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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

Here are some good high quality surveys:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5547349/

https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone

But frankly I wasn't kidding when I said every quality survey shows this.

If you have ever seen an article suggesting that loneliness is higher in the West or in capitalist economies or whatever, you have been 100% misled. That is essentially just a made up narrative that plays well in articles

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Those surveys are both about how elderly people in the Nordic countries report being less lonely than those in Mediterranean countries. They discuss things like whether extended families live together, but don’t really touch on people’s social lives more broadly. I’m not sure that you can draw a sweeping generalization from this that wealthier countries prefer less socialization.

Just keep looking up high quality surveys on different loneliness related topics until you are convinced. There are a lot of different ways to ask it. They all point in the same direction.

What exactly am I supposed to be convinced of? That people who have choices about how to spend their time 1) choose to be mostly alone and 2) are happier because of it? This is a pretty strong causative claim that would require a lot of evidence and considerable expertise in interpreting that evidence, neither of which I have.

Even the surveys you sent already suggest that people who live with spouses are much less lonely, which seems to be the opposite of your claim.

Frankly, your claim sounds so insane to me (someone who has a lot of choice in how I spend my time, enjoys the company of others often, and is not lonely) that I think it would require extraordinary evidence to convince me.

Just copy and paste my original post into ai and have it explain what I mean and what the evidence suggests. It will say it is true the correlation is massive like cm2012 says but he is being too sure with his reasoning. You can evaluate from there.

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