How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart | Hacker News Reader

How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

nytimes.com

207 pointspseudolus206 comments

Suburbs are structurally lonely (your own castle with as little reliance on others as possible), and only ‘work’ when paired with other sources of community. Those sources are disappearing for a variety of reasons but the transfer from physical -> digital, communal [1] -> personalized, eating out -> eating in [2], public space -> private space, friend time —> media time all add up. We also don’t have strong culture around co-habitation within let alone across families, and a bunch of other culture things that keep us isolated physically and cognitively.

Look at schools and retirement communities for examples of how to design community that keeps us present and with others, then compare to what most experience.

There’s a space between the immediate self/family and the super broad impersonal gov’t and/or hired services (that pave your roads, deliver your food, etc) that is severely under-developed in our modern context. Local interdependency and pooled resources isn’t a thing. My read from talking to several peers in 30s is an openness to explore alternative community structures (eg like a kibbutz) to bring this close community back. I get the sense from many that there’s just something missing and we’re all starting to rediscover the ways communities in the past organized themselves to fill this important place in our lives.

[1] communal being other-oriented or at least aware of others needs versus having our needs ever more optimized and personalized. This causes mindset shift.

[2] there are stats showing rapid increase in delivery over dining in past 10yrs, I believe it’s now majority takeout/delivery these days

> Suburbs are structurally lonely

My European perspective. I wouldn't blame it on suburbs in particular. I would blame most if not all forms of city living. Most people live in flats where nobody wants to have anything to do with their neighbor and there is no communality. People move in and move out, nobody cares. The less you have to hear of your neighbor, the better. FWIW I would rather have a 'burb castle than a flat where I have to smell and listen to idiots drink, smoke, fight and blast music. And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.

Now farms and other isolated & rural towns are a different deal. There you're no longer mass of people. You actually get to know the community around you, and people don't come & go nearly as much.

Thats not particularly a European perspective. Sounds like its just yours.

It is just mine, and I am European. I believe it is informative to spell it out in a discussion that points fingers at the (American) suburb.

your statement sounds like this is a point of view taken by the majority of people who live in Europe. Simple facts about the number and density of cities through out the history of the continent point to the exact opposite.

And they already told you they didn't mean it that way. Maybe listen to them, adjust your expectations, and move on?

Yeah I think it’s not just a suburb problem, they just so happen to be (I think) the most common living situation for Americans. And if not in actuality, certainly culturally we are indoctrinated in a suburb mindset (own a home, go to college, American dream yada yada). It’s one of the reasons moving to a city after college is so exciting for us- it’s usually the first experience we have that challenges that mindset.

You nailed it. I live in a ‘burb castle’. I was grateful to get out of my apartment. The woman in the adjacent unit would burn a dozen candles and stumble in drunk every night. The guy below would scream and break stuff during football games. Another would blast rap music at 4 AM.

Screw apartments. Now I can put up ham radio antennas, have a nice lab, garage for bike, etc.. I could not fathom living in a dense city.

> And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.

Don’t worry — I’m sure the scum feel pretty much the same about you.

The language might seem harsh to you, but you'd understand it if you'd ever lived with or near such people.

>The language might seem harsh to you, but you'd understand it if you'd ever lived with or near such people.

I understand it perfectly well, I've lived in densely populated cities my whole life. It's a naked display of something called misanthropy and it's a core tenet of an ethos of self-obsession plus empathy absence that persons in technology AND lifelong US suburbanites far, far too often are afflicted with. Zero mystery here.

Then what is its root cause?

Typically our view of the outer world is a reflection of our view of the inner world, and usually that state is obscured and perpetuated by fear/clinging to an idea of security.

>Then what is its root cause?

I can only guess. I'll be thinking about it.

I will say that fear -- useful fear, wielded as a whip of control in various ways -- is central to any process of de-socialization.

And I know who surely has the greatest interest in de-socialization: the persons at the top of our economy.

> I can only guess.

Then you shouldn't say "Zero mystery here".. or you could trick yourself and become upset later.

>then you shouldn’t say “Zero mystery here”

There’s zero mystery about OP showing misanthropy, but I can’t say where it comes from.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can clear up for you as you struggle to remain current in the discussion.

Lol typical response of someone who wants to believe they know something. You'll find out one day. Meanwhile you missed the answer implicit in my reply.

Yeah, you’ve clearly never had bad neighbors. Be grateful for that, but it doesn’t give you the right to tell others that the real problem is their frustration.

>you’ve clearly never had bad neighbors

No, I’ve had bad neighbors. What I haven’t done is to generalize the experience to seek to avoid neighbors as a class, which is exactly what misanthropy is, as well as exactly what white flight and suburbanism is.

Also, as long as you’re prattling about “rights”, please notice how easily you assumed the right to mischaracterize and invent a convenient and false history for me.

Nope, you clearly stated that there is no such thing as a bad neighbor, and anyone perceiving one has a defective moral character, that there is “no mystery here.” You want to complain about generalization, that’s another thing, but so far the only generalization here is yours, that the parent’s experience can’t be real.

Me:

>I’ve had bad neighbors

You:

> you’ve clearly stated there’s no such thing as a bad neighbor

I wish you luck managing the effects of your wild imagination in the future.

> Don’t worry — I’m sure the scum feel pretty much the same about you.

Quite possible, and that's part of the point I'm making. There's no communality, everyone just wants to have as little to do with their neighbor as possible. Even if it turns out that quite a few of these neighbors (me included) do not throw parties, do not smoke inside, do not drink and fool around, do not have loud kids or animals, do not throw trash around and break things in shared spaces, don't blast music at 3 AM...

There's too many people for people to care, kind of? And a bunch of bad apples ruin it for everyone.

YMMV. I got to know my neighbors in my 5-unit building in NYC, as well as the owners/managers of the restaurants and shops next door. The advantage the city has over suburbia is the density. I don’t have to get in a car to see any of my neighbors, we’re more or less forced to see each other on any given walk.

The reason your city is so bad is in large epart because the families move away to suburbs. In the burbs, you still get disturbances like constant lawnmowers and leaf blowers, at least in lawn-crazy USA.

Also planning laws - apartments for singles and couples are cheaper to build and higher density than apartments for families. If planning law mandates sufficient accommodation for families the dynamics change.

The constant lawnmowers get on my nerves for sure.

But even the families with loud kids and dogs and late night backyard parties never managed to disturb me as much as what I've come to expect as the norm in flats.

> The reason your city is so bad is in large epart because the families move away to suburbs. In the burbs, you still get disturbances like constant lawnmowers and leaf blowers, at least in lawn-crazy USA.

In the USA a lot of neighborly socialization is associated with yard work. The lawnmower is a signal your neighbor is out, and the polite thing to do is to chat when you run into each other. That's how I got to know my neighbors. If you weren't aware, you do shut off the machines when you talk.

The level of contempt you show for lawn work makes me thing you have little experience with it or some idiosyncrasies that cause you to hate it in an atypical way.

But cities provide you with a means to find a community if you really want one. It's a lot harder and/or less convenient to find groups that do what you like to do if you live in a suburb.

> But cities provide you with a means to find a community if you really want one. It's a lot harder and/or less convenient to find groups that do what you like to do if you live in a suburb.

I think there's a problem with equating community with "groups that do what you like." That sounds like a definition that's been infected by the "personalization" the npunt was talking about in his first note.

Real communities have a lot more diversity than that, and they're usually not very personalized. It's often no so much about finding community, but forming communal bonds with the people already around you.

Why would it be bad if things were this way? I mean, I have a very varied social circle but enjoy the company of a select few the most.

"Personalization" as you called it, has existed since immemorial times and I don't think it's something new.

Sure, it always existed and isn't necessarily always a problem. But, as with anything, it can quickly become a problem once we get better at it and turn it to eleven.

Last century, forming a sect was hard work. Now this kinda seems to happen accidentally all the time when someone tries to launch a new social media platform. For those examples the problem isn't preferring a select few, but shielding yourself from others.

But yes, favoring select few can end bad as well. When you network with and thus effectively give positions or contracts to only your select few, you can end up with a self-reinforcing feedback loop and thus quite homogeneous subset of people. And then end up with e.g. woman complain they cannot obtain senior positions or more frequent conspiracy theories about how jews run the world. Having lots of people think they are treated unfairly is generally bad for a society, especially our democratic ones.

Sure, that has historically been the case.

I will argue that communities of space is always inferior to communities of interest. We can see that historically when those communities of interest are big enough, they spend most of their time together, buy in their own shops, etc.

With the current state of society, it is a lot easier to create smaller groups, provided you have a big enough base to work with.

I dunno about that, having grown up in a rural area I can distinctly remember newcomers to the area (especially if from abroad) never being accepted unless they had young kids going to the local school (who would be accepted by the other kids much faster). There was one couple who tried extensively for years going to and organising events but never became anything more than "the dutch couple"

You also get a lot of weirdness where everyone knows a bit too much about everyone else. ...and, yeah, there's a really strong push towards conformity. If you're at all unusual it's pretty isolating. Some people will help you if you're in trouble but you'll never make anything resembling friendships.

If you grow up in the community, your direct family are pretty accepted within it, and there are other people within your age range, it's highly unlikely to be a lonely experience. in my case we had two neighbours that got married around the same time as my parents but neither could conceive, which both resulted in no other kids in the area at all and a kind of strained awkwardness between them and my parents

I lived on a kibbutz after college. It has its own set of problems. The closer you live to people, the more politics enters the picture. The less money there is to go around, the more that politics revolves around the relatively financially trivial. You can't force people to like each other just because they live in close proximity.

The problem isn't finding people with shared interests and values, it's in building real-world (not Internet-based) communities around them.

The kibbutz (or kibbutz inspired) idea my friends and I have discussed is more about finding people you like and then forming it. I can definitely see it having downsides if you’re not actively involved in its formation.

That’s great, but then you’ll start backsliding on the “diversity and inclusion” scale. I think it’s a constant trade off. As individuals with preferences, humans can’t help but form in groups and out groups.

Making everyone miserable is not the kind of diversity and inclusion we want. It's only acceptable in the sense of "if I'm a miserable out group, the happy in group don't deserve to be happy", which is maybe fairness but not a good goal state. D&I means forming good relations across boundaries, not arbitrary relations.

I still have some hope for something like seasteading to do this in the next 10-20 years (before Mars/Luna are viable options). In the interim I'm trying something vaguely like it in PR.

I live in a Christian community focused on in-common living.

Community requires commitment to stick things through. Having a common vision is important. More important is having the commitment to sticking with it, and relationship tools to help keep friendships intact in tough times.

Some key tools:

-right speech: no gossip, slander, or negative humor

-forgiveness: saying I’m sorry when offending or harming someone, and having real forgiveness

-making agreements: specific commitments that, when times are tough or good, the group can rally around.

Where is your community located?

An what happens when someone violates those principles, especially if the violator is the minister or otherwise powerful?

As he said, forgiveness and reconciliation. Sticking with it. I’m sure there’s limits and it’s often easy to tell when someone is sorry and trying to change versus taking advantage.

I second someguydave's comment. More broadly, could you tell us a bit about your community? What principles is it based on? What is the lifestyle there? How is it organized? What do people do there? Is it open to newcomers?

Out of curiosity, is it a community inspired by ‘The Benedict Option’?

People living interdependently in close proximity to one another is characteristic of most people throughout human history. It has never been perfect, but when you throw it out, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Interesting that the my image is the exact opposite.

Downtown no one talks to each other. They live in fancy apartment buildings and go out to their events.

In the Suburbs, neighbors have BBQs, block parties. I knew all the people around the house when I lived in the suburbs. The Garys next door with their bull dog and their daughter Diane living in a detached apartment above the garage. The Alberas with a farm in their backyard. The Kumbs with their kids Gary and Janice and a pool. The Ryans who mister Ryan would always ask me to rub his back and his daughters Kim and Nannet were both my babysitter at one point or another. The Caldwells with their 5 kids Brian, John, Wendy and 2 too small for me to have played with. The Bargayos with Leah and Laura. I can name at least 7 more families.

Since that time living in apartments in cities I've never made friends with a single neighbor.

For most of my life that's been the stereotype. There are plenty of movies about people knowing each other in an ET/Spielberg movie style suburban neighborhood vs the cold hearted city.

I think you may be confusing being a child/adult (or having kids/childless) vs suburb/urban. We live in an apartment in an urban but not central part of Berlin and we know plenty of neighbours, especially since having kids.

How many childless adults do you remember taking part of these suburban activities/communities?

Not the parent commenter, but in my experience, lots. When we had block parties, the whole block, non-children-having folks and kids alike, was involved. In fact, the parents in particular seemed to really enjoy these BBQ times because they got to have conversations with other adults while the collective kids of the neighborhood ran around doing their own thing. It was fun!

Opposite anecdata. Lived in the suburb until my 20s, never had a block BBQ party, my parents would sometimes have a chat with the neighbour but that's about it. Living now on the subway line in a major city, can hop in to get to see friends all the time, walk to the groceries, community center, etc. Don't talk to neighbour either, but I feel much more part of a community living in close proximity with people.

My experience is exactly the same. I've lived in several urban centers now as an adult, and I'm planning on moving to the suburbs or exurbs once I can afford to buy a house. Honestly the only people I've met in the city are the folks from Church, but all the ones with kids are moving out too. Cities feel super atomized to me right now, where folks really have little in common beyond shared misery in high housing costs.

Obviously this is just my experience.

I work in a family farm a few weeks a year and if you head into town to pick up some things you gotta budget time for making chitchat with people, and it was the same deal when living in a built up walkable urban neighbourhood in Montreal, and in Vancouver, you see and interact with the same people every day.

Now I live in a neighbourhood with many immigrants from Africa, and they're super tight knit, in terms of their involvement in the community they put anything else I've seen to shame, excepting maybe when I was staying in a small villages in Indonesia and Mexico back in my surfing days.

But, like many, I grew up in a generic cookie cutter suburb and it was pretty dismal as far as community involvement and interaction goes. People get in their cars and drive away.

> Suburbs are structurally lonely

I think it's a factor, but not a major one. Look at Tokyo, for example, which is probably very close to an ideal urban living arrangement in terms of density/comfort. Yet Japan also has a huge problem with "loneliness epidemic", from hikikomori to kodokushi.

I think the biggest factor is what grandpa Marx identified hundred and fifty years ago: human alienation is an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself.

There's tons of literature on this, e.g. see links below, but many people seem to be afraid to even read the arguments, let alone engage.

https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php

https://isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation

In my experience cities are vastly more lonely and isolating than suburbs and rural communities.

In rural communities everyone knows everyone. People talk to each other. People help each other.

This is especially true in Seattle. The Seattle Freeze is very real.

My armchair opinion is that the middle ground / something missing is characterized by a few things that used to be somewhat fulfilled by the workplace:

1. Tribal feel: 100-200 individuals not your immediate family.

2. Pursuit of some shared goal. When we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, this was probably as simple as shared survival.

3. Forced interaction and cooperation. If you can flee at the first sign of annoyance, you're never required to develop deeper bonds with the people from #1 if they are even remotely irritating to you and can just opt out of getting to know them.

Work probably fulfilled a lot of these requirements when people stayed at one place for decades. Even if people came and went, there was some stable group of people that you were stuck with in pursuit of a common goal. I suspect this held even in the face of industrialization and the formation of massive corporations. Now, though, people move around so much that the workplace feels extremely impermanent and fleeting. In some ways I think that may be a good thing. The "community" you get from work has probably always been false. But I believe it did serve a psychological need, and as that's degraded I think you're seeing a lot of unhappiness result.

Good insight, I agree the workplace is that sort of extended tribe, and as people switch jobs more frequently its replaced with a more vague 'industry' concept that is too diffuse and large to fulfill that smaller tribal association.

The need for and convenience of cars. Public transport promotes community, but cars isolate - in particular children. I daren't let my daughter ride down the lane on her bike, so she's trapped.

I’ve experienced a hell of a lot more community in the give and take of rides across suburbia than on transit, where 95% of interactions are someone asking for money.

Blaming it on community planning might be pointing to the symptom rather than the problem. I’d hazard that the real problem is intolerance born from individualism. In the American context we have a society such that people both clutch and invent their own rights while insisting that all others respect and maintaining them. This would be fine if tolerance actually existed and the relationship were bidirectional. The relationship has proven to be unidirectional in a lot of cases which has led to the polarity that we are experiencing. Abstracting further, I’d say that these situations could largely be reduced to groups of people misunderstanding the significance of difference between tolerance and affirmation.

Last words: yes it is simplistic and reductionist to boil it down like this. I’m comfortable with staging the problem like this because we aren’t considering an ultra specific case here that requires precision.

I don’t see how the rise of digital media and independence somehow lead to disassembled communities.

A lot of people argue that the internet takes us away from human connection but I disagree. If anything it brings people closer by allowing individuals to join communities that they could never have assembled with their reach in the physical world.

Furthermore if an individual prefers to be on their device over talking to people near them, it’s probably because they wouldn’t talk to those people to begin with. Or that they feel so comfortable in the community they’ve already built that they don’t care to expand (a problem that exists with or without technology).

I've recently been looking for a house cleaner and decorator as I have a hard time keeping up due to working busy hours at my job (and I really hate cleaning & decorating).

I was chatting with a friend of mine who needs a web application for something he volunteers for. We came up with the bright idea that he would clean my place then do the interior design. At the same time he's working on that, I work on his app.

We sort of organically discovered a business contract and so far it has been working great. He enjoys cleaning and design and I like programming and both of us either hate or can't do the other. In addition, it gets us both off our asses as we're generally working on these things at times that we would normally be watching TV or doing other useless things. So far it feels win-win-win and it gets to the heart of what you were talking about - how to fill in that community between hired help and your close family. The alternative was that both of us spent our own money for these services and probably end up not as happy with what we got.

There is a skill to running a friend group which regularly does activities together. It isn't a particularly deep or study-intensive skill, but there are things to learn about how to communicate about logistics and activity-preferences. Once you learn that and are able to practice it, having friends becomes much easier.

It does however also depend on meeting people who also have a reasonable level of logistical and calendar-management skill. Not everyone has this skill and not everyone prioritizes exercising it. If you have contacts who cannot unambiguously agree to meet you at a particular time at a particular pizza restaurant, you have to be willing to search out different contacts who do have sufficient skill, caring, and resources.

The non-PC argument here is that diversity directly opposed to community, and I think there's some truth to it. If everyone in an area has lived there for their entire lives, it doesn't really matter if it's apartment buildings, a small high-density European-style town, or suburbs. If the rate of migration in/out is low enough, newcomers assimilate, assuming the society is welcoming and they interact.

There are lots of places where immigration (both within the US and internationally) is very high, and where people often only intend to live for a while for work, so there's not much in the way of community, and people don't make much of an investment in building institutions (beyond their immediate household and workplace).

It's ok in technology or other well-connected professions (because I probably care more about my interactions online and at conferences with the ~200 or so security people from around the world that I closely follow, vs. anyone from my home town or where I've ever physically lived), but for anyone else, it probably sucks a lot. The only culture I've ever seen which seems to deal with that level of constant migration in anything approaching a functional way is the military, and there it's due to an overarching identity, lots of highly artificial forms of identity (the "unit", rivalries, etc.), and lots of traditions and institutions actively encouraged.

If this is true, I’d expect loneliness to be higher in diverse urban centers and lower in rural areas. Is this the case? Anecdotally I’ve notice the opposite... that diverse urban areas are less lonely and isolating.

Yes. The stereotype of a big city is that it’s cold and impersonal (and it can be).

On the other hand, it affords you more opportunity to meet people of like-mind.

Loneliness can be pretty bad in rural areas if you don’t fit into the community.

Personally, I find life in my culturally diverse city lonelier than when I lived in a small rural town. If only because most people would say hi or smile even if you didn't know them as they walk past you. In the city you tend get glared at or even have people act open hostile as they walk by. People seem to be less open to random conversation or just meeting strangers in general. More people around doesn't always equal less loneliness.

> If only because most people would say hi or smile even if you didn't know them as they walk past you.

Ooh, this is highly dependent on the city you live in, and the neighborhood you're in. I've visited many/lived in a few cities in the U.S. and Canada, and hi/smiles are actually not that uncommon, especially in the midwest, the south and in Canada.

It depends on the context of course. No one will greet you on a busy street corner, or at rush hour. But if you're walking your dog, at a bus shelter, or casually strolling in a quieter neighborhood with low pedestrian traffic, your chances are higher. It's just human nature.

Also, a great opportunity for human connection is just talking to cashiers, i.e. folks in retail that you come across. Surveys have shown that though these interactions are brief and fleeting, they can do a lot to alleviate loneliness.

I'll agree it depends on location. I'm comparing vancouver to other small towns in bc where i've lived.

And after thinking a little more on things i'm not too sure how I really feel now. Before I moved to the city I had a decent group of friends I was close with and I.knew enough people I could usually find someone to talk to or hang out with.

In the city i've met lots of different people, some i've gotten fairly close with then drifted apart from, others that I still feel close with nut don't see or talk to very often but never really friends like I had before or that feeling of knowing the people around.

But, after you mention the stuff about talking to cashiers or other people I started to think about all the people I do actually know and talk to on a regular basis, who's lives I know a fair bit about and there's lots of them. Just about every store or coffee shop or similar place I go regularly there's people I know fairly well and have conversations with. There's people on the bus I see most days i'll sit and talk with, and I even end up talking with random strangers a fair bit.

But they still just come and go, they're not really friends i've never really felt since i've lived out here that there were people I could just call up or that I knew would just be around.

I'm sorry I'm not sure where i'm going with this. This all has just made me think a lot about different things and people from over the years.

I've heard from Vancouverite friends that there has been a steady decline in common courtesies since the 80s, so you're not alone in feeling that. I've also had friends from Toronto who've found Vancouver socially somewhat cold, so much so that they've moved back to TO. Seattle (similar weather/people, i.e. cloudy weather, granola folks) is also well-known for the "Seattle Freeze" (where it's hard to connect with people), and I wonder if there's a similar phenomenon in Vancouver.

I hear you though. Finding a group of close friends you can hang out with is indeed a hard thing in most cities, and it takes a combination of effort and luck. One of the prerequisites of friendship is repeated personal exposure to each other, and cities do make that harder because they allow a range of individual lifestyles that are highly decorrelated. Unlike in smaller communities, in the city everybody does their own thing, and there are few central places where everyone gets together and meets regularly (there are a few exceptions, like continuing education classes, houses of worship, etc. I would recommend trying something along those lines).

Here's what I found though:

Friendships often start with getting to know 1-2 people, and it would help greatly if these people are sociable or are people connectors. If you can create a context where you can repeatedly meet with 1-2 people that you have something in common with (don't wait for invitations, reach out and invite them to stuff--there's a good chance that they will accept!), that will help to develop closer relationships, and from there, you will be slowly brought into existing networks. That's how it happened for me. I met this random couple who invited me to dinner, and then I invited them to dinner, and I gradually got to meet their friends and their friends' friends. It does take a bit of luck to find the right connections, but start small, and then try-and-fail a few times. Understand that there's a bit of randomness involved and accept that the process is not going to be as easy as in grade school, so sow your seeds widely and be prepared to say "yes" when opportunities arise, and to pick yourself up when people disappoint you. Best of luck.

I found living in a small town lonelier because all those small indications of friendliness were not genuinely similar to myself. Ie. Meeting my eyes and saying hello implies you actually know me or have much to do with me. Generally this wouldn’t be the case, as my hobbies have little overlap with small town life. I felt uncomfortable and lonely. In a city there’s no pretending or pretense that random strangers want to bond, and I can find my own group through meetups.

> There are lots of places where immigration (both within the US and internationally) is very high, and where people often only intend to live for a while for work

What you're describing doesn't really fit with the broader concept of immigration, which has more of a long-duration/permanent settlement aspect to it. But, I can certainly imagine that any place which is just a temporary destination for people would have a hard time becoming a real community.

Transience and migration are probably a separate issue from immigration-from-lots-of-diverse-backgrounds, but you often get both together.

The coastal/successful/etc. cities have these problems leading to lack of community; there are other parts of the US (and world, presumably) where it's just despair due to economic and social collapse. Not knowing/caring who my neighbors are in a big city, but we're all doing economically OK, is probably preferable to a town where everyone has been together for a long time but half of the people are unemployed, half are opiate addicts, and no one really has much hope for the future.

> The non-PC argument

If you want to have a reasonable discussion about these things, don't front-load your argument with labeling people who disagree with you in such broad, and frankly wrong, strokes.

Sadly we have to today. For example, I said that we shouldn't be forcing the idea that people should attend college. Rather we need to tell people to attend vocational schools to replace those who are retiring. I made the argument that the vocational schools will get you a good wage. You'll help the community. I was promptly down voted.

"Non-PC" is often used as a dogwhistle to bring back white racial communities. I stop reading when such nationalism is even hinted at.

Internal migration in the U.S. has fallen consistently since the 1980s; more people today live closer to where they were born than they did in previous decades. And in most places in the U.S. -- certainly, the places captured by this loneliness survey -- the number of brand-new migrants is tiny relative to that population of people who were born there.

While I do agree with your thought that transient communities are more lonely because they have no true community. I disagree in that I think diversity has powerful mechanisms that breeds unique experiences, which is arguably the universal joy of life.

The thesis from Sebastian Junger’s book Tribes esplains it best: when a community has a common stressor, that strengthens the social cohesion. An incredible point made was that Israel has the lowest sucide rate of all the third world countries, and guess what he attributes it to? Mandatory draft. The common stressor that every single countryman can empathasize with each other about is war. While it sounds depressing it serves as an example, do we as a nation, state, city or even neighborhood have a common stressor with each other? Antecdotally I find it challenging to think of something like that for my community.

I'd like to read that book someday, but doesn't "stressor" seems too negative. Why not the more neutral "cause"?

Because "cause" means common goal. While stressor means "something everybody has to worry about / pass through".

Hardship brings people together.

Right. People can adapt to and some even thrive on stress. What people cant handle is feeling useless or without purpose.

> ...do we as a nation, state, city or even neighborhood have a common stressor with each other?

I think "common stressor" might be too broad a term. We certainly do have a common stressor: make more money (leaving aside Banks' adage "Money is a sign of poverty"). Except we've evolved narratives around money that tend towards zero sum outlooks, and that doesn't bind us together, so that isn't the kind of common stressor you are describing.

The factor that appears to set apart the kind of common stressor you describe is an empathic quality experiencing the stressor together imbues upon the group. This is why external stressors are so quickly seized upon by politicians of all stripes (not just formal politicians, but also managers). Why the group cannot bond over overcoming common human frailties and insecurities ("will I be liked" type insecurities), is an open challenge.

I think you're conflating "common stressor" with the aspiration of being financially stable, which you're right is a zero-sum game. Your argument breaks down because its relative and finite. Money is finite and having more money than my peer is relative. If every single one of us in the country goes through the exact same experience (ex mandatory draft) then there is no relativism.

I agree in the open challenge but i'm bullish on that challenge being pinned to an objective metric and not relative. If there is something truly that every single American experiences at some point in their life that is adverse in its' nature, then that is the common stressor and that is exactly what would bond us all, lowering lonliness, and depression.

VERY small communities do have this, which is also in Tribes. For example very poverty-stricken neighborhoods in say Baltimore all go through similar hardships. They are among the least alone people, mentally because of this shared hardship (but also because they rely on eachother but that's another point).

>An incredible point made was that Israel has the lowest suicide rate of all the third world countries, and guess what he attributes it to? Mandatory draft. The common stressor that every single countryman can empathasize with each other about is war.

The second part would explain bigger empathy/cohesion (the have a common stressor), not less suicide.

I'd say it's rather that the draft can make you see often BS personal problems people tend blow out of all proportion for what they are (in other words, it "hardens" you). If you have to be accountable to a sergeant, wake up every morning at 6', do drills, have to learn to work and live with others whether they fit your echo bubble or not, etc, for a year or two, you get a taste of more stuff that awaits in the real/working word than you'd get starting from being overprotected and spoiled by your parents all your life.

How would that help? If the draft makes you hard enough for reala world without killing you, why doesn't the real world make you hard enough for real world without killing you? These "overprotecting parents" are still around in the real world (or not), so what's the difference?

>why doesn't the real world make you hard enough for real world without killing you

Obviously because the army does that in a controlled environment, where the expectations are already set for what you'll get (you're going there knowing it will be so and so -- and even at that there's army suicides, through much more rare considering the kind of stressor it is).

Whereas overprotected people can go into the adult world thinking they will crush it and be rich, famous, free of drudgery, have the perfect love life, marriage, or whatever just for showing up (or just for "working hard").

You also do that along with others around your age, and you all go through the exact same shit, and are at it together 24/7.

In short, the army emphasizes that you're not a precious snowflake from day one, you're just one of many in the camp, so you have time to soak this message in. Whereas in your "real life", failure will hit you hard, and it will feel like it's a personal failure.

And, last but not least, you also know it's gonna end in 1 year or so, and everything's compartmentalized. It's not your life. Whereas a failure to get that dream job and having to scrap by can feel like your life (in toto) being a failure.

>These "overprotecting parents" are still around in the real world (or not), so what's the difference?

The role of the "overprotecting parents" ends both when you enter the camp or the adult world. They can't fix things for you in either case (e.g. fix your broken job dreams or love life).

I could easily make the opposite argument: after being forced to spend so much time with $OUTGROUP and (pretend) to tolerate them, you want nothing whatsoever to do with them again.

Basically good friends makes good neighbors.

Given that both your argument and mine seams reasonable, is there some test we can do to figure out which belief is going to pay rent?

It's interesting that Junger points to a mandatory draft as an example. Two counterpoints to that would be South Korea and Lithuania, which also have mandatory drafts and high rates of suicide per capita.

It seems to me that both you and the OP are correct.

SK has a high level of social cohesion because of the threats it is under (militarily: NK, economically: China, Japan). Military service also creates a temporarily high degree of social cohesion among conscripts.

Yet, it also has a high rate of suicide due to it being a competitive, high-pressure society.

I'm guessing high social cohesion does not in itself lead to lower suicide rates.

Suicide by the elderly is one of the big reasons why South Korea has a high suicide rate.

Sadly, I heard it might be because the old do not want to be a further stress on families in poverty. So maybe it is due to their high cohesion, very collective culture.

Did he account for a religious population which thinks that suicide is a major sin?

Israel is one of the least religious countries on earth. A much smaller percentage of Israelis are religious than are Americans or the populace of Muslim nations, and Christianity and Islam also generally consider suicide a sin.

> Israel is one of the least religious countries on earth

Not according to this Gallup poll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

According to that Israel is less religious than the US, and is among the least religious countries (top 30%) - looks like OP stretched a bit but not by much.

Huh… well, according to this Gallup poll Israel is indeed "Among the Least Religious Countries in the World":

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-china-among-least-religious-n...

Why do they enable their ridiculous orthodox subset?

Most israelies aren't really religious, in the sense that religion guide their actions in a meaningful way .

I'd consider 51% to be a significant chunk of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

Relative to the others it is low. Furthermore that's a 10 year old poll this one is more recent and shows it closer to 42%

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irrelig...

Just an anecdote

I live in SF and it has plenty to do. But last night despite aching to get out of the house I couldn’t.

I don’t have a ton of friends out here and the ones I have are frequently busy with their own projects/life

The typical offered advice is join meetups to meet new people, but a search of meetups going on last night were only for events where you drink heavily (a weekly beer pong tournament for backpackers, that I’ve been to twice only to find it’s a huge rip off and nobody shows up) or for niche groups I don’t fall into (LGBTQA+, Elderly, meetups for specific racial groups)

Every now and then I’ll go out anyway, just go to a bar and see what happens, and maybe 30% of the time I’ll meet cool people, but those relationships never blossom. I’ll text them after and then later in the week to hang that next weekend, and lo and behold they’re busy

I do clubs/exercise classes during the week, but so far, those haven’t blossomed into outside of club/class relationships. Every now and then I’ll ask if it feels right.

My roommates are cool and my age, but much more of the “finance bro” type. I don’t mind that so every now and then I’ll suggest we grab a beer or watch basketball (they’re really into the Warriors) but they usually pass. I think they can tell I’m not quite like them.

In terms of dating, dating in SF is kind of a crap shoot, What with there being something like 2 guys for every girl out here (thank you tech), but when I do get a match on tinder and go on a date it usually goes well, then we’ll go on a few more then I inevitably end up ghosted, or call it off if it’s not working from the other end

Loneliness exists inspite of our efforts not because of it.

I’ve been in this city for over a year now, and despite all of the effort, my friend group hasn’t grown

FWIW, it took me a year and a half to establish a friendgroup in SF, and I didn't find it by meetsups or recreation, just by pure happenchance of finding someone who WILL reply to your texts, and welcome you into their friendgroup. I also find friendgroups in SF to be fairly surface level, OR vibrant/intense but short-lived.

That said, roommates are also a great way to expand your friend circle, though not all roommates are looking for that, and sometimes it takes a few different pairings to finally "click," with your roommates.

I think drop-in sports/intramurual leagues are good for this, though I could be wrong. Join a kickball league or something maybe :)

So, drinking can be problematic, but I highly recommend Karaoke, and ... moderate drinking.

You may cringe at the idea, but it’s worked for me in the past and can be a way to enjoy drinks with complete strangers with whom you have nothing else in common and often without planning ahead.

When I had no friend group, I created a small one around Karaoke night - with complete strangers. I imagine the same might work for other things like pool.

I have many times been in the same situation, and after talking to my friends they have as well. I decided to try to solve the problem with a new type of social network. You may find this interesting: https://peapods.com

I'm curious to see if there are any statistics on loneliness and race. I often see the black people in my city sitting on porches and benches in the evening and chatting with each other; it seems like a very nice community and something I wish I could have been a part of growing up. Same thing with the Latino community: in my mom's country, people still practice an open door policy among friends, still gather around the TV and scream at the sports players for hours. There is no white community so to speak: people today would probably say that's racist. But I think a lot of white people remember the "it takes a village" days, the days before we decided to demonize anyone that let their kids out of their sight, when television was just becoming affordable.

I’ve lived in the US my entire life, and I’ve come to feel like American society is one big competition to be more well-off than everyone else. Does anyone else feel this way?

I think this is why I have difficulty making friends.

I think it is the type of people in your circles. Social elite, east coast, etc is where I hear that sentiment.

I grew up poor. The only one-upsmanship I recall was in story telling or joking.

Now as a well off adult, my social circle is much smaller, and since I just moved, it is about zero, but I've not seen this competition from my cohorts at work.

This is the same thing I experienced and I grew up in a wealthy east coast neighborhood. The parents were more competitive than their kids. Since high school, all of my close friends have come from wildly different economic positions.

Not at all. I, someone that too has lived in the US my entire life, have never seen any such competition.

Humans have always had a preoccupation with their status. In capitalistic you do this largely through the accumulation and display of material wealth. This is pathological. If you look a poor or pre-capitalist societies, the only way people can accumulate status is by being useful, and by being a good guy.

I do actually feel pretty well settled with some sense of community where I live (Montreal), but one thing I've noticed while applying to jobs is how many jobs are super aggressive about relocating me to NYC or the bay area. They almost don't listen to me when I say I'm not leaving Montreal, like I need some sort of excuse to want to actually stay where I currently am.

It's probably more a demand that the new hire be on-site than it is an inability to claim the perfect excuse for remaining in Montreal.

it’s called recruiting.

The atomisation of society goes back a long way, however, I believe that the era of atomised society we now know was ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher.

What changed then was stranger danger. With schemes such as 'Neighbourhood Watch' (in the UK) people saw strangers as potential threats, just there wanting to break in, steal the VHS player and sell it for heroin. Strangers were not welcomed as visitors, that was not the default.

Much else happened then to destroy community and make it so everyone was out for themselves. In the UK we also had the privatisation of social housing and the privatisation of public transport. The car became king and the poor could end up being those terrifying homeless types that nobody likes to see but take for granted nowadays.

In generations before Thatcher/Reagan there was TV and that apparently destroyed community. True we might not have been going down to the church hall to have a dance or to play board games, however, at least with TV families watched programmes together in the front room. Plus with only a few channels you could talk about TV with people in ways you can't today. There was still a national conversation, even if it was about what David Attenborough had brought to the small screen the night before.

Community is the enemy of consumerism, if people are sat in a public space enjoying company then they are not in their cars going to shops and buying commodity entertainment. But consumerism has kind of died too, people do not shop like they used to as any mall can testify to.

Despite everything that is wrong people are innately wanting to have friends and be part of a community. This will never go away, even if those needs are currently met by proxies in social media and opioids. Although Thatcher grade leaders may want everyone divided and living in an atomised society, human nature will win in the end. Long live the revolution.

Thatcher, a despicable witch, once said: "they [the homeless etc] are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first"[0]

A Selfish Gene, atomistic, self-centered worldview, one which precludes all prediction, modelling and appreciation of collective behaviour of the kind that emerges in complex networks like society.

It's a simplistic, neat, well-partitioned model that's easy to communicate and understand, and it totally fails to model real life.

[0] https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689

People have been ruminating on friendship for a long time. Here is an essay from Samuel Johnson(the guy that wrote the dictionary), 1758. https://www.thoughtco.com/decay-of-friendship-by-samuel-john...

It's easy to point out that this is caused by 'the internet' or 'modern technology' replacing the need for human interaction. We feel less alone but are more selective about our friends, live in smaller echo chambers.

In meatspace there's this thing where you want people to like you if you meet them, possibly enforced by the fact that someone might punch you if you rile them up. On the internet we select our own groups and then with group dynamics we try to be the 'cool kid' which results in maybe racist in-jokes or maybe in radicalization.

I really have no idea how to even begin solving this and if this has to be solved at all. It seems everyone's stance is hardening and we're drawing starker 'us vs them' lines or just aren't interested in others' plights as we can just select the small subset of people that fit with our current mindset.

The core issue IMO is resilience to rejection and the work required for friendships.

Not everyone wants to be your friend, and it's easier to learn that from the internet, not only because of hate, but even casual twitter dunks.

When you do find someone you click with, it's work on both sides, and if both sides don't put in some work, it deteriorates.

The easy way out is a lot of shallow interactions that require little work where no one really gets to know you. Rejection doesn't sting as much because you can just go change a username.

Personally I think this article gets it wrong: people are already radicalized and seem lonely because they don't find any other radicals to hang out with. People who turn to angry politics just to fill the shallow social interaction checkbox are probably a small percentage of lonely people.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment:

Is there any hard data that proves that people are becoming increasingly tribal?

Perhaps the number of radicals is the same like it was 20 years ago, but the internet and social media now give those radicals a voice. Because of this it feels like we are becoming increasingly tribal, when in reality we're not.

Similar to how the crime rates are going down, but most folks think that it's getting worse.

For us who spend a large portion of our time on internet, it certainly feels like everything is crashing down.

The number of radicals might be the same, but the internet gives these existing radicals a much easier way to establish communities than before. As far as I know it's an accepted fact within social psychology that groupthink causes radicals to become more radical, which could suggest that even if the number of radicals is the same, these same radicals might become more extreme.

In the past without electronics there were multiple large groups radical enought to be violent, organize loud disturbing marches, attacked those organizing marches and so on.

I am not sure things were calmer back then.

I definitely doubt things were calmer in general, because as you say, there are a bunch of examples of the opposite. However, an interesting point is that the groups in question, in the past, were somewhat restricted to their geographical location, and were in many cases dependend on organized leadership. As I see it, these two points are less of a challenge now.

I believe there is data that shows that online interactions lead to more extreme opinion. You’re seeing this now with racist groups... it’s easy to talk about this stuff and absorb the propaganda in the privacy of your own home, while in public it’s harder to speak of it or interact with the true believers.

That makes sense to me as well, simply along the lines of the concept of "Skin in the game". With the internet, the amount of risk you take to "be yourself" is small to nil, where in the real world there can be immediate and large consequences to you and your family.

In meat space, where are the places to meet? Where are the weekly town celebrations, or the courtyard everyone retires to? Everything is locked up by money.

Starbucks is not locked up by money. On my recent trip to the US, I encountered quite a few (homeless) people in there who came to charge their phones and they got ice water for free.

Starbucks is a very interesting part of this.

It’s success in the 90’s and early 2000’s was largely due to it being a “third place” — the place where people would gather outside of home or the office. It was very social. Very much like the way the corner bar used to serve the same function in decades past.

But then Starbucks decided it didn’t want people hanging around in the stores so much, in order to make room for more merchandise and to increase churn. They were reconfigured to make people go in, spend their money, and then just go. Or worse — use the drive-thru.

I actually met the person responsible for the furniture at Starbucks stores. This was right about when the stores got rid of comfy, squishy chairs and went to those tall, spindly metal backless stools. I asked her how anyone was supposed to sit comfortably on those things for a long period of time. She didn’t have an answer, and then the corporate PR guy stepped in.

She was a small person of Asian descent and, IMO, had designed Starbucks’ furniture for herself and her circle, which fit nicely into Starbucks’ density goals. To me, it seemed like it never occurred to her that people of statistically average size, or even fat people, should be made comfortable in the stores.

If you were a frequent visitor of Starbucks in the 00’s, you’ll remember it was right about then that the coffee chain went from being a neighborhood fixture to just another corporate outpost.

>She was a small person of Asian descent and, IMO, had designed Starbucks’ furniture for herself and her circle, which fit nicely into Starbucks’ density goals. To me, it seemed like it never occurred to her that people of statistically average size, or even fat people, should be made comfortable in the stores.

Could you elaborate more on why you believe this? Seems a little out there to me.

Indeed. Also where are the times and opportunities to meet? Cities have become poorly walkable aka very hostile to pedestrian. The only encouraged social interaction is with shop/cafe' employees - and they are not allowed to have any meaningful conversation with customers.

Is there anything we can do to stop being lonely?

Over the past few months, I have made great progress on developing habits to fight my depression. I wake up very early, hike, work on my side projects, and go to communal hacker spaces sometimes.

However, I and many others still feel very lonely, it's like we all live in seperate bubbles and can't connect deeply. I have no idea what causes this divide. Have humans always felt like this?

Overcoming depression is a real struggle; I'm glad you're making progress.

Sounds like you're doing some great things!

    > I have no idea what causes this divide. Have humans always felt like this?

I don't know for sure but I feel very strongly that the answer is "yes."

If I'm correct... for the life of me, I cannot decide whether that's a comforting thought or not! Is it?

I make friends pretty easily but it's tough to really make those deeper connections. It takes years.

Do you ever hike with others? As I get older I feel like team sports and physical stuff like hiking with friends really brings me closer to them. Something about the shared challenge, I guess? Do you feel that way?

Are you in therapy? It can be very helpful for learning to develop change strategies and coping mechanisms. Depression is particularly hard to deal with alone, and your problems may be very specific.

Arthur: "All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's something big and sinister going on in the world."

Slartibartfast: "No, that's perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe gets that."

In all seriousness, the solution depends on the kind of loneliness you want to cure: if it's just social loneliness then you can join a choir or a sports team or a club or something. If, however, you have the deep existential loneliness then you're in trouble. You have to go on a quest of some sort, seek a vision, find a Faith, renew yourself somehow. Sincerity and persistence.

That's amazing! I think people might have misconceptions over how many deep relationships you're supposed to have. I used to feel lonely that I didn't know enough people who had similar interests or passions as me.

Something that helped me the most was learning how to love myself and I'm still learning. I used to hate being alone in my own company. I would have a lot of anxiety.

Someone told me to do the things you love and you'll meet people along the way. This has worked wonders for me. The most important thing for me was learning how to be vulnerable, open, and to trust people again.

After that it was figuring out what I actually wanted with my life. It helped me realize that I didn't want relationships with people who brought me down and it helped me figure out who I did want to have relationships with.

I don't think it takes that many relationships to feel fulfilled. But I do feel that as we get older, we have less room for relationships in our lives, and culture tries to tell us otherwise when it's simply not true.

I feel like I've gotten to the point where I can't have any more deep relationships, any additional responsibilities to the ones that I already have. I think deep relationships, the ones that fulfill you, come with responsibilities, and thus you can only have a limited number of them.

I find it strange that I have friends, but I'm always feel alone. I live in a huge city, work has good people that are genuine friends outside of work, but I always feel alone. Everyone talks about meetups and conferences, but I find them to be extremely superficial interactions.

I also only ever see people outside work for social purposes about once a month or two. I've tried going out more, but nothing really ever happens.

I don't get being social/

I think most "friendships" with people you work with feel like this. Try spending time with people you don't work with.

I have friends by the sheer fact that we went to HS together and ended up in the city.

If I didn't have that, I would have no friends at all. How the hell do people make them?

Personally, I went consistently to specific social groups regularly (for months at a time). Eventually you get to know other regulars and one or two or more will become a bond with you. Then invite them out for lunches or dinners. Suddenly you unofficially have a lunch with them weekly or every other week. Maybe group chats over coffee. Texting about work. Etc.

I made my lifelong friends playing competitive magic the gathering in college. It was thousands of hours together, playtesting, improving our game, trading, going to tournments across Europe... All done on a tiny budget, which created hardship, which helped the bonding. It would be impossible to expend anywhere near this level of time commitment while holding a full-time job BTW.

Find some way to engage with your hobbies publicly. Hell, even go to a (preferably small) bar you like alone and talk to people.

All my friends moved out of the city I was in and that's how I supplemented my social life until it was time for me to move on as well.

> Everyone talks about meetups and conferences, but I find them to be extremely superficial interactions.

Even here people mention finding meetups in a city. I'm with you here.. I used to visit conventions and such as well as had other random meetups with people who have similar hobbies and interests and even though I had a decent time, I always felt out of place and like an outsider. So these interactions never felt particularly meaningful, and there was no deeper connection going on. Often these events just left me more depressed than I was before going.

There is a good reason why people are escaping small towns. If you are even a little bit outside of the mold, such as being into reading instead of cars as a guy, you will be ostracized by a huge part of the community. And may God have mercy on you if you are into the really weird stuff, such as liking programming, tinkering with electronics or anime.

You just need to make up for the weirdness by hosting a BBQ every now and again. No one's gonna be made at you if you fill them up with a bit of meat and beer ;)

I don’t think this has anything to do with small town vs big cities. Loneliness is a problem also in big cities.

I do not believe people are leaving small towns because they can't watch anime or whatever.

They're leaving small towns because small towns are not the place to look for education and work.

Idk what constitutes small in your book. I grew up in towns of around 10k to 23k people. Had no trouble being a nerd, playing video games, reading, watching anime, coding.

Now I'm in a city an order of magnitude larger, and more lonely than I've ever been before.

I grew up near a town of 1200 that was 30km from a city of 20k. I was considered odd for enjoying reading but luckily went to a feeder high school of 1500 kids so met up with fellow geeks.

10k is not a small town.

Ok, sure.

Did you leave the vicinity of that small town because you were into reading?

Or did you leave it to get an education & a job?

Both. People ask if I will return to my home town when I retire and “hell no” is always my response.

The oneupmanship going on here is ridiculous. Both towns are incredibly small to me.

I lived in the Northeast Megalopolis for a bit before moving to Germany.

In the eastern US, I didn’t know anyone prior to moving there for work. The city was very anonymous, to put it lightly. The only people talking to you on the street were homeless.

I’d go to meetups and flit around, but it was hard to put down roots where everyone was friends with their college buddies from MIT or Harvard. The school I went to in the West isn’t famous for anything other than football.

I moved to Germany figuring that I didn’t have much to lose, being deracinated and all. It’s strange how many more people try to talk to you on the street. Mostly drivers and older ladies asking for directions.

Since I don’t speak German, I’m very isolated now though. It’s easy to discount interactions with service workers at CVS or Whole Foods when you’re going through them, but I think that it’s the sort of foundational thing even loners like myself need.

I was going to make an example out of these interactions..

My experience is that in smaller towns you see the same store clerks, mailmen, and other service people again and again and they will recognize you. Some will have a little chat with you, and you get to talk about your life every once in a while, even if just a little. That kind of daily interaction is a heck of a lot more than one might have living in the isolation of a big city where the same service people are too busy serving too many faces to really recognize or chat with you. For a total loner, it could mean a lot.

Are you taking lessons in German? Besides teaching you important skills, those are great opportunities to meet a huge variety of people in a somewhat similar situation.

Escaping? There is a small town resurgence going on around here. I imagine it is being mostly driven by the excessive cost of housing in larger centres, but with that comes people with wider interests.

Do people on HN really believe that people in smaller towns don’t read?

Yeah, and kinda shows their age wrt "haha this guy uses a computer, what a nerd."

Even playing video games is pretty cool and mainstream now.

My impression is that many people sneer at the things that are necessary for building relationships or consider them lazy/stupid/etc. Things like doing or not doing thing just because others like it. Things like going home to familly instead of staying late. Coordinating with friends to help each other - you are supposed to be individual. Or just socializing without networking or other practical gain.

You are supposed to work 70 hours a week and change job every two years and be aggressive in pursuing own goals. It makes for a good economy, but also for loneliness as there is no space for trust and relationships building.

I am trying to build real friendships out in the open. If any of you want to make a friend who will listen very carefully to you, talk to me!

https://philosopher.life/#Find%20The%20Others:%5B%5BFind%20T...

404

I’m highly skeptical. There’s only one piece of data cited in the article. In that data, the only mention of a possible trend is this

> shows that loneliness is worse in each successive generation.

Basically if you read the linked to report, the data show older people are less lonely than younger people right now. That’s not the same as showing loneliness increasing over time. There are many plausible reasons for younger people to be lonelier... it’s just as likely younger groups are always lonely and lose loneliness as they age.

The rest of the article talks about partisanship, which is a different issue entirely. Indeed as we sort ourselves into ideologically similar communities I might expect loneliness to decrease.

>Couldn’t it be that younger people are always lonelier than older generations?

The article doesn't merely say that "younger people are lonelier than older generations", but that successive generations are lonelier than those previously...

If you click through to the underlying report, it shows loneliness rates by generation groupings as of right now. So what is a Gen Zer experiencing with loneliness now. What is a baby boomer experiencing.

It doesn’t show what age groups reported 10 or 20 years ago with with same survey.

So the data shows at this instant younger people are lonelier. But that may have always been true.

Social institutions started falling down once TV appeared and was demanding of attention. You had to be around at 8pm on Tuesday to see your show.

Now with phones we have even bigger attention sinks.

End of the day, the rise of cheap entertainment and the long decline of mainline religious organizations, erosion of ethnic organizations, etc have led to a lot of social problems. There was an article a few weeks ago suggesting that even romantic relationships are having problems as people have trouble with social contact and apps have made sex on demand a thing.

In a grant-funded and eyeball driven world, science and media have perverse incentives to cherry-pick data to show trends that don't really exist.

You live long enough, you get skeptical of 'sky is falling' narratives...

Have you read "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam? It's a tad outdated, but describing the same trends of growing loneliness and isolation. And sure enough, the author concluded that television was a factor (though not the primary factor.)

The book makes its case through data. Lots of clear charts and a great appendix at the end. The author spends a lot of time discussing his methodology and potential problems with it.

I tend to be skeptical, like you are, of "sky is falling" research coming from academia. Especially when the conclusion is that TV is bad for us (Sounds like my nagging parents trying to get me to play in the back yard!). But after reading this book, I'm stumped. I can't say the author is cherry picking the data. Surely there are limitations to the research, and the book is upfront about them. No, there is definitely something going on. The research makes that clear. And electronic media is likely a part of the explanation.

Really simple things like counting how many people folks talk to in a 30 day period can illustrate the bigger point. It’s a real problem.

I think that we long for genuinely human interaction. The absence of that makes us lonely. But tech-mediated interactions reduce the amount of human interaction. (Having this conversation on HN isn't the same as us having the same conversation at a bar, even if we say the same things.) We get more interaction via tech (across the world, not just in the same room), but much of the human touch gets lost.

But I think the problem is bigger than that. Our philosophy has dehumanized us. It's basically a question of who we think we are.

As a society, we no longer believe in God. We believe in the physical universe - in matter and the laws of physics. That means that all we can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. That's all we can be, because there is nothing else.

In particular, we can't have any free will or any ability to make a real choice. Matter that obeys the laws of physics doesn't choose anything - it just obeys the laws of physics. We're just machines made of atoms obeying the laws of quantm electrodynamics, which make up biochemicals obeying the laws of biochemistry, which make up neurons obeying the laws of neurology - and nothing more.

We can't love in the real sense of the word - choosing what's best for the one we love - because we can't choose anything. Even the lesser flavors of love are just a matter of biochemicals and neurons just doing their thing.

There's no real beauty in any objective sense - there's just certain things happen to hit our neurons in a certain way.

For that matter, there's no truth, either, and not just in the postmodern sense. If our brains were built by evolution, they were built to give a good enough answer fast enough. They were not built to find actual truth, even were such a thing to exist.

So in this view, free will, love, beauty, and truth - everything we thought of as making us human - are dead. We're just machines, just like the computers on our desks. As more and more people believe this (and start to act like it), it becomes more and more rare to be treated in a genuinely human way. The result is that we are lonely.

You might really enjoy the short book "The Abolition of Man" by CS Lewis. It's not a fantasy or apologetics book like he's known for, doesn't presume any christian or theistic view point, but it describes a very similar phenomenon to your observations, what he calls "men without chests".

I will say that there are actually places (in the US at least) where what you describe is not the societal norm at all. But there's tradeoffs with everything. Super visible religiousity and expectations of constant amiability and politeness do have some downsides. It is less lonely though.

I've read "The Abolition of Man". It is very simply written, and takes serious thought to get the depths of what he's saying (at least for me). Great book...

... but this comment wasn't based on "The Abolition of Man". It was based on "He Is There And He Is Not Silent" by Francis Schaeffer. (His stuff is not very simply written, and takes even more thought than Lewis does. I've had to re-read it maybe a dozen times over two decades in order to - mostly - get it. Still, highly recommended.)

It's interesting to me that among the HN readership, the majority of the conversation here is either "This is true because it matches my experience." or "I had a different experience and therefore this is false."

Cities and suburbs (and rural places too, for that matter) all fall on a spectrum, and probably a bell curve. People do too. I think too many of us expect happiness to come from the place we're in magically, as if it takes no effort to find it. You still have to work to connect with people no matter where you live, However, this doesn't invalidate the contribution that certain build environments make to loneliness.

Personally I don't think it's the work/life balance that is different from 60 and 70 years ago the reason of loneliness.

I think it's the combination of the world getting smaller, via technology, and the rise of individualism the increased standard of living gives us.

From one hand, the too small world frightens us, it makes us want to shell ourselves from the big nasty world.

On the other hand, we think we are special and the others around us not worthy of us.

Greece has the exact same problem (which was made worse by the recent crisis), perhaps in different numbers, since family ties are strong here and people don't usually relocate to find work, but it's still a problem.

This is weird to me because I feel like it's easier than ever to have a social life.

Looking on Facebook, Meetup, etc. I can easily find local groups that match my interests. There's a local Ruby group, gaming groups, tennis and other casual sports leagues, and so on. Social media is actually pretty cool for that when used judiciously.

My wife and I -- despite not being particularly glamorous or anything -- actually experience a fair bit of anxiety due to having more social possibilities than we could ever really say "yes" to. We've got long-time friends in the area and I meet a fair number of people that make me think, "I bet I could be pretty good friends with that person, if my slate wasn't full already...."

I think the big change from previous decades is that social interaction is more focused. It's more interest-based.

Yes, there's less of that "sit on your porch in the evening and talk to your neighbors as they walk by" and "get to know your local postal clerk on a first-name basis" kind of thing, and something good has definitely been lost there.

Perhaps the ultimate result to all of this is that all of this is that while it's easier than ever to make friends... it's also easier to fall through the cracks. There's crazy levels of social interaction out there, tailored to your interests, if you reach out and do it... but unlike the old days, it ain't gonna reach out and grab you.

I imagine that in the old days, you sat on your porch/stoop on summer evenings and your neighbors may or may not have strolled by and settled in for a beer or glass of lemonade or whatever, including Fred and Betty from down the street who also might have mentioned that they're looking for more couples to join their bowling league or some such thing.

It's sad that doesn't happen any more, but I bet there were also a lot of nights when nobody strolled by, and perhaps Fred and Betty were jerks anyway and maybe you didn't really want them to stop by. That was also a shit way to find very specific interests like a local Ruby group or a local group of transgender Civil War reenactment aficionados or whatever. So, some things have been lost, and some things gained.

I don't think the issue is having a social life, though. It's more that a lot of those interactions are very superficial and often center around one thing. In general, people aren't making very meaningful, long-lasting connections with those people. At least, that's been the experience at the few meetups I went to. Now, I've gotten lucky with a boardgame group which has some great people that I now hang out with outside of the group (after a few months of going), but in general most of the interactions from there just feel so light. Which is fine, if that's what you're looking for (and it often is; I just wanna play games, not necessarily make great friends, though I'm glad I did with this group), but I feel that being lonely often makes people want more.

I do wonder if you being married has anything to do with how you perceieve that? I'd expect that it does, since you two have each other for companionship.

    at the few meetups I went to

I feel you, but I think any interaction would be light and superficial the first one or three or ten times, wouldn't it?

But I think what you said does feel really true. If a group meets once a month, it would take ages to form some real bonds, and people are popping in and dropping out all of the time, so it's hard to know which of the people would even be people you'd want to "invest" in, in terms of putting in the effort to get to know them better.

> When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics.

Mass psychosis - solution to loneliness.

I didn't read through the full article but I want to comment anyway. I think the problem is much more complex than simply "gig economy". In all likelihood it is a combination of multiple issues that compound on one another. Gig economy certainly plays a part in that compounding effect that causes isolation and loneliness but it is certainly not the only factor. Take a look at an average family today: you have a father and mother who both work jobs, stay late, outsource their parental duties, all just to keep up with the lifestyle they created or the bare minimum to survive. The kids are on their phones, ipads and whatnot and the adults are setting the example at the dinner table (what.. wait, nope there is no dinner table anymore as everyone just eats whenever, and if they do, they are on their devices). The growing isolation at home fosters a behavior that leads to ever more isolated existence in outside relationships. With the media constantly being pumped into our brains, we must have the latest and greatest gadgetry for what? To consume more media and become even lonelier.

The growing class divide, carefully curated media channels and a widening gap in haves vs have nots encourages an us vs them attitude. Combine that with a social media existence that allows you to select which highly tuned group you want to belong to and you've got yourself an information / viewpoint silo that breeds hate.

Then you have an ever-growing selection of consumer products that aims at creating a finely attuned solution to every need but in fact creates a sense of bewilderment and unhappiness.

Of course not all is terrible, as (some) businesses compete, you get better and better products / services (not always) that set a high bar for expectations. When the next burger, 4k TV or haircut is unsatisfactory, the feeling is compounded as we now have so much to compare to. How can anyone be pleasantly surprised when the bar to compare to is perfection?

Take our family again, the kids are going to college and accrue a ton of debt and are left to pay for it after graduation. No problems, unemployment rates are low, just go find a great paying tech job right? Well, now every entry job requires 2 years experience and nobody wants to hire college graduates. Take another dose of depression here and add it to your collective loneliness profile.

Then we have the corporate behemoths that stifle competition and create massive enterprises which control your life. Want to switch internet service? Forget it. No alternatives. Want to complain about a service you don't like? Good luck with that, you'll be connected to India and I'm sure they will put your suggestion in a corporate suggestion box... In some aspects we have too much choice and in others not enough. This of course leads to stress, frustration, anger, and despair - all of which feeds into the pool of depression. If yours isn't full, someone else's is getting there, and once it fills up it starts spilling out.

It doesn't stop there. US in particular is great at fostering a culture where we must blame everything on ourselves. Didn't get a good product? Your fault! You chose it. Didn't get the right president? Your fault! You voted for him. Didn't reach your personal goals after listening to that life coach / feel good guru podcast? Your fault! Don't you know, you're in charge of your own destiny! Forget asking for help, that's for the weak. Oh, but when you do, make sure to see a mental health professional since privacy is important (just don't complain when they share their information with insurance providers who will decide which therapy you should undergo).

Consumption, consumption, consumption. Take advantage of everyone to make an extra buck. Screw over your co-worker for that promotion. Outsource that job to an overseas contract worker - who cares about your fellow neighbor. Speaking of neighbors, why are they making so much noise? Well, don't bother talking to them because you know you won't. How dare you knock on their door and say hello, that's just weird! Nobody does that.

And people wonder why they are lonely...

I can't help but notice that it's written by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is essentially the mouthpiece of large-corporate capitalism. Brooks writes a lot of these articles, if you look at his collection on his website. You take some problem that has in its nature the alienation of people from their meaningful purpose in the world, probably because of the needs of corporate capitalism. Unfortunately, large-scale solutions, such as industrial policy, are not in the allowable repertoire of the AEI, so his proposed solution is for people to ... do something about it. Try harder? Not sure.

Edit - fixed grammar in first sentence.

The increase in loneliness has been associated with the rise in social media. I am trying to build a new type of social network to help reverse this trend, I would love for you all to join me and help grow the community! https://peapods.com

Is this a result of people having lots of direct interactions with mobile phones instead of people these days?

Family and friends are the most important, valuable assets you can own. Don’t compromise those for money.

Probably far too late to comment on this, but it struck me that the relationship between loneliness and privacy is not well explored. Does anyone know where there is any research about this ?

America is being torn apart and loneliness is a side effect.

The culture wars. The gender wars. The importing of people from third world cultures. The inbalanced economy. The stagnant wages. The drug epidemic.

The US is in a long slow decline into a low trust society. I can now buy my way into nice places and largely myself from the effects. But I grew up poor and old my friends and the rest of my family are not so lucky. I’ve seen what happens to the poor and middle class in America and I only see it getting worse for the foreseeable future.

I blame this on the built environment of the US. Nothing is human scale or people oriented. It's commerce and cost oriented. Very few independent shops in most cities. No concept of a high street or village of shops, no public square, nothing.

I'm referring to the post WW2 America. Obviously, you'll find these things in the old core of New England and parts of the South.

That sounds like a old, outdated stereotype from a 1990’s cartoon.

Many (most?) American cities of any size have spent the last 20-25 years trying hard to make their cities more pedestrian friendly. Some even require that any new building over xx floors have street-level retail or other gathering places in order to make urban life more vibrant.

Unfortunately, success is scattered. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. But as more people move to cities, things seem to be improving.

Yes but it's all artificial. All those ground floor shops are places that sell things or offer services that most people are not interested in.

the article concludes with the point that it ought to have started with -- you have to be the change you wish to see in the world

The only issue with that is when everyone else is still hooked to the reasons for loneliness (culture, phones, etc; there's a lot of them). It's gotten to the point where there's almost nobody for you to interact with anymore, and I fear it's just going to get worse as younger and younger kids get phones and grow up with phones and not having to interact socially.

No one talks about the irrational fear of talking to strangers. We are lonier because we have been taught to not trust.

Um the people in the confederate States were super neighborly and friendly. Not sure this is the cure-all recipe for avoiding antagonism between factions, or sections as they used to be called.

I am not sure what this has to do with loneliness. And I am not sure why you feel the need to emphasize "Confederate States" when it has a name: Southern Courtesy. Having growing up in the region and both given and received Southern Courtesy, it's more about community building and less about breaking out of loneliness.

When a bunch of Yankees moved into town during my childhood, they also were quite friendly but just in a different way. They're people too and I find the whole distinction rather silly anyways. Both groups have their nice folks and both have their mean folks.

Also it's perfectly fine to be alone, as it doesn't mean you have to be lonely.

The conclusion from the article was: Each of us can be happier, and America will start to heal, when we become the kind neighbors and generous friends we wish we had.

My point is that the neighbourliness of the southern states in no way healed the sectional rift. Ie the author didn't backtest his theory against history.

So either the authors conclusion doesn't follow from his premise or the conclusion is unrelated to the rest of the article (which I did read), or the last paragraph is not a conclusion or the whole article is just nonsense?

We seldom sing together.

It's possible that what we're witnessing is behavioural sink[0]. It's been observed in other mammals that overcrowding leads to social degradation and eventual total failure of the population.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

I used to live in Montana, on the outskirts of a small town. There were few enough people around that it was trivially easy to take 10 minutes getting even further out of town and find yourself at a trailhead that hadn't been used in months.

My point is that if you did wind up seeing someone else, it made you happy in a way that just doesn't happen when you live in a more densely-populated area. And this coming from someone who is in general a rather reclusive introvert. But it was a good feeling to live at such a density that seeing other folks was essentially always a positive.

Yep. I often go for walks alone in the countryside and I'll often stop and have a short conversation with every person I see (which may only be one or two). I wouldn't even do that at the large company I used to work, let alone in a city.

How much of this loneliness is caused by romantic longing? Marriage is increasingly devalued, the age of virginity loss is rising[1], maybe romantic partners just recently had a greater role in keeping these feelings at bay?

1.https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0614-yrbs.html

I used to be lonely, I used to want to belong to a group, I used to want an identity.

Then I realize these desires are causing suffering.

Through meditation and medical marijuana, I've been able to free myself and realize, these are the artifacts of our Tribalistic nature.

But we live in a modern world, access to everything except the ones our ancestors used to value. I've come to enjoy solitary more and more.

I think ignoring or suppressing our tribal nature en masse is part of the problem. We evolved in an environment of small, closely related communities, and develop in groups and out groups. Without a sharply defined in group, everyone becomes part of the out group, meaning we default to distrust until proven otherwise. It's sad.

It's a dire state of affairs. Some people on HN will go on never marrying, having kids, or ever being in an intimate relationship. Race and culture also plays a big factor but society tends to only look for whatever elevates them, gloss over the uncomfortable truths, almost a collective ego which it shields itself the true side of human nature: The race towards monopolization of violence in the tribe through which the actors and directors of this selected group are able to exploit the mass and writing the rules of reality. One set of rules for us, the other for the rest.

I just don't find this human world exciting or interesting. I've come to loathe it. I am bound by karmic law so it's not like I can do whatever the fuck. I almost feel like my religion binds me to a life of a eunuch. Unable to indulge in one of basic human needs, unable to connect, because I've been trying to numb out this world since I was a kid. It's no wonder I am alone and others like me find themselves all alone. Our inability to bond, communicate, express is conditionally instilled through environmental circumstances you can't change. So I guess that's how Karma dictates who gets born to a nice loving rich family to everything that isn't. But society blames people like me, it's my fucking fault, there's something wrong with me, that if I just said the right things or meet the expectations in some quantitative manner. No more. The will to fight disappears and a sense of calm and wellness from submission to the present offers a warm refuge powered by the extra serotonin floating around due to medically induced state of inhibiting the reuptake process.

The present is the only Truth. The past and the future lives only in our memory and imagination.

The funny thing about this article is that it says political tribes are the reason for American division.

Then the NYT editors choose to award cogent comment status to a list of comments blaming it all on the GOP.

They can’t help themselves.

Fear sells. And the news sell fear.

Something is always tearing america apart. We are always on the brink. The past few months, it's facebook tearing us apart. Last year, it was putin and the russians tearing america apart. The year before that, it was trump/hillary.

When you sculpt your country as a dog-eat-dog community go cry on someone else's shoulder. If you feel that social structures like in Europe are too socialist of communist for your taste you lost the discussion before you started it.

> When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics.

Couldn't outrage culture be seen as a good thing? What is the appropriate response, if not outrage, to rampant systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of social injustice? Should we just lie down and accept it?

"outrage culture" generates outrage for its own sake - not for the sake of motivating productive action, since outrage isn't necessary for that. Twitter is a great example of the futility and impotence of outrage culture on display. The vitriol I see in my feed accomplishes nothing but clickbait, virtue signaling and memetic toxicity, it certainly doesn't help.

> There is profit to be made here. The “outrage industrial complex” is what I call the industries that accumulate wealth and power by providing this simulacrum of community that people crave — but cannot seem to find in real life.

... does The NY Times lack self-awareness or are they doing this on purpose? If I had to blame one media organization for increasing polarizarion and divisiveness with the goal of increasing readership profits, it would be the NYT without a doubt.

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