fabian s. klinkeThe Cry for Help Buried in our Culture
Source: The Cry for Help Buried in our Culture, Darwin’s Lab, 25:54, uploaded 2024-08-05, category Society / Culture, playlist index 548.
Darwin’s Lab reads the darker mood of recent art, games, and music as a social symptom. Paintings carry undertones of sadness, games turn towards bleak futures, and cyberpunk keeps gaining ground. The narrator treats this pattern as a sign of an unmet need. Creative work gives that need a public form, perhaps as a cry for help.
The video borrows the word entropy from thermodynamics, where it describes disorder and unusable energy, then applies it to negative emotion and social decline. That use is presented as a psychological analogy. From there, the argument follows a chain: anxiety rises, smartphones weaken direct contact, online systems reward conformity and prestige, digital escape removes the pressure that once pushed people into the world, and the loss of shared purpose appears in the culture’s art.
Anxiety and the first clue
The narrator dates the visible rise in mental illness to around 2012. He reports increases of 67 percent for schizophrenia, 134 percent for anxiety, and 72 percent for ADHD. The video gives no country, dataset, diagnostic method, or baseline for these figures, so they remain claims made by the speaker. Their function in the argument is clear enough. Anxiety becomes the first clue that a wider social arrangement has begun to produce persistent distress.
Fear responds to an immediate danger. Once the threat passes, the alarm can stop and the body can settle. Anxiety anticipates a possible threat, which can help a person prepare for danger. The response becomes harmful when ordinary situations trigger it and leave the person in a lasting state of distress.
The timing of anxiety matters as much as its mechanism. Human beings depend on groups, so social rejection can feel like a threat to survival. The narrator says that people aged eighteen and younger often fear social death more than physical death. He places that claim beside a broad historical observation: the world has become safer since the 1990s whilst relationships have deteriorated. He takes the combination as evidence of a social problem.
The second clue is generational. The first digital wave brought personal computers and the internet during the 1990s. The narrator says that mental illness did not rise during that period, and that Millennial teenagers were happier than their Generation X counterparts. The second wave brought social media and smartphones. Those devices kept the internet in reach at every hour and made social comparison into a continuous activity.
Smartphones, distance, and public judgement
The iPhone 4 appears as a symbolic starting point. It arrived in June 2010 with a front-facing camera, whilst Instagram grew from ten million users in 2011 to ninety million in 2013, according to the figures given in the video. The narrator imagines someone falling asleep on 28 June 2007, the day before the first iPhone went on sale, and waking fifteen years later. The streets would look familiar, yet people would carry small rectangles, stare at them whenever they stopped, avoid eye contact, and trade deeper conversations for quick exchanges.
He sees the change as a fracture in community. A discussion of drone warfare from a book the video calls Robot Ethics supplies the comparison. Killing from a distance can remove the eyes and the guilt of a person on the other side. Social media creates a related distance. Users judge people in public, quickly, and at scale. A person who refuses to condemn the day’s chosen target can be judged as a traitor, whilst a minor mistake can remain searchable in a world where posts travel and persist.
Distance changes the social cost of cruelty. The screen hides the person receiving the judgement, and the platform makes the judgement visible to everyone else. The narrator connects this behaviour to the enforced conformity of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people who stand apart from the approved order face punishment. The online version is unstable because the target can change within hours, although the pressure to join remains.
Cultural learning, conformity, and prestige
The video explains the long human adolescence through cultural evolution. Around three million years ago, the narrator says, cooking made food easier to chew and digest, which helped reduce the size of human jaws and digestive tracts. Survival then depended increasingly on learning. Humans gained an advantage from spending more time acquiring knowledge, so an extended childhood became useful as a period of cultural apprenticeship.
This apprenticeship depends on imitation. The narrator names two strategies from gene-culture co-evolution: conformist bias and prestige bias. Conformity gives a newcomer a workable guide to a social environment. A teenager who joins a new school in 2015 sees that most classmates use Instagram, opens an account, and learns the platform’s habits by watching the people around them. Social media compresses the learning process. A person can scroll through a thousand examples in an hour, with likes and comments marking each one as a success or failure.
The platform therefore becomes an efficient conformity engine. Engagement determines which behaviour receives attention. The behaviour itself can be destructive because the system measures time watched and actions taken rather than the quality of a life. Young people then imitate the accounts with the largest numbers, even when the popularity records a talent for provocation rather than a valued skill.
Prestige bias gives this imitation a second force. The evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Henrich is credited with the idea that human groups grant prestige to people who seem competent in a valued activity. If a community calls Frank its best archer, someone who values archery may respect Frank before seeing him shoot. The social platform inserts a visible score between the person and the judgement. Facebook’s like button and Twitter’s retweet button make spread measurable, then give users an incentive to shape every post for maximum circulation.
The narrator attributes a 2017 account of this process to Sean Parker, an early Facebook executive. Parker described a social-validation feedback loop that exploited a vulnerability in human psychology. The video treats the result as a break in the old link between excellence and prestige. The platform can attach prestige to whatever attracts attention, which lets popularity imitate competence.
Utopia, excess, and the escape from difficulty
The argument then turns from social pain to excessive comfort. We Happy Few imagines a society controlled by a drug called Joy. The drug suppresses anger, sadness, and grief, yet it produces addiction, memory problems, manipulation, and a false euphoria. The game asks what happens when a society removes every unpleasant feeling and leaves people with an artificial version of happiness.
The narrator pairs the game with John B. Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment. Four breeding pairs of mice entered an enclosure with unlimited food, water, nesting material, a stable temperature, and protection from predators and disease. The population doubled every two months at first. Around month twenty, the social order began to fail. Males that lost access to mating formed coalitions in the centre of the enclosure, where they fought and sometimes ate one another. Dominant males tired from defending their territories. Nursing mothers became vulnerable, neglected their young, and sometimes killed them. Survivors grew up without the social skills needed for adult life. Females isolated themselves, some males focused on their appearance, and reproduction stopped by month twenty-two.
The experiment has obvious limits. The video acknowledges the dispute over applying a mouse enclosure to human society. It keeps the study as a warning about escapism, since the enclosure solved the animals’ physical problems whilst removing the struggles that organised their lives. In We Happy Few, Joy creates the same split. The world appears bright and clean whilst the drug is active. Once the colour disappears, the player sees decay, pollution, and crumbling buildings. Comfort has hidden the conditions that produced the distress.
Social media becomes the video’s human version of the enclosure. It offers a place to escape circumstances and present a successful life during depression. Withdrawal produces paranoia, anxiety, and irritability, which the narrator compares with the effects of leaving Joy. The comparison is his interpretation. The game and the experiment supply images for the claim that digital escape can leave a problem untouched whilst making the escape harder to abandon.
Hikikomori and the failure to launch
The narrator calls the most painful form of this withdrawal a “failure to launch”. He uses hikikomori, a Japanese term for people who retreat from work, school, and social contact, as its clearest example. Japanese society has placed strong pressure on young people to study, find work, and meet the expectations around them. When the economic bubble of the 1980s collapsed during the 1990s, the route towards success became harder. Some young men withdrew into their childhood bedrooms and closed the door.
The internet changed the cost of retreat. A person could meet many needs alone in a bedroom, then use games, pornography, and endless browsing to keep boredom away. Staying inside reduced immediate anxiety, yet each year indoors weakened confidence in the outside world. Anxiety fed hopelessness, and hopelessness made the room feel like the only manageable place.
The narrator treats the pattern as a worldwide possibility rather than a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. He also questions the usual account of safer teenage behaviour. Gen Z drinks less alcohol, has fewer car accidents, and gets into fewer physical fights. Those outcomes look healthy in isolation. The narrator reads their speed and scale as signs of withdrawal from risk, with the technology industry supplying ways to satisfy desires without the risks that once accompanied them.
This is where the argument reaches generative AI. The narrator worries that an AI girlfriend could remove the risk of rejection and that games could replace exploration with a controlled version of adventure. He connects this forecast to Émile Durkheim’s claim that strong community ties and moral authority reduce the likelihood of self-harm. Durkheim feared that modern society would loosen traditional bonds and leave people anxious and directionless. The narrator says that Gen Z has found it harder to put down roots in the physical world, which helps explain the late-2010s interest in purpose and meaning.
Art as a record of social loss
The video returns to the cultural evidence with which it began. Music such as cyberpunk carries a melancholy associated with technological progress. The narrator names Billie Eilish and Juice WRLD as artists who captured the alienation of digital adolescence. Games such as Cyberpunk give that feeling a setting, where technological power exists beside a loss of human values.
The social bonds created by smartphones also carry a cost. The narrator says that people gained more connections whilst the number of real friendships declined, because maintaining many shallow relationships displaced the time and effort needed for deeper ones. He treats the resulting loneliness as an unintended consequence of a system designed to connect people.
Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State gives the video its final image. Its protagonist travels through an abandoned America filled with the remains of technological civilisation and people lost inside virtual reality. The survivors keep themselves blind to the decay by hiding in digital worlds. The narrator sees the same pattern in social media posts. Each interaction reaches many people, so users edit their best qualities into public form and hide the rest. The relationships remain asynchronous and easy to discard. When someone causes anger, removing them takes less effort than working through the conflict.
That arrangement satisfies the desire for contact at a shallow level. People receive the appearance of connection whilst the work that makes a relationship durable disappears. The problems then remain in the background until they emerge through creative expression. The narrator treats the bleak images in contemporary culture as evidence of those unaddressed needs, with technology associated with emptiness because it supplies the escape and preserves the cause of the distress.
The sacred and the shared reason
The narrator ends with his own reason for making the channel. He began with evolutionary biology, then found that its value increased when he connected it with other fields. Émile Durkheim supplies the final concept: homo duplex, the two-level human.
The first level is the ordinary world of personal health, wealth, reputation, and daily wants. Durkheim calls it the profane. The second level appears in rituals that draw people beyond individual interest and place them inside a collective purpose. Christian singing in church, Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca, and sports fans singing before a game all give the group a shared action. Durkheim calls the resulting state “energised communion”.
The video treats this as the missing condition of a strong community. People can stand near one another without sharing a reason. Ritual gives them a reason, and the reason lets the self recede for a while. The darker undertones in art, games, and music then become a request for that kind of purpose. The narrator ends the series with a hope that shared meaning can answer the cry he hears in the culture.
Evidence limits
The note records the narrator’s argument rather than confirming its research claims. The reported mental-illness figures, the comparison between generations, the social-media user counts, the Sean Parker account, and the claims about friendship and teenage behaviour need their underlying studies and definitions before they can support a causal conclusion. The description names Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and four further research links, although the video does not walk through their methods or findings.
The video also moves quickly between cultural interpretation and evidence. We Happy Few, Universe 25, The Electric State, cyberpunk, and selected musicians make the argument easy to see. They show what the narrator thinks the age feels like. They cannot by themselves establish that smartphones caused the reported mental-health changes, that social media caused the decline in close friendships, or that generative AI will produce more hikikomori. Those links remain the video’s interpretation.
Further reading / references
The video names Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation as the main source behind many of its ideas. Its description also supplies these research links: