First, I wish to make it perfectly clear that as a technophile, I fucking love the 21st century. I love all of the crazy shit we're able to do with phones, computers, and the internet. When I can ask my phone for directions instead of a gas station attendant and actually get directions I can understand, when I can talk to somebody halfway across the world who is living the events I'm seeing on the news and get real-world perspective, when I can do all the research I need for a project in a single evening instead of having to wait for someone to return the book I need to the library, it's a great time to be alive. So obviously, this post is going to be somewhat biased toward the "technology is fucking awesome" side.
But I also want to make it clear that I'm writing about the 21st century from a completely opposite perspective that Wong did. Wong is a straight white guy (that pretends to be Chinese-American on the internet) who is just hitting that age when men feel the need to buy overpriced sportscars so they can re-live their 20s, while I'm a gay woman who is just hitting the age where she's trying to get her shit together and stay out of Old Economy Steve's basement. I love the 21st century because technology and changing social norms have granted me the ability to rant like this. Wong hates the 21st century because people are starting to value the opinions of straight middle-aged white guys less and less.
The difference in these perspectives is immediately apparent when Wong opens his article with a lamentation that 25% of us would fail the "Naked Photo Test" -- that being the number of people you would trust with a lewd photo of yourself.
Maybe you've heard of a little phenomenon called "revenge porn." If you haven't, let me explain it as plainly as I can:
1) Girl meets Boy
2) Girl dates Boy
3) Boy asks for nude photos
4) Girl sends nude photos because they've been dating for years and she trusts Boy
5) Girl and Boy have a fight, break up
6) Nude photos Girl sent Boy end up on porn sites because Boy is an asshole
7) ???
8) Profit
Revenge porn has been around since Hustler started their "Beaver Hunters" section in the 1980s (and got sued for it). And even as far back as 2000, it was a thing on Usenet. So 1) I'd be interested to know how many of that 25% who wouldn't trust anybody with a nude photo happen to be female, and 2) anyone lamenting that people don't trust others with naked photos is kind of an entitled douchebag anyway, because you don't get to dictate how trusting other people should be with their private shit.
And that's only the beginning. His real lamentation is that we have fewer and fewer close friends today than we did years ago. And to be honest, that's such a bullshit statement because "close friend" is a 100% subjective term. To David Wong, a close friend is someone he can send a nude photo to and not have it wind up on StudMuncher.com. For a straight white guy, this is not a very high bar at all. To me, a close friend is someone whom I can tell that I've been struggling with suicidal thoughts since I was eight years old, and they won't spout some horrible ignorant platitude at me.
So without further ado, the 21st century is less miserable than you think because...
1. You Have Fewer Annoying Strangers In Your Life
Wong's argument here is that technology which lets us avoid annoying people makes us less able to deal with the ones we do run into, and being forced to deal with these idiots makes us miserable. That when people did have more annoyances in their lives, they were happier somehow because they were able to ignore it.
The problem with this logic is that again, as a straight white guy, the annoyances he's describing are laughably petty: a fat lady who can't operate a shopping cart. A toddler kicking in his seat at the theatre. A confused cashier at Blockbuster. The smelly old man at the doctor's office. Shrill voices. Clunky jokes. Body odor. Squeaky shoes, for fuck's sake.
I wish those were the kinds of annoyances that I use my iPhone to filter out.
Instead, I use my phone to avoid the creepy old guy on the bus trying to hit on me. The religious nut trying to convert me to Mormonism. The teenage girls muttering in quiet tones about my weight. The middle-aged douchebag telling me to "smile more." The old woman telling me I'm a slut for wearing stretch pants in public.
And I'm white. People who don't have the good fortune to be born white use their technology to filter out even worse bullshit. If all it takes to send David Wong on a screaming crotch-punching spree is a pair of squeaky shoes, I think that says more about his ability to tolerate strangers.
Furthermore, the "happier time" he's hearkening back to is "fifty years ago." So in 2007, that would've been 1957. Let me tell you a little bit about 1957. The reason it seemed like a time when people were more tolerant of annoying strangers is because up through roughly the mid-60s, the U.S. was a culture of fake politeness that didn't tell annoying strangers that they were being fucking annoying. People dealt with the horror that was post-World War II by simply pretending bad shit didn't happen. It was all manners and niceties and putting on the cheerful face to hide just how much you actually wanted to punch that guy in the crotch. You didn't talk about your problems. You kept up appearances. You maintained that idyllic veneer of Norman Rockwell paintings no matter what.
Not to mention people old enough to remember 1957 would be pushing their 70s-90s today. If you poll them now? Of course they're going to say life was better back then. They still had their own teeth and didn't need dialysis and weren't punching in phone numbers of friends they forgot were dead.
Plus, the economy was in a lot of ways better (at least for white people). A family of four could make it on a single income, and the job didn't require more than high school education (often not even that). Today, because of stagnating wages and even the shittiest jobs requiring at least a 2-year degree, people are forced to go into shitloads of college debt -- which can't even be discharged in bankruptcy -- for a job that can barely support one person, nevermind a family. But that isn't technology's fault. That's the fault of sheer corporate greed.
Anyway, with the 1960s counterculture movement came the notion of foregoing the turd polish and being honest. It was now both okay and encouraged to tell your out-of-town relatives that they'll need to book a hotel this trip because you do not feel like having them invade your house for a week. You could now tell that asshole at work to quit showing you pictures of her kids and asking when you're popping out your own because you don't fucking care and it's none of her goddamned business.
People weren't any more tolerant back then. They just pretended to be, because it was bad form to tell people to stop pissing you off.
Today, with smartphones and hand-held gaming consoles and iPods and e-readers, we're able to get to and from work and endure layovers at the airport (and flights) and not get harangued as much by random annoying strangers. Because to most people, being engrossed by an electronic device is visual shorthand for "don't fucking bother me." Not being bothered as often by creepy-ass people makes me the absolute opposite of miserable.
2. You May Have Fewer Friends, But They're Better Friends
Here, Wong makes basically the same stupid argument as above, but with the twist that putting up with annoying people got you more friends. Somehow. He doesn't really explain that very well, except to say that "technology is bad."
And again, having more friends doesn't mean people back then had more close friends. People didn't share their dark, horrible secrets with each other, not even their so-called "best friends." Apparently in David Wong's world, just tolerating somebody makes them a friend. Right after lamenting that we don't tolerate people enough to send them nudes. Which is it? You can't claim people don't have enough friends these days if you're constantly moving the goalposts that define "friend."
It also bears mentioning that again, what Wong is classifying as an "annoying friend" is only annoying in that petty straight-white-guy way. The example he gives of an "annoying" friend? Someone who listens to different music than you.
Really? If that's the most annoying friend you've ever had to deal with, I'd say you're doing pretty fucking well for yourself, Mr. Straight White Guy.
Try having friends who regularly made sexual comments and jokes about your body. Or who didn't just not share your interests but belittled you for having them. Or who teased you about being a lesbian before you even knew what the word meant (which made it so much fun when you had to accept later that they were right).
The 21st century doesn't just allow people to find those with common interests. The internet provides a nice cloak of anonymity and the ability to literally change your identity with a few mouse clicks. As such, people are often more open and honest about themselves online than they are face-to-face, because there are fewer reasons to lie.
People lie when they feel threatened, mostly. When they fear what others might think if they knew the truth. That social filter that Wong detests so much? That's actually working in our favor online. If people don't like the truth or judge us harshly for the truth? We can avoid them, rather easily. We can almost guarantee that we never have to hear from these Judgey McJudgersons ever again. Being able to filter out that threat gives us less incentive to lie.
Which means that the friends we do make this way end up being better friends. Because they are friends with us rather than with the well-adjusted act we put on.
Case-in-point: none of the (very few) meatspace friends ("meatspace" being the edgy new term for "not the internet") that I have ever made have been particularly close. Most of them I don't really talk to anymore after figuring out they were kind of huge dicks. And the ones I do still talk to are kept at arm's length. I still put on the well-adjusted act, and there is deeply personal shit I will not tell them for my own sanity.
The best friends I have ever made can all be counted on one hand and I have met them all through the internet. I've been talking to these people for over a decade in some instances without ever knowing what they even look like. I have told them the deeply personal shit I don't tell the meatspace crew. They know the type of person I really am and they haven't run away screaming, and that means way more to me than having a bunch of "friends" who are utterly fucking clueless.
3. There Are More And Better Ways to Communicate (Including Texting)
In this point, Wong contends that if 40% of an e-mail is misunderstood, then that means text is an inferior form of communication because most of our cues are nonverbal. There are a few problems with this. Not the least of which is that the article he quoted for that 40% study was in The Christian Science Monitor. You know, the same people who look to prayer to heal cancer rather than a hospital? Yeah, those guys. And the study was not even in regard to the e-mail medium itself, but how racism and sexism affect how people read e-mails. Thing is, nonverbal cues are just as easy to misinterpret because emotions are inherently unstable and fickle anyway.
Just as an exercise, read the following sentence:
"I didn't say you stole my money."
Now read it again, and place the emphasis on a different word. It's the same fucking sentence, but it will have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed. Back when I worked in Call Center Hell, where the only form of communication was your voice, this was noted as something to be careful of. Tone and inflection can very easily set off an already agitated customer purely because they're viewing your emotional cues through their own red-hazed brain. Likewise, we are quite capable of giving off the impression that we're angry, stressed, or scared even when we aren't. Especially when patterns of abuse have skewed the way we interpret nonverbal cues. And this doesn't even count people on the autism spectrum, for whom nonverbal cues are inherently useless.
The idea that you can't properly convey emotion through text is fucking insane. If that were true, we wouldn't have books at all. We have not only a myriad of punctuation marks and formatting to tell us exactly how a sentence is intended to be read, but we have connotations of words themselves that convey emotion. That's kind of what writing is.
Which of course begs the question: if writing is such a bad way to communicate, then why did we invent it in the first place? And why have we been increasingly relying on it for 5,000 years?
See, inventions don't hang around that long unless they serve a need. And the need that writing serves as a form of communication is twofold: record and privacy. The brain is actually pretty shit at remembering details, and has a nasty habit of making up its own to fill in the blanks. So we invented writing as a way to keep our shit straight. We're much better communicators when we have a record to refer back to and keep our messages consistent.
Face-to-face also has the disadvantage of conveying information (badly) to third parties who may be watching and listening. One perusal through Overheard in New York should demonstrate why this can be a bad thing. Writing it down and giving the message to somebody keeps it relatively private. This is why coded messages all throughout history have been passed along largely through writing and inscription rather than orally.
The problem is not that texting is a shitty form of communication; it's that people are shitty communicators, and writing is a skill that's being taught less effectively in schools than it used to be (because steady budget cuts and stagnating pay have driven the good teachers into careers where they can put food back on the table).
But it's especially telling that the example Wong uses as a reason texting sucks is a friend of his not wanting any of the chili he made, and (if he isn't exaggerating) Wong getting so offended that he didn't speak to him for six months. Because this pretty much illustrates just how bad Wong is at following his own advice.
Even if "no, thank you" is a phrase said friend uses sarcastically a lot and you are really that proud of your culinary skills, how close can you possibly be as friends that you can't tell he's not being sarcastic this time? And that you would drop communication altogether for half a year over a bowl of fucking chili?
Oh, but Wong then admits that he did that because he was already in a bad mood when he read that text. So really, he made a ridiculous snap judgement about someone he supposedly called a friend, and then blamed texting for it. It's almost like this was one of those "annoying friends" he says we're supposed to have more of, that he got pissed off at for a stupid, petty Straight White Guy reason, but it's just easier to blame newfangled technology than admit when you're being a douchebag.
The reason texting, IM, and e-mail make us less miserable is because we now have yet another form of communication, and one that we don't feel pressured to answer right away. You can put away messages up on IM if you're busy doing stuff or just don't feel like talking. You don't have to answer a text or an e-mail as soon as you receive it. There are no awkward silences to worry about. Communication through writing is a godsend for introverts because we can take all the time we need to recharge between interactions so that we're not cranky as fuck because we want some alone time for a few hours. Having that option has made a whole lot of people way less miserable and lonely.
4. Online Company Lets You Know You Aren't Alone
Here, Wong tries to tie all three previous points together with a little bow of smug superiority: because we're communicating badly and only to the few people that don't annoy us, that makes us lonelier. Somehow. His reasoning seems to be that because you can't convey emotion through text, you filter everything through your own shitty mood instead.
But as said before, you most certainly can convey emotion through text if you know what you're doing. It's especially weird for a writer to say that you can't effectively communicate emotion through words alone. You would think somebody whose livelihood depends on such an ability would realize just how fucking stupid he sounds.
The reality is that online interaction, especially mobile, has exploded in the last decade because it fills a need. People work crazy hours. They have families to take care of. Many just don't have time for good old-fashioned hanging out in person. Face-to-face outings are becoming more of a luxury from a bygone era in which one full-time job could provide for a family of four. Now with people's schedules all over the place, texting and e-mailing are the preferred methods of keeping in touch because you can respond at your leisure.
Fine, so you can't both get the same night off work to go see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Instead, you can see it separately and squee at each other. Which is pretty much the same thing you'd be doing if you met up to see it in person anyway.
Either way, the important thing about online company is that it's company. Like I've said before, the friends I've made online have made me feel less alone than anyone I've ever met in meatspace. These are friends who have talked me out of a mental breakdown at two in the morning. Friends who have simply checked in on me when they hadn't heard from me in a couple days (and I've done the same for them). Friends who let me know that there are real, living, breathing people out there who give enough of a shit about me to ask if I'm all right.
That is more than any meatspace friend has ever done for me.
Even if we don't necessarily talk every day, we still see each other in our buddy lists. We see that we're logged on, and not seeing that name there for an unusal amount of time makes us concerned for each other. We know we aren't alone, and we know there are people out there who care.
Gee, it's almost as if it's easier for Wong to blame technology for loneliness rather than a complete lack of people skills...
5. We Get Criticized Now More Than Ever Because We're Encouraged to Be Honest
Remember what I said before about 1950s culture being all about the politeness and not telling your friends and family when they're pissing you off? Yeah, we're revisiting that again. It's funny that Wong should make this point about not being criticized enough in the 21st century as opposed to past decades, because the reverse is reality: not criticizing people is at the heart of old-timey culture. "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."
And of course, here's the hilarious irony, straight from Wong's own mouth:
"And none of it mattered, because none of those people knew me well enough to really hit the target. I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little."No shit, Sherlock. That much is fucking obvious. Because if you had any real friendships built on real honesty and real criticism, you wouldn't be talking like such a complete fucking tool. You wouldn't be making the most mundane, stupid problems into world-ending crises. You wouldn't be wanting to go on a screaming crotch-punching spree over a stranger's body odor. You would realize that maybe, just maybe, it's you who is miserable in the 21st century because you choose to be.
And yes, this goes right back to being Mr. Straight White Guy. People have been loath to criticize straight white guys for much. See, when women act like straight white guys, they get death and rape threats hurled at them from all over the world. When brown people act like straight white guys, they get shot and choked to death by police officers who shouldn't have badges.
When a straight white guy acts like a straight white guy, he gets to hold seminars telling other straight white guys how to assault women, and gets paid handsomely for it.
So the fact that David Wong hasn't been criticized much in his life is less a product of 21st century technology and more to do with him being born into the most fortunate demographic in the country.
E-mail and texting are actually the perfect tools for incisive, brutal honesty, because the person you're sending them to can't shout you down and punch you in the head for saying shit they don't want to hear, but desperately need to. You are free to speak your mind without interruption. Sure, they can delete them. They can just not read them. But guess what?
They can do the same fucking thing in a face-to-face or phone conversation. They can hang up. They can walk away.
And the thing is? With e-mail and text, people are actually more likely to take it in than ignore it. Or at least that's been my experience. Precisely because they aren't being put on the spot. They have time to read it. More importantly, because of that recordkeeping ability that I mentioned earlier, they've had time to re-read it, to stew and simmer and anguish over it until they finally came back to me a week later and said "you know what, you're absolutely right."
Because often their first reaction is going to be to go on the defensive, and when you're in real-time, that gut reaction of "how dare you" is all you have. You don't have time to settle the fuck down before you're expected to respond.
And that's really one of the reasons people are far more honest with each other today that they were in 1957. If you wanted to give someone a piece of your mind back then, you had three choices: 1) write a letter, which required you to spend money for paper, ink, and postage, 2) phone or telegram, in the days before free nationwide long-distance, or 3) in-person confrontation, which risked everything from getting beaten bloody to simply getting shouted at so you can't get a word in edgewise. Besides the old-timey notion of pretending nothing's wrong and hoping one day it will actually be true, it also cost money, time, and the chance of incurring bodily harm to tell somebody they were being a shithead.
Today? We have lost our patience for bullshit, and e-mail and texting don't really cost you anything extra, and the person you're telling off can't beat the tar out of you for doing so. And if they break off the friendship? Their loss. So there's far less reason to keep our grievances to ourselves. We aren't suffering from a lack of the ability to suffer fools. We're simply less tolerant of shitty behavior, and less afraid to say when we've had enough.
6. There is Way More to Be Outraged About, and We're Better Informed of It
Here, Wong essentially sweeps every major event of the past 20 years under the rug because people in 1957 had it worse, but somehow seemed to tolerate it better. Which means we're miserable about nothing today because we're told to be miserable by the news we consume.
Again, he's missing the bigger picture because he's viewing the decade through the rosy pink nostalgia goggles of Grease and I Love Lucy and every musical Rogers and Hammerstein ever wrote.
This ability to suffer horrible tragedies while seeming to not be outraged by much of anything is again fueled by the 1950s training to keep up appearances and pretend everything is fine. It's also funny that he mentions Vietnam, but completely forgets about the shitloads of protests against it. Including the one where the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four unarmed college students.
Instead, what example of purposeful bad news does he use? Conflicting reviews of Fall Out Boy. Not even facts, but an opinion. That only a straight white guy would get outraged over.
Not the tanking economy and burgeoning global credit crisis. Not the epic clusterfuck that was the handling of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. Not the commuter train bombings in Mumbai. Not anything remotely relevant that was going on in the world at the time.
It's almost as if because David Wong doesn't think the current bad news is worth being outraged over because it doesn't affect him personally, nobody else should be outraged over it, either. And if they are, it's only because they're sheeple who have it so good that they have to find ways to be miserable now. Which, you know, kind of negates all his previous points about how everything was better in the 1950s.
Even in 2007, we had the war in Iraq, which unlike World War II, was both completely unnecessary and making literally half the world angry at us. And unlike Vietnam, we knew the weapons of mass destruction were a fucking lie and we ran in there anyway. And we knew that the Bush administration had absolutely no plan to get out once we were in. And we knew it was quite literally a war for fun and profit. We did it anyway.
So yes, people were pissed off and rightly so.
We aren't "victims" of an "outrage machine." We simply have a lot more to be pissed off about. We did in 2007, and we have even more now. And we know more because unlike in 1957, we don't depend on the ad-driven media to give us our news while they fight for ratings. We have social media that can tell us exactly what is happening on the ground, from people who are living it.
We aren't pretending everything is fine anymore when we know it's not. We're no longer lying to ourselves about the state the world is in because we can no longer afford to, and we're out of excuses.
And why does this make us less miserable? For the same reason an abused child finally telling their school counselor about their shitty home life is less miserable: keeping up that facade of happy-go-lucky when your existence is anything but is draining. Physically and mentally.
We don't have to do that anymore. The ability to speak our minds and let the world know just how angry we are and that we're not going to take it anymore is cathartic. Therapeutic. We aren't bound by a culture of bullshit to pretend we're fine anymore. Moreover, admitting things are bad is the first step to changing them. It makes us feel we can actually do something about our problems besides endure them gracefully.
7. We're Finally Taking Mental Illness Seriously (Unlike This Asshole)
So according to David Wong, we're more miserable today because due to the ability to have friends that are not local or at the very least don't know exactly where you live and can this dig through your trash for your printed work schedule, we don't have to be burdened by their mundane problems. And that makes us literally worth less as people. It doesn't matter if we're there to talk them out of a suicidal funk at four in the morning, if we don't have to drive them to work, we mean less as a friend (it also bears mentioning before I go any further, that this reasoning is going to quite literally fly in the face of everything he says next).
I'm not even sure where to start with this mountain of bullshit and Straight White Guy Problems. Except to say that if fixing computers or being interrupted from a marathon of your favorite TV show is a bigger issue to you than being talked out of suicide, can I have your life?
This goes right along with his "make assholes like me think you're a better person" article in that his solution is that you can only learn to like yourself when you do stuff that makes you worthy to other people. And in David Wong's world, that means fixing his computer.
But here's the rub: he unwittingly admits his entire reasoning is bullshit right here:
You can't bullshit yourself. If I think Todd over here is worthless for sitting in his room all day, drinking Pabst and playing video games one-handed because he's masturbating with the other one, what will I think of myself if I do the same thing?Well yes, douchebag. And the trick is to stop thinking people are worthless just because they spend their time doing shit you don't approve of. When you label any pastime or preference as something that devalues a person, you are creating a way to hate yourself if your tastes happen to change. And yes, there is a difference between thinking the act is worthless, and thinking the person is. Case-in-point: I think organized sports are pretty worthless. But athletes are still people, and thus they still have inherent value, just like everybody else. In David Wong's world, value as a person is defined purely by how useful he finds you. Something the worst people in the history of the world -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot -- adopted into national policy at various times, and the results were not pretty.
His solution to combat this feeling of worthlessness? Not counseling. Not medication. Just "doing stuff." Being "useful." In fact, he flat-out says counseling is useless if you don't make yourself useful and likable to other people. If you don't do something with a "tangible result."
So wait a sec... Wouldn't "doing something" include fixing your own fucking computer? Or finding other ways to amuse and feed yourself rather than dropping in on your friends unannounced and nagging them for their sandwiches? Taking the bus to work instead of bugging people for car rides?
But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is his insistence that we're miserable because we don't work enough on things that we can see. That we don't struggle to survive by having to hunt and gather our own food. That office jobs make us miserable because we don't get anything physical out of it.
No, that isn't why office jobs make us miserable. Office jobs make us miserable only when we feel undervalued by our bosses. When we feel we aren't getting enough in return for what we do (not just pay, either, but even acknowledgement of a job well done). And when our bosses implement company policies that make it frustrating as fuck to do the work we're required to.
Yes, accomplishment is great. But I wasn't miserable doing call center and retail because it wasn't anything physical (retail was actually very physical). I was miserable because I had to lick the boots of and wait hand and foot on asshole customers, and apologize and take the blame for shit that wasn't my fault while getting paid a near-starvation wage.
People don't cut themselves just to make their pain and healing real. There are as many reasons for self-injury as there are self-injurers. For some, it is the physical manifestation of pain that has no name. For others, it's to punish themselves for feeling things they think they aren't supposed to. And for still others, it's a way they ground themselves out of dissociation and remind themselves they're still alive, still people.
Thing is, suicidal teens and self-injurers have been around forever. We just didn't fucking talk about it the way we do now. Because 1950s culture said we weren't allowed to.
See, 1957 was only five years after the publishing of the DSM-I, the first standardized manual on mental illness. And while the DSM-I is absolutely horrible by today's standards, it was still better than what came before it, which was essentially "stop whining and do something with your life."
Which is exactly what David Wong is advocating.
While our mental health system is still a far cry from adequate, people are less miserable today because these problems are finally getting taken seriously. Because we have a better understanding of them than we did fifty years ago.
Modern technology has given us myriad ways to break out of the pit of self-hatred. Hell, there's even counseling chat services out there (perfect for people who can't talk on the phone because they're physically disabled or they just have terrible anxiety about it). We have new ways to make friends we would never meet otherwise. We're not expected to put up with toxic bullshit anymore. We're allowed to tell people what kind of day we've actually had instead of pretending it was fine when it wasn't. Moreover, this same technology has allowed people who aren't straight white men to be heard over the droning, petty complaints that privileged fucks define their world by.
The reason David Wong is miserable in the 21st century is because he is the exact type of toxic douchebag and annoying friend and stranger that we invented iPods and tablets and smartphones and Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita to filter out. And because he's miserable, he assumes everyone else must be miserable, too. And if they're not, he's going to try and convince them that they are because he's just the kind of shithead who can't stand anyone else having fun when he isn't.
See, technology is an inanimate object. It can't make anybody miserable. People like David Wong choose to be miserable despite all these advances because they're pining for a decade they didn't even live in, where nobody questioned their privilege.
It's not us that need to get out and reconnect with the world. It's David Wong and everyone like him who need to get out of 1957 and accept that straight white guys just aren't as important as they used to be. And that that's made everyone else a lot happier.
