Something Is Seriously Wrong With People?

[00:00:00]Hello world. I'm an unemployed ex big tech software engineer with 25 years of experience in the tech industry. So a couple of days ago, we got a letter containing a credit card from a company that we have never used before. So apparently someone likely some kind of a scammer had opened up a credit card account in my wife's name. So fearing identity theft, I immediately called that credit card company. Right? My goal was to one lock down the credit card account and two get and understand what personally identifiable information was used to set up that credit card in the first place. So I called them up and after navigating the annoying AI agent for like 20 minutes, I finally got in touch with a human being. Now talking to this customer service person, it was super annoying. It was like everything that he was saying, he was reading off of this script. And he couldn't deviate off of this script, not even a little bit, even when it would have made sense for him to just talk to me like a human being and get this problem solved. So, the conversation sort of went in circles. And after a while, it felt like I was talking to another AI agent instead of an actual person. But I knew for sure that this was a real flesh and blood man. He was just behaving like an organic robot. It was such a frustrating and disconcerting experience. So, this conversation is a recent example of a kind of behavior that I've been noticing a lot lately. It seems to me that a lot of people are behaving in this scripted, performative, almost robotic way where it becomes hard for me to know if this person is actually authentic or genuine or even human. It's sort of like interacting with NPC characters in a game where they look like a person, right? But once your player starts interacting with this NPC player, there's only such a limited set of things to do and things that you can talk about that you almost immediately know that they're actually a bot. Now, just to be clear, not everybody that I interact with behaves like this, right?

[00:02:18]But enough people are exhibiting this behavior enough for me to notice. When I was still back at work last year, this was a very common thing that I would see. People would do things that seemed totally scripted and entirely performative in nature. Things like converting a really basic idea or even just a comment from some executive into a whole series of executive summaries and briefs and slide decks and so on.

[00:02:48]things like attending or even scheduling meetings that have no functional purpose whatsoever. Meetings just to show alignment or meetings to make sure that the right people are there for some kind of a decision-making kabuki theater.

[00:03:05]Now, this kind of behavior, it's not unusual for work. On some levels, all of us, we put on a performative mask, right, when we're at work. But what was unusual to me is that for some people at work, their masks seems to never come off. So now that I'm no longer working, I have the extra time now to strike up conversations with other people when they are not at work and I see this strange behavior even in such situations. In casual conversations, there seems to be this very narrow bubble of topics that I can talk about casually with most other people.

[00:03:49]Superficial things like pop culture or food or local happenings and so on. If I were to breach this little information bubble, then people get really uncomfortable really fast. And it seems to me that people's attention spans, they're just really short nowadays. So, it's really difficult to have these sort of deep, meaningful conversations with anyone because you only have a few minutes to have these conversations. So, bottom line, it really weirds me out that so many people are behaving like lifeless NPCs. But, I feel like it wasn't always this way. 20 years ago when I was in my 20s, it felt like people were so much more authentic and genuine and open to conversation. I literally struck up conversations with random people on the streets back then.

[00:04:46]And I actually made some friends that way. Back then at work, it felt like I could have genuine, meaningful conversations with so many of my co-workers. And I made a bunch of friends from people at work back then.

[00:05:01]So this phenomenon is really strange and I really gave some thought as to why people are behaving like this nowadays and I found some possible explanations.

[00:05:13]So let's get to it. Sensory over stimulation could be a contributing factor. If we think about it, the majority of the population in this country, well, they spend the majority of their time on these digital platforms. This is a unique and recent environmental change where people are now exposed to this tidal wave of information of content. And most of this content is designed to excite or anger or frighten or just stress people out.

[00:05:46]Essentially, it's like a deluge of informationational noise without any way for people to act out on that information. And it just gets to a point where people become overstimulated.

[00:05:58]They're desensitized. Their attention spans are shot. They're just burnt out.

[00:06:03]In such a state, people may just lack the mental energy and motivation to behave like natural human beings.

[00:06:11]Another reason may be due to employment conditioning. So the average person in America basically has no money. As such, most people are super duper dependent on their jobs in order to survive in our hyper capitalist system. So, working that job or jobs then becomes an activity that consumes the vast majority of that person's existence. Now, here's the thing. Most jobs, especially corporate jobs, have all of these rules and structures that people would need to follow. While at work, people have to stick to these mundane rules, scripts, processes, and guidelines. While at work, you need to use neutral, emotionally detached language all the time. You need to track your performance milestones all the time. So, people then have to put on this performance every day for months, years, even decades. If we think about it, this is a kind of long-term conditioning that deemphasizes human qualities such as authenticity and creativity and it forces people to perform tasks mechanistically in order to satisfy some arbitrary set of performance metrics. Now, most people consume social media, right? And it's possible that social media is adversely shaping people's mental model. And this shaping operation could be via two different methods. The first method is via the creation of an information bubble. So, back in the '9s, before social media was a thing, the internet was this open, wild, semilawless place where when you surf the internet, it was essentially a kind of exploration. And I learned a bunch of cool, weird, interesting things while exploring the internet back then. Nowadays, however, social media algorithmically curates and serves people this neverending stream of content. And a lot of people, they would just veg out and keep swiping up to consume this unending stream of curated content. This then over time causes people's minds to be influenced by this bubble of content that they didn't choose for themselves. That then leads to the second method, which is the shaping of people's behaviors. So, within an information bubble, if you take the time to look around a little bit, you'll quickly notice these influencer personas. These personas, usually just a limited number. They're supposed to represent the ideal person within this information or content bubble. Say if we look at a platform like LinkedIn for example, we'll quickly find examples of these personas. There's the copy and paste motivator, which is this person that would post and repost the exact same ultra cringe, pseudo inspirational business success stories, and they'll just keep doing this over and over. There's the overly philosophical influencer where they'll treat every interaction as some sort of a leadership lesson. Your overpriced Starbucks coffee is just a drink to normal people, right? But to them, it's the foundation of effective team empowerment. It's like that. And unfortunately, people, and I mean a lot of people, they tend to copy the behaviors of those they perceive to be successful. People do this for a sense of external validation, perhaps even at the detriment of their own well-being, kind of like lemmings. Yet another explanation that I found is that many modern societies are undergoing a meaning crisis. What exactly is a meaning crisis? Well, it's this widespread cultural phenomenon where many people in a society experience this sense of hopelessness, lack of connection and nihilism. People think that this meaning crisis is due to a set of recent changes that happened to the structure of society. Changes like the decline of people believing in traditional religions, like the push for consumerism to become the central pillar of modern life, or the push for people to become hyperindividualist.

[00:10:53]All of these changes leave the individual person with a feeling that life is empty and pointless, thus making people lose their intrinsic motivation and direction in life. So all of these theories whether individually or collectively they may explain why people have been so off recently. However, as a counterpoint, I must also share this final explanation provided by my dear wife. So my wife believes that people in fact haven't changed at all. Her thinking is that I'm noticing this difference in people's behaviors simply because I'm getting older. Perhaps I just have a nostalgic rosecoled view of how people behave towards each other back 20 years ago when I was a young man. And that memory could very well just be distorted by time. To top it off, she also told me to stop thinking so much because it flares up my anxiety.

[00:11:52]So that's what I got so far. And I do admit that all of this could just be my age and sense of nostalgia messing with my head. It's possible. So, I really want to hear what you all think about this. Do any of you see this strange robotic like behavior in other people?

[00:12:10]Especially for the millennials and genzers out there. Are the people that you're interacting with daily, are they warm and genuine and open or do they behave more like NPCs? Anyways, that's all I have to say about that. If you have a morbid curiosity to join me in this life journey, please feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel and subscribe to my Substack newsletter. If you want to support my vlog creation efforts, please feel free to become a member of this channel or just buy me a coffee. If you want a one-on-one coaching session with me, just schedule it. Anyways, thanks for watching. Talk soon. Bye.