Posts Tagged ‘loneliness’
“Wall Street sells stocks and bonds, but what it really peddles is hope”*…
Over the last several decades retail investors had been eclipsed in the stock market by institutions (e.g., pension funds). But COVID and the economic environment that surrounded started a trend that is reversing that polarity. Retail investors now account for roughly 30% of daily US equity volume, according to Goldman Sachs. Their stock trading in May of this year ran 10% above the previous record, set during the January 2021 meme-stock frenzy, and June set another all time high.
Much of that growth has come from the individuals known as day traders.” And while for the last 18 months or so, institutional investors have been cautious, often underweight, under-levered and short of conviction, these active amateurs in the retail crowd did the opposite, buying the dips, riding momentum strategies, and adding leverage. Retail investors tend to follow the herd, as can be seen in the surge in popularity – and valuations – of meme stocks and artificial intelligence stocks in recent years.
While historical performance is no guarantee of future results, history is not encouraging. The most “generous” reputable study your correspondent could find suggested that roughly 20% of day traders were at least marginally profitable; the balance lost money. Other studies suggest that 95-97% of all day traders lose money.
But as Simone Foxman reports, money is not all that they lose…
Surging retail trading isn’t just transforming markets; it’s also highly correlated with demoralization in young men, according to a new study.
One-quarter of men aged 18-29 said they trade stocks daily, and almost two-thirds of them (64%) report feeling like failures, according to a study of 2,000 men published Wednesday by the Institute for Family Studies, a pro-marriage think tank. The findings were strikingly similar to outcomes among men who gamble: Of the 23% of young men who said they gambled daily, including on sports and events, 66% reported similar angst, according to survey, which asked the young men a variety of questions about their personal behaviors and outlooks. Daily fantasy sports and pornography use were similarly correlated to feelings of failure, the survey found.
The struggles of young men are generating growing alarm among academics, pundits and billionaires. They warn that men are lagging in education and employment, gambling with their financial health on sports or event betting platforms and facing mental health crises.
At the same time, the line between gambling and investing has been blurred. Stock volumes from retail investors have doubled over the past 15 years, and day traders have driven record options volume. Now platforms like Robinhood Markets Inc. and Interactive Brokers Group are trying to capitalize on interest from Gen Z by also offering event-betting alongside stock-trading.
Some research suggests young people have embraced risky financial behaviors to try to generate returns in a world where homeownership and other markers of financial success are out of reach. Eighty percent of Gen Z investors said they’d invested or considered investing in stocks, options, crypto or prediction markets because they feel financially behind and see these investments as better tools to meet their financial goals, according to a Northwestern Mutual study.
The IFS researchers hypothesized that day trading, gambling, playing fantasy sports and porn use — among other activities — may be both coping mechanisms for dejection, stress and loneliness and also exacerbate them. Young men who engaged in these activities less than daily were about half as likely to report feelings of demoralization.
Overall, 42% of survey respondents said the statement “all in all, I am inclined to think that I am a failure,” described them very or somewhat well. This feeling was particularly strong among men without college degrees and those who were neither employed nor in school.
A quarter of participants said they felt lonely all of the time, while 30% expressed feeling that way some of the time.
The study also found disillusionment with the American dream, even as young men fostered high hopes for the future. Seven in ten respondents said that success is more a matter of who you know than ability or hard work, but 84% still said they had ambitious plans for their futures.
Further to the passing reference to “event-betting” above, we should note that prediction markets, while smaller than retail investing (at least for now), are growing explosively. Like day-trading, prediction markets are pitched in the language of empowerment and democratization. The former involves stocks and bonds, while the latter sells “event contracts“; but they share the same user base, the same psychological architecture, and the same uncomfortable gap between how they are marketed and what they actually deliver… so seem likely to contribute to the issues unpacked above.
Risky business: “Some 64% of Young Men Day Trading Stocks Feel Like Failures” (or here) from @simonefoxman.bsky.social in @bloomberg.com.
###
As we parse symptoms and diseases, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the U.S. Treasury Department, citing a lack of demand, ceased production of the $2 bill, which had been around in various forms since 1862. The (redesigned) denomination, featuring a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, was reintroduced in 1976… though readers will be forgiven if they mistakenly thought that “the deuce” was still retired: so few are in circulation that they are rarely encountered.
“They are alone together”*…
Andrew Trousdale and Erik J. Langer bridge the years between Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone and Jonathan Haidt‘s The Anxious Generation with a brief history of the trade-off between convenience and connection in America. From Zach Rauch’s introduction…
The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.
This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.
Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”…
Trousdale and Langer trace the social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have played out from the the late 1940s to today. It is, at once, familiar and shocking. They conclude…
When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.
The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.
Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.
There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.
Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.
Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.
We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.
History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Scrolling Alone.”
In the spirit of the call for forward-looking determination, pair with “The Displacement of Purpose” from Peter Adam Boeckel (“If AI automates production, then humanity must automate compassion. Only then will progress remember what it was for.”)
[Image above: source]
* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (in which he also observed: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”)
###
As we get together, we might spare a thought for Aldus Manutius; he died on this date in 1515. A printer and humanist, he founded the Aldine Press. In the books he published, he introduced a standardized system of punctuation and use of the semicolon. He designed many fonts, and created italic type (which he named for Italy).
And apropos the piece featured above, we might note that on this date in 1965 “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the first major hit for the Righteous Brothers, simultaneously reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in the US as well as the UK singles chart. The song was produced by Phil Spector (who had discovered the duo at a San Francisco show) for his own label, Philles Records. All the songs previously produced by Spector for Philles featured African-American singers; the Righteous Brothers were his first white vocal act– they had a vocal style, blue-eyed soul, that suited Spector.
“Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing”*…
Americans are now spending more time alone– mostly at home– than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. While the pandemic certainly enforced some of that isolation; the post-COVID world remains extraordinarily atomized.
In a bracing essay, Derek Thompson, explores the emergence of this wide-spread isolation, unpacking its drivers, enumerating its considerable (personal and civic) costs, musing on the possible impact of AI, and pondering what might lead to a return to sociability…
… “I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam [author of Bowling Alone] told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.
The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school…
On how we spend our time and what that yields: “The Anti-Social Century,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com (gift article).
See also: “You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention,” from @chrislhayes.bsky.social (also in @theatlantic.com, also a gift article)
* Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
###
As we call a friend, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Alexander Graham Bell placed the first transcontinental phone call, from New York to San Francisco, where the Panama–Pacific International Exposition celebrations were underway and his assistant, his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson stood by. Bell repeated his famous first telephonic words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” to which Watson this time replied “It will take me five days to get there now!” Bell’s call officially initiated AT&T’s transcontinental service.
And, on ths date 45 years later, in 1959, The first non-stop transcontinental commercial jet trip was made by an American Airlines Boeing 707, from Los Angeles to New York. The sleek silver plane made the flight in airline official time of 4 hours and 3 minutes, half the usual scheduled time for the prop-driven DC- 7Cs then in regular use on that route.
You must be logged in to post a comment.