Comment by atomicity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atomicity | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like this mindset is actually responsible for a lot of modern-day unhappiness. Why are 1st world countries somehow more lonely?

Something I've noticed while talking to my older relatives outside of the US is that their social life often are the people that they meet in their (first) job in the location they ended up staying in. It feels straightforward that the people that you spend 8+ hours a day with are going to be the people that you feel like you know and can trust.

It seems like some odd modern/corporate idea that work is just for work. Imagine if we had the same mindset for school, and tried to make things "productive" by eliminating all breaks and the assumption that students should get to know each other during class/free time.

I think we need to accept the idea that work is really going to be much of your social life when you move, work friends are not your best buds, and only later on can you have a social life that doesn't deeply involve people at work.

Look up "third place", it's a really fascinating concept which I've been obsessed with for a long time and I really want to solve it, at least for me. I feel my long-term sanity depends on it.

The gist is people used to have at least three social circles they'd hang out daily: family, work, friends outside of work. Note that I don't mean "participate in activities" with any of them, just be among these people, even without any goal.

We've lost the third place. It's only family, work and hanging out with friends sometimes, usually to _do_ something. I've noticed this big disconnect looking at older people in Southern Europe which spend their afternoon at a bar playing cards, or in the recent ages men hanging out in clubs and women in sewing/book/gossip clubs or when I visited family in central Africa where it's common to just hang out in the porch after dinner and chat with passers-by and just be there and _socialise_, without any goal in particular. I had the luck of experiencing something like that for a few years and it was incredibly nourishing and I miss it dearly.

Until we restore this third place, and find a way to make it work in the modern world, the loneliness and unhappiness epidemic can only grow, is my opinion.

I don't take issue with people making friends with people they work with. I do the same. I take issue when society or individuals make work their sole social outlet. On the contrary, I think people who make work their social outlet are more likely to be lonely. What happens when your coworkers leave? Or you get a new job? Or you are fired?

Having multiple outlets for socializing, and making work a smaller, secondary one, makes for a much more resilient social life in my opinion. Which is obviously a major part of why some have found the last year of remote work hellish, and others, just fine, or even quite freeing.

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