Society has always had its antisocial people. For whatever reason, they didn’t want to interact with others.
In the past, these people would have the same roles as most others. The most severe would specialize as scholars and graveyard keepers.
And, if they ever wanted to emulate social interaction, their two options would be reading or spending time around animals.
Reluctantly social
Interacting with others takes effort. From a cynical view, every social engagement includes the following:
- You must listen to other people complain about dumb stuff.
- There will be misunderstandings, and they will create conflicts.
- To spend time with people takes away from doing other things, and usually with synchronized appointments.
- Not everyone is always available when you need them.
On the other hand, we also need people:
- We like others to listen to us complain about dumb stuff we find important.
- Our mental development closely connects with our skills coexisting with others.
- Time well-spent with others is arguably the most meaningful thing to do in this life.
- Even when people aren’t reliable, the good ones are still there for us in a true emergency.
The antisocial person, therefore, sees a definite need for social interaction but frequently won’t pay its cost.
New technology
Starting with the development of the printing press, reading became the standard antisocial experience. Society began industrializing, and more people moved to cities. Eventually, reading overshadowed time with animals as the preferred hobby for the socially averse.
The 20th century has added radically new ways to communicate, and media industries have fulfilled that desire. An over-information trend dominates our daily lives. It started with cheaply produced paper, went into radio and television, and is now through the internet.
Now that everyone is a type of “scholar”, we have a new social problem. Right now in 2026, I haven’t seen anyone correctly identify it, let alone confront it.
Social, but not
The free market of ideas has created a unique progression within the realm of fiction and dramatized stories:
- Every fictional work is a contract between a creator and consumer for the consumer’s entertainment.
- The free market in general, but also more recently with the attention economy, gives people what they want.
- When more people want more entertainment, the best customers will be the addicts.
- The media addicts (who will be largely antisocial) demand will shape the creators’ works to do more than entertainment should.
- The entertainment, over time, becomes an addictive substance that can effectively replace social interaction.
I call this experience “diet socialization”:
- The body needs a reasonable amount of sugar, but we may get more than we ought to.
- Soft drinks labeled “diet” are usually replacing variants of sugar with an indigestible substitute (e.g., aspartame, sucrose, stevia leaf extract).
- The body reacts to sugar substitutes like real sugar (i.e., metabolism changes and the pancreas produces insulin). In the same way, the mind will react to these semisocial experiences with the same inaccurate response.
This phenomenon isn’t within any specific media, but it has now arisen within nearly every genre.
Some examples
Diet socialization is so ubiquitous that it’s practically a staple of Western society.
Books, television, and radio use serials with recurring characters who have highly relatable experiences. Those characters then react more like the audience than their culture of origin would dictate. Each episode implies an increased bond between the main characters.
Video games strip away most of the character to allow the player to insert themselves into the role. Even in a fantastical setting, the player will perform a vast range of tasks that bear familiarity with real-life conflicts. Any realism will be subordinate to the player feeling their choices affected the game’s world.
Further, social media itself is a form of diet socialization. Each individual only barely interacts with anyone but receives feedback through high-quality design to continue posting and commenting.
This trend is also moving forward at an alarming rate now that people can talk with believable-enough chatbots.
What it’s not
Now, I need to clarify that I am not condemning good storytelling. Good stories have relatable characters and immersive stories. Some of the best stories also contain diet socialization, and they’re not mutually exclusive.
The difference is partly in how the storyteller terminates the experience. The media should at least encourage the viewer/listener/user/player to conclude after a few hours. If the media encourages binge consumption, it’s likely diet social. This means short stories, movies, and the news don’t usually qualify here.
Another condition is in how much the experience is trying to imitate actual experiences with actual people beyond the medium. Normal people don’t typically go skydiving or fight gigantic monsters. However, normal people do ask each other what to cook for dinner or make small talk about pants.
I’m also not saying we should blame the creator. Every time something “bad” comes into public consciousness, the political reaction cycle seems to look for someone to exile. This is the willing consent of a creator trying to make money and a consumer willing to spend it. The fault for this lies mostly in these consumers’ slightly larger existential void, and we all share that risk in ourselves.
Why it’s a problem
To be as specific as possible, this issue goes deeper than someone simply consuming something for a long period.
Diet socializing extends deep into the human condition to provide a sufficient-feeling replacement for the experience of interacting with others. Its effects create two significant, interrelated problems:
- The experience itself isn’t actually socializing, so it doesn’t generate any actual bonds with other people.
- For socializing, the consumer creates an idealized and impossible-to-meet standard (which is also the most compelling argument against pornography).
These two problems merge together to generate a predictable descent:
- Someone has trouble connecting with actual people.
- They have nothing to do on the weekend, and diet social options are available.
- After consuming the media, they feel they’ve had a human encounter (which is technically true since art depicts the human condition).
- However, they now have a higher ideal than before for connecting with others, as well as still not having friends.
- At some point in the future, they have trouble connecting with actual people, perpetuating the cycle.
This was once confined to Japanese animation nerds called “otaku”, but it’s just about everywhere these days.
The long-term effects
This is a very prevalent pandemic, and this media addiction has created many problems within society.
- When people don’t find a mate, marriage rates go down.
- Raising children requires selflessness and sacrifice, and therefore media addiction severely obstructs family planning.
- An idealized depiction of what a partner “ought” to provide has a direct impact on people choosing to divorce.
- All the sedentary time in front of a screen heavily contributes to a person’s overall degrading health and subsequent mortality.
I’m not saying that everyone who watches Cheers repeatedly or plays through Skyrim will become fat, lazy, childless incels. It does, however, increase those chances.
This also increases the chances for others to exploit this condition:
- Institutions who run diet social experiences will usually try to make their consumers into addicts.
- Unscrupulous individuals who observe how these experiences work can often take advantage of those experiences to draw in unsuspecting people (e.g., “catfishing“).
- All of this will be magnified because of the lack of other people who would otherwise address the issue.
But it’s not the end
This situation, however, is a self-correcting mechanism:
- People with media addictions don’t tend to reproduce as much or as frequently as people who live more meaningful lives. Give it 40 years, and it’ll sort itself out via reproduction rates.
- Societies that accept media addiction as normative develop communities with weak social bonds. This makes them extremely brittle against any large-scale hardship. After a few wars or economic recessions, other more well-connected societies will overtake them.
Of course, we can all make choices that affect those around us. See something, say something.
I also don’t have a good short-term answer for this beyond “touch grass”, so please let me know if you find one.