The Impulse Society: How Our Growing Desperation for Instant Connection Is Ruini

ng Us

October 15, 2014 |

The following is an excerpt from Paul Roberts' new book, The Impulse Society: Am
erica in the Age of Instant Gratification [3] (Bloomsbury [4], 2014). Reprinted
here with permission.
The metaphor of the expanding fragile modern self is quite apt. To personalize i
s, in effect, to reject the world as is, and instead to insist on bending it to ou
r preferences, as if mastery and dominance were our only mode. But humans aren t m
eant only for mastery. We re also meant to adapt to something larger. Our large br
ains are specialized for cooperation and compromise and negotiation with other ind
ividuals, but also with the broader world, which, for most of history, did not c
ater to our preferences or likes. For all our ancestors tremendous skills at modi
fying and improving their environment, daily survival depended as much on their
capacity to conform themselves and their expectations to the world as they found
it. Indeed, it was only by enduring adversity and disappointment that we humans
gained the strength and knowledge and perspective that are essential to sustain
able mastery.
Virtually every traditional culture understood this and regarded adversity as in
separable from, and essential to, the formation of strong, self-sufficient indiv
iduals. Yet the modern conception of character now leaves little space for discomf
ort or real adversity. To the contrary, under the Impulse Society, consumer cult
ure does everything in its considerable power to persuade us that adversity and
difficulty and even awkwardness have no place in our lives (or belong only in di
screte, self-enhancing moments, such as ropes courses or really hard ab workouts
). Discomfort, difficulty, anxiety, suffering, depression, rejection, uncertaint
y, or ambiguity in the Impulse Society, these aren t opportunities to mature and tou
ghen or become. Rather, they represent errors and inefficiencies, and thus oppor
tunities to correct nearly always with more consumption and self-expression.
So rather than having to wait a few days for a package, we have it overnighted.
Or we pay for same-day service. Or we pine for the moment when Amazon launches d
rone delivery and can get us our package in thirty minutes.* And as the system g
ets faster at gratifying our desires, the possibility that we might actually be
more satisfied by waiting and enduring a delay never arises. Just as nature abho
rs a vacuum, the efficient consumer market abhors delay and adversity, and by ex
tension, it cannot abide the strength of character that delay and adversity and
inefficiency generally might produce. To the efficient market, character and virtue
are themselves inefficiencies impediments to the volume-based, share-price-maximiz
ing economy. Once some new increment of self-expressive, self-gratifying, self-p
romoting capability is made available, the unstated but overriding assumption of
contemporary consumer culture is that this capability can and should be put to
use. Which means we now allow the efficient market and the treadmills and the re
lentless cycles of capital and innovation to determine how, and how far, we will
take our self-expression and, by extension, our selves even when doing so leaves
us in a weaker state.
Consider the way our social relationships, and the larger processes of community
, are changing under the relentless pressure of our new efficiencies. We know ho
w important community is for individual development. It s in the context of commun
ity that we absorb the social rules and prerequisites for interaction and succes
s. It s here that we come to understand and, ideally, to internalize, the need for
limits and self-control, for patience and persistence and long-term commitments
; the pressure of community is one way society persuades us to control our myopi
a and selfishness. (Or as economists Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis have put it,

community is the vehicle through which society s oughts become its members
wants.
) Bu
ommunity s function isn t simply to say no. It s in the context of our social relationsh
ips where we discover our capacities and strengths. It s here that we gain our sen
se of worth as individuals, as citizens and as social producers active participant
s who don t merely consume social goods, but contribute something the community ne
eds.
But community doesn t simply teach us to be productive citizens. People with stron
g social connections generally have a much better time. We enjoy better physical
and mental health, recover faster from sickness or injury, and are less likely
to suffer eating or sleeping disorders. We report being happier and rank our qua
lity of life as higher and do so even when the community that we re connected to isn t
particularly well off or educated. Indeed, social connectedness is actually mor
e important than affluence: regular social activities such as volunteering, chur
ch attendance, entertaining friends, or joining a club provide us with the same
boost to happiness as does a doubling of personal income. As Harvard s Robert Putn
am notes, The single most common finding from a half century s research on the corr
elates of life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world,
is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one s social conn
ections.
Unfortunately, for all the importance of social connectedness, we haven t done a t
erribly good job of preserving it under the Impulse Society. Under the steady pr
essure of commercial and technological efficiencies, many of the tight social st
ructures of the past have been eliminated or replaced with entirely new social a
rrangements. True, many of these new arrangements are clearly superior even in ost
ensibly free societies, traditional communities left little room for individual
growth or experimentation or happiness. Yet our new arrangements, which invariab
ly seek to give individuals substantially more control over how they connect, ex
act a price. More and more, social connection becomes just another form of consu
mption, one we expect to tailor to our personal preferences and schedules almost a
s if community was no longer a necessity or an obligation, but a matter of perso
nal style, something to engage as it suits our mood or preference. And while suc
h freedom has its obvious attractions, it clearly has downsides. In gaining so m
uch control over the process of social connection, we may be depriving ourselves
of some of the robust give-and-take of traditional interaction that is essentia
l to becoming a functional, fulfilled individual.
Consider our vaunted and increasing capacity to communicate and connect digitall
y. In theory, our smartphones and social media allow us the opportunity to be mo
re social than at any time in history. And yet, because there are few natural li
mits to this format we can, in effect, communicate incessantly, posting every conc
eivable life event, expressing every thought no matter how incompletely formed o
r inappropriate or mundane we may be diluting the value of the connection.
Studies suggest, for example, that the efficiency with which we can respond to a
n online provocation routinely leads to escalations that can destroy offline rel
ationships. People seem aware that these kinds of crucial conversations should no
t take place on social media, notes Joseph Grenny, whose firm, VitalSmarts, surve
ys online behavior. Yet there seems to be a compulsion to resolve emotions right
now and via the convenience of these channels.
Even when our online communications are entirely friendly, the ease with which w
e can reach out often undermines the very connection we seek to create. Sherry T
urkle, a sociologist and clinical psychologist who has spent decades researching
digital interactions, argues that because it is now possible to be in virtually
constant contact with others, we tend to communicate so excessively that even a
momentary lapse can leave us feeling isolated or abandoned. Where people in the
pre-digital age did not think it alarming to go hours or days or even weeks wit
hout hearing from someone, the digital mind can become uncomfortable and anxious

without instant feedback. In her book Alone Together, Turkle describes a social
world of collapsing time horizons. College students text their parents daily, a
nd even hourly, over the smallest matters and feel anxious if they can t get a quick
response. Lovers break up over the failure to reply instantly to a text; friend
ships sour when posts aren t liked fast enough. Parents call 911 if Junior doesn t res
pond immediately to a text or a phone call a degree of panic that was simply unkno
wn before constant digital contact. Here, too, is a world made increasingly inse
cure by its own capabilities and its own accelerating efficiencies.
This same efficiency-driven insecurity now lurks just below the surface in nearl
y all digital interactions. Whatever the relationship (romantic, familial, profe
ssional), the very nature of our technology inclines us to a constant state of e
motional suspense. Thanks to the casual, abbreviated nature of digital communica
tion, we converse in fragments of thoughts and feelings that can be completed on
ly through more interaction we are always waiting to know how the story ends. The
result, Turkle says, is a communication style, and a relationship style, that al
low us to express emotions while they are being formed and in which feelings are no
t fully experienced until they are communicated. In other words, what was once pr
imarily an interior process thoughts were formed and feelings experienced before w
e expressed them has now become a process that is external and iterative and publi
c. Identity itself comes to depend on iterative interaction giving rise to what Tu
rkle calls the collaborative self. Meanwhile, our skills as a private, self-contai
ned person vanish. What is not being cultivated here, Turkle writes, is the ability
to be alone and reflect on one s emotions in private. For all the emphasis on inde
pendence and individual freedom under the Impulse Society, we may be losing the
capacity to truly be on our own.
In a culture obsessed with individual self-interest, such an incapacity is surel
y one of the greatest ironies of the Impulse Society. Yet it many ways it was in
evitable. Herded along by a consumer culture that is both solicitous and manipul
ative, one that proposes absolute individual liberty while enforcing absolute ma
terial dependence we rely completely on the machine of the marketplace it is all too
easy to emerge with a self-image, and a sense of self, that are both wildly inf
lated and fundamentally weak and insecure. Unable to fully experience the satisf
actions of genuine independence and individuality, we compensate with more perso
nalized self-expression and gratification, which only push us further from the r
eal relationships that might have helped us to a stable, fulfilling existence.