“`html
Economic headwinds are creating an unusual paradox: a heightened need for social connection coupled with a growing awkwardness in forging those connections.
Many, in a bid to avoid vulnerability and protect themselves, are adopting a methodological approach to distance. They’re sidestepping workplace camaraderie, downplaying romantic possibilities, and instead, focusing on constructing idealized notions of intimacy within friendships and other relationships.
This suggests a subtle but significant shift in human social dynamics, influenced by both economic realities and technological advancements.
It’s like a crowd poised to enter an amusement park, tickets in hand, filled with anticipation for the brave new world ahead, yet simultaneously wavering between excitement, apprehension, and longing. Everything seems worth exploring, but a solid foundation remains elusive.
In China, where the average workweek clocks in at a hefty 48.26 hours, the office is arguably the place we spend the most time outside of our homes.
Consequently, some are striving to transform their cubicles into cozy havens, while others find the corporate landscape oppressively bland. They are effectively hypnotizing themselves, envisioning their workplace as a real-life version of the horror film, “A Quiet Place.”
In that movie’s narrative, monsters are blind but acutely sensitive to sound. Survival hinges on minimizing noise.
Now, this pervasive anxiety is unexpectedly manifesting in the contemporary office. Disenchanted workers imagine themselves as survivors in a post-apocalyptic scenario, with bosses and colleagues cast as the sound-sensitive monsters.
The optimal survival strategy: Silence.
You might have already encountered these individuals.
They seem ordinary on the surface, but secretly identify as members of the “Silent Order.” Their daily ritual begins with reciting the Silent Order’s mantra at their desks: “The sacred flame burns, silence illuminates; I am a wealthy, independent beauty.”
Following this incantation, devotees engage in copywriting and posting – routine workplace “blessings”. The particularly pious may add affirmations designed to manifest positive outcomes: “Remember, you are a wealthy and successful individual.”
This collective workplace resentment has solidified into a new set of behavioral guidelines:
Within company premises, discussions are limited to work-related matters only; personal topics are strictly off-limits; non-essential conversations should be minimized.
If conversation is unavoidable, keep it brief and superficial; be discreet about personal affairs to maintain an air of mystery; refrain from initiating topics before others do; feign ignorance about matters unrelated to you, while remaining affable; politely decline unwanted tasks from peers, and communicate honestly with superiors; speak and work slowly; engage in strategic “goofing off” while ensuring keyboard activity simulates productivity; clock in and out efficiently, arriving precisely on time and leaving promptly at the end of the day; and above all: do not try to “save” others.
In short, crossing the office threshold effectively renders the mouth the most useless of facial features.
The “shushing” gesture popularized by the character Zhen Huan in a popular period drama has become a symbol of rebellion. It’s both a relevant hand signal and an aspiration to emulate Zhen Huan’s ability to conceal emotions and keep personal matters private in the workplace.
Like Zhen Huan kneeling in the snow vowing to “live as a vegetarian for life,” the online devotees of silence are often even more committed. Some are recent recruits, while others have been practicing for over two years.
As the old saying goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Online, users commiserate, devoid of hierarchical distinctions. Anyone who stumbles across the forum takes a swipe at their company, leaving a single word: “Checked-in.”
If the office is resembling “A Quiet Place,” then location-sharing apps are becoming a hybrid of “The Truman Show” and the 1980s horror classic, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (where Freddy Krueger could precisely locate his victims in their dreams).
Since the release of Apple’s iOS 15, the “Find My” feature’s real-time location updates have gained widespread usage. Apple explicitly stated the purpose was to provide “instant speed, direction and progress” when tracking someone’s location.
Essentially, a feature designed to locate devices is repurposed to track people.
In this era of ubiquitous smartphones, built-in location trackers resemble the green diamond markers hovering over characters in “The Sims”. The function is powerful enough to reveal another person’s direction and speed of travel.
Your closest friends, then, could transform into GPS-enabled digital companions. And those whose curiosity trumps their manners, can ask at any time “What are you doing there?”
While some Millennials report feeling uneasy about the overreach, younger generations, particularly Gen Z, have embraced location sharing as a novel form of socializing.
A recent study by Civic Science found that approximately 65% of Gen Z users engage in location sharing, with 16% sharing their location with at least five people.
Sharing one’s location with friends is considered trendier than doing so with family. Capitalizing on this trend, Instagram recently launched a live location-mapping feature, allowing users to freely share their whereabouts with friends at-will.
Essentially, the feature functions as a digital “Marauder’s Map,” lacking a direct messaging interface. However, a person’s location can reveal a lot, holding different meanings for different people.
One woman disclosed, “I consistently share my location with a few close girlfriends; it’s simply reassuring.” A cycling enthusiast mentioned, “Sharing locations with my fellow riders is just plain fun.”
But more often, the sentiment is that maintaining constant surveillance, even by friends that one likes, feels unnerving.
It’s also apparent that sharing has become an expression of intimacy for many young people.
Beyond location sharing, shared albums, daily routines, and even shared friend groups have become prevalent cultural phenomena.
Yet, in romantic relationships, where trust should be paramount, vigilance intensifies just when intimacy should develop.
Some people in relationships resemble Pearl, the terrifying character in the film of the same name. Private musings once freely shared among friends become taboo topics with a lover.
Consider the location-sharing dynamic: couples often engage in polarized debates. Some agree to activate it, while others find ways to reject the request.
This same sense of boundaries is playing out in more formal settings. Some couples execute formal contracts – officially known as “relationship agreements”.
The rationale is simple: In an era awash with PDFs, some consider romantic gifts and financial support as a form of micro-asset transfer.
Fearing future accusations, they seek formal documentation beyond verbal assurances or written notations of “irrevocable donation”.
Contracts such as the ones below serve as protection for assets and personal interests.
A search for “relationships” on social media no longer yields an abundance of sweet vlogs. Instead, “how-to” style queries are the key starting point.
Relationship formulas, characteristics of healthy relationships, relationship “needs checklists”, tips and tricks… guides abound.
Only those involved can truly say how much love is mixed in.
These three new forms of close relationships may seem baffling. A workplace where communication is shunned, friends who share private locations, and romantic relationships measured by contracts and assessments.
The rate of societal change means yesterday’s perspectives are no longer applicable on judging today’s relationships.
New forms of relationships are developing like crazy… I’d call this The Great Disruption.
How and why did this start?
Young people “doing crazy things” in friendships, work environments and romance is a sign of detachment from traditional ways of interpersonal relationships. They are feeling the burdens and risks that exist in these settings.
Reality is being distorted. Everyone has their own set of problems to deal with.
Not everyone is necessarily super cautious about what they share, but the icy feeling between people is something everyone can feel.
When some try to chase down what that icy feeling is caused by, they automatically assume it’s caused by differences in generational point of view.
A millennial (born 1981-1996) finds the coldness the most obvious when talking to someone in Gen Z (born 1997-2012 or 2010).
They think that because Gen Z spends so much time online or on their device that when they come back to real life, it doesn’t feel that much different to them. “It’s like watching a movie in black and white”.
But if you look at the timeline, Gen Z didn’t choose to be socially distant on their own. It’s just that they had zero experience getting involved in “normal” interpersonal relationships that the older generations had taken for granted.
Remember that the start of Covid almost exactly overlapped with the first groups of Gen Z leaving high school to go to college. This meant that after leaving school, they were again put in a socially restricted environment.
In the ensuing years, this generation spent a critical time of their lives in social environments that caused their personality, feelings and skills to stagnate and not develop normally.
In an environment like this, the so-called “Gen Z Stare-Down” is an inevitability.
By the time they come into the workplace, their ability to learn and connect is barely there. Gen Z will always have a massive gap that separates them from older generations.
From the point of view of the people from before who were around at a time of economic prosperity, the gap between them and Gen Z is huge. This is why there are so many stereotypes about them.
Society doesn’t care about how people were formed.
In an era of increasingly serious competition for finding work, corporations don’t have time to nurture talent. Instead they prefer ready-made people. The crises that Gen Z is facing is probably at a level never seen before in history.
Besides the negative state that has been imposed on them because of generational differences, the flood of information is also having an effect.
In this world of the internet, people worship information. Gen Z and the generations that follow put a focus labels and messages.
Social media is leading people into thinking that having different information and knowledge than someone else is the original sin of our lives. Echo chambers have become the norm.
So, when these thoughts are brought into a relationship, people assume that the level of information that each person has is directly proportional to the level of intimacy that exists.
Because of all the pressure they are put under, almost everyone wants to find a way to share what they are going through. Their electronic device makes it easy to talk about what they want at any time. The amount of information has exploded and the intensity of feelings has been diluted.
But communication is about understanding and the trading of points of view. Just throwing information at the other person is just going to cause them to swallow the information like a video.
The reason we all feel a general disconnection to everything is because of the lack of resonance.
So the simple answer is to keep quiet.
Because everyone wants to be understood, whenever they realize that they’re not, they express themselves more.
But can a few words alone dissolve what was there from the start?
With that in mind, problems and breakdowns in relationships and friendships come to life. People are more interested in self-preservation so they slowly close off to the world.
In this setting, the concept of being friends with someone is special. There isn’t much of a direct risk when it comes to having friends, so it’s less of a danger to connect with that person.
That’s not to say that there isn’t any competition or overlapping of resources between friends. It’s just that if the road to success aren’t in conflict with each other, friendships are like intertwined parallel lines.
Because of all that, sharing more information, or even expressing feelings may not necessarily give rise to problems in one’s current life.
Because of that manageable range of risk, those friendships may be one of the most secure sources of support in today’s world.
Restricted friendships are not a problem that only the young face, all age groups have the same issues.
Those in their 70’s may remember when they were kids going into their neighbor’s house to watch TV and basically treating them as family. Those in their 90’s may remember times when they would do anything to help a friend.
But those times are gone. Urban design has eliminated the close friendships that would result from the layout of the old neighborhoods. Even marriage is about two people being equal in terms of wealth.
In a world of friendships as thin as water, everyone has a shell around them. Being polite while keeping your distance is the basis of friendships in this day and age.
Some may think that this coldness is specific to Eastern cultures, but in the West, the problem is just as relevant.
For example, people use Reddit to talk about how tense workplace relationships is. There are questions about how to be quietly polite at the office and how not to be found after punching out.
“I tell them my phone got lost.”
“I list an rotary phone number when I fill out my work information and have an answering machine available for whenever they call me.”
“No one said that I have to talk to them when I signed the contract.”
All the causes listed boil down to a single element: a declining economy.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused development slowdown not unlike a new Ice Age. Everywhere you look and everywhere you go there is going to be negative emotions and feelings about the future.
One foreign firm that polled people in China found that people are now less self-confident in terms of their personal advancement.
Around 60% responded that they could improve their quality of life in 2004, but that figure fell to 38.8% in 2023. Only 28.3% believe in reward for putting in the work.
Similar numbers exist over the span of the planet.
Pew Research found that because of many aspects about society, Americans were showing a level of negativity about the future. Morality and ethics measured in at 63%, and the education system measured in at 59%.
Because conditions are so terrible, there is a prevailing sense of nostalgia. Some 60% of those pollted in 2023 wanted things to go back to normal or to the way life was before.
No matter the structure and place where we live, it seems that our interactions with another are frozen at that same cold level.
Faced with an changing world, we all compromise and bury our head in the sand like an ostrich. We are safe by separating ourselves from our friends and coworkers. In those moments of separation, we want to find someone who will listen.
We won’t feel safe in those relationships, so we lean towards those friendships more. When we expect those friendships to meet the level of need, the results can be negative.
The Independent recently reported how one Gen Zer shares their location with 30 people, but also feels that, “I’m not that close with many of them, but I would feel socially awkward because it comes across like a direct blocking of friendship.”
Whether it’s the cautiousness the workplace or the possessiveness of friendships, these limits are never intended to cause harm. If we continue to make those choices that we don’t feel deep inside, we will feel even more estranged than previously.
“Neighborhood” is how people living together will meet under normal circumstances.
He argues that a stranger is not someone you don’t know, but someone who you choose not to know. The act of avoidance is what causes our society to be that cold. That creates the feeling of being alone and stops one from experiencing the world.
Developments like that causes each and every one of us to create a force field called “the losing of the neighborhood”.
Under the current conditions, everyone wants to tuck into themselves and avoid the cruel world. We don’t want to be the first to open up with our emotions. The reason these abstract things are said
Original article, Author: Tobias. If you wish to reprint this article, please indicate the source:https://aicnbc.com/7768.html
