Accidental Repression

New Theory, based on personal experience:

The "distraction culture" created by social media, the internet, and any other service that provides low "friction" in accessing content actually represses self-actualisation, leading in part to the reason it may be leading to higher rates of depression and mental health issues. In conjunction with technology reducing the need for interaction with the world to produce results and products (and therefore providing self-actualisation), there becomes a void of self-actualisation in individuals, leading to depression, anxiety, and uneasiness in younger generations. Gen Z effectively has to work less, but also have more things to distract them from work and work that is more abstract and detached from tangible, real world results. It's a no wonder how ADHD and ADD diagnosis' have skyrocketed in the past couple of years. If you can't see the impact of your work, how can you measure and confirm that what you're working on really has value outside of how you're getting paid and what you think of your own job? How do you maintain self-actualisation? And how to you do this without getting distracted by interfaces regurgitating content that is designed to hook you like a drug?

It's all very strange to me. These unnatural addictions work to pull out our inner Id, which is dangerous as now more than ever, in a time in which the human environment has changed profoundly, do the impulses of the Id actually come to harm our own well-being. It's my personal belief that when individuals in a society can no longer reconcile the Ego with the Id that we surrender to the primal impulses that tear societies apart. Society is, in many ways, the result of a collective Ego. 

The impulses created by the Id, in turn, need to be counteracted with a powerful Super-ego; if we're going to pander to our Id and gratify ourselves to progressively more and more erotic and dangerous pornographic material online, we have to construct an incredible Super-ego to prevent us from actually repeating that constructed experience with our sexual partners in the real world, and to tame our expectations. But these extremes overall may lead to less sex with a partner because the pornographic experience shifts the balance to the Id, and the powerful Super-Ego counteracts that. But here you get a regressive Ego, where you are having less sex than is required to replace and sustain the population. 

Of course, we aren't doing any of this intentionally. This is just capitalism being capitalism, albeit neo-liberal capitalism that manifests unregulated industries that take advantage of our impulses, and economic measurement being inherently anti-human. But our information overload, our "Id clicking" and our "super-ego sanitising" leads to us accidentally repressing acting on the things that matter to us, placing a fog over our perception of the real world as this mundane realm where we have to pause every once-in-a-while to eat, shit and sleep. And the more frictionless our access to content becomes and the more intangible our work becomes, the more of a challenge it becomes for our minds to resist. The harder it becomes to ensure that you are self-actualising. 

These days it seems that one is either distracted from their work, out of a job (or soon to be), not seeing the fruits of their labour or working in a job that is menial and pointless, a "bullshit" job. Magnitude of work is one thing, but direction is another. But as distraction culture makes it more difficult for people to properly find a direction (on top of economic realities such as wealth inequality), our developmental progress as a society is going to suffer. We aren't going to be thinking ahead. 

And when stagnation occurs, life tends to self-destruct, artificially turning back the clock to an earlier junction, branching off in a different direction, hopefully one that will lead to more sustainable future growth.