Capitalism and convenience are making us lonely | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism and convenience are making us lonely

medium.com

38 pointsRupertWiser14 comments

Being social nowadays is like exercise - it not longer naturally happens frequently in our lives and so we have to consciously choose to do it. Also like exercise, it seems impossible when you start and takes months of effort to really feel comfortable about it.

Given only ~25% of the US population exercises regularly, this bodes poorly for actively being social. I suspect we need to "artificially" engineer living conditions to push people together naturally.

Walking, hiking, paddle boarding, skiing, biking on recreation paths all have existed for years. People can choose to do activities that have normal social interaction. Or not. Don't blame a particular economic system.

Life has choices.

It's funny that in your examples you entirely chose excercise.

The point is that it used to not be a choice. Most people were constantly socialising because their work involved lots of socialising, and their housing was shared with lots of people. Those things are a lot less prevalent than they used to be.

At school it's very easy to make friends not just because you're a kid or that you're choosing to socialise, but just by default you spend 6+ hours a day with the same people.

I feel like the designs of our houses have a lot to do with this. Recently, I explored the idea the implications of larger houses:

https://gist.github.com/numtel/28ffb7181ad1a296a077db76c474b...

When people write anti-capitalist articles like this, I wish they would state a credible alternative that solves the problems they attribute to capitalism.

It's easy, lazy, and politically opportunistic to attribute social problems to capitalism.

And ultimately wrong - because capitalism isn't some complex system of social organisation.

It simply means the efficient allocation of capital.

Criticism and theory are different disciplines, and it's not necessary or likely that people skilled in one are necessarily skilled in the other.

Dismissing criticism based on this arbitrary criterion is lazy. Someone being unaware of or unwilling to present an alternative doesn't mean there isn't one, but especially it doesn't mean they're wrong about their criticism.

> And ultimately wrong - because capitalism isn't some complex system of social organisation.

> It simply means the efficient allocation of capital.

Have you ever played the game go? One of the really incredible things about it is that has very few very simple rules, you can adequately explain them in 5 minutes. But the ways they interact with each other, and create and resolve influences and constraints is incredibly complex and it takes years to develop a full and reliable intuition for all of the consequences of those simple rules. Even then it's common to see a pattern and understand that it is true, and must derive from the rules, but be unable to articulate the mechanism precisely.

When we talk about capitalism we are talking about all of these second and third order effects on power and influence and selfhood and our lives, not the handful of simple rules they may derive from. People aren't generally much stupider than you; what you find simple we do as well. And yet we still find value in discussing it in these terms, find that it can reveal understanding more than just "simply efficient allocation of capital."

So speaking of "easy, lazy, and politically opportunistic" that's exactly what I will accuse your comment of. A shallow dismissal based on your own sense of intellectual superiority.

If having friends and community is truly valuable to people then there is a huge business opportunity to provide that value. What I'm hearing instead is that folks are complaining that something doesn't exist and then not being willing to pay for it. If you're not willing to pay for something then it's not really that valuable at the end of the day.

Community doesn't commodify well because it doesn't scale. You can't hire 100 more workers to produce 1000 more communities every day, so there really is no ability to sell it. It's basically the only thing you legitimately can't pay for, you have to "earn" community by being actively involved with many people over the span of multiple years, nothing else will produce the right neurochemical response of safety in people's minds.

Funny to think that this could be solved by the free market.

I'm sorry you don't believe the free market has the power to solve this problem, but some one somewhere will eventually innovate and we'll all change out minds from impossible to inevitable. The first one to do it will be seen as a rule breaker but then as a luminary and finally a thought leader. We all know how the story goes.

I’m so baffled by both your comments on this subject. And I have a hard time figuring out if you’re serious or if you’re joking.

It’s so weird. Some things are not business opportunities. If people are feeling lonely because society is a mess, that’s not a business opportunity. That’s a social issue that should be solved.

it's an elegant system. capitalism creates problems, which are just opportunities for you to monetize.

Sometimes people try out arguments to experiment with ideas. This might be one of those cases involving the limits of reflecting human relations as economic relations. One example we already have is the reification of real world social relations into social networks which are monetized. There shouldn't be a reason why this is a one-way process - economic relations which are the proximal cause of distal social relations - namely the instantiation of friendships. Maybe in another world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com