To save us all, invest in meat space

There is a youth loneliness crisis but it hides itself so we must look for its signs strewn across our culture. IF we don’t acknowledge this, behave like it matters and do something about it, we’re in trouble.

I met a woman and we're in the early stages of a burgeoning new relationship. She is not my usual type but under her tough, defensive exterior there is a vulnerability and kindness that is really attractive. It feels... right. But it couldn't be happening at a worse time; she's a smuggler who has been exiled by her Nomad gang and I'm a mercenary with a faulty biochip in my brain...

So no, none of this is happening in the real world. It's a computer game I'm playing, and it reflects a controversy around the new Grand Theft Auto. Hardly surprising – GTA thrives on controversy and has been accused of glorifying violence and crime. This time? The controversy is... romance.

The lead characters are two Bonnie and Clyde-style bandits who rob banks in Vice City (a fictionalised version of contemporary Miami). You can play either character but the strength of your relationship is key to how well you work together and so how successful you are at robbing banks. And so you have to work on your relationship – flirty texts, going on dates, that sort of thing.

And some of the partners of guys playing these games are not happy. As one put it “how come my man be texting Lucia all day but not me?”. (Lucia is the fictional girlfriend.) I am tempted to answer 'well go bank robbing with your man then' to highlight the entirely fictional nature of this.

But that misunderstands that this is a serious issue. It is about loneliness and particularly (in this instance) the loneliness of young men. The game I'm playing is nominally a strategy investigation-shooter game but an enormous amount of it is built around relationships. I did a side quest where I had to get through to my ex-cop downstairs neighbour who was deeply depressed and suicidal and then persuade his two colleagues that he needs help and empathy, not to be told to harden up.

Tonight I am going for dinner with River and his single-mother sister. We've just rescued his cousin. He was groomed online by a serial killer who preys on lonely young men. River isn't doing very well with all this, guilty he should have paid more attention. I am going to dinner in a computer game purely because the two of them are struggling and need a friendly ear.

If you don't play computer games, this may all sound utterly bemusing. If you do, you can't help notice something. More and more, games are based on relationships or are filled with relationships. I'm watching every one of them in my game and they're all of a similar type – someone basically good is damaged in some way, suffering, feeling alone, and they need help.

Not gun-shoot-kill help. Well, OK, they mostly do at some point need gun-shoot-kill help. But at the heart of the storyline is connection and humanity and empathy. In case you don't know it yet, Grand Theft Auto is almost certainly the world's biggest and most important cultural artefact after the football World Cup. It's sales, reach and impact dwarf films and music and festivals.

It cost an eye-watering $2 billion to make. I promise you that at that money, Rockstar Games isn't guessing what its audience wants. It has researched its audience and found it is lonely, damaged, in search of a connection. And if I'm honest, you'd be amazed how real the connection can feel, even with a pre-scripted animated character. My partner doesn't play games but she welled up overhearing one of the storyline sequences.

Which is to say nothing in this article is going to decry or blame gaming. In fact on the whole, gaming is one of the actually quite positive activities a lot of isolated young men engage with. They may be parasocial relationships with anonymous people online playing a role or with fictional and scripted game characters, but it helps people explore their feelings.

But on the whole it is heartbreaking. I'm wandering around this fictional city of lonely, damaged people and I am very well aware that this is being designed to reflect the interior lives of its audience. And when I hack a computer with River and find the sequence of grooming emails that ensnared his cousin, it becomes actually painful. It is horrible. It is real. And it speaks to its audience.

Of course they can't live in these game worlds and much as I might have enjoyed my first night with my new paramour as we tentatively explored our developing feelings while holed up in a shed in a sandstorm, I also know that so did everyone else who played the game (as a man at least – there is a different love interest if you play as a woman). I know it isn't real.

For me, coming off the game, I can talk about what just happened and how I feel about it with my family. I actually felt like I had to after the River storyline. To come off the game, having been even more emotionally invested than me and then realising – it's not real? You're alone in your dark bedroom? Remind me the antidepressant statistics for people under 35 in Scotland...

Does anyone care about this? Not really. Certainly not in policy terms. The Scottish Government's lip service to the curse of loneliness is, well, cursory. It did its usual – stuck a couple of million quid in a pot and gave it to corporate charities who knocked together loneliness campaigns, mostly for the elderly.

If you want to know how much political weight gets placed on the interests of young people, have a look at the AI debate, or the sorry state of universities and the calls that the management class should be bailed out of their disastrous mismanagement by imposing the costs on the young. Politics doesn't care about loneliness because it's hidden and it doesn't care about young people because there isn't enough them and they don't vote.

Lonely young people therefore don't register. When the bill for mental services and antidepressants comes due, no-one will admit that we just let it happen because we didn't care about youth.

“If we do not invest in social infrastructure now and with the zeal of the Victorians, I fear for the future of our society”

There is another heartbreaking phrase that is used by young people online. Some exist almost wholly in cyberspace (the number of young men reporting having not a single close relationship in their lives has increased by 500 per cent in a decade); they refer to 'meat space'. That's what we'd call 'the real world'.

In that world, for our poor traumatised youth, is the painful, messy, ugly reality of modern life in hypercapitalism. They turn their eyes from it. It's all just mess, humans are just meat, everyone is in pain. If only we could escape our meat reality. This is part of the cult of AI, created largely by exactly these kind of young men. They think replacing humans with AI would be a blessed relief for us all.

Yet the science is utterly straightforward. We are a social species and every aspect of our wellbeing has evolved to revolve around in-person human relationships and connection. The development of the modern city was the first challenge, then the commercialisation of social relationships in the Thatcher/Blair years, then the hyper-fragmentation of social media and online shopping.

We are incapable of evolving fast enough to cope with this as a species. We cannot stop being social after 150,000 years of learning the opposite (and another couple of millions years before that when we were monkeys). Our psychological wellbeing requires human interaction.
Or, to put it another way, everything that can solve our problems exists and can only exist in the meat world. It is quite literally not replaceable. Unless we fight this in the real world, we lose. And there is a way to know whether we're fighting.

Let me put this simply; you can find the solution to this problem everywhere you find more than one person congregating. Everywhere. The more of that we do, the better our chances of being OK are. If we’re investing in that, we’re doing the right thing. I don't care what it is – saying hello to someone you know very slightly when you see them in the supermarket.

Playing in your football/rugby/hockey/whatever team. Going to your dancing class. Or just going dancing full stop. The pub, cafe, community centre. The am dram club or the golf course or bowling green. A local voluntary group or a farmers' market in the town. A local music festival or a just watching your local football team get humped. The disused car park where the kids hang out.

There is almost no bad version of 'more than one person in one place' for mental wellbeing unless they're wearing three-hole balaclavas and swearing they're only there to protect women and children (who always feel safer in the presence of angry men in black balaclavas). If we want to protect our society, we need to invest in places where people meet.

Is that what we are doing? Nope. We are actively engineering our society for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Our social spaces are dying, partly because the economy has been restructured to be online and antisocial (if you want people to be reckless and irresponsible with their money, get them to do it isolated in their home where they have no social checks or balances).

We railroaded through online gambling. We don't care about your local village hall but we do care very much that you should accept the data centre next to your house. Why? Because that propels us to a new world where AI can remove even more of the need for human connection in return for our money.

Don't have friends, spend credits on an AI assistant who will tell you whatever you want to hear in a simulated human voice. When it is over and you realise you have no life and want to kill yourself, you can both seek help and facilitate your own death with all the same infrastructure. It's profitable either way – you suit yourself. As long as you have your wallet out.

Politicians are lobbied by big tech but are these days almost openly contemptuous of the interests of society. Local government is a problem to be cut and centralised. Yet local government and not central government is the real sponsor of 'meat space'. In truth central government builds Scottish Enterprise for the rich. Streets and playing fields and pubs and youth groups and community centres?

That is local government, and local government has (by a million miles) been the giant loser under devolution. We have cut and centralised local government and in doing so we have put a hole in what makes us feel better – society.

The speed at which we're moving into a multi-crisis our politicians are no longer able to cope with is accelerating. Some would argue we're already there and I'm not sure I could argue against that. They can't get an economy to fund the public services to maintain human wellbeing and nothing they do is changing it (because they do the same thing over and over).

At this point managing decline might be too generous a description. It feels more like we are facilitating decline, because preventing it feels like too big a task. The canary in this coal mine is youth. I thought about including the statistics in this but as I was writing it an article came in with lots of detail describing youth mental health as a 'seven bell alarm'. Read it, then demand action.

I try to imagine my life if I hadn't had friends. I can't imagine how I'd have coped. When I needed them, they were there. When they didn't know I needed them but I did, they were there anyway. When someone had to tell me I was a dick, they were on hand, and they were there again when someone had to tell me to be less hard on myself.

How would I have replaced that? What would have happened to me if I tried? I don't know, but thinking about it scares me. Then I realise what I am thinking about is the life of many young people now, siloed in boxes, lonely and in pain – because we designed this society on behalf of the investor class and we forced them to live in it.

If we do not invest in social infrastructure now and with the zeal of the Victorians, I fear for the future of our society. This stuff keeps me up at night worrying, yet if feels like no-one else cares. So fuck the world. My digital, fictional Night City awaits. It may be a hellscape but is one where I have the agency to make things better with my sniper's rifle and a friendly word for some lonely strangers.

Why on earth would I want to leave that world for this one? And, by extension, what the hell have we done?