Not Quite Right features discussions that are unfiltered and uncensored,
and may include themes that are inappropriate for younger listeners.
Also, I swear a lot.
Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to not quite right.
My name is Ed, and this is the second of a series of
interviews that Amanda and I recorded at the Words on the Waves Writers Festival
this year.
This time we're speaking with Hugh McKay.
Hugh McKay is a social psychologist.
He was at words on the ways for his talk entitled The State of Australia.
Today.
He's the author of 24 books including The Way We Are,
Lessons from a Lifetime of Listening.
And we spoke with you about the importance of listening and how to find
connection in an increasingly isolated age.
So here's our discussion with Hugh McKay.
So we're here at Words on the Waves with Hugh McKay.
Good morning.
And you've just finished your talk in the Dip about the state of Australia today.
So that sounds like a quite a wide ranging topic.
Tell us about that.
Yes, it is a wide ranging topic.
How foolish I was to agree to cover all this in a short time.
But I mean, there are lots of ways of describing
contemporary Australia, and it's easy to slip into negativity
because we know that one of the characteristics of contemporary Australia
is that we have a mental health crisis.
We have epidemics of anxiety and depression and loneliness.
We're gambling too much, we're not sleeping enough,
we're overmedicated, we're overweight.
And there's a long list of things you could say problems with Australia,
but this is not a negative book.
What I'm trying to demonstrate is that over the last 30 or 40 years there have
been big social changes in Australia which have had the effect of making us
more socially fragmented, more individualistic,
at the expense of our mental health.
We haven't understood what we were doing to ourselves.
We've been shrinking our households.
The biggest single household type in Australia and the fastest growing
household type is the single person household.
And of course our households are getting smaller and our houses are getting bigger,
which is a strange irony about Australia.
High rate of relationship breakdown.
Between 35 and 40% of marriages ending in divorce.
Great mobility.
We're moving house on average once every six years.
We drive everywhere.
We wave at our neighbours car instead of stopping and talking to our neighbours.
We're busier than we've ever been.
We don't have time for social connection to the extent we should.
And of course we've all fallen for the IT revolution where we're confusing contact
fire screen based devices with human communication which relies most crucially
on eye contact, which you can't have virus screen.
Yeah.
So all of those things taken together have had the cumulative effect.
These are these are not things that were done to us.
These are choices.
We've been making nothing about how to live without understanding that for
members of a social species, which humans are.
I mean, we're we're built for connection, we're built for community,
we're built for cooperation.
And yet in this very recent past, we've been making all these choices about
how to live, which have actually been going against
our own human nature.
And so it's not surprising that the consequence of this would be depression,
anxiety.
I mean, herd animals from the herd dispersers,
they don't do well.
A lot of the issues that you mentioned like that fragmentation of ideas and the
individualistic thing, they used to be, I remember in like maybe it was the
nineties, 2000s, a lot of talk about Americanization,
like as a cultural force.
I don't know if that's still talked about as much these days,
but I think that's definitely like a driver of a lot of that individualistic
mindset and fragmentation in Australia is one thing and division,
but compared to America, it's it's a very different thing.
Yes.
Oh, absolutely right.
But that's the direction we've been going.
And we, as you say, we've got a long way to go and I hope we
never get there.
I hope we're going to reverse these trends.
That's the message of the book.
We can do something about this, rebuild local communities and watch out
for people who are at risk of social isolation.
Be more alert to the needs of the lonely and the and the marginalised.
But you're right, the the example of America is very
instructive.
When your society is built on the cult of individualism and competitiveness,
then it's going to be a damaged society.
But neuroscientists tell us they can find in the human brain the cooperative centre.
In other words, it's in our DNA to cooperate.
There's no such thing as the competitive centre in the human brain.
That's a learned response.
But we have to nurture our capacity and, and,
and what drives our ability to cooperate is all the qualities you need to
cooperate.
Kindness, compassion, tolerance, inclusiveness, etcetera.
That's in us.
That's innate to to have those qualities, but we don't always nurture them well.
Tolerance in particular feels like something that's a little bit in short
supply at the moment.
The more the more individualistic we become, the less tolerant,
the more judgmental, the less compassionate, the less empathic.
It's a dangerous trend.
It's not irreversible, of course, and we're still doing very.
I mean, I, I said in my little talk a moment ago,
while we're thinking about the issues we have to address,
we also need to remember that every day all over Australia,
millions of people are performing acts of kindness for each other.
Yeah.
You know, it's still a very positive society with
these warning signs.
Yeah.
So some of these problems that you mentioned, like universal,
maybe Western problems, but a a few of them are very Australian.
I think like the gambling 1 is one that stands out to me, is quite Australian.
It's more so here, especially in NSW than elsewhere where we
have pokey machines in every club and gambling ads on TV in the way that we
wouldn't have had, you know, for smoking and alcohol.
That's still completely rampant and a blight on our culture, I guess.
So, yeah, I guess what are what are some of the
ones that you see that really need to be addressed very, very soon?
Well, you mentioned one.
We are per capita, if we are the world's biggest losers,
it's kind of gambling.
That's an extraordinary and very sad aspect of Australian life that needs
urgent attention.
I think also we've got to pay attention to the household issue.
I think that's that's urgent for us.
We're talking about the housing crisis at the moment.
Well, it's a very complicated crisis that we're
a nation of spare rooms.
And in fact on census night that the last two censuses, there were 1,000,
000 empty dwellings.
Now they're holiday houses and rental properties that weren't occupied and so
on.
But a million, you know, it's not 100,000, it's a million empty.
So there's an oversupply in one sense and there's this silly problem of the houses
that we build and the apartments being much bigger than we need.
So in the last 75 years, while the average size of the Australian
household has been steadily shrinking down, now the average is 2.
5 persons per dwelling.
The size, the average size of Australian dwellings
has more than doubled, gone from 100 to 240 square metres.
So I think we've got to have a serious rethink and maybe house prices will force
that rethink.
I think they're going to be a lot more multi generational households,
a lot more people who'll decide that they can just tap a granny flat on, you know,
and that'll be good.
I mean, bigger, more chaotic, more fluid households are actually better
for us and especially better for the raising of children.
Yeah, the nuclear family has not turned out to
be a good model.
I'm raising kids.
Happy to hear that.
Actually, I'm living in a multi generational house
right now.
So my mom is living with us and with our children as well.
So 3 generations under our roof.
And I really love it.
And we've talked, my mom and I talked before about this
issue that other people think is a problem,
which I don't see as a problem is the declining birth rate,
because there's this panic that there won't be enough taxpayers to sort of look
after the non taxpayers at the other end of the age spectrum.
And you know, our conclusion that we reached is, well,
what's going to happen is it's going to force people to live in multi
generational households because that's got to be an answer.
If there's not enough care facilities or whatever it might be all,
all care workers, that job is going to come back within the
family in a way that perhaps it's been outsourced a little bit for a while.
And I don't see that as a bad thing.
I think that's wonderful.
And in other cultures that's normal, absolutely normal.
And it used to be for us, if you go back 100 years,
we were typically three generation households,
the odd aunt or uncle coming and going or a lodger or some very,
I mean the situation you've described in your own household.
Very good for any children who are present because they've got more than
just mum and dad as a or mum as a model of how to behave as an adult.
They've got another older person.
Very good for the parents because there's a grandparent who's sharing the load.
I read recently about a human rights lawyer from Uganda who moved with her
husband and two children to Switzerland because she got some job.
And she said the contrast moving from the Ugandan village where she'd lived,
where there was an extended family and the sense of the true village where,
you know, you could park the kids.
You know you could park families that had lots of kids,
just park them all with the neighbour while mum went off to get her hair done
or something.
That no question, of course, suddenly moved to Switzerland.
No family, the neighbourhood not functioning like a
village, she said.
The burden of being a parent in a stripped down nuclear household crush
them.
They found it almost intolerable, unmanageable after the experience of
their home in Uganda.
Isn't it ironic that you know, you think you're simplifying your life.
You know, you think, Oh well, it's just two kids.
It's not the 10 neighbours kids from next door as well.
But actually it becomes harder because you're not sharing.
And of course people have different strengths and skills.
And so one person's good at cooking, another person's great with kids and
having fun.
Like you don't get to lean into your strengths either.
You've got to be everything to those children all the time.
And that's that's a lot.
Well, that lovely African saying, it takes a village to raise a child.
It's absolutely true.
And in good neighbourhoods, even around Australia,
there are lots of little streets and apartment books and so on around
Australia that are functioning like villages, very good for the kids.
Yeah, I was going to say, like, it seems also to be a consequence of how
we design our cities.
I I feel like people live very isolated lives.
And when you look at new suburbs that are being built like it's kind of an ocean of
houses that are separated from each other without any shared kind of community.
There's nowhere to go in the area.
Like you don't have anywhere to walk around.
You don't have that mixed business with with houses.
So everyone just goes home, gets in the car, goes to the shops,
gets in the car, goes to work.
It's very low trust as well.
In the area that you live in, you wouldn't feel comfortable just apart
from maybe your medium neighbours, like just I've got to go out.
I'm going to leave my kids with the neighbours that just doesn't really have.
Yeah, everyone sounds silent.
That's very true.
And that model that you've just described is very widespread in outer metropolitan
areas, especially around Australia and living in
regional areas.
I I spoke recently to a young woman who'd moved into a new housing subdivision in
Orange in the central West NSW, and she said she's lived there for six
months and hasn't yet met any neighbours because they all come and go by car.
They all have electric garage doors.
So you drive up, the door goes up, you drive in, the door goes down.
I did say you could go and knock on a neighbour's door.
Oh yeah, I'll get around to it.
But six months and she still hadn't met anyone.
So it's, it's like a social desert.
Yeah, absolutely.
And as you say, then there's no coffee shop nearby,
no sort of natural we need, we need places where we can incidentally
contact and connect with each other, just passing in the streets.
So, you know, stop talk about the weather, anything just to give people that sense
of belonging, which is absolutely fundamental because
we are, because we belong to this species, the centre belonging is fundamental to
our mental and emotional health.
Yeah.
And it's, it's good that people are talking about
this as well and recognising that that is a problem.
But still you don't see anything changing from the perspective of like new housing
developments aren't changing the way that they're, they're being designed.
Some are, There are, there are some very bright little lights.
We have one here, not too far, I think, actually.
Yeah.
The Eco Village.
And it's very much being designed with that in mind.
That's a sense of community.
And I know someone who lives there and she says her kids,
it's it's like going back in time.
They're all shoeless out in the street playing together.
And, you know, it's that environment where you just
expect your kids to come home when when it gets dark and you trust all your
neighbours.
And, and I just fantasise about moving there
because it sounds absolutely beautiful.
Yes.
And there are, there are examples that some developers
have become very enlightened and understand, you know,
you've got to get AGP coffee shop and a, you know,
library or a community centre or a church or something before there are any people
to go there.
You know, even to subsidise some of these things in
order to generate some kind of community, community hub from the beginning.
Yeah.
So it is, it is happening.
I keep hearing about like a Japanese model of these things.
I'm not sure if you've heard of this, but just the idea of having a mixed
community with businesses in the community.
So you know, houses on top of shops and so there's
actually a reason to walk out into the community and,
and you don't need to all travel to Erin Affair,
which is our local shopping centre.
You can just walk around and meet people and interact.
Yes well, you go village near here.
The gym is a famous example of of someone getting it right.
A lovely example, not lovely.
An awful example of getting it wrong is the decision that many local councils are
now making, particularly near Melbourne, to go high rise because we're all
committed to this idea that there's a housing shortage we've got to build.
You know, I think it is, as I've suggested,
more complicated than that.
But the solution in so many places is go up and going up.
Three or four stories is fine.
Medium density, very good for building a sense of
community.
Go much higher than that and Paris is a good model of low rise.
Go high rise up 20 or 30 floors.
And it has the opposite effect.
People become obsessed with privacy and security.
Avoid eye contact in the lift.
And I don't don't talk to people in the car park.
It's people crowded together too closely and community breaks down.
So you've, you've talked about anxiety and
depression.
I'm interested in particular in social anxiety because I see like huge increase
in social anxiety just even amongst friends and family and even myself who,
you know, I'm an extrovert.
But I find myself getting, like I said, if I'm getting social anxiety.
And I wonder what that stems from because you're saying it's natural for us to want
to be social and then we get an opportunity and where many people
withdraw roaring away from that opportunity to connect with people
getting too scared to do so.
So what are your thoughts on yes, yes, I think we're getting out of practise.
It sounds, it sounds silly and almost too simple,
but the more fragmented we become, the more fragmented we will become.
And one of the things you find about people experiencing loneliness,
for example, is they become less and less inclined to
make social contact.
They become more inward.
And, you know, we'll say, Oh, no, you know,
I think I'm better off on my own.
Whereas of course they're not.
No, once we start to lose a lot of
spontaneous connection with people around us,
then it's a strange psychological process where we start to feel scared.
Another example of the same phenomenon with kids who had to be homeschooled
during COVID.
Record numbers now of kids experiencing this thing called school refusal.
They're actually scared of going back into a crowded classroom because they've
got out of practise at being social animals.
So it's a fragile thing and we really have to nurture it in our kids and in
each other.
So how do you nurture it in your own life?
What are you?
What are the ways that you stay social?
I'm constantly saying let's have a cup of coffee and yeah,
that's checking up on the neighbours and so on.
Yeah.
But yeah, I'm like you on natural, probably a bit of an introvert.
So I have to remind myself that if I go a day without making eye contact with a
number of people, that'll be very bad for my mental health.
And you can't do it on a screen.
You think you're looking at someone's face on the screen,
but you're looking at a screen.
There's no eye contact there.
And as an Organism we thrive on eye contact with each other and when it's
missing we experience this thing.
There's a Melbourne psychologist called Michelle Lim who's called this phenomenon
social hunger.
And she says if you don't have enough social contact,
you don't may have enough eye contact, you start to experience social hunger,
which has very similar symptoms to physical hunger.
You get cranky and irritable.
And, and one reason why there's so much bad
behaviour on social media, bullying, trolling, abuse, etcetera, is that the,
the heaviest users are socially hungry and they're they're they're angry and
they don't know why and they're reaching out.
But in these aggressive ways, Yes.
Yeah.
That's fascinating.
You can get into a downward spiral about all this.
It's it's all reversible.
And it all starts in the street where you live.
No, you know, the state of the nation we can wring our
hands about, but the state of the nation is an
accumulation of all our streets.
We just need to make sure that we're rebuilding the sense of community where
we live.
So tell us a little bit about your book the way we are.
So you're saying you're you're exploring like the more positive aspects of
relationships and being social.
Like what are some of the lessons?
What are those positive aspects that you can share with us?
Absolutely crucial importance of listening like you 2 have been doing very
nicely.
Thank you.
When someone listens to you, the unspoken message is I take you
seriously enough to bother listening to what you're saying.
I'm prepared to entertain your ideas.
We might disagree violently, but just for the moment I'm going to hear
you out.
And if you don't listen to someone, if you're looking at your watch or
something distracted or something, the unspoken message that you're sending.
The thing is, I don't take you seriously enough to
bother listening to watching.
I'm not even prepared to entertain your ideas.
You'd never say that out loud to someone would be too offensive or hurtful.
But that's the implication when we don't listen.
Listening is the great therapeutic gift that we give each other.
The test.
I mean, it's not easy to listen because the test
of whether you're really listening to someone is whether you're preparing for
the possibility that you might have to change your mind.
And if you're not open to that, you're not really listening,
you're just hearing.
So I'm convinced that the breakthrough in personal relationships,
even within a family, but among neighbours, strangers on a bus,
work colleagues, anywhere is rediscover the lost art of
listening and connections will follow.
Well, it doesn't mean we're we're all going to
agree with each other, but it means we're going to hear each
other.
Yes, I think it's very true.
I think those conversations often don't happen when we're talking about people
falling into different camps and different,
especially political sides of their little ideology.
And I think most people will gravitate towards friend groups and people who
share the same views as they do and often won't engage.
And it's always kind of this fight rather than, you know,
intention to actually listen and understand the other,
the other side of the story.
But social media exacerbates that, too because you get the, you know,
a confirmation bias, the chamber effect.
Yeah, Exactly.
Yeah, and we're also on the cusp of all of the
AI, generative AI stuff that's going to make
that even more complicated and, yeah, problematic.
So yeah, it's going to make it even more urgent.
Yeah.
To drop in and say g'day to the neighbours and look,
keep an eye on that guy at the end of the street who's recently bereaved and maybe
needs someone to say hello.
Yeah.
More than just a message on their Facebook or whatever it happens to be.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, an important conversation to be having,
I think, definitely.
So thank you for spending some time with us.
Great pleasure.
Yeah, thank you very much.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Ways Riders Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture and the art of writing.
Something doesn't seem quite right.