Salaries haven’t kept up with productivity since 1965. In fact 1965 was an inflection point for a number of important social well-being metrics like health, education, and housing affordability. So what happened around 1965? Of course the Vietnam war is the pat answer. However of far more social import is the sexual revolution and the accompanying marketing of female hormonal birth control. As Dijkstra, of all people, observed, the pill was a true radical novelty and as such society wasn’t equipped to cope with it. It is to prior forms of contraception as the digital computer is to the slide rule or abacus: a paradigm shifting invention.

Western societies have been living in a state of sexual bulimia for the last four generations and we wonder why it’s become dysfunctional?

Social media addiction and its consequences belong largely in the effects category and not the causes one. But hey we now have millions of things to choose to stream and back in the early ‘60s there were only three channels so really we’re better off.