By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start the process of transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app
For more than a decade, we’ve been living as unwitting participants in the greatest social rewiring experiment in the history of the human race. As we have traded authentic analog connection for virtual existence, our isolation from one another has produced a kind of skepticism, mistrust, and lack of experience with one another. Our social musculature has atrophied, involving the capacity and skills to develop and deepen real relationships that allow us to authentically share in each other’s triumphs, losses, joys, and sorrows. Places and people with whom to celebrate. Places and people with whom to grieve.
The erosion of authentic connection is juxtaposed to the rise of carefully crafted and manicured virtual connections that occur largely through social media. These virtual relationships create a way of thinking about others that makes us mistrustful, fearful, and disappointed (read: unrewarded). Our brains are social comparison machines- and they tell us that we are not good enough, beautiful enough, or talented enough to live authentically and boldly in our friendships, families, and local communities. To have our real, messy selves revealed is terrifying. Our motivation to act towards others in authentic ways is undermined by a lack of perceived rewards that will come from interactions, manifesting in justifications such as “It is not worth is” or “I don’t have time.”
My goal with this blog is explicit: To unpack the features of an intervention designed to improve relationships, communities, meaning and purpose. My goal is to build a community around a philosophy and plan to reclaim our social world. To re-engineer or RE-WIRE the ways that we ground ourselves and our young people in the meaning and thriving that can only come through relationships and community. To build the art and practice of relationships, service, and vulnerability.