Ask A Genius 1142: Enamored With Our Own Awesomeness
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/10/31
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I do have a topic.
Rick Rosner: What is it?
Jacobsen: What have we missed about the future? We’ve missed the ways in which technology will change social interactions.
Rosner: So people are trending toward more isolation?
Jacobsen: Yes. And there’s a long-term rise in narcissistic tendencies. So if you have a rise in isolation and narcissistic tendencies, you’re seeing a breakdown of social relations to some degree.
Rosner: Yes, I agree with that.
Jacobsen: People are adapting to these levels of disconnection. They’re projecting a false identity to the world—an idealized version of themselves. That idealized version is better than everyone else, which gets in the way of forming real relationships.
Rosner: You can still hook up. You can bestow your awesomeness on somebody, but only for so long.
Jacobsen: It destroys intimacy.
Rosner: Right. Carole and I—and I’m allowed to say this—we watched our way through an entire season of a dating reality show, which I’ve never done before.
Jacobsen: That sounds like sheer torture.
Rosner: It was, but you can sit there and do other stuff while it’s rolling. But it was also interesting because of who the people were. They took five international superstar soccer players from Europe and brought them to America. These guys are internationally famous, except in America, because we don’t know much about soccer.
These guys are millionaires, famous as hell, and toned because they’re soccer players. They’ve got everything, but the purpose was to see if they could form relationships without telling women they were soccer players. They had to pretend they had regular jobs.
Jacobsen: How did it go?
Rosner: They put them up in a nice place. Eventually, they moved a bunch of women in for an extended dating, courtship, hooking-up deal. Each guy kind of got to pick at least one woman, maybe two, and they got to see if they clicked with each other. A lot of them did. At some point, toward the end, they got to tell the women, “Oh, and by the way, I’m also a millionaire, famous, and a great athlete.” Right? So how many of the couples do you think stayed intact? After they told them they were famous and rich?
Jacobsen: More than average?
Rosner: Zero.
Jacobsen: Really?
Rosner: So even with the advantage of being rich, famous, handsome, and often charming, in some cases, the guys decided they couldn’t trust the women—maybe one or two cases. But in a lot of cases, the women were like, “Well, no.” That’s crazy to me because these were people they got along with, yes, for the most part.
Now, one of the five was a retired soccer player who’d been notorious for being kind of a jerk during his career. That one, you could see falling apart because the woman moved with him back to England or Spain or wherever they were living, and as she found out more about this guy, she had legitimate concerns that he wouldn’t be able to stay on his best behavior for the duration of a marriage. But the other ones, you look at the guy—he has all these social advantages, and yet he’s still not good enough for you to even try an extended relationship with, which speaks to, I think, what you were talking about earlier.
I’m not saying anything negative about these individual women; everyone on the show seemed pretty reasonable within the context of modern behavior. But it does show that modern behavior makes it hard to compromise your “awesomeness” in a relationship.
Jacobsen: That is true.
Rosner: There used to be a big difference between people in New York and people in LA. In New York, you’re walking, interacting with people. In LA, you’re in a car, so you’re not interacting face-to-face. I’ve always thought East Coast people had better social skills.
Now, nobody is interacting face-to-face. Violent crime in the U.S. is down 50% since the nineties, and a lot of that is because it’s hard to commit street crime when nobody is on the street. So yes, I do think technology is putting us in our own spaces, to the detriment of social skills and relationships. The end.
Rosner: The end.
Jacobsen: That’s just chapter one of what’s going to be different about the future.
Rosner: Yes.
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