“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard
There was a time, not so long ago, when holiday cards were the means by which acquaintances updated us on their lives. Often featuring family photos with everyone dressed up, or perhaps casual with a seaside or mountainside backdrop, it was understood this was a “best shot” curated to feature everybody happily together.
Those holiday cards were eagerly opened, shared and even saved. Occasionally they might broach boundaries of good taste, perhaps featuring a photo of the sender’s new Lexus shining brightly as the Christmas star, or containing more pages than an IKEA assembly pack and listing the fifth grader’s achievements. But most of the time these cards conveyed the annual family update and welcome holiday cheer.
Now social media spreads such cheer throughout the year — holiday cards that do not stop. In the past, we were included on others’ card lists; now we are their “followers,” and they ours. Everyone spends lots of time exhibiting, checking likes, sending “stories,” updating statuses, etc. In other words, time alone with our phones.
Yet, in this constant barrage of “socialization” many feel isolated, even apathetic.
Playing to an audience is often fodder for personal discontent, despite large entourages. Besides, do we really care what our college roommate had for dinner last night when we haven’t seen her for 20 years? There is no real human connection through social media. We are not experiencing life first-hand, but rather in a fast-changing virtual reality.
It is a great irony of our age that, although we are more connected, we are less so. Look around at an airport, a waiting room, a grocery line. Most people are staring at their phones as if they’re magic mirrors, engaging only with the device in their hand.
And of course there’s this: What are you not doing while fixating on your screen?
Still, what’s the harm?
Plenty, according to social scientists, including increased depression and escalating suicide rates. Young people, whose social network is mostly electronic and whose validation depends upon it, are often taunted and preyed upon by those hiding behind online anonymity.
Teens’ unsophisticated willingness to buy into the glossy accounts of others’ fabulous lives causes increasingly low self-esteem, producing overriding dissatisfaction with their own lives. They compare their relatively tame — normal — lives with those of the more beautiful, more interesting, more sociable, which to their inexperienced eyes looks to be basically everyone else.
Increasing evidence of toxicity and damage is emerging, especially for our children. Johns Hopkins, Yale and others, have published articles on the detrimental effects of introducing electronic media too early, and the surgeon general has called for a warning label on social media platforms.
The surprising thing is that this is surprising. Cause and effect, and comparable to the one-child policy instituted in China in 1979 that resulted in too many baby boys (males, culturally preferred, females aborted.) Years later: not enough girls to marry the surplus of boys. Predictable. Facebook was launched in 2004, opening the door to social platforms, and we are just now starting to realize its detrimental effects?
In the great sweep of social media, illusion reigns with its inherent falseness, from the seemingly innocuous act of simple selection — not posting unflattering photos — to photo manipulation and digital Botox. Yet, have you ever, even once, heard anyone say, “Everyone loves her because she is so perfect”? It is never perfection we connect with: It is humanness.
Thanks to increasing access to this lightning-fast, but tinny, media, we now have young adults who would more likely leave their grandmother at the mall than their cell phone. Phones feel like their connection to the world. But are they? Listening to Grandma’s stories is likely a better, and certainly more rewarding, connection.
Life isn’t curated updates, not just “our story” playing out, but the stories we share, experiencing this time and this place together.
Rarely have we faced anything that so permeates the psyches of our lives, particularly those of the most vulnerable. Now, with brilliant AI breaking over the horizon, we tend to forget what is important. We may be able to find all the answers, but do we even know the questions?
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver
Curate it and post it? Or live it?
Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.