During the pandemic of 2020-21, I was glad for our large, three-story house in a woodsy neighborhood in southwest Missouri, which bordered on a park with a lake. School and work were online, groceries were delivered, public entertainment had been suspended, and my wife, teenage daughter, and I were home all of the time. Nobody wants to be around anyone that much, even those we love, so I was grateful that the three of us could separate from one another — even occupy different floors — and when that wasn’t enough, leave the house altogether and lose ourselves in nature, where the only company would be animals, trees, and water.

That people don’t want to spend too much time together used to be well-understood and served as the basis for common expressions and wisdom: “Don’t wear out your welcome”; “Good fences make good neighbors”; the idea that someone can be “overexposed” or require “me time”; that every kid sharing a space with siblings desperately wants his or her own room; the notion that “personal space” is something people are entitled to; and we could easily add “Larger houses make for happier families,” as those of my friends trapped in tiny apartments with their spouses and children over the course of the pandemic in New York, Boston, and other major-metro areas will attest.

The reason isn’t hard to grasp. Even the saintliest souls bring with them a raftload of irritating eccentricities, annoying habits, dumb opinions, grating expressions and inflections, and intolerable tastes, so controlling one’s exposure to others is an essential component of good relations. Sometimes, we need to be able to “go away” or risk becoming ill-tempered and quarrelsome, which is why I stay in a hotel when visiting relatives, rather than cohabiting (and why I decamp to a hotel when too many from our clan visit us and cohabit).

I say that this “used” to be well-understood, because it seems like an awful lot of people have forgotten it, and if you’ve been wondering why everyone is so pissed off so much of the time, perhaps it’s because we’re all seeing way too much of each other; not in person but on social media; and not loved ones or dear friends or even good acquaintances, for whom our tolerance-threshold is high, but total strangers in whom we have no emotional or other relevant investments against which to balance the inevitable, myriad aggravations to come.

If your kid’s penchant for peanut butter and bologna sandwiches evokes disgust, consider what seeing fifty such concoctions a day, posted with chirpy captions like “Eat Outside the Box!”, will do. If hearing your twelve-year old play “Shake it off” over and over again makes you want to punch holes in the drywall, imagine suffering an endless barrage of Taylor Swift-related posts from a gaggle of overgrown “Swifties.” When just one or two inane political arguments with an uncle or cousin threaten to bring on a sudden rage, think about what a regular diet of left-wing “Resistance!” and right-wing “shitposting” will do. If the passive-aggressive interactions with people in your workplace raises hackles, what sort of havoc will a steady stream of “Gentle Reminders” and “Fun Facts” from a worldwide-web’s worth of nobodies wreak? If you’re sick to death of your friend’s incessant bellyaching, what is likely to be the result of constantly hearing from dozens of strangers about their depression, anxiety, disability, neurodivergence, marginalized group status, lack of money, failure in the workplace and the like? And if your older sister’s bossiness makes you want to give her a good smack, what will be the effect of being told what to do, say, think, like, hate, eat, drink, drive, support, oppose, “center,” etc., day in and day out, by an unceasing stream of online scolds whom you don’t know and never will?

That everyone is spoiling for a fight in this accursed environment might be taken as a perverse sign of good health, but the truth is that it’s utter poison for a civil society or for any population trying to repair or recover one. And yet, here we are, saying and showing far too much, far too indiscriminately, to far too many people. It’s difficult enough to find terms that adequately describe this sort of purposeful immiseration of oneself and everyone else, but determining why we do it is an even steeper challenge; one that will require serious social-scientific investigation, which is why I won’t offer a bunch of barely-baked guesses. But, not only do I believe relations among people will not improve until we stop doing this, it seems almost certain that our mutual antipathy will only get worse so long as we overexpose ourselves to everyone, everywhere, at every possible moment. Social media has provided us with a test as to just how much of each other we really want, and the answer seems to be: “Not nearly this much.”