The modern malaise

It’s time, I think, for a lofty pro­nounce­ment. It has, after all, been some time since I made one — a week at least.

One of the biggest prob­lems in soci­ety today is the Social Quandary; the Social Dilemma, if you prefer a rather stronger and more con­crete term.

What do I mean by the Social Quandary? Well, it’s the kind of prob­lem that, on the face of it, isn’t really that import­ant. It shouldn’t keep you awake at night. It shouldn’t par­tic­u­larly upset you. But it nags away at the back of your brain, and you’re never entirely sure what to do about it.

The Social Quandary is caused by the com­plex­ity of the world we live in today — a world in which rela­tion­ships inter­act in ever more con­vo­luted ways, and in which there are so many pos­sible mine­fields in those social inter­ac­tions that occa­sion­ally you reach a point where, in its most basic form, you have abso­lutely no idea what do for the best. Or even what to do, full stop.

Take my par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion. I don’t want to make it sound like ‘everything was easier back then’, because that pat­ently wasn’t the case. But from what I can gather, there seemed to be a few more cer­tain­ties — prob­ably due to the fact that there weren’t nearly as many ways in which people could inter­act. Face-to-face was still, primar­ily, the chosen form of com­mu­nic­a­tion. Go back another gen­er­a­tion, to my grand­par­ents’ era, and it was most likely even more applicable.

In the early days of the 21st cen­tury, there are so many options for inter­ac­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion that the num­ber of mine­fields on which one can acci­dent­ally tread has vastly increased. And as we don’t like tread­ing on meta­phor­ical land­mines, the Social Quandary rears its ugly and some­what per­plexed head.

Once it’s there, tap­ping away in the back of your brain, it’s very dif­fi­cult to ignore the SQ. In rela­tion to its actual import­ance — which is usu­ally neg­li­gible — the amount of thought we waste on it is usu­ally enorm­ous. We con­sider the pros and the cons and then the pros again. Will it or won’t it affect this or that per­son? Is it or isn’t it my busi­ness? If I do that, will this hap­pen? If I don’t, will that hap­pen? While con­sid­er­a­tion of such point­less ques­tions can be a sol­it­ary pur­suit, you will also find that whole hours can be swal­lowed up in whispered dis­cus­sions of the latest SQ.

Of course, some are more prone to Social Quandar­ies than oth­ers. You’ve prob­ably already guessed that they fill a large sec­tion of my day-to-day exist­ence. I wish they didn’t. I wish I had more cer­tainty about how to live life without meet­ing the petty SQ at every turn. I admire people who man­age to avoid them; they seem to have a line to fol­low from which they will not be diverted.

This week has proved to be a par­tic­u­larly lively one for SQ activ­ity. I think there may have been nar­row SQ iso­bars over west Lon­don or some­thing. The SQ gauge was regis­ter­ing high fre­quen­cies. Those are the only explan­a­tions I can offer.

And so I sit here, on an unusu­ally quiet Fri­day night, let­ting the latest couple of quandar­ies roll around my brain like two loose marbles. (Bad ana­logy, sorry). They’re not espe­cially import­ant. A decision on either of them won’t alter the course of anyone’s life (includ­ing mine). They’re noth­ing to get upset about. Not really. But they’re bloody irritating.

Many months ago, I inten­ded to build a web­site ded­ic­ated to the 21st cen­tury phe­nomenon of the Social Quandary. I never did. Make of that what you will.