Porn, Pop-Tarts, and the Infinite Scroll: Preparing Kids to Thrive Amid Supernormal Stimuli
"Supernormal stimuli" is an obscure term, but it may be the most important thing for children, parents, and citizens to understand about the modern world.
Hello Bar-Setters,
We live in a world full of supernormal stimuli (sometimes referred to as hyper-normal stimuli).
Supernormal stimuli is an obscure term, but it may be the most important thing for children, parents, and citizens to understand about the modern world.
Supernormal stimuli are products and technologies that hack us. They exploit once necessary bio-evolutionary adaptations in order to drive us to do some sort of behavior (typically consumption).
I introduce this concept in my book with an anecdote from a trip to Florida:
I stared off the dock at the bait fish frantically circling an underwater light. As if choreographed, hundreds of them repeated the same counter-clockwise pattern over and over with no end in sight. Their whole lives, it seemed, would be nothing more than this circle. Brayden, my destruction-bent nine-year-old nephew threw a pebble at them. In perfect uniformity the entire collective darted right, before rapidly returning back into formation to resume their obsessive task.
“Why are they doing that?” Brayden wondered aloud.
“Because of the light.” my wife, Neely, responded.
“That’s stupid.” Brayden added.
Feeling the need, as usual, to shatter this simple moment with heavy life lessons, I interjected:
“It is just like humans and smartphones. These fish are driven by a biology that never could have expected a world of fluorescent, artificial underwater light. Like moths to the flame and humans to the infinite Instagram scroll, any other purpose has been overridden by a powerful, biological draw.”
“Oh. Well, I’m going inside,” says Brayden. Neely looks at me and shakes her head.
As ill-conceived as my message was for a third grader, it is a fundamental understanding for anyone concerned with living well in our bizarre modern world. Our biology did not expect this world of incessant, (supernormal) stimuli, where the natural rewards that once helped us survive and thrive are now available in extreme, unnatural doses, often completely removed from the evolutionary benefits they once ensured. We need some sort of framework for mediating the complexities of modernity and our staggering technological advancements or we may spend our days as aimlessly as those bait fish.
This is the chief issue of our time and the foundational goal of this newsletter. To get a clearer idea of what I mean by supernormal stimuli, let’s look at some specific examples of common supernormal stimuli and how they have changed what we consider to be “normal” human behavior.
Supernormal Food
The human brain loves sugar. We will gorge ourselves on salt, fat, and especially sugar, because our primitive mind (which runs most of us, most of the time) still thinks it is a hunter-gatherer living on the savanna. It still thinks that you might go days before your next meal and that if you don’t eat all these figs (or Fig-Newtons), that a troop of baboons may come along and eat them all.
Modern food companies don’t just offer an abundance of cheap food. They’ve engineered their foods to hack what they call our “bliss point,” and to delay satiation so that we eat even more than we would if we were eating actual food. I detailed this a few weeks ago in my post: Have We Made it Too Hard for Families to Be Healthy?:
A 2013 study from Connecticut College showed that rats who were offered Oreos spent as much or more time consuming Oreos as they did when they were offered cocaine or morphine. More still, they found that the Oreos stimulated even more neurons in the rat’s “pleasure center” than cocaine or morphine.
Most popular “foods” today deliver a supernormal stimuli—a level of temptation/pleasure/insatiable-ness that does not exist in a natural state. This means they are really hard to stop eating once we start. In other words, they are addictive.
When you hear supernormal stimuli, think of bait fish swimming around a light…
or human moths flying towards the proverbial flame.
Supernormal Tech
Smartphones, social media, apps, games, and many other modern tech tools also deliver a supernormal stimuli.
Similar to food companies, most tech and online media companies make more money when you consume more of their products. So, tech designers study the human brain in order to make us scroll as long as possible, check back more frequently, and react more emotionally. Former Google engineer and founder of the Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, calls this the “race to the bottom of the brainstem.”
There are people who would hear my criticism of supernormal stimuli and think:
But I like Coke and Snapchat and Pornhub, and getting to feel powerful when I play Call of Duty.
I like that TikTok delivers me the most optimally entertaining video for my specific personality; I like that I never run out of things to look at on my phone; and I like that people “like” my Instagram pictures.
You may like these things. But the cumulative effect of a world of supernormal stimuli is that we are degraded and used. Culturally and individually. We don’t use our lives towards our purpose, but are used on behalf of someone else’s.
Still, some may be thinking:
So what? What do I care if I’m “being used” so long as being used gets me more pleasure and less pain?
Good question.
Comfortably Numb
Perhaps you presume more pleasure and less pain will equal less happiness. The data would indicate otherwise.
We have more entertainment, convenience, comfort, and safety, and we’re more insulated from pain than any people in the human history. And, yet, there has been an increase in mental health disorders across the developed world.
As Brandon Hidaka explains in the Journal of Affective Disorders:
By appealing to evolutionary proclivities, like a desire for energy-dense food and status competition, the economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment promoting decisions that maximize consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.
We’re more comfortable than ever, while starved of something far more essential.
The Problem With Easily Satisfied Desires
In addition to prompting us to consume excessively, supernormal stimuli often interrupt our development.
For example, adolescent men have always been obsessed with attracting women. Traditionally, that obsession has played an essential role in our development.
We developed a degree of courage by asking girls out face to face.
We developed resilience from our repeated rejections.
We learned proper grooming, manners, and charisma because we wanted to increase our dating stock.
There are other powerful drives that motivate males too.
Men have traditionally aspired to distinguish ourselves in athletics, music, creative projects, and in many other realms. Among other reasons, those aspirations are motivated by a need to satisfy our yearning for purpose, empowerment, and for brotherhood. As the saying goes:
“Women bond face to face. Men bond shoulder to shoulder.”
Today, adolescent males often fail to cultivate productive virtues—they fail to develop charisma, confidence, health, athleticism, humor, resilience, etc.—because there is an easier way to satisfy their drives.
They can effortlessly quench their innate thirst for status, connection, women, and personal empowerment through two particularly powerful supernormal stimuli:
Porn and video games.
These supernormal stimuli offer a similar (while inferior) juice for far less squeeze.
A fourteen-year-old boy, today, does not have to develop the courage to ask a girl out face to face. It’s socially acceptable for him to just click the Instagram app and direct message her.
And if the whole dating thing is too scary or it doesn’t go well, no big. He can use that same phone to go to Pornhub.
Today, men can satisfy most of their drives without having to go through all the work and discomfort that comes with raw, natural life experience.
How Porn Distorts and Disrupts
The term supernormal stimuli comes from Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. Tinbergen created an experiment where male butterflies were presented with fake cardboard female butterflies that had been enhanced with brighter colors. He found that the male butterflies preferred the static cardboard phonies over the real female butterflies that flew all around them.
High schooler Isabel Hogben notes the implications of this experiment brilliantly:
This represents what happens when we are bombarded with fake stimuli. Our brains form new pathways and connections—a process called neuroplasticity—and at some point, after repeated exposure to a supernormal stimulus, we prefer the cardboard butterflies and the fake boobs over the real thing.
This process is especially detrimental to the still-growing, sex-obsessed adolescent brain. Artificial stimuli can saturate and warp a young mind before it ever encounters a real-life sexual experience.
Hogben goes on to explain how supernormal porn transforms healthy, natural inclinations into something far more disturbing:
When I talk to adults, I get the strong sense they picture a hot bombshell in lingerie or a half-naked model on a beach. This is not what I stumbled upon back in fourth grade. I saw simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence. The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog.
Hogben claims that many of her peers are addicted to this sort of porn, and that there exposure to this content manifests in severely dysfunctional expectations and behaviors:
An Indiana University study shows that the earlier a girl is exposed to porn, the more she will accept behaviors like choking [and other disturbing stuff]…
Meanwhile, models and female entrepreneurs—women who little girls look up to—are flocking to OnlyFans to sell naked photos of themselves.
In short, most of my friends think this stuff is normal.
The Road No Longer Beckons
According to the Federal Highway Administration, the number of 18-year-old Americans who had a driver’s license dropped from 80% in 1983 to 60% in 2021 and in that same period, the number of 16-year-olds dropped from 46% to 25%.
Likewise, in her landmark 2017 piece, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?, generational psychologist, Dr. Jean Twenge reported that:
“12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.”
“…only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.”
Technology satisfies basic drives that would have prompted young men and women to explore, aspire, and develop themselves. Consequently, they remain a zombie-like shell of their potential.
The Number One Skill for 21st Century Success
We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data processing mechanism, but these data cows hardly maximize the human potential.
—Yuval Noah Harari
The most important skill-set that students and citizens need in order to thrive in the modern world is this:
to understand supernormal stimuli,
to develop a toolkit so they can recognize and avoid manipulation (by supernormal stimuli and propaganda), and
to identify and cultivate specific values which will clarify goals that are more important than immediate gratification—we need a vision of a certain kind of person that causes us to aspire to be more!
This should be a primary focus of schools, churches, parents and communities in the 21st century. It is my primary focus.
More than just teaching these things, we have to provide a vision of a better way. The majority of today’s youth do not aspire to reach their potential because they are satiated by their distractions. We must give them a reason to aspire. More to come…
Thank you very much for reading! Please share with anyone you think would find this valuable.
Carry the fire!
Shane
Shane--your writing is refreshingly accurate. You need to get it out there but what magazine or paper will risk telling it like it is? We need this truth telling in our world.