The Loneliness Epidemic
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.
The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.
No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else.
Not to mention most of our time. People nowadays spend far more time at work than ever.
Over the 20th century here, work hours have slashed in half. Henry Ford introduced the 5 day work week in 1926, prior to that it was 6.
You think the average farmer in the late 1800's worked 40-50 hours? What about the average coal miner, or factory worker?
How much time was spent in meetings, how much time preparing food, fixing clothes, patrolling territory, scouting things out, making home improvements etc.
If the modern person only worked for food, then I think a few hours a week would suffice.
I don't get what is with these snarky replies all over Hacker News these days. His point was that people work a lot. Quarreling over whether some people some time during history has worked even more is missing it.
Doing a load of laundry on a hand washer and scrubbing board takes forever and is pretty brutal. So is getting up super early to put coal in the furnace (and then keeping it going all day every day). Running a stove you have to load with wood means starting really early. Churning butter by hand. Possibly grinding flour by hand. Making everyone's clothes by hand - when the sewing machine came out it made Singer incredibly rich because it saved so many women so many hours sewing their family's clothes by hand.
Nearest extant comparison would probably be Amish women.
Do you have anything supporting this claim? The facts say otherwise: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
It's easy and fun to be pessimistic, but to claim that people today work more than ever is ludicrous.
A few generations ago kids worked at 10, there were no weekly limit, no weekends, no vacations, no security, no form of compensation if you get injured/die while working, no pension, no sick leave &c.
In first world countries we never worked so little for so much comfort.
> By the act of 1892 one day in the week, not necessarily Sunday, had to be given for entire absence from work, in addition to eight recognized annual holidays
> Children may not be employed in industrial work before 12 years, and then only 8 hours a day at work
> The first attempt to secure legislation regulating factory employment related to the hours of labour, which were very long - from twelve to thirteen hours a day.
> Boys of 13 may be employed in certain work underground, but under 16 may not be employed more than 8 hours in the 24 from bank to bank. A law of 1905 provided for miners a 9 hours' day and in 1907 an 8 hours' day from the foot of the entrance gallery back to the same point.
With women's entry into the workforce plus the 1964 Hart-Cellar Act's lifting of immigration quotas the workforce more than doubled in the 70s. At that rate how was work compensation ever supposed to keep up? I'm not saying the trade-off wasn't worth it, but you can't 2-3x the labor pool and then pretend we don't know why wages decreased while competition for scare resources increased.
Knowing a reason for wages to drop is not the same as it being acceptable.
Average hours worked has gone down steadily over the last two centuries:
> 1830 69.1 hours per week
> 1880 60.7
> 1929 50.6
> 1988 42.4
> As the twentieth century ended there was nothing resembling a shorter hours “movement.” The length of the workweek continues to fall for most groups — but at a glacial pace. Some Americans complain about a lack of free time but the vast majority seem content with an average workweek of roughly forty hours — channeling almost all of their growing wages into higher incomes rather than increased leisure time.
I wish people could understand that they are more than their job. It's so ingrained in us though. One of the first things people asks each other is, "What do you do?" It encourages a definition of self that is centered on one's job.
If it weren't real life, I'd think I was watching a dystopian film at most social gatherings. :(
he said via a social network
For most folks that existential crisis is driven 100% by the realization that they have little in the way of a safety-net, and all it takes is several turns of bad luck to end up in a poverty trap that isn't easy to climb out of. Remember, most Americans make what, 65k or so as a household? And are in massive debt to all of the things they needed to even be able to make that money (college education, car, house, etc).
I think that's more US specific.
Said the person (probably) working in an industry that's blooming, without a hint of irony.
It took a lot of introspection for me to realize that my core essence and sense of self couldn't really be distilled down to much more than what I did for a living and my consumption patterns. It's quite scary and I've been searching for ways to balance myself out and get more meaning out of life.
How is this different than what the majority of civilization had to do throughout history? People have always clung to their profession as their identity. Hell, people used to name themselves after their profession.
If that is the problem, then push for fewer hours worked per week.
Loneliness only sets in when you have nothing else to do and you’re all alone. If you’re swinging a hammer at a hot forge for 16 hours a day loneliness is a secondary concern.
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
This is the opposite of loneliness.
Recently society has been pushing for these two things, at the expense of personal connections. That means many successful people are working jobs that are out of the experience of their parents. They also do not necessarily share a lot of experiences of their formative years with the people they work with. All of this comes from personal freedom, but at the expense of being close to the people you spend your time with. I suppose you could also put it that its at the expense of spending time with the people you are close to.
Maybe, our current obsession as a society with personal freedom and social mobility is an extreme which is itself the cause of all the loneliness. It's an extreme which reduces the stability and cohesion of our society, because in promoting the freedom of the individual above all else, you've harmed the social connections which make a society work.
Maybe there's a happy medium, but I think we might have passed it by over a century back.
I think social (cooperative) gaming might be an exception to this. I'm not about to argue that it's _better_ than real-life social interaction, but hanging out and communicating with the same individuals every evening while working on shared goals as your avatars inhabit the screen can combat loneliness for many individuals without (and with!) alternatives[0].
These interactions can even lead to real-life communities and relationships. So again, not a perfect substitute, but certainly not as much a detractor as sitcoms or (I would argue) social media.
I live 100 kms away from most of them, however we can still catch up and have fun playing games.
Its definitely not the same as real life interactions, but it allows me to interact with people that I normally wouldn't see without visiting them.
Choose a degree that appeals to you, where you will learn what you like, instead of one which acts as a stepping stone for a higher paying job? Even in countries with sane tuition prices (read: not the US) plenty of people will blame you, and that decision in particular, for any financial problem for all your life.
Become pregnant, and/or plan to work fewer hours for some time to take care of your kids or any older relative? How brave of you. Here's your prize in the form of reduced pay for the next 10 years or so.
Decline that managing position because you like your current job better and you know you won't enjoy being a manager? Cue the disapproval stares from people close to you.
Stay in your job for 15 years because you like the people, the work itself or some particular perk? When you finally leave, your next job will pay less than if you had hopped around each 2 years. That's if someone wants to hire you.
Sure, every decision counts and very often there is a tradeoff between trying to find happiness and trying to find a job that sustains you. However, lately the tension between those two is so high that any small decision towards living the life you want to live may very well end in financial misery for the rest of your life. This is not hyperbole; I know people who fucked up mildly once, fifteen years ago, and are still paying the price. And I'm one of the lucky ones... I haven't fallen through the cracks. Yet.
https://www.askamanager.org/2019/07/can-you-advance-professi...
I would gleefully take a pay cut to have a 35h work week _if my wage still allows me to eat out once 3x a week_, but I will work 40h + commute and feel always exhausted until I get there. See how easy is to fall on that trap.
The caricature you are offering only really works for overpaid tech workers.
Yeah, that's right I'm over paid. Eat a bag of biscuits you assuming flesh bag.
I'm giving up parts of my life to make money, and you expect me to want less than what I'm making?
>Become pregnant, and/or plan to work fewer hours for some time to take care of your kids or any older relative?
>Stay in your job for 15 years because you like the people, the work itself or some particular perk?
>However, lately the tension between those two is so high that any small decision towards living the life you want to live may very well end in financial misery for the rest of your life.
Are you expecting society to reward you for making ultimately selfish choices aimed at maximizing only your own personal happiness?
In the case of the degree choices, I know plenty of people who have jobs with a much higher social utility than mine, yet make much less and suffer long periods of unemployment (I'm thinking about, for example, people whose job is to educate people from marginalized communities).
In the case of taking care of other people, I just can't fathom how would you find selfisness in stepping out of a job in order to take care of other people.
And about staying a lot of time in a job, it can definitely make you incredibly productive, and in all cases I know in tech it forces people to have a "big picture" idea of some problem domain which is damn useful when trying to move to a company working within the same domain; it's very different from hopping companies and having to learn a slightly different tech stack and/or company structure each time. Sadly, this doesn't translate at all into a better salary, because as an industry we seem to have collectively decided that staying too long in a job is anathema.
The penalty persists because the years spent pursuing goals other than those that confer useful skills and experience cannot be regained. Are you suggesting that we reward all people equally, regardless of whether they are able to demonstrate the same degree of utility?
>In the case of taking care of other people, I just can't fathom how would you find selfisness in stepping out of a job in order to take care of other people.
Selfish from the perspective that taking care of a sick loved one does not necessarily provide a benefit to society at large. More importantly, that time spent not working or learning is effectively a pause in ones growth as a professional - what is the alternative, making hiring and salary decisions by age rather than experience?
>I know plenty of people who have jobs with a much higher social utility than mine, yet make much less and suffer long periods of unemployment
This is a bit of a conflation. I am arguing over choices which do not benefit society, in which case it is reasonable that one's career value is lower. This particular problem is one of misplaced valuation in our society, as there are tangible benefits to the degrees your acquaintances pursued.
Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.
There is no intrinsic benefit to society at large in pursuing a degree - only those degrees which enable one to contribute in some form, and even then the benefit only occurs if one uses the knowledge obtained to conduct useful work.
>Yes, society should absolutely tell business that it isn't as important as it thinks.
Businesses have the goal of generating some sort of value. Yes, that means that employees must make certain sacrifices with their time and future plans - that's why they get paid. But this conflict between the goals of a business and the goals of an employee exist regardless of whether we organize into business-employee relationships or not, because fundamentally any significant, communal goal requires these same sacrifices to be achieved. We won't have any engineers or doctors or programmers if everyone majors in English Literature out of a fundamentally selfish desire to learn something with significantly less benefit to society.
The same goes for the other listed pursuits. I'm not saying that one should dedicate themselves to their work - but the detriment to one's career that comes with pursuing these, again, selfish goals (from the perspective of society) is generally just, because it isn't fair to force others to allocate their resources to activities which do not benefit them.
There are some theories that this magically coincides with creating value in an ideal model, but no period in history has actually worked that way. There are many proposed explanations for why it doesn't, but I'm not much interested in why. All I care about is that those models don't describe reality.
So businesses are all about generating income for their owners. But society is about all people in it, not just those who control the capital. It is necessarily true that there will be cases where the best thing for society is not the best thing for businesses.
Business has pushed the public narrative too far towards blind support of "business is a good thing." Your post even seems to just assume that as a given. You claim that a goal is "selfish (from the perspective of society)" when the only thing you can criticize about it is that it isn't maximizing business value.
Business isn't everything. Sure, a society needs a functioning economy in order to survive. But that's a far cry from assuming "good for business" is the same as "good for society".
The latter is certainly more nebulous, though, and I can understand why you might wish they were the same thing. It would allow you to optimize society with simple quantitative measures instead of complex qualitative discussions about which sets of opposing goals have the better overall outcome. But the real world doesn't cooperate with such things. There are always going to be conflicts over goals, priorities, and even values. Resist the temptation to believe in an easy answer. Reality isn't easy.
>No more selfish then changing job because some perk.
The point here is that GP was complaining that there were no career benefits to making such a decision - why should there be, exactly? Such a career move benefits oneself and ones family. No one else.
Because it proves they are decent people I guess?
Same as leaving the job and changing. Benefits no one but you.
When all possible actions are framed as selfish, that whole argument is nonsense.
This is definitely an uncomfortable truth that isn't talked about very often, and the information age seems to exacerbate it.
This is so true, and the weirdest thing in the world to me. Especially in tech, you get really heavily punished for staying at a job more than a few years. To the point where, in interviews, you are asked why you stayed so long. Why would you penalize someone who might make a long-term commitment to your company? You're basically flushing all the training and institutional knowledge they hold down the drain.
I've been at my current job 13 years (although I have advanced through multiple titles in that time). I may be slightly underpaid, though last time I looked a few years ago it was about average for the area. I've considered leaving occasionally, but I like the people I work with and the work most days is interesting and engaging.
Moreover, I'm content. Maybe I could get more money if I job-hopped or moved to a place like the Bay Area. But why? I'm comfortable now, all my needs are met, I have plenty of disposable income, and my family is happy. We never want for anything.
We have this weird aversion to people being content. There's a lot to be said for stability.
> This is so true, and the weirdest thing in the world to me. Especially in tech, you get really heavily punished for staying at a job more than a few years. To the point where, in interviews, you are asked why you stayed so long. Why would you penalize someone who might make a long-term commitment to your company? You're basically flushing all the training and institutional knowledge they hold down the drain.
In Germany, the mentality is different. If you switch jobs after few years, you have to give very good reasons - for exactly the outlined reasons.
As an immigrant I feel this is quite an American thing - there's always talk of your _career_, your _pursuits_, your _goals_, interesting things you did over the weekend...
Let's start at the numerator - you appear to be calculating life "happiness" (according to some internal metric) vs ... cost. You appear to be calculating costs as being:
- Not making more money because the degree did not lend it to making more money
- Social approbation for not making more money
- Missed revenue (income) because time spent with family/childcare
- Social approbation for not taking the higher-ranked (and labeled as such) gig
- Missed economic opportunity (income) for work-social reasons or work-enjoyment reasons
I mean - I'm a fan of doing what you like - but surely you don't expect society to pay you to watch Jerry Springer and smoke week all day at home munching down on pizza, right? How is this different?
Am I missing something?
The median person lives just 18 miles away from their mom. 57% of Americans have never lived outside their home state. A third have never lived outside their hometown.
The more I read about it, I’m convinced “loneliness” is an upper middle class problem.
Which makes it all the more suitable for a discussion on HN, wouldn't you say?
People seem to actually believe that 5 thousand a year gives you a middle class lifestyle in the third world. The cost of eating only rice and beans and living in a tin shack with dirt floors is pretty much the same everywhere.
I agree with your premise in general though, because given a similar lifestyle and similar percentage of savings (let's say 10%) from your salary you get in a high COL place vs. low COL place, high COL place would be more preferable, as that 10% will be higher in absolute dollar value, and a lot of goods are priced the same everywhere.
By your definition no American is a member of the global lower class, as defined purely on an income basis. That's a fine point to make if the discussion was about global poverty, but that's clearly not what this discussion is about. In effect, your comment amounts to whataboutism.
I made a similar choice a couple of years ago to downgrade my career into a slower-paced, less stressful scenario with less money, and again personally for me the results have spoken for themselves.
Unless I'm Elon Musk, the whole business of business isn't really designed in my favor, so it's logical for me to partake but only just so.
It feels nice down here, join us!
Unless he literally works in a warehouse or in a position that is pure “worker bee,” $100 says if we knew the actual job title this guy held we’d deem him “clueless.” (Not that he actually IS clueless, who knows, I’m just using that word in the gervais principle sense of it).
“I made a similar choice a couple of years ago to downgrade my career into a slower-paced, less stressful scenario with less money” is quintessential “clueless” reasoning.
Prioritizing things like a slow pace and a lack of stress is something that “clueless” people tend to do, not “losers.” Darryl (& co) in the warehouse are stressed, dude, and they don’t have the time or inclination to prioritize things like lowering stress. They’re too busy living paycheck-to-paycheck. Toby in the office is less stressed, and I bet if you talked to the character Toby he’d say almost exactly what the guy wrote above.
I mean look what he’s doing here — sharing his emotional reasoning with the group. That’s something “clueless” people do, not “losers,” who tend to merely act on emotions rather than reflect on them and THEN act.
If this guy ACTUALLY became a “loser” and started working in an Amazon warehouse and it wasn’t part of a larger “clueless” meta-scheme to get a tax break or something, I would be literally shocked.
Clueless are people buy into the "Arbeit makt frei" idea.
In the linked article, the majority of people in the office (not even considering the warehouse) are losers.
Stanley is the quintessential "loser", and he precisely optimizes for "slower-paced, less stressful".
In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's the "worker bees" that are clueless. Dwight, for example, is as "worker bee" as they come. He jumps on command.
From my reading, this hierarchy has nothing to do with social status outside of work. It is precisely how you behave on the job.
My reading seems similar but different to yours. I agree that it has nothing to do with social status outside of work: to me it’s about emotional processing.
I can’t recall the specific passage but I remember Venkat talking about how clueless people seek absolution in collective emotional processing. That’s what leads me to believe the dude you’re replying to is clueless.
I completely disagree that Stanley is a loser, to me he is a quintessential clueless. He’s working in the office, not the warehouse: he’s in middle management, so IMO he’s clueless by definition because he is part of the padding between the masters/sociopaths/bosses and the slaves/worker bees/losers.
I think your perspective is interesting but I feel like I am adhering slightly more strictly to the heuristics laid out in GP.
"""
The minimum-effort Loser Stanley tells him coldly, "this here is a run-out-the-clock situation." The line could apply to Stanley’s entire life.
"""
So either you are pulling your info from some more-original source than I am, or you're mis-remembering what the article says.
He states clearly that middle managers provide the buffer between the sociopaths and losers. Thus, Stanley is clueless.
Venkat’s description of Stanley as a “loser” completely destroys his own heuristics that only clueless are in middle management.
So congratulations, you’ve found a flaw in Venkat’s logic. He contradicts himself. However, I still think the general heuristics he lays out are valuable (as you seem to).
Thanks for the quote man — you made me realize the issue isn’t quite as cut-and-dry as I thought it was. I see your point now. Thank you.
The people in the warehouse don't report to Stanley. His job is to get sales from customers. He has no one reporting to him.
Michael is the chief clueless person in the show. Dwight and Andy are aspiring clueless.
The losers are the people who do the day-to-day work that keeps the company in business. The sociopaths are the people at the top who view the company as a board game with pawns that can be moved around or sacrificed at will.
The purpose of the clueless is to put a buffer between the sociopaths and the losers so that the sociopaths don't have to consider that their pawns are real people with real feelings and real families to take care of.
There are three classes of losers according to his system:
1. Over-performing losers, who are prime candidates for promotion to the clueless ranks
2. Average losers, who know they have a raw deal but don't have the ambition or coldness to do anything about it.
3. Under-performing losers, who are prime sociopath candidates because they have a lack of "give a damn" about what they do and are willing to push the boundaries because they know the deal is not in their favor.
Note that the over-under here is relative to ability. Jim is an under-performing loser, while still being very good at his job, because he doesn't put in his best effort.
Kevin is an average loser because even though he's not that good at his job, he's giving a good-faith effort to what he does.
Dwight is over-performing because he's always attempting to go above and beyond, even when it is inconvenient to him.
I was right and you were wrong. Learned something new today. Thank you!
Further I checked and Stanley is a sales rep, not middle management.
I really enjoyed reading through that article series last year when I first came across it. I spent a good amount of time wondering where I fit in the hierarchy relative to my coworkers. Ended up deciding that like all models, it's useful but incomplete. Still an interesting thing to know about.
Sort of similar to learning about personality types like Myers-Briggs or Enneagram.
Stanley is a sales rep and that is absolutely a part of the clueless layer. He provides buffer between the masters and the slaves in the warehouse dude: he is clueless. Not a loser like Darryl in the warehouse, not a sociopath like Robert California or Ryan the Temp, but clueless.
I am a clueless loser sociopath so take from that what u will :)
Thanks for the interesting discussion. :)
Stanley isn't middle management, he's an aging sales guy who is too old to justify switching jobs; he's close to retirement, and the "run out the clock" quote in the article is spot on about it being his whole life at this point -- he's killing time until he retires.
He's a loser because he doesn't have the willingness or ability to be a ruthless sociopath -- why bother, he's out in 2 years or less -- and has no illusions about how the company feels about its employees.
He is clueless because he doesn’t have the willingness or ability to be a ruthless sociopath , but he still doesn’t want to be a loser in the warehouse with Darryl.
Stanley is a low-status clueless, not a high-status loser. (IMO).
These are interesting perspectives all around and I welcome further friendly debate. Thanks for sharing your thoughts guys. :)
Clueless, these are the people who believe in so called company values, think they can change things or try to achieve something. Relatively rare nowadays in most places, but these do happen. Both of the middle managers were this.
Losers are people who indeed care more about social aspects than getting things done. While the top sees this as a distraction it really is, but does not care about the day to day operations, just power.
It is an interesting way to look at organizations though.
One partner working long hours is enough for both partners to be lonely in marriage. Partner having time consuming hobby is enough for you to be lonely in marriage.
People in work are not friends, they are competitors, allies, enemies, whatever. They are not people you can talk with openly. Moreover, there are plenty of jobs where you work mostly alone or have only temporary relationships.
End result is loneliness.
Social life is not about having money (well unless you're really poor) - it's about having time and people to spend it with. You can be in top 5-10% of income and a total loner - plenty such people in tech.
Also have to get over the fear that people will judge you for taking your kids with you out into the world.
I agree that for someone that had a very active social life before having kids and moving to the suburbs would likely see a drop in that activity when suddenly having to take care of small kids in a suburban situation.
However, for someone that before having kids they already don't have any friends/family close by (imagine a fresh middle-aged, childless, immigrant couple moving in an area where there are very few other people from their own country), having kids would force a lot more opportunities to interact with other people (doctors, caretakers, teachers, other parents, etc) and ultimately speed up integration. Sure, none of those relationships may become a deep friendship connection but it's a lot better than having no human interaction.
What I said should be taken with a grain of salt. I did what I did for more than a decade, savoring both the good and the bad.
Make more money -> spend more time at work -> buy more "things" -> attach happiness to those things = set up for discontentment.
- Enough for buying satisfied house and land AND a nice secondary room in the middle of city. So they support two main life styles. Need a peaceful time, go to house surrounding by nature. Need a party, city life, back in town.
- Enough money for commuting between places as you want
- Enough money for buying whatever objects. Get bored, go shopping
- Enough money for not worrying about it so you can do things that improve your contentment.
Well, this is not new, money solves maybe 90% of whatever problems you have right now.
A mid-career software engineer at FAANG might have a greater income than every single person they grew up with. But they probably know middle managers making even more, as well as ex-colleagues who hit it big with a startup. Those middle managers know many people making more than them, all the way up the food chain. Those colleagues at the startups probably know people who had more equity, VCs, etc. with even more money. And this continues on and on.
Oh God, I wish I did. She's not even 18ft away until she dies, and she'll probably outlive me.
This is quite stark in some poorer countries (e.g.: some African, South American or Asian countries). You don't see that much in the US, but you do see it in some European countries and the ones with more of this are the ones that I find have less inertial loneliness. Thus: "first world problems" occur when you need the person next to you less. Maybe this is the same phenomenon that makes a country like Iceland famous for helpfulness towards others?
Yeah, exactly. You trade a social life for financial stability accompanied by loneliness. I've had one or the other, but not yet been able to find a balance. It's, very, very hard to do except for the few among us who have a highly desired technical skills (check) and excellent marketing skills (uh, nope). Those folks can run successful freelance/consulting businesses, work reasonable hours, and still make good money.
Part of what I’m wondering is if people are agreeing they spend more time alone than in the past, social norms say that means we’re lonely, so they agree with the idea.
I grew up in the country with a lot of alone time. I loved it. I don’t consider myself a depressed person. I can imagine anything I want, write the story down, plan projects, do the deep work of being me.
Being more social just feels like a series of shallow experiences relative. Drinks, coffees, some emotionally exciting event... all fleeting to me.
My own head is forever.
I think we want to believe loneliness is bad because of social pressure to connect, get a job with people we don’t know but we need a job, etc
Personally, I find that all incredibly stifling and stressful for little personal gain (the aristocracy of course loves a population that’s normalized to a small set of behaviors but that’s a diff topic).
Upper middle class types seem to have engagement in social structures forced on them. It’s bizarre to me
Edit: this article and digging into the idea is what underlie my take here https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/17/peopl...
Racism and such aside, I feel there’s a lot for urban grind types to learn from rural life
I'd expect those to be the loneliest of people. At least people who travel often learn how to meet and make new friends and rarely find themselves stuck in social isolation.
My mom grew up in a family of 11 siblings in Bangladesh, most of whom lived with their families in the same city when I was a kid. It’s hard to express rich and full life was back there.
For one, as the article pointed out, there are differences between social interaction and loneliness. For another, there are many broken families out there today, especially with the rise of opioid and other brutal addictions.
Anecdotally, I've seen hispanic families tend to be closer-knit, while a lot of other families tend to have some pretty serious problems. As one data point, my parents now live only a few miles away from me but I see them only very occasionally. Likewise, former close-knit groups of friends who all never left their home town -- and in at least one case, ended up buying homes only a couple blocks away from each other -- ended up squabbling and fighting and stopped talking to each other at all.
So whereas your experiences have led you to suppose that being close to childhood friends and family makes someone less lonely, my own -- and those of the various other nomads I've gotten to know over the years -- lead me to suppose that getting away from childhood friends and family helps to stave off the loneliness.
The screen and the Job have no volition of their own. It's humans themselves that choose to spend more time with them instead of interacting with nearby humans. And this is happening despite the fact that we 're no longer in the industrial age, and people don't need to live near the factory where they work. The Job provides people with enough money to frequently escape from nearby people (travel, or "experiences"), money to move in upscale tiny apartments where they can be alone in a crowd, or to move in comfy suburbs where they can be alone physically. It seems highly-paid people choose those, and it is lower class people that keep socializing with their neighbours.
I presume many of those people do not idolize their relationships with other humans as the most precious thing in the world. They weigh them against the freedoms afforded by money and technology and act accordingly.
2. miasma is a negative word (means repulsive)
I agree however, it is actually one of the reasons that more well-off people tend to socialize less: other people are not always "wonderful"
Being poorly presented and inarticulate is a form of privilege - it's traditionally associated with academia, but with the rise of the "computer nerd" stereotype, it has increasingly slipped into other venues. What comes to mind is Tfue, the world's top Fortnite player, whose Twitch streams largely consist of him grunting "uuggggghn" and complaining about "stream snipers" with coarse language. He gets millions of viewers.
2 - Apologies, I was misusing the word
A requisite, it isn't. But, for people living in cosmopolitan cities, or people who have an open mind about the world, of course it is.
As a kid, having my own TV meant countless hours of video games and my own movies too. I enjoyed it more than I abused it.
Are smarphone/tablet TVs worse or the same ?
One difference, the kind of entertainment you had on TV wasn't that much thinking or discussing. It has different effects I suppose. Also TV had a different ethos (if I may).
One last thing, about my first point. Having a single TV meant disagreements about who decides what to watch. This led to having more TVs.. and now more screens too. Technology is the mirror of our own social bonds.. we need it but we also need to deal with the issues. It gives a weird form of peace of mind not to have to deal with others.
For me int he early 90s was "Hey Aaron/Jimmy/Dani it's raining outside so we can't go ride bikes, wanna play a game?" and then either taking turns or playing a two player game and talking the entire time. Then early 95 when more than one or two of us had computers in the homes it was similar, if it was nice out we were outside, if not we were on IRC and/or a MUD and moving into the later 90s bla-dinging each other on AIM while in a MUD or in Ultima or Everquest with each other if it was too late to go out or bad weather.
Now it's 3 people sitting in a room with a tv going, and all three have their phones out, occasionally sending each other memes and not talking.
Playing evil's advocate a bit just to poke my own bias.
You can only be anti-social in the presence of other people. Otherwise you are simply alone.
Pinker implies social critics abuse the words "epidemic" and "crisis" (both words used in the article of this thread).
After reviewing the downwards-sloping graph (plotted from 1978-2011) and more data, Pinker writes:
Modern life, then, has not crushed our minds and bodies, turned us into atomized machines suffering from toxic levels of emptiness and isolation, or set us drifting apart without human contact or emotion. How did this misconception arise? Partly it came out of the social critic's standard formula for sowing panic: Here's an anecdote, therefore it's a trend, therefore it's a crisis. But partly came from genuine changes in how people interact. People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings via digital media. They confide in fewer distant cousins but more in co-workers. They are less likely to have large numbers of friends but also less likely to want a large number of friends. But just because social life looks different today from the way it looked in the 1950s, it does not mean that humans, that quintessentially social species, have become any less social.
I'm not suggesting that everything is hunky-dory, just that we bear in mind the proportions of the problem. Also Pinker may well be off the mark here, as others have pointed out in[1].
Tried to find more data on this, which seems to confirm Pinker's hypothesis - https://ourworldindata.org/global-mental-health
The data seems unrepresentative, though. While data on suicide rates is fairly clear, it might be more interesting to look at revealed preferences instead of self-reported ones. To this end, indicators for "lives of despair" (drug OD deaths, hospitalisation for drug/alcohol abuse etc) might be more appropriate.
Edit - Removed some emotional language
The part where you condemned the people you grew up with? Oh, you left that in. What on earth did you remove--something about kicking dogs?
One, family sizes are down. My parents who emigrated to the US had tons of siblings. My mom had like 8 or 9 (including a few kids who died early) and were closely knit until they emigrated the US separately as adults. My dad had 3 or 4 as well iirc.
Two, the transitions, especially the changing of jobs, and especially if it necessitates a move away from your prior group. People tend to like fixed roles and fixed communities in my experience, changing that is a big risk and a big source of anxiety. I've moved around a lot in the US and I've noticed that a vast majority of people I knew were born and raised in the states they still lived in, sometimes in the same towns, although college and the first "career" job tended to be the biggest changes and the transitions slow down after that unless forced. This even holds true for a lot of the emigrated workers I've known. As soon as externalities like job security and immigration status are stable they build families and start looking to settle down and hope to find a career long employer.
I would imagine that based on what I've seen people would be less lonely with fixed jobs, in fixed locations, with large, stable families. And people hopping jobs, company layoffs, long lived local businesses failing, and families having fewer kids are big causes of "loneliness". Although, like the article says there's not exactly a strong rising trend going back as far as the last century anyway...
here in brasil people usually don't drink fancy stuff, like pink blueberry, or things like that.
Usually beer, straith licor or things like vodka/cachaça with fruits.
I just drink fancy girly stuff like Daiquiris when I in the mood to learn a new drink, and can drink in peace without other people to judge my frail masculinity.
The vast majority of people still meet their partners through "traditional" means, very, very few meet through sites and apps. And when I say "very, very few" I'm talking less than 10%.
https://www.mic.com/articles/112062/the-way-most-people-meet...
https://www.bustle.com/p/the-most-popular-ways-people-are-me...
Starting the conversation is hard and it can be very difficult to tell if they really want to talk before they do, I guess that's part of why you want a good bartender because they'll usually start conversations with everyone.
What I think is creep is some stranger who straigup knows your name, your face, and can just as easy starting to virtual stalking your life and find out where you live.
Fucking hating online dating solutions like tinder.... really not good talker on line, without seeing the person face to face.
[0] https://qz.com/1546677/around-40-of-us-couples-now-first-mee...
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disinterm...
https://qz.com/1546677/around-40-of-us-couples-now-first-mee...
Going out and seek genuine connections with people instead of buying "pretty girl"s drinks is not creepy.
Genuine connection != deep conversation.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here, beyond being an advocate for harassment.
You care about art? Go to museuns. Like italian food? Go to a cantina once in a while, even alone you will eat great food, make friends with the owners and waiters, etc.
Theres always something to do outside facebook.
Supposition: It's because of all the marketing. Most of the time someone trying to talk to you is trying to sell you something, and you build up a defensive behavior to combat it.
> A Solution for Loneliness: Get out and volunteer, research suggests
The more connected the human ant hill gets the more we will behave like ants. Disconnected because we don't need to be as connected. Connected because that is the only way to survive. Those that can't handle the change...wont. This is a process of societal metamorphosis whose tracks have already been laid.
Maybe they do and we just don't know it? (anthropocentrism)
most people aren't interested in a place where they can go and meet anyone; they want a place where they can meet others who share some vaguely defined set of similarities. this is the part you have to pay for.
Volunteering.
This is evidently written from the perspective of an englishman, but I find the contrast with the American South (where I was born and raised) evident: here, it is very common to strike up a pleasant conversation with strangers. If you are left in each other's company for a few minutes, it's almost rude not to. I find that there's something of a cultural difference which might help here, as you can get a little bit of socialization from unexpected places. I regularly chat with the doorman at my office, and know he has another job as a music promoter. He also figured out a particularly clever way to game Spotify. Same with lots of other random people.
I'm not positioning this as a perfect solution, but as one more change which might help. Half of me wonders if this is because the South was always so spread-out that we took company where we could get it. But I certainly am not qualified to trace the roots of cultural stuff like this. Anyway, just something to think on.
Similar to the UK would be somewhere like Japan, which is well-known for its culture of restraint and politeness. Loneliness and suicide rates are high, while dating and marriage are suffering. It would appear a result of having a relatively restrained social culture.
PS. what is the spotify trick?
Individualism and decadence are being more or less encouraged, or at any rate tolerated; families are shrinking and relationships are treated just like another object. The concept of friendship lost value as a result of the tolerance towards vices (envy being the leading cause).
I believe that the Christian religion was in part developed to address these problems. I am not aware of any society that lasted without religion and had strong communal ties.
I don't understand how anyone can be surprised at this result.
Stop for a moment and think: what bonds me with the people living in my vicinity? Since in 2019, you can't say: religion, race, nationality and nation without being labeled one way or another. And historically, nothing else worked.
Sometimes people formed bonds they shouldn't have and then the religion starts a crusade or two
All my young friends are burdened by inflation that has never been addressed by increasing wages to match it.
People cannot see themselves saving for homes and specifically if they have a huge debt from student loans; being conditioned to go to university before the brain has developed. People are under a lot of stress as a result of these problems and loneliness is becoming the product.
Even my Christian friends that go to church are feeling the loneliness epidemic.
People who sought company in church were often disappointed, because most of the others who went there had lives of their own and weren't that invested in the whole thing.
Hell, the loneliest people I know are consistently religious.
I guess this is not restricted to religion.
Regarding trust, I would say there was very little trust in the socialist times as well. You don't need a lot of trust to borrow some salt from a neighbor or even trade a favors (ex. you get me ahead in the queue to buy a car and in exchange I get you access to buying foreign holidays), which is what people mainly were doing in the socialism. You do however need a lot of trust to start a business together. Since in socialism all people were just cogs in the giant socialist machine, they never needed to develop trust towards each other. Now, in capitalism, it's backfiring.
I mean I know the exact opposite so I guess our anecdata are at an impass.
Perhaps one of the most relevant teachings of Jesus is from his Discourse on the Church when he says: "For where two or three gather together in My name, there am I with them." (Matthew 18:20)
"Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because its foundation was on the rock." (Matthew 7:24-25)
I think if you really sat down and thought about it you would come up with other moral/ethical scenarios that would land in your personal gray area that would be soundly rejected by Christianity.
In your hypothetical, the Christians would be just as eager for the benefits as anyone else. Let's not pretend Christians, as a group, are somehow more moral than atheists or anyone else. History does not support that contention.
Yes, it kinda did, at least in Europe. But honestly, as someone coming from a Christian family from India, and seeing that christianity in India plays an outsized role (as in Indian Christians, not foreigners) in social services despite its status as a minority religion, I think it's safe to say that Christianity is uniquely into helping others. A few of our relatives were even jailed for 'marxism' for daring to think the poor ought to be treated with dignity.
I think this implies this has not always been the case, which I don't think is true, at least in my country in USA. People came to America partially to avoid religious persecution. And of course, slaves were also brought to America and a whole field of pseudoscience was created to explore how black people deserved their enslavement.
This was the case at least through most of the 20th century. Even in the 50s and 60s when "white flight" was cleaning out the predominantly ethnic urban neighborhoods those people were moving to suburbs where they had a lot in common with most of the people there and the people left in the city had a lot in common with each other.
>People came to America partially to avoid religious persecution
It's worth noting that a lot of those groups were being persecuted for being too hard-line and once in the new world they formed their own little groups and kicked out or hanged anyone who didn't agree perfectly with them. While I think we'd all be better off had certain ships sank, members of fundamentalist cults tend to get to know each other, especially when they're trying to not starve and not get scalped by the natives they started a war with.
>And of course, slaves were also brought to America and a whole field of pseudoscience was created to explore how black people deserved their enslavement.
Shared adversity is arguably the best way to bring people together. Now, before anyone misrepresents me as saying slaves anywhere at any time had it good, I'm not. I'm just saying that chronic loneliness was not a problem they had.
To conclude, having stuff in common brings people together and because of the way society tended to work in the past race, religion, nationality, nation, and other things we pretend don't matter today were strong indicators as to how much you had in common with someone and commonality tends to lead to meaningful interaction and/or friendship which solves loneliness.
In order to wage warfare and conquer a region with large numbers, you have to convince others to fight for you. This was difficult. It led to the agricultural revolution and bureaucracy through centralization (to pump out more bodies), thus civilization, and the use of religion as a means to bring a larger society together under one banner.
All of which to say, loneliness as the epidemic we understand today is a modern problem. On one hand, the family unit has been decimated, and on the other we're more disconnected from larger society. The nature of work has changed, the way we operate in society has changed. More than just the Church has slipped away.
When you say that, what are you thinking of? Rome wasn't monotheistic, before it Judaism wasn't really a military powerhouse, and Christianity only really came of power due to it's growing popularity in the Roman Empire. I can't think of an example of an ancient monotheistic empire, and post-classical it's really only Islam and Christianity, and for Christianity at least, that seems to be largely secondary, based upon institutions of a polytheistic past.
Obviously it's possible to have a large, shared polytheistic religion. We still have those today. The religion being a common denominator is more in the spirit of the point I was trying to make. Using a single God as a means to unite people was more palpable to some leaders. Muhammad understood this. The Arabs hadn't scriptures, nor institutions, and he saw the unifying power of Judaism and Christianity. When you have pagans worshiping separate sets of gods, it's less effective to try to politicize "all these are valid", "some of these are valid" and have them follow along.
From the wikipedia entry on religion in ancient Rome - "Even the most skeptical among Rome's intellectual elite such as Cicero, who was an augur, saw religion as a source of social order. As the Roman Empire expanded, migrants to the capital brought their local cults, many of which became popular among Italians. Christianity was in the end the most successful of these, and in 380 became the official state religion. "
No, it didn’t “expand its power after monotheism”. The Roman Empire didn’t even begin its official flirtation with Christianity until well into the 4th century CE. However, most historians consider the Roman Empire to have been in its waning days then, as it never fully recovered from all the shocks of the 3rd century. The full extent of Rome’s power happened under paganism and well before Christianity was anything more than a small, persecuted sect.
If anything Christianity seems to cause a problem for organized military - after Rome we don't see an organized, professional military for another thousand years. People may think of "the crusades", but let's be honest, the majority of that was really more a rag-tag rabble causing trouble, rather than any sort of organized and united fighting force.
The Origins of Political Order does a better job of conveying what I was attempting to convey.
But you still have to believe in some magical being(s), and so do all your mates.
Modern religions (not even all) may be about the bond between practitioners, but that's only because we can explain weather patterns, and the governments of most states don't rely on things like the "mandate of heaven" to function.
Mythology and religion also orignally served the role of upholding a unified value system and conception of reality which is critical for social cohesion and survival.
Of course this isn't the only issue. Modern technology allows people to exist without interacting with another humans physically. This certainly is part of the problem.
Take China for example, I don't think it is a country of religion, and on the other hand, I don't think the society lacks communal ties either.
Traditionally, the Chinese society is organized or bonded by ancestry roots. According to [1], people sharing the same ancestry root first formed tribes, tribes then grouped together to form states.
My last name, for example, came from a southern village in China. The village is also named by my last name. The majority people in the village share the same last name as mine, the rest are outside people who married to the village. The entire village can be traced back to a guy who settled there 1000 years ago. Not only they have a temple (or community center) to worship ancestors, they keep a Genealogy book to document the history. And this is just one example, there are many many villages like this.
It’s a bit like the houses in Game of Thrones.
Although, as modernization continues, this organization form is disappearing.
You say this, but then go on to describe what is generally understood as a system of ancestor worship.
Religion isn’t mostly — or even necessarily — about theology or beliefs. One of the first realizations of comparative religion scholars was that codified beliefs are a relative rarity.
Did you actually do that? For how long?
The problem we are seeing right now is that it looks like everything is moving towards a kind of social-contact-unfriendliness. Too much stress, connection (the expectation of being always reachable, and therefore available for work), busy streets, dominated by cars, big and impersonal chain stores, etc. Many of these are not necessarily bad by themselves, but they also had an important role in social interaction that has shifted now, and we might need time to find new spaces and solutions for that interaction.
In the modern age though, I could argue that close collaboration is not a necessity for survival or even success, and as such why cant a portion of humanity thrive without the need for extensive social contact?
Until the day comes that we are able to (if we are able to) remove these drives, neglecting them will continue to have deleterious effects.
Let's not forget there are two hazards here. Loneliness is one; the other is the suffocating tyranny of constantly attending to others' ideas and feelings, because attending to your own would be unacceptably disruptive of precious social connectedness. In "A Room of One's Own" Virginia Woolf diagnosed the injustice of a society that reserves the privilege of aloneness to men, and particularly upper class men, while denying it to women (who are supposed to be "selfless") and to a lesser extent the lower classes (who are supposed to be too mindless and animalistic to make anything of solitude.)
Being reluctant to intrude on another's social space is a good thing. It should be joined with skill at inviting others in, and a readiness to respond to that invitation. Let's not shit on people who have solved one half of the problem as if they were inferior to people who have only solved the other half.
- no one asking favors
- no obligations
- no emotional BS dumped on you
- no judgements
- no going along with what you don't want to do or opting-out
- no one invading/pushing your boundaries
- no meetings to keep
- fewer liabilities
- no disappointments
- no hierarchy
- more projects and work done
Disadvantages to being alone:
- more stress
- more anxiety
- less potential fun
- less sex
- less humor
- less mental stimulation
- fewer opportunities
- less productivity for big projects
To each, their own; there are many trade-offs and no simple answers. Key question "better together?"
I don't think I can generalize to entire genders from my experience though. it could simply be that it's easier for introverts to make same-gender friendships, so I only have a set of relatively outgoing women to select friends from.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-face...
"Likes" and reading narcissistic postings probably are not a good substitute for real human contact, and the more people become addicted to social media the less real human contact they are likely to seek. Of course companies like Facebook and Google (YouTube) purposely design their offerings to be addictive and as we know additions can be detrimental to one's mental and physical health.
Although the current focus on isolation is often described in the media as “the loneliness epidemic,” Robin Hewings, Director of Campaigns, Policy and Research for the U.K.’s Campaign to End Loneliness, warns that for a subjective, self-reported experience like loneliness, “it’s not very easy to make comparisons across time, and it’s not obvious that it’s getting worse.”
While he acknowledges that aging populations mean that there are likely to be a greater number of elderly people around who are suffering from isolation than in previous decades, he also points out that when you look at the percentages of those affected, the trends are harder to discern. “There was some work done in the late 1940s, which would seem to suggest a not dissimilar level to today. This is right at the speculative end,”
Talking about loneliness is slightly more interesting than what dress celebrity X wore at event Y. It's just bullshit - at least the dress talk doesn't pretend otherwise, for the most part.
We're living in the greatest time ever. I understand that when you make no money and you're writing articles, it may seem like there is a loneliness epidemic. There isn't - we're doing better than ever. More people are having first world problems than ever. It's great to have those, just talk to someone with a little perspective that you respect for it to rub off on you and go on about your day :)
Being able to have a cheeseburger delivered on demand does not make up for systematic loneliness and dehumanization. The more I travel, the more perspective I get, the more I think that things have gone deeply wrong here.
I don't understand how you can claim that with a straight face. Did you read the article?
14% of the UK population say they experience loneliness "often" or "always". 46% of a 20,000 people study in the US reported "sometimes" or "often".
Hundreds of thousands of people in Japan can be classified as hikikomori, living a lifestyle of extreme social isolation. There are similar numbers in most industrialized nations.
Downplaying or ignoring these facts is a terrible disservice to mental health, just as we did for decades with depression. This is indeed a global epidemic and I applaud the UK for introducing health programs to tackle it.
My tips: Actively take time for yourself. to get to know yourself and become more aware of yourself. Even if you do not suffer from such symptoms yet, it will be one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself in whatever position or situation you find yourself.
- Rise of hyper-mobility
- Rise of the portable screen
- Rise of inequality necessitating more workaholism
- Increase of monopolized corporate media
- Heightened nationalism, xenophobia and politically-polarized, separate realities
are factors which atomize people from each other.
Like all things in life, loneliness is not absolute in origin. Depending on your circumstances, combined with external levers, loneliness is not easy to pinpoint, but there are a few common externalities.
For the blue collar worker you have your typical financial concerns that make you overwork or worry about not having enough work to provide for yourself and or family. Spending time on people is a luxury most people with financial concerns simply cannot afford. If you are lucky you’ll be working too much to be lonely and it’ll only hit you when you have time to catch a breath.
Screen time is certainly a factor but not a cause. It’s a symptom of a sick society with failed systems, infrastructure, architecture, family structures and communities.
Depending where you are in the world, design of your community or should I say the lack of, will play a large role. If it takes a 30 min drive to see a friend be say a 5 minute walk, it becomes easier to remove yourself from face to face interactions.
The constant rise in cost of living puts financial stress on families, which in turn translates to personal stress, health problems, obesity and so on. This fuels a feedback loop that ultimately leaves little to no room for interaction with anyone. The easiest way to medicate that issue is you guessed it, with a screen.
Then you have your constant exposure to media and the team effect of polarization. People are brainwashed by nonstop streaming of irrelevant crap which makes them feel like crap and further remove themselves from society. Add in social media which amplifies all of these effects. The grass is always greener on the other side and this seems especially true through social media lens. Down the depression hole we go which further removes us from interaction.
We make deliberate effort to improve “mobility” and “accessibility” through roads and infrastructure which alienated public transportation projects. If you are lucky to live in a small walkable community, you might stand a chance at running into someone you know to strike up a conversation, but otherwise good luck talking to everyone speeding down a road. Even small rural communities in walkable cities are getting less friendly to foot traffic in certain parts of the world due to vehicle congestion.
Let’s not forget the convenience of online shopping. As awesome as it is, we simply don’t get as much stimulation as we would going outside and seeing people face to face, whether we talk or not is irrelevant.
For kids there are video games. Can’t play? No problem, watch others play. Society norms have changed. In countries like US, depending on where you live, talking to others outside comes across as odd and unwelcoming. We are so concerned about everyone’s need to be left alone that we ignore their silent plea to have anyone take any interest in their life.
Consumer choices have been negatively shaping people to feel more individual. When everything is customized to your liking, it’s hard to think as a group, for the benefit of the collective. This in turn leads to more consumerism, heightened expectations and disappointments when those expectations are not met.
Information has a large role to play in spread of loneliness. Having to choose from thousands of products online vs just getting one or two choices, shapes our expectations. Before, I’d you wanted to buy some nice bed sheets, you’d go to a store and maybe make a day out of it. Go to the mall, eat out, do things with others, relatives, friends. Now you click a button and spend days or hours looking at thousands of search optimized product titles which may or may not have anything to do with what you searched for. All the consumer choices and information like reviews, while seemingly great, just cause more mental fatigue, stress and ultimately contribute to a host of factors, some of which are tied to loneliness.
This is just scratching the surface. My point being, we are brining this onto ourselves in many different shapes and forms.
For me it is not enough to just be with people. For instance, when I was in HS I would never have characterized myself as a lonely person. I believe that is because those relationships, long forgotten, had serious depth. I also had more confidence when I was younger making my intimate life easier to progress.
However, now a days I have neither and I have lost the confidence to strike up the band. I honestly find it hard to even look a women in the eyes much less ask her for her name and tell her mine. Tbh, even if I was going to force myself to make a new friend I wouldn't know where to start.
Luckily for me I have pretty damn thick skin and have learned to deal with my loneliness, depression and anxiety. That being said, at 32, I find myself feeling as though dying young and alone is a probability. However, I take heart in knowing that it could be worse, for many people are simply dying of starvation and so, on the whole, I am a pretty lucky guy.
If loneliness is a problem that someone else can solve I just don't see how. From my perspective, this is a problem that, like a snowball rolling down a hill, builds up over time and eventually takes on a life of its own.
the hardest part was how long it took to understand the problem. you seem to understand the problem already, and that puts you into the position to do something about it.
you don't need to strike up the band. find activities that you are interested in. a hobby, or volunteer somewhere. the nice thing about both is that you are not expected to do it for the sake of meeting people, so you don't need to push yourself to talk to anyone, and noone will mind if you just focus on the work. the socialization will come eventually. by the time you get to look a woman into the eyes, you may already have shared your activities for a few months or more. i met my wife that way.
Not only would it provide some relief from the feeling of being shackled to bullshit jobs for life if you don't want to starve to death, it would also help foster much stronger communities.
Of course the devil is in the details, how do you avoid it becoming a ghetto. Probably not by putting it in its own neighbourhood.
So far I haven't come across any information on physical communities of homesteaders, although a local community seems like a necessity if you ever want to take a vacation again. Can't really leave crops on their own for very long without them dying, let alone livestock...
I feel like we consistently choose the short-term risk aversion of walling ourselves off from neighbors, blind to the long-term damage it does to our society.
No. Politicians throwing money at something is not evidence of a crisis.
Snuck premise much? I doubt he'd agree that it's dogmatic, nor would I. Governments are certainly needed for certain things, but politicians tend to come up with problems to solve, or try to solve problems which they are not equipped to solve. They aren't really supposed to create a social order so much as a legal one, anyway. Even if the could, I'd see that as disturbingly close to brain-washing...
This is why it's dogmatic. You can't agree that there are use cases and then in the same sentence denigrate all the use cases. Or... I guess you can, but...
> They aren't really supposed to create a social order so much as a legal one, anyway.
At the risk of being overly ontological, the legal order arises from the social order, since the law is simply a construct of beliefs that society nominally agrees on.
> Even if the could, I'd see that as disturbingly close to brain-washing...
...And there it is. It's ok to disagree with some things that politicians do. That doesn't mean there aren't good politicians.
That is a big leap to call those two ontological. Laws represent the beliefs of those that right them, nothing more. I am sure most politicians believe they know the will of their constituents, which is simply another belief. And yes, if a law is egregiously beyond social norms, it is possible that it will be rejected by soceity, but I would argue that is a distinct veto function.
It is strange this is an epidemic when it is a problem that seems so easy to solve.
UPDATE: based on responses to my comment it seems the core problem may be closer to home than we like to admit. CS Lewis' book The Great Divorce details this misanthropy, where hell is a product of the residents' own making because they choose to live on their own because they do not like anyone else.
This is like saying alcoholism is an easy problem to solve because all they have to do is stop drinking.
If it matters I’m 40 and they run from 50-70 in age.
I'd prefer to talk about events or ideas, or activities that interest me. It's far easier to join an online discussion already in progress to feel less isolated in South Bumblefart, USA.
I have found that familiarity does sometimes breed contempt, but absence does not always make the heart grow fonder.
Now, if they want to talk about that time their fighter gutted an orc with an awesome double crit, I’m all ears, but Cowboys losing to some other team in sportsball, not so much.
Some people have uncommon interests or opinions, and may be reticent about sharing them in the absence of some enabling signal, as one can be punished socially just for having them.
It doesn't help that my employer has a mainstream dress code. If I saw an exact copy of myself before or after work, I wouldn't want to talk to it, unless we were in a nerd haven.
I've had too many conversations that bring in early "so what church y'all go to?" or "what's your football team?". The wrong answers can get you a "bless your heart," which seems to be Southern for "fuck off, asshole". Wearing a Chicago Cubs tee-shirt sometimes invites conversation, but my spouse is the fan that live-streams every MLB broadcast that isn't regionally blacked out, and for me it's really more a signal for "I'm from the Midwest." The Chicago skyline on my usual payment card has sometimes unintentionally served the same purpose from restaurant servers and cashiers who are also ex-Chicago-residents.
It's why I'm considering a nerd tattoo, like "e^pi*i=-1" or the Fano plane mnemonic for octonion multiplication, or a space-filling model of my favorite molecule, benzaldehyde.