Here is where I start writing down my New Year’s resolution🎊Yes, from this viral meme, because to me it is a quite audit of modern life. 2015: community 2020: contraction 2025: tools, routines, platforms — quietly doing the work people once did for each other Some of this is helpful. We are more self-sufficient. More efficient. More capable of being alone. But, are we better at carrying loneliness more quietly? At what point does efficiency stop being progress and start costing us meaning? I think what’s changed goes beyond relationships, across three deeper shifts: 1. Time Life accelerated. Everything became instant, and optimized. But the things that give life texture and richness — trust, human touch, reflection — cannot be rushed. 2. Systems and Institutions Work, policy, and markets expanded to fill the space once held by community. We asked individuals to self-supply what institutions no longer carry: belonging, purpose, resilience. 3. Technology It absorbed some key functions humans used to provide one another — listening, companionship, reassurance, motivation. But it also isolates us with its binge-consuming and people pleasing mode. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is not a failure on principles but a trade-off. For individuals, the question becomes: What kind of aloneness strengthens me — and what quietly empties me? For institutions and leaders — public and private — — the question is harder: What are we optimizing away without noticing? This where I started writing New Year’s resolution. What about you? How are you protecting what cannot be optimized — in your work, your institutions, and your life?
Thank you for this beautiful post. It really touched me to the core. There is a point, I even vent to AI instead of talking to a real person.
We need to create more in-person relationships. Friendships are like gardens - they need constant tending and love to flourish.
Have you heard that young children are going back to manual world? I was talking to a friend who has five year old child and she is collecting Pokémon cards and exchanging them with her friends. That is what I used to do when I was in a primary school. Perhaps we have reached a point the technology has become a norm for the new generation and they need human touch and interaction?