the road to recovery is long. On average, respondents believe it takes six years for a money wound to heal. More sobering still, many don’t believe financial trauma ever completely resolves.

As the holiday season approaches, the serves as a powerful reminder of the emotional complexity behind financial stress, urging compassion, understanding, and support for those struggling with money-related challenges.

In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to takeaway, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery. This is up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis said. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, then screens continue to fuel and even accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience.

The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.

From meerkats to macaques, social animals tend to live longer, take more time to reach maturity, and have more extended reproductive periods than their more solitary counterparts, according to research from the University of Oxford.

However, living in social groups comes with clear tradeoffs. On one hand, social animals can share resources, protect each other from predators, and help raise offspring together. On the other hand, they face increased risks of disease transmission, competition for resources, and social conflicts. Yet despite these challenges, scientists say the benefits of social living appear to outweigh the costs.

Rather than simply categorizing animals as either social or non-social, the researchers developed a novel spectrum of sociality with distinct levels. At one end are solitary animals like tigers and cheetahs, which spend most of their time alone except for breeding. In the middle are “gregarious” animals like wildebeest and zebras that form loose groups. At the far end of the spectrum are highly social species like elephants, most primates, and honeybees, which form stable, organized groups with complex social structures.

The findings have particular relevance in our post-COVID era, where humans have experienced firsthand the impacts of social isolation.

Lead author Rob Salguero-Gómez says, “This study has demonstrated that species that are more social display longer life spans and reproductive windows than more solitary species. In a post-COVID era, the impacts of isolation have been quite tangible to humans. The research demonstrates that being more social is associated with some tangible benefits.”

Derek Thompson, a writer for The Atlantic, notes that as our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Thompson writes:

Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.”

Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer, said last year that “for the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” From studying floor plans, he noticed that bedrooms, walk-in closets, and other private spaces are growing. “I think we’re building for aloneness,” Fijan told me.

Internal documents from Tik Tok executives and employees reveal that the social media platform is driven to capture the attention of users. Here were some of their own internal statements:

• An internal presentation on the 2021 strategy for TikTok describes the company as being in an “arms race for attention.”
• “It’s better to have young people as an early adopter, especially the teenagers in the U.S. Why? They’ve got a lot of time.”
• “Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience.
• “The product in itself has baked into it compulsive use.”
• “The reason kids watch TikTok is because the algorithm is really good... But I think we need to be cognizant of what it might mean for other opportunities. And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at somebody in the eyes.”
• As an internal guide on push notifications explained, a key goal of TikTok’s push notifications is to “Activate & Engage users with the right content at the right time, to encourage users to open the App more and stay longer.”
• In a chat message a TikTok employee confirmed that the company’s “goal is not to reduce the time spent” on the TikTok app, but rather to ultimately “contribute to DAU [daily active users] and retention” of users.

A young woman writer in England named Freya India (see her Substack called “Girls”) writes:

Since I was teenager, it seems like everyone has been selling a solution to Gen Z’s loneliness problem. One app after another to find new friends! Constant hashtags and campaigns to bring us together… But I’ve noticed that, recently, the latest “solutions” … aren’t encouraging face-to-face friendships.

[Instead], there are the imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends. There are imaginary therapists, a “mental health ally” or “happiness buddy” we can chat with about our problems… There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic,” apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.”

I remember me and my friends spending hours after school writing our own songs, coming up with lyrics and drawing album covers—now we would just generate it with an AI song maker. Children are playing together less, replacing free play with screen time, and creativity scores among American children have been dropping since the 1990s. Part of that may be because children now depend on companies to be creative for them. Their imaginary worlds are designed by software engineers. Their imaginary friends are trying to sell them something. My imaginary world wasn’t trying to drag me anywhere, while algorithms now transport kids to darker and ever more extreme places.

Did you know horses have friends? They do according to writer Sterry Butcher, who lives on a Texas farm with horses.

According to Butcher, horses form friendships, and these friends stand nose to rump to cooperatively swish flies from the other’s face with their tails. They’ll rake their teeth against the other’s withers or back, scratching places the other cannot reach on his own.

And not only do horses scratch each other’s back. They watch each other’s back. In the wild, they spend the entirety of their lives within the eyesight of another horse. Even domestic horses, who don’t venture beyond their pasture, will take turns staying awake while others sleep. It’s like shifts on guard duty.

What horses have is what we need. Every one of us needs a friend. Someone who will swish away the annoying biting flies that come toward us in life. Someone who will scratch our back, helping us with the things we can’t reach or do on our own. Someone who will stay awake and protect us from dangers.

For most of the last 30 years, the story of religion in America has been a pretty steady one: a constant, and consistent, drop in religious affiliation every year. Starting in the 1990s, the share of Americans who identified as Christian, or identified with any religion at all, began to drop precipitously. At the same time, those with no religious affiliation — nicknamed “nones” — began to spike.

That trend might be ending. Over the last five years, the share of Americans who are “nones” has stabilized at roughly 30 percent, across multiple tracking surveys — largely because of one group: Zoomers.

Sometime around or after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, young Americans began to find, or at least retain, religious belief at higher rates than previous generations.

Gen Z seems to be the key. Recently, surveys have found that Zoomers are the only generation not losing their religious affiliation. Why? There’s no unifying explanation for this trend, but it extends beyond the United States. And that suggests that there might be some structural reasons Gen Z is rediscovering faith. Something about post-Covid seems to be bringing youth back to Christianity, specifically, but also to religion in general.

There are three potential explanations:

1. Loneliness: Gen Z seeks community and connection in faith to combat widespread feelings of isolation.

2. Distrust of Institutions: Turning to religion as a countercultural response to declining trust in government and mainstream culture.

3. Political and Social Shifts: Young men are becoming more religious and politically conservative, while young women favor more liberal faiths, reflecting broader generational divides.

In the U.S., solo dining reservations have risen 29% over the last two years, according to OpenTable, the restaurant reservation site. They’re also up 18% this year in Germany and 14% in the United Kingdom.

Japan even has a special term for solo dining: “ohitorisama,” which means “alone.” In a recent survey, Japan’s Hot Pepper Gourmet Eating Out Research Institute found that 23% of Japanese people eat out alone, up from 18% in 2018. As a result, many restaurants in Japan and elsewhere are redoing their seating, changing their menus, and adding other special touches to appeal to solo diners. Even so-called family restaurants are increasing counter seats for solitary diners, and restaurants are offering courses with smaller servings so a person eating alone gets a variety of dishes.

OpenTable CEO Debby Soo thinks remote work is one reason for the increase, with diners seeking respites from their home offices. The pandemic also made social interactions less feasible and therefore less important while eating out.

The growth in solo dining also is the result of more people who are living alone. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that 38% of U.S. adults ages 25 to 54 were living without a partner, up from 29% in 1990. In Japan, single households now make up one-third of the total; that’s expected to climb to 40% by 2040, according to government data.

Increasing interest in solo travel – particularly among travelers ages 55 and over – is also leading to more meals alone.

Possible Preaching Angle:

A time of solitude can be a refreshing break from a busy schedule. But for many people solitude is not a choice. Without putting singles in an embarrassing spotlight, it would be encouraging if church members would diplomatically invite singles to share a homecooked meal, especially during the holidays.

When talking about the harms of social media today, one of the first problems people mention is FOMO—fear of missing out. Scroll through Instagram and see your friends having fun at a party you weren’t invited to. Check Snapchat to find everyone’s Bitmojis together on Snap Map without you. This feeling of constantly missing out, we’re told, is a major cause of anxiety and depression for Gen Z.

But that’s not true anymore. More often, it’s the opposite. We want to avoid the risk, the rejection, the awkwardness, the effort, and energy that the real world demands. Our major problem isn’t fear of missing out. It’s fear of taking part.

Look at how many young people are scared of doing everyday things. Not just fear of learning to drive, or getting a job—but scared to order in restaurants. Can’t walk into a cafe. Don’t want to open their door for a delivery. Under the hashtag #socialanxiety on TikTok, which has nearly 3 billion views, young people are sharing symptoms, describing debilitating anxiety, even recording their panic attacks in public.

One British TikToker hosts a series called “Doing Things You’re Afraid of To Show You It’s Okay.” In the series, she films herself facing challenges like getting in an elevator, asking for help in a supermarket, and asking for directions. It’s great to see someone working on their anxiety — but what’s alarming is how popular these videos are, and how many users say they have the same fears. Meanwhile forums like r/socialanxiety on Reddit–which has over 400,000 members–are filled with teenagers and young adults admitting that they are afraid of the real world. They feel much more comfortable online.

Many young people even fear making phone calls, and avoid it as much as possible. One study from last year found that 90% of Gen Z say they have “phone anxiety,” writing down scripts before they speak.

Across social media, there’s also a growing celebration of missing out. The phrase “JOMO” (Joy of Missing Out) is catching on, along with TikToks, tweets, and memes about the relief of cancelled plans. They say this is about wellness and self-care but that just sounds nicer than self-isolation. Missing out is good for our mental health, we tell ourselves. We’re better off inside.

Gen Z is the first generation who had a phone-based childhood, who spent their formative years in a pandemic, who have had less face-to-face interaction than any other in history. The only world they’ve ever known is one where they can get everything they need without interacting with another human: self-service checkouts, delivery apps, online porn, online lectures, and online communities.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The only thing scarier than the real world is never being brave enough to enter it. The life to be afraid of is the one unlived. Learn to trust God and live life. Discover the gifts and abilities that God has given to you. Get up. Get out. Give it all you’ve got. Fear missing out again. And then refuse to do it any longer.

Loneliness is more than a feeling; it’s a public health crisis.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has been raising awareness about the loneliness epidemic and its serious consequences. In his 2023 report, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” Murthy highlighted the links between loneliness and increased risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. Young people are especially affected, with 79% of adults aged 18-24 reporting feeling lonely, compared to 41% of those 66 and older.

Murthy believes the solution lies not in focusing on ourselves but in fostering deeper connections with others through relationships, service, and community. He notes that modern society often emphasizes self-centered pursuits like acquiring and achieving more, which fail to address the root causes of loneliness. Instead, he emphasized the joy that comes from connecting to something bigger than ourselves, calling service “one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness.”

Social media plays a significant role in the loneliness epidemic. While apps like Instagram and TikTok allow for increased contact, they often fail to nurture meaningful, deep connections. Murthy explained that the shift from having confidants to contacts, and from friends to followers, has diminished the quality of our relationships. The superficial nature of online interactions can’t replace the intimacy and trust built through face-to-face conversations.

To combat loneliness, Murthy recommends investing time in fewer but deeper relationships, engaging in acts of service, and building community. Small gestures, such as bringing dinner to a busy friend or helping someone overwhelmed, can reduce feelings of isolation and foster connection. Likewise, using personal skills to contribute to a greater cause—like volunteering—can create a sense of purpose and belonging.

Murthy said, “Building community is one of the most important things we can do for our health and wellbeing.” By prioritizing genuine connections and collective purpose, we can address loneliness and its widespread impact on mental and physical health.

A surefire way to never get hurt: Imagine a life free from heartache and disappointment, a world where you are impervious to the pain that comes with emotional vulnerability. Picture yourself gliding through your days without the sting of rejection or the ache of unfulfilled dreams. Sounds perfect, doesn't it?

After all, you've learned from an early age that vulnerability can lead to pain. A harsh word from a friend, an unreciprocated crush, a family argument, each instance teaches you to guard your heart. This foundational fear shapes your approach to relationships and life. You begin to understand that vulnerability is a double-edged sword, capable of bringing both joy and sorrow. Your instinct to protect yourself becomes the cornerstone of your emotional defenses.

As you grow older, you start constructing your fortress brick by brick. First, you hold back your feelings, and you certainly don't let anyone see your weaknesses. This way, you prevent others from having the power to hurt you. Next, you refrain from sharing your opinions. By keeping your thoughts to yourself, especially on controversial topics, you steer clear of potential conflicts and judgment. You begin to distance yourself from people and avoid deep connections that could lead to betrayal.

This isolation does protect you from immediate pain, but it slowly starts to build a barrier between you and the world. At this point, your defenses are at their peak. You've perfected the art of non-participation, and your emotional fortress is impenetrable.

You've built walls around your heart so high, that you've effectively isolated yourself. The fear of getting hurt has led you to a place where you're no longer living, but merely existing. Your fortress, meant to protect you, has now become a prison. As you reflect on your life within these walls, the consequences of your choices become painfully clear. You've successfully avoided heartbreak, but you've also missed out on love.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Choosing to be vulnerable in our interpersonal relationships requires true faith and humility. No one likes to get hurt and everyone wants to feel safe at all times. The consequences of building an emotional fortress around ourselves are very serious.

Journalist Derek Thompson is lamenting the decline of church attendance in America. As an agnostic, one would think he would be pleased. In a piece for The Atlantic, he writes: "Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence."

Thompson paraphrases social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation:

Many Americans have developed a new relationship with a technology that is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. (To) stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. Digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals put us in our body, requiring some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional. Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews pray. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people.

I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

Fifteen-year-old Aaron was going through a dark time at school. He’d fallen out with his friends, leaving him feeling isolated and alone.

At the time, it seemed like the end of the world. “I used to cry every night,” said Aaron. Eventually, Aaron turned to his computer for comfort. Through it, he found someone that was available around the clock to respond to his messages, listen to his problems, and help him move past the loss of his friend group. That “someone” was an AI chatbot named Psychologist.

The chatbot’s description says that it’s “Someone who helps with life difficulties.” Its profile picture is a woman in a blue shirt with a blonde bob, perched on the end of a couch with a clipboard clasped in her hands and leaning forward, as if listening intently.

A single click on the picture opens up an anonymous chat box, which allows people like Aaron to “interact” with the bot by exchanging DMs. Its first message is always the same. “Hello, I’m a psychologist. What brings you here today?”

“It’s not like a journal, where you’re talking to a brick wall,” Aaron said. “It really responds.”

Character.AI is an AI chatbot service launched in 2022. Character.AI’s website attracts 3.5 million daily users who spend an average of two hours a day using the platform’s AI-powered chatbots. Some of its most popular bots include characters from books, films, and video games, like Raiden Shogun from Genshin Impact or a teenaged version of Voldemort from Harry Potter.

Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots. The competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’ve logged 12 hours a day on Character.AI, and posts about addiction to the platform are common.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Since young people describe feeling addicted to chatbots, they might find themselves sitting in their rooms talking to computers more often than communicating with real people. It raises questions about how the AI boom and what the future could hold if teenagers—and society at large—become more emotionally reliant on bots.

The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving.

That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms—a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.

But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. The housing crisis is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans.

According to surveys in 2015 and 2016 by the National Association of Home Builders, 86 percent of households want a combined kitchen and dining room—a preference accommodated by only 75 percent of new homes. If anything, the classic dining room isn’t dying fast enough for most people’s taste.

If dining space is merging with other rooms in single-family homes, it’s vanishing altogether from newly constructed apartments. Americans might not mind what’s happening to their houses, but the evolution of apartments is a more complicated story.

Floor-plan expert Bobby Fijan said “For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat.

This is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020. A dedicated dining space might feel wasted on someone who lives alone.

As households and dining spaces have contracted, the number of people eating alone has grown. According to a 2015 report by the Food Marketing Institute, nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In an age when Americans are spending less and less time with one another, a table and some chairs could be just what we need for fellowship and human interaction. Make an effort to invite people over, especially during the holiday season, and especially those who live alone.

A Florida mother has sued artificial intelligence chatbot startup Character.AI accusing it of causing her 14-year-old son's suicide in February of 2024. She said he became addicted to the company's service and deeply attached to a chatbot it created.

Megan Garcia is on a mission to raise awareness about the dangers of AI. Garcia maintains that the site’s protocols to protect children are woefully inadequate, and wants to spare other parents from the pain she’s had to endure.

In an interview, Garcia said, “I want them to understand that this is a platform that the designers chose to put out without proper guardrails, safety measures or testing, and it is a product that is designed to keep our kids addicted and to manipulate them.”

Garcia maintains that her son, Sewell Setzer III, had been chatting with an AI chatbot on the platform for months, and that as a result, he’d become more withdrawn and sullen. Sewell eventually quit the JV basketball team during this time.

It was only after confiscating his phone as punishment for misbehavior that Garcia discovered that many of the chatbot’s conversations with her son were sexually explicit. “I don’t think any parent would approve of that,” said Garcia, adding that the discovery was “gut wrenching.”

In the lawsuit, Garcia says that her son had been specifically chatting with it in the moments before he died. In the exchange, Sewell had mentioned considering self-harm, and the chatbot seemed to encourage that desire. Sewell then shot himself with his stepfather's pistol "seconds" later, the lawsuit said.

Garcia said, “There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that. I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”

After the lawsuit was announced, Character.AI announced a sweeping set of changes designed to protect its younger users, a move that Garcia derided as “too little, too late.”

As the village speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated places of the planet.

The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, hunt, fish, and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets.

They have preserved this way of life for hundreds of years through isolation—some villages can take a week to reach. But since September (of 2023), the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk.

The 2,000-member tribe is one of hundreds across Brazil that are suddenly logging on with Starlink, the satellite-internet service from Space X. Since its entry into Brazil in 2022, Starlink has swept across the world’s largest rainforest, bringing the web to one of the last offline places on Earth. The results have been less than utopian:

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” said 73-year-old Tsainama Marubo sitting on the dirt floor of her village’s maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where they sleep, cook, and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. “But now, things have gotten worse,” she said. […] “Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet.”

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

Leaders realized they needed limits. The internet would be switched on for only two hours in the morning, five hours in the evening, and all day Sunday.

Decades ago, the most respected Marubo shaman had visions of a hand-held device that could connect with the entire world. “It would be for the good of the people,” he said. “But in the end, it wouldn’t be.” “In the end,” he added, “there would be war.”

His son sat on the log across from him, listening. “I think the internet will bring us much more benefit than harm,” he said, “at least for now.” Regardless, he added, going back was no longer an option. “The leaders have been clear,” he said. “We can’t live without the internet.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Two things here stand out: The first, that exposing a remote tribe to this modern tool created many of the same problems experienced within modernity: Use of the internet changes the user. Secondly, the categorization of the internet as simultaneously harmful and essential is perhaps unsurprising, but it’s fascinating that putting limitations on use of the internet seems to be the best way to deal with this ambiguity.

Suffering and struggles can open the door to discovering true meaning in life. This is what Celine Dion learned after her diagnosis with Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS).

When Dion first discovered her diagnosis, it was a devastating blow. The rare condition, characterized by severe muscle spasms and rigidity, began to take over her life, causing both physical pain and emotional distress. Most significantly, the disease affected her vocal cords. Dion, who is passionate about performing, was forced to cancel performances and take a step back from the public eye, which added to her sense of isolation.

Despite the physical and emotional toll of the illness, she found new purpose in her journey. Dion shared:

No one should suffer alone. A lot of people are going through things alone for many, many, many years. If I would have just stayed secretly behind, my home would have become a prison, and I would have become a prisoner of my own life. Today I live one day at a time. The fact that I found the strength to communicate my condition with the world makes me very proud. Maybe my purpose in this life is to help others, and that is the greatest gift.