Hacker News Reader

Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Undeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see them nonstop is incredible.

View on HN

I’m glad I can call my parents to ask them for money for groceries after I was laid off

And yet, when we are with family and friends, we’re on the damn phone!

Do people actually visit family in-person at least less often? And to the degree they augment rare family in-person visits with a lot of phone calls and/or video calls.

I can believe a lot of friend get togethers IRL have been replaced with video calls. There's a tradeoff. I have a group of older friends and we still get together in-person but Zoom calls are a nice adder.

I'm in a few organizations where we also find Zoom a nice alternative to people schlepping somewhere for an hour meeting that mostly works as well online--and we still have a few physical get-togethers over the course of the year.

Young people are forced to move to wherever job opportunities are due to how hyper optimized the economy has become, so I would say most people spend way less time with family than 30 years ago

It's complicated and you can look at a lot of studies. People have always moved where opportunities existed--including across oceans pre-aircraft. Yes, when there were company towns, people moved less.

Why are people much less happy then?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...

I wonder what event started in 2020 that might have caused major social and economic disruption, and could have had that effect. Maybe something that drastically limited peoples social mobility and lead to mass isolation.

The trend goes back way further than 2020

More precisely, Americans are more diagnosed with depression. In the five years prior to COVID it's shown as rising by 3.3 percentage points. Is that surprising? The trend isn't likely to be flat. Also, is this happiness? Also, does a graph starting in 2015 relate to the question about the 90s? Also, do you expect happiness to be driven by having new things, or for people to adjust their expectations and remain constantly unhappy? Isn't disruption the main cause of unhappiness?

Because they have lost the ability to distinguish correlation from causation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com