Welcome to my new professional blog!
Unfortunately, I would have liked to begin this blog with an introductory post. But given the circumstances, this will be my first post:
…Okay, I’m reposting Simon Sinek’s video on Millenials in the Workplace with 44 Million views because I agree with his critiques, BUT I completely disagree with his analysis and recommendations. I would like to note that I am a great fan of Sinek’s work and influence on leadership and management generally. And I am pleased to hear he is pushing the Millennial self-critique on a substantial level. Thus before deconstructing Sinek’s argument, I will say that I am in support of his impotence-critique of Tinder. While, I understand that it has helped some friends find significant others, ultimately Tinder undermines normal human mating dynamics and threatens to diminish the value and meaning of both sex and romantic relationships (e.g.: it eliminates the risk of rejection and all its deeply healthy and meaningful consequences.)
Counter-Argument against Sinek:
Blaming the nigrostriatal dopaminergic system, parenting, iphones, and companies are very vague and simplistic explanations.
1) Addiction is not an accurate model to account for Millennial problems. Dopamine is definitely involved, but actual neurobiological endemic addictive neural pathways are highly unlikely. Referring to evidence about dopaminergic activation is not sufficient to ground an argument for addiction itself. By claiming addiction he inflates the effect of social media. If social media is like an addiction that is handicapping our generation, we would not need a social media video to reveal this epiphany. It would be blatantly apparent. Additionally there is no DSMV social media disorder (fyi: Acute and Chronic Selfitis are not a thing).
2) Sinek’s simplistic addiction model, leads him to an erroneous critique of the environment and corporations. He makes a vague claim that “evil” corporations with “bad leadership” are harming millennials and should change their behavior. He ultimately dismisses the Millennials’ responsibility to change themselves by saying “they were dealt a bad hand” — using the same language he used to criticize enabling parents — and concludes that corporations should be holding our hands to help us grow up. He partially comes to this conclusion, because drug and gambling addicts also need hand holding and detox programs to reach sobriety. If you listen closely, he’s actually telling Millenials that they are helpless, because he is exactly comparing us to addicts who require external regulation.
3) He actually gives little to no recommendations to Millenials themselves because at most, you may try leaving your phone in your pocket at dinner (but this is a very old idea with low efficacy). No one is going to leave their iphone in their living room. Recommending that we use social media less is an anachronistic idea that is not a tenable solution.
TL:DR. Sinek does a great job at pointing at problems. His analysis and recommendations are both wrong and underdeveloped.
More complex psychological and neuropsychiatric mechanisms actually are mediating his overly simplistic explanation.
Here’s my take:
My Critique:
One psychological explanation is the idea that social media allows persons to engage the world primarily with their represented selves in lieu of their actual selves (e.g.: via an avatar). Although Freud’s theories are not precise, they are useful to explain that social media acts as a barrier between the ego and id, thus preventing their integration necessary for Goldstein’s self-actualization — made famous by Maslow, but better studied by Carl Rogers and other phenomenologists. Unfortunately, Eriksonian Stages of Development say that failure to achieve self-actualization will imprison an individual in an adolescent stage leading to role confusion, isolation, stagnation, and despair. This accounts for the millennial employment problems and higher rates of anxiety, depression, addiction and suicide in our generation. It also explains the Sinek’s impotence-critique of Tinder, which was hilarious.
My Recommendation:
1) Concept 1: The onus is on the individuals primarily and secondarily on our support systems (e.g.: parenting and education systems). I don’t think corporations are at fault or in need of fixing, because free markets are sufficient to regulate their productivity and LONGEVITY.
Concept 2: Encourage integration and innovation of social media in order to enhance self-actualization vs inhibit it.
2) Individual: Rather than anachronistically stigmatizing social media, we need to develop a dialogue and discipline of appropriate and responsible use of social media. This can be broken down into two aspects:
2b) Education on Social Media Avatars: Recognize that the best way to communicate your true self is in person, rather than on social media. Our psychological default is to portray an avatar that will please others on social media. It may be possible to portray a true self on social media but it will take discipline, attention and awareness, and practice. (e.g.: try asking for feedback from a close family member if they “feel” like you are the same person as your Social Media Avatar.)
2a) Goal Oriented use of social media: Social Media should be used for particular purposes such as increased productivity, distance relationships, crowd-sourcing, immediate communication, emergencies etc. When those goals are irrelevant or completed, our default should be “Social Media Off”. Also most of the time these social media goals should be secondary to real-life goals (although there may be exceptions), but social media goals should never undermine or subvert real-life goals. (e.g.: write out your goals/reasons for using social media. Practice restricting use to those goals.)
3) Parents: Parenting classes on social media use. Integrate social media restrictions into child discipline. Consider parent determined age restrictions (see 4). Consider restricting content (e.g.: Tinder) in the same way parents might restrict dating under a certain age. Consider having a “Social Media Responsibility” talk. Consider including social media in your parental “Sex Talk”. Consider using social media use as a reward (e.g.: chores for hours on social media).
4) American Pediatric Association: consider a Movie (PG, PG13, R, NC-17) rating system for optional adherence.
5) Society: Encourage social media innovation (e.g.: augmented VR, telemedicine and crowd-sourcing technologies necessary for Yelp, AirBnB, Uber, etc.) research to make social media align with normal psychological development of self-actualization.
6) Fundamental Concept: The idea of labeling an entire generation is only useful in identifying a historic cohort, but is an inadequate concept for speaking about behaviors and psychology/neurobiology because one word cannot represent the psychological diversity of a historic cohort (e.g.: Big 5 Personality Trait Population Distributions). Sinek makes his first mistake by trying to speak about an entire historic cohort with one erroneous addiction theory. Rather, he may actually be talking about only a natural subpopulation of individuals who are high in openness and agreeableness and low in conscientiousness personality traits.
TL:DR. Sinek does a great job at pointing at problems. His analysis and recommendations are both wrong and underdeveloped. Instead I suggest an underlying psychological mechanism on the inhibitory effects of social media on self-actualization and propose that the onus is on individuals to increase their conscientious use of social media.
