The trouble with 'donating our dopamine' to our phones, not our friends

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Recently, my guest, writer Derek Thompson, took his family out to dinner and noticed that while the restaurant was bustling, he and his family were the only people actually sitting down to eat. Every few minutes, a flurry of people would walk in, grab bags of food and walk out. The restaurant's bar counter had become, as he puts it, a silent depot for people to grab food to eat at home in solitude. In February's issue of The Atlantic, Thompson writes about the phenomenon he calls the antisocial century. More people are choosing isolation over hanging out with others, and we can't blame it all on COVID-19. This trend started before the pandemic. The problem is that humans by nature are social beings, and the consequences of isolation are stark. Our personalities are changing, as well as our politics and our relationship to reality.

Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said, we're in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Derek Thompson is a writer for The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He's also the author of the books "Hit Makers" and "On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity," and the host of the podcast "Plain English." His new book "Abundance," co-authored with Ezra Klein, comes out in March. Derek Thompson, welcome to FRESH AIR. And I'm excited to talk with you again.

DEREK THOMPSON: It's really wonderful to be here, and I'm excited to talk to you as well.

MOSLEY: OK, Derek, I think a lot of us would assume that what you saw when you were out to dinner with your family is just a holdover of the pandemic, but you actually traced this isolation even further back. What did you find?

THOMPSON: This is a story that seems to go back at least 60 years. There was a very famous book written in 2000 called "Bowling Alone" by the sociologist Robert Putnam. And Putnam traced the entire 20th century and showed that in the first half of the 20th century, people were significantly more social, more likely to join unions and clubs and associations, more likely to get married, more likely to have children. Just about every measure of sociality was rising as if on a single wave for the first 50 or 60 years of the 1900s. And then in the second half of the 20th century, something changed and people became less likely to marry, less likely to have children, less likely to join associations, less likely to spend time with people, really less likely to do just about everything.

And the book is really extraordinary in that it traces everything from, you know, big social phenomena like marriage, to tiny social phenomena, like how many thank-you cards or greeting cards you fill out every year and finds that just as all manner of socializing was on a surging wave in the first half of the 20th century, that wave crashed and declined in the second half. A lot of people are familiar with Robert Putnam and his thesis of "Bowling Alone," but what really startled me is that there was a tremendous acceleration of alone time in the 21st century.

MOSLEY: OK, Derek, when I hear you say this goes back 60 years, I'm just thinking the consequences then must be more profound than we realize, and technology is at the heart of it.

THOMPSON: Absolutely. Technology is the heart of it. There's many things we can point to that changed the 1960s and 1970s. But I'm very persuaded that if you want to understand the marrow of this issue, you should be looking at the most important technologies of the 20th century, which are the car and the television. And the automobile, I would say, privatized people's lives. It allowed us to move into the suburbs, to move away from density, which is to say, other people, spend more time alone in our backyards and alone in our houses. But then along in the 1950s and 1960s came another technology that really fit right with the automobile, and that's the television. And if the car privatized our lives, I think the television privatized our leisure.

And when you dig into the numbers, it is extraordinary just how much TV changed what it meant to be alive in the last 50 years of the 1900s. There is federal data suggesting that between 1960 and the 1990s, the average American added about six hours of leisure time to every week. That's an extra 300 hours of leisure time every year. And think about, like, if you were waking up on January 1, and someone said, how do you want to spend an extra 300 hours of leisure that I'm giving you this year...

MOSLEY: Right.

THOMPSON: ...Do you want to...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

THOMPSON: ...Learn how to play an instrument or, you know, learn a new language or read all the books you wanted to read? We didn't do any of that. We basically spent all that time watching more television. So coming up to the age of the smartphone, even before you get to that infamous device, you had, I think, the automobile and the television set, sort of setting the ground for what has been an enormous decline in face-to-face socializing.

MOSLEY: Your article makes a distinction between solitude and loneliness. And this was probably, for me, the most profound part of your piece, because we actually are under this assumption that all of this me time - I think a lot of us, I should say, not everyone, but that this me time is good for us. It's like a form of self-care, because it's, like, as if the world is so overstimulating that we need all of this time alone.

THOMPSON: To me, this is the most important conceptual scoop of the essay. As you mentioned in your open, everyone wants to talk about loneliness these days. You know, Vivek Murthy says that loneliness is an epidemic. You have ministers of loneliness being granted new positions in places like the U.K. and Japan. Everyone wants to talk about loneliness. But among the many people that I spoke to for this article, I talked to the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who passed along a relatively familiar - within sociology - definition of loneliness. Loneliness, he said, is the gap between felt social connection and desired social connection. Loneliness is a healthy thing to feel in the right doses. It's what gets us off the couch to spend time with people.

But in fact, I think a lot of Americans don't feel lonely as we typically define that feeling. Rather than spend time alone and think to themselves; I should be around more people, I think many Americans, in the last 20 years, particularly, are spending more time alone by choice year after year after year. So the reason why I think this is really important to point out is, that there's a lot of very, very smart people who have read this article and read previous articles about loneliness, who look at the hard data and they say, you actually can't show with a lot of survey data that loneliness is rising. Actually, loneliness seems to be very stable. My point is they might be right, and maybe the social crisis that we have today is rising solitude without rising loneliness.

MOSLEY: That sociologist that you talked to that told you, like, loneliness is a healthy response and that it is the thing that pushes us off the couch out into the world, that kind of makes it sound like our phones might actually be blocking us from feeling that natural instinct. But yet people feel like...

THOMPSON: Yes.

MOSLEY: ...They're being very social by being on their phones and being on social, you know, media sites and stuff.

THOMPSON: They might feel that way, but it is not a coincidence, I think, that if you ask generation after generation, how many friends do you have, it turns out to be the most phone-bound generations - young people - who have the fewest friends. If you ask people over the last 30, 40 years, how many times do you spend hanging out with your friends, that number has declined by 50% for high schoolers. If you ask high schoolers going back over the last 20 years, how anxious do you feel, how consistently depressed or anxious or sad do you feel, those numbers are near all-time highs. So it's very, very hard to say for sure what people feel when they look into their phones. And I should absolutely grant the premise that a lot of time that people spend on their phones is social after a fashion. You have to put all of this together, that the same Generation that's spending a historic amount of time on their phone has fewer friends, spends less time with their friends, feels more depressed, feels more anxious. That tells me that the phone time we have that seems to be a substitute for face-to-face socializing is a poor, poor substitute.

MOSLEY: You know, I've been thinking about social media videos of people who record themselves dancing or, you know, talking, or sometimes people are pouring their hearts out, you know, into - you know, they have videos on TikTok and stuff. And watching them, though - like, watching people dance - it feels like a party. I'm vibing off of their vibe. They seem happy. They're enjoying themselves. But then I think about everything that happens after they record themselves. You know, they turn off the camera. The music is off. They're all alone. They're literally standing in their living room there alone. And I feel this especially when someone is pouring their heart out. They're crying into the camera and then, at the end, like, they're going through the comments to get validation.

THOMPSON: It's a lovely thought - and it's a spooky thought - that many of these videos that we see that sometimes move us are moving us when we're alone. And the person who filmed that emotional video is also alone, editing the video alone, tracking the comments alone. And so that rather than have a disclosure of emotional intimacy between two people that are there for each other, we rather have a broadcast of emotional intimacy shared by one person who is alone with millions of other people who are also alone. That is an uncanny reality that we live in.

And I should say, I thought - when I came into this essay-writing process, I felt like I had all the facts at my disposal. I had poured over the federal American Time Use Survey, and I could point to the numbers and say face-to-face socializing has declined 20% for Americans in the last 20 years, and alone time is at the highest rate that we have going back to data in the 1960s. But what I didn't have were stories. And here's where my wife was actually very helpful to me, ironically because she's on TikTok. And she said there's this trend or this theme on TikTok where young people will film celebrations and funny dances when a friend cancels plans.

MOSLEY: (Laughter) Right. Right. Right, yeah.

THOMPSON: Now, I should back up and say we all know that feeling of...

MOSLEY: Yes.

THOMPSON: ...Having the worst, most busy, exhausting week in the world, and it's Friday night and we're exhausted and want to go to bed at 9:30.

MOSLEY: Or it's cold. Right. Yeah.

THOMPSON: I mean, yeah, right. And a friend calls at 8:30 for, you know, the 8:45 reservation that we had, and they say, I'm sorry, I have to cancel. And we celebrate internally. I understand that feeling. I'm not a monster. I'm not a robot. However, put the following facts together - the most socially isolated generation in recorded history has a trend of filming celebrations of when their friends cancel plans. That's a strange fact. That's a strange juxtaposition. And if you go back to Klinenberg's definition of loneliness - being the urge, the drive, to fix your alone state by being around other people - what do we do about the fact that it seems like so many young people, who spend more time alone than any previous generation in recorded history, celebrate and dance when they get more alone time and me time and isolation? This - something strange is happening here, and it does a disservice to the strangeness to call it mere aloneness.

MOSLEY: OK. Let's continue talking about this in just a moment. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson about his recent article for the Atlantic, "The Anti-Social Century." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, we're talking to writer Derek Thompson about his February cover story for The Atlantic called "The Anti-Social Century," which looks at how Americans spend more time alone than ever.

You're working out this theory that - I love how you put it - that we are donating our dopamine to our phones. Can you say more about that?

THOMPSON: When I was finishing edits for this essay, I was reading a book, "Dopamine Nation," about the functioning of our dopamine systems. And I learned that there's two different ways of measuring dopamine. There's phasic dopamine, which is sort of the dopamine hits that we receive from certain experiences, and there's our tonic dopamine, which is the baseline level of dopamine that we have. And without making this overcomplicated, 'cause I might not fully understand it ourselves, sometimes when we have a really high-dopamine experience, there's less dopamine - or, to be colloquial, less drive - that we have left over.

And what I think is happening with smartphone use is something like this. We pull out our phones and we're on TikTok or Instagram, or we're on Twitter, and we're flipping, flipping, flipping with our thumbs. And while externally, it looks like nothing is happening, internally, the dopamine is flowing and we are just thinking, oh, my God. We're feeling outrage. We're feeling excitement. We're feeling humor. We're feeling all sorts of things. We put our phone away, and our dopamine levels fall. And we feel kind of exhausted by that which was supposed to be our leisure time.

And a friend then asks us to go out. They say, hey, do you want to come meet me for drinks? What we think isn't, I've just been reading a book. I've been enjoying perfect quiet. I really want to be around people. I'm healthily lonely. Instead, we think, I'm exhausted. And thinking about leaving this house and getting my hair done and doing my makeup or putting on the right clothes and maybe using the subway, and maybe the subway's broken, or getting into a car, but I don't want to call the Uber - we start imagining all the misadventures of getting out of the house. And we think, that seems like too much energy to expend, and I'm in a low-energy state. So I'm just going to say no to the friend, and in fact, I might even celebrate if they end up canceling their plan in the first place.

One way to summarize what I think is happening here is that we are donating our dopamine to our phones, rather than reserving our dopamine for our friends. As a result, we find ourself in this uncanny space where we simultaneously have more time to ourselves but are so - are made so exhausted by that alone leisure time that we're pulling back from opportunities to be truly social.

MOSLEY: Yeah. You know, I talked with the comedian Roy Wood Jr. a few weeks ago, and he had this joke about the decline in the interaction between the store clerks because they're all automated now. And, I mean, you're - what you're talking about here makes me think about that because that's a little bit of a dopamine hit. When you have a fun interaction or a really nice conversation with the store clerk as she or he, you know, is scanning your groceries, those small interactions, from what I'm getting from you, are also really important things in our lives.

THOMPSON: I think they are important things in our lives, and they're important things in their lives, too. I talked to the psychologist Nick Epley at the University of Chicago for this piece. And he makes this really interesting point that there's many people, especially introverts but including some extroverts, who sometimes withhold conversation with strangers, or even with people they do know, because they assume that the other person just won't want to talk to them or the other person will find them uninteresting. And he says that that's typically not true, that there's a great deal of human interaction that's governed by a principle of reciprocity. Which is to say, if I'm nice to you, you'll be nice to me. If I give you a compliment, you'll say thank you. If I tell a joke, you'll smile, even if it's a terrible joke. This is how humans get along is through this kind of reciprocal engagement. And many times we forget that, and so we withhold conversation from other people. And in particular, we withhold deep conversation with other people, you know, fearing that deep conversation will be found annoying by the people around us, but it's typically not. It's typically deeply enjoyed.

Lots of his studies, including some randomized studies, seem to find that people - even introverts - are made much happier by these brief encounters in our lives with people on a train or, you know, the clerks in the store that we're visiting. And what I think is really profound about that mistake that we're making, is that, yes, maybe it's just a 15-minute conversation with someone on a train, or maybe it's just a 10-minute conversation with someone in a store, and all that's improving is just the little experience of that little 10 minutes. Well, life is just one 10-minute experience after another. That's all it is.

MOSLEY: Yeah, That's true.

THOMPSON: The way you live...

MOSLEY: That's true.

THOMPSON: ...Your minutes is the way you live your decades. And I think that it's really important to remember that, like, these little social experiments that we do, these little social - these little bits of socializing that we experience, they can be really beautiful. They can really beautifully transform our experience of that day and people around us. And so I do think that you don't want to underrate the power of these small little gestures.

MOSLEY: I was thinking about, you know, many employers are now pushing their employees to come back to work. During the pandemic, folks were working from home. There is also, like, this tension here, because it feels kind of hostile that so many workplaces are demanding that we go back into the office. But is there a trade off for that - a benefit to that - to actually be in the office? What does the data say about productivity, but not just that, maybe lessening the loneliness meter scale for us as individuals?

THOMPSON: This is a really big and important question, and I'll start by answering it this way - I work from home. I support working from home. I wish that more companies had more flexibility about work-from-home. But I try to not lie to myself about the costs of, or even the effects of, working from home. There are days where I just don't see people, outside of my family, at all. And of course, homebound life means more time with the people that I love. It means more time with my family. It also has a cost. It means I see the world less. I'm around other people less. I feel a little bit lonely more, and not lonely in a healthy way where it's easily discharged and I just, like, go out and see people. I spend more time of chosen aloneness day after day after day. I recognize these own costs in my life. And I think that we need to recognize that just as offices are an invention of the 19th century that did one thing well - getting white-collar workers together - and did many other things poorly - for example, requiring long commutes - work-from-home is another technology and every technology has both the rose and the thorns. It does some things very well, such as reducing commute time and giving people more flexibility over their lives. But it does other things terribly, like getting people around other people with whom they might have wonderful conversations.

You know, some companies I think that do this really wonderfully - pure remote - often will build into their weeks, mandatory ritualistic hangouts. Every month, everybody gets together. Every two months, everybody gets together. I think the problem is, especially for young people who aren't established at work and really can be profoundly lonely, who need to build friends, need to build networks, if they're working from home, there's many times, I think, where the company isn't an office. It's not a building that people go into. The company is a group chat that happens to issue a W2 statement every January. That's a very different phenomenon. And we should just be honest with ourselves when we're reckoning with what are the benefits of - the real benefits of - and what are the costs of - the real costs of - spending so much time working at home alone.

MOSLEY: My guest today is Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson, and we're talking about his February cover story, "The Anti-Social Century." We'll be right back in just a few. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And I'm talking to Derek Thompson from The Atlantic about his February cover story called "The Anti-Social Century," which looks at how Americans are spending less time with other people. Over the last 20 years, hanging out with others has plunged by more than 20%, choosing me time instead. Now, the problem is that humans by nature are social beings, and the consequences of isolation are stark. Our personalities are changing, as well as our politics and our relationship to reality.

In addition to The Atlantic, Derek Thompson is the author of Work In Progress, a newsletter. He is also the author of the books "Hit Makers" and "On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity," and the host of the podcast "Plain English." He has a new book with Ezra Klein coming out in March called "Abundance."

OK. So I was reading about how fewer Gen Z adults reported being involved in romantic relationships during their teenage years. What did you find in the research about this?

THOMPSON: I'm researching for a piece about this right now. I think it's really interesting to think about a kind of lifecycle interpretation of the anti-social century, and here's what I mean by that. Different data sources suggest all of the following - that teens have fewer friends than they used to; that high schoolers hang out with their friends less than they used to; that 20-somethings are less likely to date than they used to be - less likely to have sex than they used to have, as well; that 30-somethings are less likely to get married than they used to be and that 40-somethings are less likely to have children in their household than they used to be.

And so these are different trends. And I don't want to suggest that all of these things are somehow, you know, caused by one thing, like the television and the smartphone, but they're all happening at the same time. And it's every station of human relationship that's in simultaneous decline, and that's really fascinating and troubling.

MOSLEY: Did you find other factors, aside from technology, that might be causing this?

THOMPSON: Yeah. I do think that sometimes I am guilty of talking about these phenomena as if they're exclusively about digital technology and our inner world, of our emotional need for private time or other people. But just as important as changes to the inner life of Americans, I think, are changes to the external world of America. Between the early 1900s and 1950, we built a ton of what the sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls social infrastructure. We built library branches and community centers and public pools, and we built places for people to spend time outside of their home and their work. In the last 50, 70 years, we haven't built nearly as much of this stuff.

MOSLEY: Is this what we call, like, the third place or the third space?

THOMPSON: It absolutely - yeah, third space or third place is a term that some people have for the place that's not your home and the place that's not your work. And so it's a place that you choose to be with people you're not related to, and you're not financially obligated to be around them by dint of the fact that that's where you get your W-2 from. And so they're important because these places build community. The literal structures that house these third spaces seem to be in decline, and we've simply built less of them.

You know, Klinenberg was in Chicago at one point reporting for one of his books, called "Palaces For The People." And he was talking to a community leader in Chicago about the fact that more young men seem to spend time at home, whether it's playing video games or looking into their phones.

MOSLEY: Or working out.

THOMPSON: But he said - right. They're working out. You know, they're lifting weights. They're playing video games. They're looking into their phone. They're not spending time outside of their home. And a community leader said, you can blame the phones if you want to. But it's just as much about the fact that, look around - where would they spend time? The social infrastructure is dilapidated compared to where it was 50 or 70 years ago. There's been very little ingenuity spent on building out the external world of social infrastructure, whereas there's been an enormous amount of ingenuity spent on making our phones more compelling for us to spend time alone on our couches.

MOSLEY: I mean, is there a throughline, then, to sort of this disenfranchised male? You know, we talk about, like, the incels and some of those things that, like, we've really been having discourse about. This kind of delves into also our politics. But is there a throughline that you see in the data there?

THOMPSON: Something very interesting and troubling is happening for men. That's for sure. Whether it's related to the incel meme or the incel news peg that exists out there, I'm less certain of. But what's very clear in the data is that alone time has increased most for young, single, less educated men. And there's further research that looks at all leisure time and breaks it out into a bunch of different categories with a bunch of different labels. And basically, the exercise is about, how much time do people spend in sedentary leisure - you know, watching television - versus active leisure - say, working out or playing a sport? And how much of each of those categories is spent with other people - say, watching TV with, you know, your spouse or with a friend - or watching TV alone?

And for young, less educated, unmarried men, the rise of sedentary alone time has just soared. We're talking about watching TV by yourself, playing video games by yourself. You know, alone time - alone active time would be, like, working out by yourself. But the one line - the one graph line that was just clearly striking in the data that I reviewed is sedentary alone time for single young men. That group clearly has something going on that is a steroidal version of what's going on for everybody else.

MOSLEY: Thinking back to the little bit we were talking about regarding romantic relationships in young people, there was this article a few weeks ago in The Times about a woman who is in a full-fledged relationship with ChatGPT. And, you know, of course, that made me think about the movie "Her" from 2013, where Joaquin Phoenix's character was in love with an operating system. How are these AI companions maybe furthering this trend or stepping in to fill the void for people who are isolated?

THOMPSON: You know, that article was alarming to many people, surprising to many people. It certainly wasn't surprising to Jason Fagone, who's an author I spoke to who's writing a book about the fact of - and the rising phenomenon of - people having relationships with AI. Companion AI has millions of users. Millions of people have relationships with text bots, essentially.

You know, Jason told me about characters from his forthcoming book, one who's a young man who - I think this is actually very similar to a "Black Mirror" episode - tragically lost his fiancee, instructed a chatbot to essentially have the personality of his deceased fiance and used that chatbot in order to work through his grief. And he wasn't pretending to date a silicon-based version of his dead fiance. He was using the fiance essentially as he would use an extension of a therapist - to work through the traumatic grief of losing someone who you love more than anyone in the world. So things like that are happening.

You know, you were born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s. There's going to be kids born in the 2010s, the 2020s, who might grow up in an era where lots of people seeking friendships are balancing two different alternatives. On the one hand, there are these carbon-based life forms - otherwise known as people - that you can be friends with. But people are messy. And sometimes, you know, we talk too long, like maybe I'm doing with the answer to this question. And...

MOSLEY: (Laughter).

THOMPSON: ...You know, we have private lives of our own. And, you know, sometimes we're selfish, and we're not very good at validating the feelings of others. And on the other hand, you have an AI that you can instruct to talk as long as you want, to answer the question in exactly the way that you want, who's going to validate whatever you say, who has no life to lead of his or her own. I mean, you could say I'm anthropomorphizing the AI. And they might simply decide that silicon-based friendships are superior to carbon-based friendships. And I think it's a real possibility that's looking us square in the face.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson about his recent article for The Atlantic, "The Anti-Social Century." We'll continue our conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking to writer Derek Thompson about his February cover story for The Atlantic called "The Anti-Social Century," which looks at how Americans are spending more time alone than ever.

OK, Derek. Let's talk a little bit about political polarization. I love the subtitle of this section of your piece. It's called "This Is Your Politics On Solitude." How has all of this isolation - how has it changed our politics?

THOMPSON: One of the most interesting conversations I had in the reporting process for this piece was a conversation with Marc Dunkelman, who's a researcher and author at Brown University. And Marc told me that, ironically and surprisingly, this age of the digitization of everything has actually made some relationships much closer. You know, it's possible to text your partner throughout the day, hundreds of times, and stay connected to them - and, you know, any best friends that you have - stay connected to them in ways that were totally impossible. And so you can think of this as being the inner ring of intimacy has grown stronger, or it's potentially grown stronger for some people, in this age of the smartphone.

At the same time, the fact that we have access to social media and group texts plugs us into networks of shared affinities that we could also never really experience 20 or 30 years ago. So, for example, Marc's case was he's a big Cincinnati Bengals fan living in Providence, Rhode Island. And he said, you know, look - there's, like, 17 other Cincinnati Bengals fans in, you know, the entire state of Rhode Island. There's no one around me who shares my interest in the NFL. But because of the internet, I can talk to this global tribe of Bengals fans and we can stay connected with each other.

And he made this really profound point that while the inner ring of intimacy is strengthening, and the outer ring of tribe is also strengthening, there's a middle ring of what he calls the village that is atrophying. And the village are our neighbors, the people who live around us.

MOSLEY: You actually say that this kind of helps explain progressives' stubborn inability to understand President Donald Trump's appeal. Say more about it.

THOMPSON: So I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family that we disagree with, and this has consequences on both sides. On - for the Republican side, I think it's led to the popularization of candidates like Donald Trump, who essentially are a kind of all-tribe, no-village avatar. He thrives in outgroup animosity. He thrives in alienating the outsider and making it seem like politics, and America itself, is just a constant us-versus-them struggle. So I think that the anti-social century has clearly fed the Trump phenomenon.

If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years, perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America - and, more to the point, live in your neighborhood - to understand where their values come from.

You don't have to agree with their politics. In fact, I would expect you to violently disagree with their politics. But getting along with and understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about. Understanding someone who doesn't share your politics but also sends their daughter to the same dance class, has an issue with the same math teacher that you have an issue with, has a problem with the same falling-down bridge in your community that you have a problem with - finding ways to see people who disagree with us as full-blooded people who share some of our underlying values is a part of what living in a community is all about. And I do think that just as the anti-social century has turned parts of the right into this angry, all-tribe, no-village style of politics, it is also partly responsible for why so many progressives claim to not understand the most successful political movement of their time.

MOSLEY: You know, what's so interesting about what you're saying, too, is that I feel like we were having this conversation in 2016, when there was this indictment on elite and mainstream media - that, like, somehow the mainstream media missed this Trump wave. And from 2016 to now 2025, I mean, we're still here with this baffled - like, people are baffled by the phenomenon that you were - you're talking about. How much of a role does media play in this issue, as well?

THOMPSON: I think it plays an enormous role. And, you know, I could spend all sorts of time criticizing, you know, institutional media. But the truth is, I think, this is a demand problem, which is to say it's an audience problem, fundamentally. I think that most people want news that makes them feel a sense of fluency. And fluency is this term from psychology that has a very specific meaning. It's not like being able to, you know, speak Spanish like being able to, you know, speak Spanish very well or English very well. Fluency refers to a style of metacognition, a feeling that we have about thinking. I have a personal theory that might be wrong, but it's just my theory, that what most people want from news is fluency. What they want from their news is a feeling that is adjacent to entertainment, that the thoughts that they have when they're consuming that news make them feel good. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of curiosity. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of self-righteousness. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of anger or outrage. But what they want is that sense of fluency, and that sense of fluency tends to come from media that we agree with. It doesn't make us feel this disfluent sense of, someone who I trust to be on my side is now saying something that's not on my side. I don't like that feeling.

Then I also think that the news itself - you know, we can't let ourselves off the hook. If the people who are reading The New York Times or reading The Atlantic or listening to NPR feel like they don't understand, you know, the most important political movement of this time, which clearly is the Donald Trump movement - he's the President. It's Republicans who control the Senate. Well, clearly, you know, we have failed - the media, institutional media, we have failed to teach or reflect some kind of truth about our nation to the people who rely on us to understand the truth of our nation.

And suppose - to connect all of this back to the anti-social century, we all need to get out a little bit more. And If we want to be appropriate and wise consumers of news, we want to be wise consumers of news that make us sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about the future.

MOSLEY: OK, Derek, short of some apocalyptic ending of the internet that will force us to look up from our phones and at each other, what can we do to combat this?

THOMPSON: The answer is very straightforward. You leave your house. You hang out with people. You invite more - or you invite more people to your house in order to have dinner parties, which have also declined tremendously in the last 20 years. This is an easy problem to solve on the surface. The problem is, what about the collective action issue? It is easier to hang out with your friends in the physical world if your friends are already likely to or have demonstrated a willingness to hang out in the physical world. It's easier to throw a dinner party if the couple guests that you're inviting over already go to dinner parties, have already demonstrated that they want to go out on Friday night - go over to people's house on Friday night in order to have wine and chicken and steak or whatever.

So I do recognize there's a collective action problem here to solve. But I also think it's really important not to overcomplicate this by suggesting that requires some enormous cultural shifts. I think that our little decisions, the little minute-to-minute decisions that we make about spending time with other people, these decisions can scale. They create patterns of behavior. And patterns of behavior create cultural norms. And those cultural norms can scale as well and they create ages. And right now, I think we're in an age of anti-socializing. We're in an age of withdrawal. We're in an age of, it's totally fine to be at a party and look down at your phone for 30 minutes.

I think that a different future is possible, and that future rests on, is built on these tiny little decisions. Should I text a friend when I have a little bit of time, or should I go on Facebook? Should I hang out with my friend, or should I just text them? Should I, you know, make some date for a bunch of people who are on a group text and live in the same town, but, like, never get together to actually see each other, and so we're constantly in a state of catching up, but never in a state of hanging out? These are all things that everyone listening knows how to do. My wish is that a few actions here and there could actually trigger a behavioral cascade.

MOSLEY: Derek Thompson, I always really enjoy talking to you. Thank you so much.

THOMPSON: It's a real pleasure. Thank you.

MOSLEY: Derek Thompson is a staff writer with The Atlantic. His cover story is called "The Anti-Social Century." Coming up, our TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new documentary "Without Arrows." It follows a Lakota family over the course of 13 years. This is FRESH AIR.

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TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. A new entry in the PBS "Independent Lens" series of documentary films is called "Without Arrows." It's about Delwin Fiddler Jr., a Native American member of the Lakota Sioux Tribe, who returns home after years in Philadelphia to visit his family on their South Dakota reservation. The filmmakers of "Without Arrows" accompanied Delwin on his journey and kept revisiting him over more than a decade. Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.

DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: The last time "Independent Lens" presented a film by director Jonathan Olshefski was in 2017. That documentary was called "Quest," which showed the life of an African American couple living in north Philadelphia - everyday life - captured for over a decade and condensed into a film about family, aspirations and setbacks, and sudden unexpected events. It managed to be simultaneously very specific and universally relatable. There was something about having the patience to spend that much time with your subject and to go wherever events took you that made "Quest" a very special movie and an equally special viewing experience.

And now Olshefski is back with another documentary for "Independent Lens," filmed in a similar fashion over a total of 13 years. Once again, he tells the story of a family and a culture not usually represented on TV or film with this amount of respect and care. This time, it's called "Without Arrows," and it's the story of Delwin Fiddler Jr., a member of the Lakota Sioux Tribe. At the time we meet him, in 2011, Delwin is living in Philadelphia, running a company that teaches and performs Native ritual dances. After more than a decade away, he decides to return to the Sioux Tribe reservation in South Dakota, where his parents and other relatives still live. Olshefski went along to record the family reunion, envisioning it as a short film, but Delwin decided to stay and "Without Arrows" became a much larger project with a much deeper vision and message. As the film grew in scope, Olshefski teamed with a co-director, Elizabeth Day, a Native American from the Ojibwe nation in Minnesota. Her input and Olshefski's up close and personal filming style combined to make "Without Arrows" feel less like filmmakers observing from the outside in and more like candid, honest snippets of family life from the inside out. We see moments of simple joy - a water balloon fight with the young nieces and nephews or card games of gin rummy that give Delwin's mother joy throughout the years we spend with her. We see beauty in the landscape and the horses and in the eventual introduction of a new generation of the Fiddler family. But we also see hardship and tragedy from violent thunderstorms to periodic additions to the family graveyard. And shortly after Delwin jr. returns home, his mother Shirley informs him of the duties she expects him to embrace.

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SHIRLEY EAGLETAIL FIDDLER: Now you have to learn of the sun dances. You have to learn of the prayers, the songs that go with the prayers and the inipi. There's a lot of youth that needs prayers. A lot of these youth are suicidal. These are the ones that need help. Now, can you do this? Now, you're 30 now. See, that's the responsibility you have to do now.

BIANCULLI: Even though Delwin's father, Delwin sr., is still around, he's a quiet character, who's great fun to watch, especially when tending horses are playing with his grandchildren. It's the mother who knows and recounts most of the family history. Their lineage can be traced back to the Battle of Little Bighorn and beyond, and they're now the custodians of the Lakota ceremonial pipe from that battle. In Lakota language, that pipe is called the channunpa, and Shirley displays it and old photographs of their ancestors with pride.

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S FIDDLER: This is an old picture that my grandma Hannah Elk Head kept. This is Elias Elk Head right here. He was the chosen next keeper of the pipe. During the Little Bighorn Battle. And they defeated the battle, and we're still here today. And we are still descendants from each keeper of the channunpa.

BIANCULLI: The personal history of the Fiddlers gets even more personal when Delwin jr., in a pensive moment alone with the filmmakers, talks about an event from his own adolescence. When you hear it, you suddenly understand why both Delwin and his mother are so concerned about legacy and family.

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DELWIN FIDDLER JR: When my little brother shot himself and - changed a lot - and changed our family a whole bunch. My little brother died in my arms. To sit there and to watch your little brother bleed and die in your arms, and you can't even do a damn thing about it, it's not every day a 14-year-old would see.

BIANCULLI: The evidence that time heals runs throughout "Without Arrows," but so do many other messages. Olshefski and Day present them beautifully and clearly, yet with subtlety. There's no narration and no talking-head historians, just the images and the people on film to teach you about life, love, commitment and perseverance. In "Without Arrows," they do so in an emotionally powerful fashion.

MOSLEY: David Bianculli is professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed "Without Arrows," part of the "Independent Lens" series, now streaming on PBS. On the next FRESH AIR, how Louis Armstrong became the first Black pop star and musician who provided the foundational language of improvisation. We talk with Ricky Riccardi, author of "Stomp Off, Let's Go: The Early Years Of Louis Armstrong." I hope you can join us.

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MOSLEY: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Special thanks to Jose Llanas and Conor Anderson from WDET for additional engineering help. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

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