Absolutely, people are vastly underestimating the social and health effects of loneliness.
Loneliness is the gateway drug to depression and resentment.
Of course, I am referring to unwanted loneliness here. I think people who are comfortable being alone for most of their lives aren't in the same category.
> I think people who are comfortable being alone for most of their lives aren't in the same category.
In fact, we suffer from the opposite problem: lack of solitude. Frankly, I think this is a much bigger problem than the overblown loneliness issue. There are people everywhere, avoiding them is practically impossible.
I have no social contacts and I often work from home. Most of the time I don't even want to hear anyone, and get agitated by the noise of traffic (which is a constant where I live.)
However after sitting at the computer for a while I do crave human interaction. Places like Reddit, HN or online games are my usual venues for that, but they don't fix physical isolation.
As per my other comment [0], my Holy Grail is being able to do my thing in proximity to other people, in a beautiful environment, without having to interact with anyone or being affected by them, like a calm park with internet access and something to put my laptop on. :)
I agree. Needing a full-time job to survive means I get maybe three hours of time to myself each day. The rest is in an open plan office or commuting. And it’s not even true solitude, since rent prices here force me to share a house with other people.
As long as I have a close friend or two that I can share my thoughts with when the need arises, and personal activities that occupy my thoughts and time when I’m by myself, I can’t imagine feeling lonely ever again. More solitude, please.
My first taste of gut-wrenching loneliness was when I was 13. I was a little lonely before, but then we moved. That wasn't the issue.
Some girls decided I was lesbian. Now, them being half correct is besides the point (I'm bisexual at 40 years old). The entire freaking school stopped talking to me.
It eased up a bit next year since there were some new faces in high school, but I struggled for years and years. I struggled with loneliness, in part because I never actually felt like I could just be myself. The midwest, especially in small to medium sized towns, is full of social pressure to conform - in this case, it was usually conformation to the traditional family setup with ties to some christian sect. I could sometimes find small groups of friends that simply accepted me, but sometimes not.
5 years ago I moved to Norway. I knew exactly one person. But I'm also not lonely. This is a place known for being difficult to meet people and make friends, but I've honestly been happier. I have two or three friends, and find that society mostly doesn't care about me conforming as much. Sure, I'm not accepted by everyone, but society itself is set up to try to be inclusive instead of tossing aside folks that do not fit in. It was a real life-changer.
When meeting people from other cities, it is hard to explain exactly how bad Seattle is. One case in point, the Seattle meet up scene is dead compared to other similar cities. Even the engineering groups (PHP, React Native) that have hundreds of active participates in other cities will have dozens to none in Seattle.
Put 10 people from Seattle in a room and suggest an activity, and everyone will nod their heads, say that sounds like a great idea, and then never take the final steps of organizing to do it.
This Seattle mentality lead me to found https://www.thawd.net where we are melting the social freeze. I'm a technologist, so I have to believe that technology can solve problems, and I hope that the system Thawd is building can help reduce loneliness. The tl;dr is that Thawd removes all the friction of social activities, and presents the user with a great big "get me together with other people right now" button. Everything Thawd does happens super short term, 3-72 hours in the future, and our MVP is not eating dinner alone, we form a group of people who'll enjoy spending a couple hours talking with each other.
If I don't solve the problem, I sure hope someone else does, because, honestly, Seattle is a lonely place to live.
I feel like I have a similar problem here in the DC area particularly as an engineer. All the meet ups and activities around here I find not fulfilling enough, and have a disconnect with actually wanting to pull through.
Is this coming to my area? Or could you possibly show me how this works with a small demo or something so I can maybe help do something similar around here?
Since you are in the DC area I can plug the DC Code & Coffee[0] and their sister meetup NoVA Code & Coffee[1]. Both are great, active biweekly meetups with around 40-60 attendees each time. Its not just for software engineers, we get data science, devops, security, etc. people coming in. Even people not in tech but looking to make a switch. Its a lot of fun actually.
As someone who grew up in/around DC and works almost entirely with recent transplants (mostly Southerners, for some reason), I think that Seattle Freeze article definitely applies here, too. Lots of my coworkers seem to have had (or are still having) issues making friends. Not stated explicitly, but I think some of them have quit or will quit as a result. They've had better luck meeting people when traveling. It's kinda sad.
That’s interesting. Chicago is nowhere near the tech city that Seattle is, but I’ve found the tech meetup scene here to be pretty active and decent. Interestingly, some of the best meetups here (devops, tech in motion etc.) aren’t organized by tech folks but by non-tech folks working for tech companies.
Also I’ve found Chicagoans to be a friendly lot in general, including the techie types. Maybe it’s the midwestern thing, but it’s relatively easy to strike up a conversation with strangers. I think it has to do with a more balanced ratio folks in engineering and non engineering roles. Many of tech companies here are oriented around finance and marketing, rather than pure engineering.
Empirically I’ve found that meetups comprising solely of high IQ nerdy folks (eg C/C++ meetups) to be fairly awkward. I don’t want to fall into lazy stereotyping but I wonder if by concentrating certain types of talent in one area, one is inadvertently optimizing for specific traits at the expense of others?
This is a great comment. I live in Seattle, and I think the Seattle Freeze is largely a tragedy of groupthink. If you want to break out, there are a ton of opportunities to learn about this city and meet interesting people. Here are a couple networks that might help someone get started:
Getting out of my loneliness was a struggle at first, but after putting in some effort, I now have a great friendships that will last a lifetime. Not only do I feel comfortable meeting new people, but I really enjoy the process as well. Here are some books that have helped me break out of my "freeze" depression:
Oh certainly certain types of stress are. Indeed, it is well known that interpersonal bonds are formed under times of stress.
College roommates studying for finals together, soldiers going through boot camp, business partners getting off the ground, stress brings people together.
Most of today's world revolves around removing stress, and I agree that is a part of why making friends is harder.
Best of luck, but I'm not sure it'll work in Seattle. I think it would fare better in other cities like Nashville for example.
I feel Seattle has a curse. And the issue is not with meeting people. At least not for me. I meet people easily, and you could say I have many friends in Seattle, but it doesn't provide me joy. Because frankly, everyone is boring and uninteresting, including me. Seattle has a way to turn people into boring and uninteresting entities. I was fun and interesting before moving here, now I'm boring and stale. I'm exaggerating, but I think there's some small truth to this, and its the cause of the Seattle freeze.
It's very strange. Maybe its the lack of sunlight. Maybe its the layout of the city. Maybe its the high cost of living, or the abundance of people who didn't grew up here, or tech. But it seems everyone defines themselves through their job, and everyone has pretty much the same job, and not much else going for them.
It makes it hard to connect in meaningful ways. So you might rather stay in, play games, watch tv, go on a hike alone, etc. Then hang out with other Seatellite.
>Maybe its the lack of sunlight. Maybe its the layout of the city. Maybe its the high cost of living, or the abundance of people who didn't grew up here, or tech. But it seems everyone defines themselves through their job, and everyone has pretty much the same job, and not much else going for them.
All of the above. Commuting 1-3 hours every day solely due to traffic the city is doing absolutely nothing about so you end up having an 11-13 hour day most days, most non-engineers having to live 10-40 miles outside of the city where all you can really do is stay inside, you work so much in the city that going back there or staying there after work is mentally painful, the homeless problem and seeing all kinds of stuff a human shouldn't see such as death on the streets or people high as s#-t on meth roaming around the city screaming about shooting up schools, the cost of living is far too high in the entire region for a lot of minimum wage ($15/hr is not liveable within 10+ miles of the city) workers. Unless you live in the city, traveling to a friends house can be 45min - 2 hours by public transit. Employers don't give vacation time unless you're corporate and are a $100k+ salary worker. Employers needed to be mandated by the city to just give 5 paid sick days. Seattle is very exploitative and fisically right wing; its not this socialist paradise everyone makes it out to be.
I'm personally exhausted on my weekends. My week ends up being ~60 hours with my commute and none of that is at home.
Boulder, CO and Seattle, WA were extremely socially frustrating places for me. In Seattle, they make it pretty clear they don't want to know you or talk to you. In Boulder, they seem like they do, but then they never show up.
Denver was a totally different scene. Oakland, is pretty amazing. Berlin, in the acroyoga scene, incredible.
Don't let yourself stay in cities that make you really unhappy!
I think technology is the reason we're lonely. We can talk to people without seeing them or hearing their voice, we can ghost on people while talking to them, we can easily find another event or person to hang out with that isn't you, dating is entirely and solely based on physical attraction and swiping either way on someone's picture, you can look at other people from up to 50, 100 miles away if you want where we just had social circles and 'tribes' before. I've given up on dating here in Seattle, it's extremely tough even as a lesbian here. Our social lives are fairly superficial I feel.
I feel like I'm now part of the Seattle freeze after 3 years, but it's not exactly hard to make friends here. I'm extremely shy and have bad social anxiety, but managed to make quality lasting friends when I got here by using Reddit, Facebook groups, and meetup (no longer use any of these, so add +50 depression points). Most still talk to me and hang out with me frequently. It's also rainy, dark, with crippling depression for 9/12 months.
We need deeper, local, and more meaningful social interactions, and less shallow, global, low quality connections.
In the course of the last 12000 years, we've evolved from small, hunter-gatherer tribes, to highly dense, highly competitive, modern human establishments, and in the process have created a world perhaps too complex to successfully navigate without properly augmenting our intellects and social abilities. It seems that much of the technology we have developed recently hasn’t worked in our favor, but rather against us, and one consequence might very well be loneliness.
No matter what we decide the proper course of action is to successfully address the challenges of modern life, we must not forget that the only way forward is to accept our shared destiny and the need for collaboration.
After all, we’re in this together. There’s no need to fight.
> It seems that much of the technology we have developed recently hasn’t worked in our favor, but rather against us
Tell that to my insulin, my grandma who had a kidney transplant, my coworker conceiving via IVF, the kid down the street who called 911 on his iPhone when somebody tried to kidnap him...
Agreed, technology is often the easy way out of things that can and when possible should be solved without, Type II is a great example of this. It costs 1 in 4 healthcare dollars in the US. [1] It is curable, permanently, through diet and weight loss, and as recent studies show potentially just fasting [2].
Kids can be left unattended right now in Japan, it's also a cultural thing. There was a great Citylab writeup about this a few years back. It's typical for Japanese children to run errands alone via the subway at age six. FTA "'[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others.'" [3]
I think this attempts to disregard the very real, human experiences and emotions of the commentator for the sake of self satisfaction, and only serves to alienate. Even if you're right, there are other ways to go about it.
I take no joy in saying this, but I suspect that all else being equal, the result of this would be that people would just spend more time consuming media in isolation. Not basing this on feelings, but rather on having been up close with some (anonymized) wireless network datasets. People of all incomes and social strata spend absurd amounts of time in solipsistic media consumption.
It's easy to spend "absurd amounts of time in solipsistic media consumption" is you're weighted down after a 10+-hour work day, or an 8-hour work day + a couple hours of commute, and all others you know are in similar schedules...
Yeah, for those of us with a very finite and easily depleted amount of energy for social interaction, it’s conpletely empty by the time you get home or Saturday rolls around. Net result is, you avoid even eye contact with the person who lives 10m from you.
That seems to be cultural. I remember reading some study about it. Americans socialize through work, and make friends at work. Thus, work is their life. But in Europe for example, this wasn't the case. And thus they worked to live out their other activities, instead of living to work.
> they worked to live out their other activities, instead of living to work.
I'm from Europe, and I agree. Not everyone, but most people look at a job as just a means to a salary, regardless of what they do.
But I'm actually critical of this mindset: if you see things that way, then you are spending a great amount of your time doing something 'because you have to', slogging through the work day just to get to the stuff you like to do.
I know I'm generalizing, but I perceive Americans as more intense workers than Europeans. Maybe it's worse for their health, but look at what it's done to the world: space travel, computers, the internet, smartphones: all things that dominate the world (and are ultimately good, even though they have bad sides) and were made / greatly developed in America.
Most Americans feel this way to. Most aren't working for NASA or doing meaningful work. They just need a paycheck, to pay for all the crap they bought on credit.
Not to mention, even for creative people who love their job, nobody stops you from working on things on your own free time (e.g. if you're a programmer you can do open source, build stuff you like as side projects, etc, the most "meaningful work" does not have to be your pointy-haired bosses mandated projects at work).
People love to complain about work, but in reality if they become unemployed, many people's lives are destroyed.
That's even if they have a decent money flow from some pension or whatever. The social isolation and lack of purpose turn a lot of people into lonely couch potatoes, just waiting for death.
I had a bad attitude to work in my youth, until I figured out how to think about it:
A ton of people work to make everything I enjoy. The food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc. Millions of people who get up in the morning and work through the day and come home exhausted make all of this possible. To me, the only decent way to react to this is that I must join in and contribute my part to this system.
> That's even if they have a decent money flow from some pension or whatever. The social isolation and lack of purpose turn a lot of people into lonely couch potatoes, just waiting for death.
That's one of the saddest aspects of the current setup - even if you manage to escape the system (say, retire very early), you'll still have no one to hang out with, because everybody else is working all the time.
>People love to complain about work, but in reality if they become unemployed, many people's lives are destroyed.
That's only when they have been raised in cultures that teach them that their work is their ultimate purpose, and have them structure every aspect of their lives around it.
Nobody dies from not having to work in Mediterranean culture's for example...
>A ton of people work to make everything I enjoy. The food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc. Millions of people who get up in the morning and work through the day and come home exhausted make all of this possible.
Besides the food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc, that people do want and depend on, billions of people are also forced to work to make all kinds of crap they don't care about, that makes no difference, is marked up 5 to 100 percent, for others to be unhappy consuming them, and to kill the environment with externalities in the process.
I notice a lot of retirees like this (close family included!) but I think this is a matter of conditioning and temperament. Having had a habit of working or going to school one’s entire life, suddenly having plenty of time to yourself is likely a huge sudden change.
I’ve seen some individuals, once retiring, take up hobbies and volunteer and enjoy time with friends at cafés. I think they were aware that they could spend a retirement doing nothing, and that was likely a big motivator to find pastimes.
> We need deeper, local, and more meaningful social interactions, and less shallow, global, low quality connections.
I would be fine with just relaxing in public places like parks without actually having to interact with anyone, unless some people appear to share interests.
Sadly, safe, clean public places seem to be an exception rather than the norm in the world at large, at least from what little I've seen of it.
So we go back inside enclosures that are commercial establishments (coffeehouses, restaurants etc.) in order to be around other people, but interacting with other patrons there is kind of a social taboo.
From my time on the planet I can only think of video game arcades from my childhood as the best examples of places where people got together to have safe fun and often interacted with each other out of choice and had even more fun in doing so.
We have many of those places where I live, but I still don't take advantage of them. I think I'll try to change that and spend more time around other people in nature even if not directly interacting with them.
Edit: I realized I wrote this outside of a small cafe in my neighborhood, with people talking, relaxing on their own, and having breakfast. I consider myself an introvert but always seem to work better in cafes like this, with people around (especially if those people are also working). I always thought it was due to the tentative time limit making me focus better on the task at hand (since it would be rude to stay too long in a cafe), but now I'm wondering if just the proximity to other people might also be helping.
> video game arcades from my childhood as the best examples of places where people got together to have safe fun
As much as I loved '80s arcades (and wasted way too much money in them), "safe" is not exactly a word I'd use. Many of them, in Italy, quickly became drug markets or money-laundering operations (or both). Arguably, the few surviving ones are even worse today. They were not very healthy either, with no natural light and people smoking.
But yeah, it was a place to go with friends, and I have great memories about those times. Our furious NBAJAM challenges were the stuff of legend.
I heavily disagree regarding deep local relationships. While those are important, people seem to forget how important passing acquaintances are and how useful they can be in saving off loneliness. Not every interaction needs to be deep in order to have value.
I wonder if we can learn from Japan. I’m sure they hsve studies about this given some aspects of their culture results in low real-life interactions with strangers, and they have a number of people[Hikkimori] who basically stay in days on end.
Not that one culture easily translates to another, but from a health perspective maybe we can learn from them.
Too be honest, making social interactions is exhausting, maybe it's because I'm introverted, but I too feel lonely. I certainly don't want to die early due to loneliness, lol what a stupid reason don't you think. There are hermits who live long lives, I think it's a better way to learn the ways of solitude than tackling these problems with paid services. This is kind of ironic how capitalism progresses to this point but the prosperity that affords the individualism causes this loneliness problem. In addition, perhaps biohacking can come into the picture in fixing the loneliness problem, for example we know fictional works can induce senses of emotions, so essentially still using technology to solve the loneliness problem but without the humans involved, like the Xiaomi chatbot in China that helps millions with their loneliness problem but beyond just the app level. An anecdote about the Paro robot mentioned in the article: a professor told me Paro robots actually caused panic in the elderly care center at first lol.
You can't hack your way into fixing what is essentially a non-technical problem. I guess what I'm saying is that loneliness is not a pathogen that can be removed but a symptom of something you don't have (social circle, friends, intimate partners etc.) The most reasonable solution seems to be something like in the movie "Her", or in Westworld where they use humanoid robots as "good-enough" replacements for humans.
Yes, technology acts as an amplifier for human intentions (Kentaro Toyama's words, not mine).
Thus, fixing the underlying cause of the Seattle Freeze is the only thing that can fix the Seattle Freeze, not layering tech-based fixes on top.
As someone living in Seattle since 2011, I hypothesize that most people here are sufficiently affluent that they do not need to interact meaningfully (read "make friends") with people other than their family. IMHO, this is the root cause, and I don't think that technology can change this state of affairs.
It may be possible to hack the negative effects of loneliness biologically, because loneliness's negative effect may be meditated through brain chemicals:
"It showed that mice experiencing the stress of spending two weeks in social isolation had elevated levels of a brain-signaling molecule called Tac2, which in turn increases levels of a neuropeptide called NkB. The abundance of this molecule, the researchers write, might be responsible for all of the stressed-out behaviors they noticed in the mice"
Now maybe we could create a medicine to target those. But on the surface , it sounds like a terrible idea - because psychiatric medicines have a lot of side effects in general.
But also, even if found an ideal method to remove loneliness, loneliness does seem to serve a role - without loneliness people won't create connections between each other, and probably won't care about other people(as we currently seen with smartphones, social skills and empathy declined).
And sounds like a terrible way to build a society, far different from that of the hermit monk(at least in buddhism), that, while alone, is training to increase his compassion towards all other living beings.
This is more of a societal problem and to fix that requires some re-education of people that are coming into and only have been that society for a while, namely:
- Be open to strangers
- Be open to chance conversations (ie: remove your damn headphones once in a while)
- Introduce yourself to your neighbours and help them
I am passionate about solving this problem. 20 years ago, Robert Putnam wrote a book called “bowling alone” where he put forth the stats on the collapse of social groups in the US. Since then, the problem only got worse, and it also reflects itself in dating, and so on.
What do y’all think of this solution? We spent years on it and it is almost ready to launch. This was a kickstarter campaign video we had put together.
I think it's interesting that so many here think tech meetups are the solution to loneliness. In part that's frustrating because I don't work in the tech industry (programming is a hobby for me), but it's also seems strange because I don't particularly want to limit myself to meeting people who work in the same field. But here in LA, that unfortunately hasn't made things any easier for me. It's just really damn hard to start new relationships here. You need a reason to see someone more than once, and it's hard to establish that the first time you meet someone.
I'm reminded of people who do the "if we're not in relationships at thirty, let's get married" thing. It seems absurd to most of us because it seems like you need an established romantic relationship. But maybe that's a mistake - maybe it's just as good to commit to making things work with someone you know you're compatible with. Likewise, I see people on the subway or bus looking at their phones, and I know many of them have to be lonely. It seems absurd for two lonely people to sit beside each other silently for half an hour. But maybe that's the problem: with modern technology we lack the pressure to create social bonds. If it's the 1930s I probably need to be on good terms with my neighbors. We're so independent now - I can even avoid interacting with a clerk if I want because people are willing to ship groceries to my door.
What seems to be needed is a way for many of us to blindly push a button that says "commit", and get randomly matched up with a compatible group of friends. Is that the best way to form social bonds? Probably not, but it's so much better than what we have currently that to go on as we do seems like madness.
> What seems to be needed is a way for many of us to blindly push a button that says "commit", and get randomly matched up with a compatible group of friends.
There is an event starting in LA that might exactly do that [1]. At least in Lisbon, this works very well.
Disclaimer: I co-organize in Lisbon and build the app for this.
It seems like a mistake to assume that things were better in a previous time, when the world in general enthusiastically adopted the current technological situation.
It didn't happen because people were happy with how things were.
I agree with everything you said. I decided to try solving the problem with a new type of social network, feel free to sign up for the beta: https://peapods.com
It's my opinion America's social fabric has been thoroughly destroyed by it's relentless commercial focus, and it will take at least a few more decades before Americans will rediscover the need to connect with each other.
I have been going to the same coffee shop for 13 years. It is one of the only coffee shops in Atlanta that has comfortable chairs and couches that one is happy to spend hours socializing in. Almost every single other coffee shop in the city has succumbed to the frigid tyranny of aluminum and plywood. If you spend significant amounts of time at one of these "coffee shops," your only companionship is likely to be your laptop.
Its bars are a little better, but in general our country has turned our traditional watering holes from places where you could go to find a social group, to places where you must bring your social group with you if you are to have any kind of interesting fun at all. It's becoming difficult to find bars with an active social scene of regulars which doesn't feel obnoxiously cliquish. Americans, even when they are social, often fail spectacularly to be inclusive.
The only place left where you can go to reliably dispel your loneliness anymore is church. Sadly, even if you're religious, the atmosphere can feel oppressive. My mom all but gave up her quest to find a church where she could fit in with, and she is not a picky lady in this regard.
If you were to trace all three of these phenomenon down to a single underlying source, it's consumerism. If Americans aren't immediately getting what they want in any given situation, they leave and go back to their ivory tower / nest that they've constructed out of well-meaning, but myopic products / services that leave Americans feeling catered to, but not fulfilled. We don't want to sit and painstakingly build friendships any more. We want friendship-in-a-box. And our 'third places' have increasingly surrendered to those wishes.
I find your consumerism narrative unconvincing as you've laid it out here. I am, however, curious how much you blame mobile devices and social media, because that seems like (a) the Big Thing that's recently changed, and (b) because narratives and my experience around why people choose superficial connection or social disconnection through the use of social media and mobile devices seems very convincing and common.
Wish we had more rigorous data on causation here though.
You might want to check out Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" which makes similar arguments as the OP and was published in 1995, well before mobile phones had really taken off.
(I see now the article has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, too.)
There's certainly a role to play there, but I subordinate the technological roles underneath the commercial ones. Our mobile devices and social media, like the rest of our society, leave us feeling catered to, but not fulfilled.
We can go to Instagram and see lots of beautiful photographic artwork, and even contribute to it yourself, but taking a beautiful picture is not the same as having a beautiful life, and can indeed blind you to the amount of effort it takes to construct it behind the relatively much much smaller amount of effort it takes to snap a decent picture.
We can go to Facebook and discover what us tech kids figured out way back in the nineties, that interacting with people outside of meatspace removes our inner filters and simultaneously removes the all-important communication channel of tone of voice, leading every sentence to feel like an attack to be defended from. We get an intense "intellectual" experience without having to do the work of actually understanding not just our own positions, but also how to best communicate and distill those positions to others. Catered to, not fulfilled.
We can pick up our phones and obtain, on tap, video games that engage our minds with an experience that's compelling enough to hold attention without the work of slowly building up skills or having to coordinate sit-down time with our fellow humans to hone those skills with. Catered to, not fulfilled. If you get good at Candy Crush, what bragging rights have you earned?
Technology has finished the job of driving us apart from our peers, but it didn't begin it. It's the proximate, not underlying cause. Technology used to bring us together, we used to prioritize that which allowed us to spend time and engage over a greater surface area than 'mere' conversation. We all watched network, then later cable, news and then talk about what we all saw at the diner or bar.
Now every single social interaction we have has been gamified and monetized to a far more granular degree, and our third spaces sit ossified in the corner like a beaten step-sibling.
Technology, the phone in our pocket, only has a small role to play. If Americans wanted more and deeper and harder social interaction, we'd demand social media and phone apps that would give it to us. I believe China's mobile app ecosystem is pretty good at providing technology that brings them together rather than drives them apart. But Americans don't want that, we want to be catered to.
> China's mobile app ecosystem is pretty good at providing technology that brings them together rather than drives them apart
What makes you think of that? Please elaborate. IMO people chat, share stuff, pay and do others things in the same app(wechat) is neither necessary nor helpful for bringing them together.
It's less about what they provide and more about how they use it. Americans use technology to wall themselves off from others, Asia in general with the exception of the unfathomable Japanese, uses technology to assist and facilitate, the same way we used to use it until the last few years.
If an American wants to connect with a fellow American, they must first find a convincing reason to. We don't just talk to each other anymore. The rest of the world is not like this. China is merely one example. It's America that's the exception. China is the rule.
I don't follow your logic about consumerism being the problem. America has been consumerist for a long time, longer than your 13 years of observation. Is there perhaps another advancement other than "consumerism" in the last 13 years which could account for your observations?
I speak more in a sibling comment, but basically, the sheer number and quality of the services available provides for anyone to retreat from challenging situations to ones in which they need expend no personal effort to get rewarded.
In the past even those escapes required effort. Anyone who grew up in the eighties playing Nintendo knows just how much effort was required to obtain mastery, and thereby fulfillment, over a video game. Now the games are laser-focused on removing all obstacles to that feeling.
I'd like to give this phenomenon a better name to distinguish it from 'mere' consumerism, but there's definitely been a shift over the last 10 years or so as the Internet has gone mainstream. The Pandora's Box it opened up had real knock-on effects on the rest of society.
Consumerism hardly unique to America. There are societies far more status-oriented and focused on consumerism than America and they don't exhibit pervasive social isolation. (Often it's just the opposite.)
It's not consumerism, it's just beautiful, unadulterated capitalism. The incredible thing about the evolution is that nobody planned it. The invisible hand magically produced a society of lonely, desperate, and paranoid people who must work and study all the time less they become poor and be totally ejected from polite society. Most Americans don't even get two weeks vacation time. It's absolutely appalling but, as an investor, it's also kind of amazing.
In the end it's difficult to imagine any kind of fundamental reevaluation of America's economic model and so the culture won't change. Instead I suspect we'll see more and more people turning to often toxic online communities to manage their anxieties. The problem here is that it's very easy for lonely, desperate people to be radicalized and this could put significant downward pressure on profits. I'd really like to see something done to address this issue before it's too late. The market can over commit on stuff like this and it introduces significant volatility into long term returns.
I agree. I think a more nuanced assessment would be better, but for my part, i work in consulting and am moving from Australia to the us. All i have heard from my us counterparts is that they are lucky to get two paid weeks off a year. I get 4 minimum, and generally end up taking about 6 weeks paid leave a year. No questions or issues taking it provided i request it in advance.
Do my us colleagues get paid more? Yes, about 10-30% when adjusting for col and ppp. But the inability to take time off sounds terrible.
America's working culture and general work life balance sounds like it needs a hard reset.
Everything you’ve said agrees with my experiences. Though I’m not sure I would attribute this phenomenon to consumerism.
After speaking with my older relatives and being a part of more closely knit communities while moving around as a child, I would say the fall of churches is the single biggest cause here.
It used to be that every week you’d see your neighbors for 3-4hrs supplied with discussion material, the culture/doctrine encouraged using your gifts to help your neighbors out, and other purely social events would be organized through the church. That combined with belonging to the same “tribe” as everyone is a recipe for a strong social community.
In my current experiences, churchs are some huge corporatized production with some hype man spewing what the people want to hear then everyone goes home. These churches focus on growing numbers and building their campus without think of the community’s needs. It’s hard to build a strong social community with a sea of people.
The smaller churches are filled with aging congregations sadly watching their culture die with them as younger generations fail to build any sense of community.
I hope that we can find a way to replicate the good parts of our church going history. America could definitely use some stronger communities.
I imagine the solution to be some sort of Boy Scouts for Adults. It would be different from a MeetUp Group in that there would be some minor level of commitment which is important to keep people attending when they need it most: when they are feeling a bit down; and there would be a regular meeting schedule. If I were not traveling I would seriously look into setting something like this up.
I am well aware of that. I think a sort of secular replacement for Christianity is needed. Liberalism seems to have just done away with it and left nothing to replace it. It had its problems but it also served some good purposes. This is one of them.
> Liberalism seems to have just done away with it and left nothing to replace it
The original "inventors" of social liberalism (and arguably its most vocal supporters today) did have replacements: strong friend circles where they were popular, political parties with strong ideological roots, cultural clubs, societies of shared interests, etc. They fought for auto-determination precisely because they wanted equal dignity for their preferred replacements, in the face of institutional snobism. At the end of the day, even anarchists have clubs.
The real problem is that very little is done in education, in most countries, to let kids explore different social groups and perspectives in order to choose the one they fit best; and even less is done for lonely adults. They are usually grouped per age and along fairly omogeneous class lines, which is a complete crapshoot.
Perhaps we‘re just not built for living in metropolitan areas with millions of people within a few square kilometers and we‘re isolating ourselves from the strangers we see every day because it makes us uncomfortable. Move back to small villages and cities?
I feel like a lot of this problem is to do with logistical convenience.
As we get better at traveling further for work / school we build relationships with people who are less convenient to maintain.
These relationships demand higher effort than a local relationship and are more fragile than relationships built on convenience (assumption).
IMO the solution to this is to somehow decouple where we work / learn from who we work for / which schools we go to so that local, convenient people can work and learn together on different jobs / courses and build relationships that are convenient to maintain.
Right now i think the neucleus of our social lives and the places we build the most of our relationships (school, work) are too far from the places we relax (home) for us to easily maintain longterm, social relationship because those relationships are often founded and maintined through convenience.
That or we need to spend less time working and officially dedicate much larger portions of our lives to maintaining social lives. We could do this trough reduced working hours, increased leisure time and perhaps some sort of “hanging out” subsidy so that people without disposable income can afford to travel to spend time together.
Earlier, we were depended on others (relatives and neighbors) for many things. Now dependency has reduced drastically, so there is no need for relationships. I have have seen strong bonding in neighborhood where they are economically weak.
Another way is for people to become more comfortable with digital communication. If you enjoy communicating with someone face to face, you'll probably enjoy communicating with them in written form too. For instance, I have some people I message very day, some I message every week, some I message every month, and keeping in touch like this allows the relationship to stay strong and grow, in spite of us rarely seeing each other in person. This approach is also ultimately more scalable: hanging out generally takes a lot more time than messaging someone, so you have time to hang out in person with fewer people than you do to message people, especially considering that it's possible to have multiple conversations simultaneously over instant messenging.
The alternative is to give up all your friends when you move overseas or change cities, which seems absurd given the wealth of communication tools the modern world offers us.
> The alternative is to give up all your friends when you move overseas or change cities, which seems absurd given the wealth of communication tools the modern world offers us.
But why continue communicating with old friends using, IMHO, a shallow form of building a bond when you can develop new relationships with people where you are now and can meet or have fun face-to-face?
I’m actually seeing an over reliance of people using digital communication for everything, to the point where they’re starving themselves and potential friends of a meaningful way to have a relationship.
This ties into the other comments that point out that we’re starting to favour global, weak ties to people instead of local, strong ties. I’m not a fan of that personally.
>But why continue communicating with old friends using, IMHO, a shallow form of building a bond when you can develop new relationships with people where you are now and can meet or have fun face-to-face?
Because relationships develop and grow over time? Why deploy your server on the Linux kernel, when you could just write your own operating system and deploy on that instead? Why essentially throw away the countless hours you've invested in building a relationship with someone? I imagine you wouldn't apply the same logic to a spouse or children: "sorry honey, I'm moving overseas now, but don't worry, I'll find another wife there."
Why do you consider bonding over text shallow? To me if anything it's less shallow, as you have to actually engage with somebody as a person. When hanging out in person, you can bond with anybody over movies, drinks etc. without ever developing a deeper understanding of them, solely by the biological nature of how spending time with people promotes bonding.
>This ties into the other comments that point out that we’re starting to favour global, weak ties to people instead of local, strong ties. I’m not a fan of that personally.
What don't you like about that? Statistically speaking, you're much more likely to find someone you get along with better along any particular dimension among the billions of people on the globe than the few people who by pure chance happen to be geographically proximal to you. If we assume people seek the most satisfying relationships possible, it's natural for these to be geographically diverse.
We should be encouraging people around the world to have fewer children, not more. Local declining birth rates are at worst, a generational problem, and the solution isn’t to breed because of a poorly defined and researched, and massively overhyped loneliness epidemic.
Without judging automation, that's the effect off making everything fully automated and highly efficient. You can
- order a pizza home without talking to the pizzeria and their staff
- get a car drive to your destination without knowing the language of the driver
- get your shirts washed and ironed without going to the laundry
- have your grossery delivered home skipping all steps of the purchase process in the grossery store
- write code for your customer without ever meeting him
- and so many things more
As a friend uses to say, the need for warm hearted and human body contact in a broad sense is built into our DNA. Not being exposed to it will make us suffer.
We always hear that we're social creatures, and as you said, that human contact is built into our DNA. But, almost everything you mentioned is successful by choice. If we're that social, why are we ordering pizza to our house and not socializing at the local pizzeria or arranging a neighborhood pizza potluck? If we crave interaction, why are we having groceries delivered to our kitchen and not going to the local market and making friends?
Something doesn't add up here.
Are we more lazy than social? We kind of want to socialize at the pizzeria, but we'd prefer to sit on the couch and eat pizza while watching Netflix? If that's true, then why not embrace our lazy selves?
Are we scared? We want to socialize at the pizzeria, but we're concerned we might say the wrong things, or not be attractive enough. It makes us nervous and causes anxiety, and we can avoid those feelings by staying home.
Or do we just selectively want to socialize? We might not value conversation at the pizzeria, but we just need a partner at home, and a good friend as a neighbor, and that meets our requirements. If we don't have that partner or friend, we feel a need to socialize, but at the same time, we know that pizzeria can't fulfill that need, so we stay home and remain lonely.
I really don't know what's going on, but there are lots of opportunities to socialize, so either we're not that social, or something is holding us back.
We're also tribal, and we don't see those people (pizza worker, grocer, etc.) as part of our tribe. People need a central rallying "thing." Historically this has been genetics, religion, that sort of thing. This is one of the downfalls of multiculturalism, we have not yet figured out what to put as the central "thing" for us to feel like we're all part of the same tribe.
It struck me when I went back to college for a reunion how the college social experience is so different from the adult experience. The parties are the obvious example, but you can still go to parties as an adult. The main thing is that your spend your waking hours with other people. You may have roommates, or, if you're lucky enough to have your own room, you're sharing a hallway, a bathroom, mail room, etc, with people around you. You eat meals with other people. You walk around campus, with other people and/or running into other people out doing the same thing. If you want to hangout with people outside of the regular routine, they're usually 1-10 minutes walk away. It's like the Steve Jobs office plan, designed to get people to bump into each other. You can have solitude if you want it, but you have to work for it. (Being introverted, I didn't always appreciate that.)
As an adult, if you live the "American Dream" and end up with a nice house in the suburbs, it's possible to not see anyone outside the office, except through the windshield of your car. Your car will deposit you back inside your garage at the end of the day, so there's not even a chance to interact with your neighbors (something Bin Laden pointed out in his plans for people to blend in without notice). In the name of convenience, schools and other activities have drop-off and pickup lines of cars, so there's no real social interaction there. We have scheduled and optimized our way to a lot of unhappiness.
It reminds of me of creatures in the zoo, out of their natural environment, looking sad and lonely and bored. Except we often work really hard to put ourselves in the zoo.
> It reminds of me of creatures in the zoo, out of their natural environment, looking sad and lonely and bored. Except we often work really hard to put ourselves in the zoo.
I know the "+1" comments are against rules, but I just wanted to say that this is absolutely spot on.
It makes me wonder then if there's scientific proof if people who live and work in dense urban metros like NYC are less lonely compared to those in suburban or rural areas i.e. most people are walking, taking public transit, almost constantly surrounded by people and crowds.
I don’t know if it’s true for everyone, but I get the feeling that this is why a lot of young people choose to live in crowded, expensive places like NY and SF. Sure, for some people it makes sense economically because there are unique jobs opportunities, but for most people, I think it’s just being around other young, energetic people.
That all plays out, but I think there is more. For example, in school, you're not competing with anyone. You and everyone else are like brothers in arms, struggling to get through the same challenges. At work, you compete with your colleagues. You compete for the jobs, the roles, the positions.
When you struggle through challenges with others, like in school, that's already a great way to relate and bond. When you compete with others like at work, you can't be close, you need to play smart, don't goof around, be serious, present yourself to others always with your strongest and smartest stance.
Then you mention parties, ya you can go to a party as an adult, though they're rarer. That said, you have less incentive. A lot of parties in college are motivated by people looking for romance. Love and attraction plays a huge role in bonding. Ya, even for friendships.
I guess it goes to ask, what are the ingredients to a deep relationship? For me, it has always involved being vulnerable, showing my true colors, being goofy, trying things, failing, struggling, making a breakthrough, succumbing to my desires, being playful, etc.
If you manage to do all that with someone else, and grow comfortable, and feel safe. That will be a deep and meaningful relationship.
Grown up work life seems conductive to none of those things.
These are all great points. Although one thing I notice about school vs afterwards is that school is very competitive, because everyone literally gets a grade and people compare in a way that people don’t do with salaries and bonuses. Yes, there is also great cooperation at school and competition in the office, especially for promotions, but it seems (to me) less inherently competitive.
Well, it probably depends on your personality, but for me, you do measure yourself against others, but you're not competing. Everyone can pass, everyone can get 100%. You win or lose on your own, not because someone else was better. Well, once you're in anyways. Applications are definitly competitive.
Try interacting with the public on Muni or on Market St sometime. You'll mostly get asked for money, threatened with death, followed, preached to about everything from aliens to God to Obama, scammed, lungs full of urine vapor, shoes coated in human shit.
College and suburbia have a lot in common: they're both curated for some level of having one's life together, where that's making the grades and test scores, or qualifying for the mortgage and car loan. They both self-select for similar values and life circumstances, whether teenaged career ambition or middle-aged middle-class desires for family life. They both guarantee a certain set of shared experiences.
In a city you get none of that. Everyone is welcome whether he sleeps in the doorway or the penthouse, works 9-5 in a cube or scrapes by in a punk collective. That gives cities their dynamism and creativity but also means the person next to you on the subway is exceedingly unlikely to meaningfully inhabit the same community. I've lived both ways, and I have to say I found the city a lot more alienating.
It depends on the college. Some are entirely commuter schools and have no student housing on campus. Others only guarantee dorm rooms to freshmen; upperclassmen have to fend for themselves.
The jobs we destroyed, destroyed the self-esteem of the people, who refuse to interact without a role in society to show for themselves. Thats the reason why the normies are more self-social isolating.
On HN its usually the control-problem. Any relationship is loosing a part of your life you control. Hard to accept that for some personalities.
Loneliness, when used for turning the search light inwards, can turn out to be a very rewarding experience. Most of the enlightened souls have spent a decade or more in solitude and looking inward. If the time of aloneness is used well, it can help find many answers. Eventually people do end up spending time with others, but those interactions turn out better when the time of being alone has been gainfully spent.
I've seen reported that it takes about 200 hours of unstructured time together to become "good friends" with someone. Outside of high school and college, I'm not sure where you get that amount of consistent open-ended time with someone. It makes the outlook for building friendships later in life seem bleak.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadLoneliness is the gateway drug to depression and resentment.
Of course, I am referring to unwanted loneliness here. I think people who are comfortable being alone for most of their lives aren't in the same category.
In fact, we suffer from the opposite problem: lack of solitude. Frankly, I think this is a much bigger problem than the overblown loneliness issue. There are people everywhere, avoiding them is practically impossible.
Move to another country, where you don't speak the language. There will still be people, but they won't interact with you.
But if you tried it, you would find that isolation behind the language barrier felt like solitude to you.
I have no social contacts and I often work from home. Most of the time I don't even want to hear anyone, and get agitated by the noise of traffic (which is a constant where I live.)
However after sitting at the computer for a while I do crave human interaction. Places like Reddit, HN or online games are my usual venues for that, but they don't fix physical isolation.
As per my other comment [0], my Holy Grail is being able to do my thing in proximity to other people, in a beautiful environment, without having to interact with anyone or being affected by them, like a calm park with internet access and something to put my laptop on. :)
This usually gives me the best of both worlds.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944802
As long as I have a close friend or two that I can share my thoughts with when the need arises, and personal activities that occupy my thoughts and time when I’m by myself, I can’t imagine feeling lonely ever again. More solitude, please.
My first taste of gut-wrenching loneliness was when I was 13. I was a little lonely before, but then we moved. That wasn't the issue.
Some girls decided I was lesbian. Now, them being half correct is besides the point (I'm bisexual at 40 years old). The entire freaking school stopped talking to me.
It eased up a bit next year since there were some new faces in high school, but I struggled for years and years. I struggled with loneliness, in part because I never actually felt like I could just be myself. The midwest, especially in small to medium sized towns, is full of social pressure to conform - in this case, it was usually conformation to the traditional family setup with ties to some christian sect. I could sometimes find small groups of friends that simply accepted me, but sometimes not.
5 years ago I moved to Norway. I knew exactly one person. But I'm also not lonely. This is a place known for being difficult to meet people and make friends, but I've honestly been happier. I have two or three friends, and find that society mostly doesn't care about me conforming as much. Sure, I'm not accepted by everyone, but society itself is set up to try to be inclusive instead of tossing aside folks that do not fit in. It was a real life-changer.
When meeting people from other cities, it is hard to explain exactly how bad Seattle is. One case in point, the Seattle meet up scene is dead compared to other similar cities. Even the engineering groups (PHP, React Native) that have hundreds of active participates in other cities will have dozens to none in Seattle.
Put 10 people from Seattle in a room and suggest an activity, and everyone will nod their heads, say that sounds like a great idea, and then never take the final steps of organizing to do it.
This Seattle mentality lead me to found https://www.thawd.net where we are melting the social freeze. I'm a technologist, so I have to believe that technology can solve problems, and I hope that the system Thawd is building can help reduce loneliness. The tl;dr is that Thawd removes all the friction of social activities, and presents the user with a great big "get me together with other people right now" button. Everything Thawd does happens super short term, 3-72 hours in the future, and our MVP is not eating dinner alone, we form a group of people who'll enjoy spending a couple hours talking with each other.
If I don't solve the problem, I sure hope someone else does, because, honestly, Seattle is a lonely place to live.
Is this coming to my area? Or could you possibly show me how this works with a small demo or something so I can maybe help do something similar around here?
Thawd is launching first in Seattle, then it'll go city by city.
[0] https://www.meetup.com/dc-code-coffee/
[1] https://www.meetup.com/NoVA-Code-Coffee/
Seattle is just really strange. You can live here years and years and be lucky to meet more than a couple of people.
Of course YMMV, I know people who can walk into a random bar and walk out with 5 best new buds for life. :)
I met all of my friends within 3 months of moving here and haven't made a single new one in almost 3 years.
Also I’ve found Chicagoans to be a friendly lot in general, including the techie types. Maybe it’s the midwestern thing, but it’s relatively easy to strike up a conversation with strangers. I think it has to do with a more balanced ratio folks in engineering and non engineering roles. Many of tech companies here are oriented around finance and marketing, rather than pure engineering.
Empirically I’ve found that meetups comprising solely of high IQ nerdy folks (eg C/C++ meetups) to be fairly awkward. I don’t want to fall into lazy stereotyping but I wonder if by concentrating certain types of talent in one area, one is inadvertently optimizing for specific traits at the expense of others?
https://www.facebook.com/SeattleSocialCircle/ https://theevergrey.com/
Getting out of my loneliness was a struggle at first, but after putting in some effort, I now have a great friendships that will last a lifetime. Not only do I feel comfortable meeting new people, but I really enjoy the process as well. Here are some books that have helped me break out of my "freeze" depression:
https://www.amazon.com/Charisma-Myth-Science-Personal-Magnet...
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenme...
YMMV, but putting in the effort to understand and connect with new personalities has greatly improved my life.
It'd be interesting to explore the idea that the friction might be an essential or an important step into building long lasting relationships.
College roommates studying for finals together, soldiers going through boot camp, business partners getting off the ground, stress brings people together.
Most of today's world revolves around removing stress, and I agree that is a part of why making friends is harder.
I feel Seattle has a curse. And the issue is not with meeting people. At least not for me. I meet people easily, and you could say I have many friends in Seattle, but it doesn't provide me joy. Because frankly, everyone is boring and uninteresting, including me. Seattle has a way to turn people into boring and uninteresting entities. I was fun and interesting before moving here, now I'm boring and stale. I'm exaggerating, but I think there's some small truth to this, and its the cause of the Seattle freeze.
It's very strange. Maybe its the lack of sunlight. Maybe its the layout of the city. Maybe its the high cost of living, or the abundance of people who didn't grew up here, or tech. But it seems everyone defines themselves through their job, and everyone has pretty much the same job, and not much else going for them.
It makes it hard to connect in meaningful ways. So you might rather stay in, play games, watch tv, go on a hike alone, etc. Then hang out with other Seatellite.
All of the above. Commuting 1-3 hours every day solely due to traffic the city is doing absolutely nothing about so you end up having an 11-13 hour day most days, most non-engineers having to live 10-40 miles outside of the city where all you can really do is stay inside, you work so much in the city that going back there or staying there after work is mentally painful, the homeless problem and seeing all kinds of stuff a human shouldn't see such as death on the streets or people high as s#-t on meth roaming around the city screaming about shooting up schools, the cost of living is far too high in the entire region for a lot of minimum wage ($15/hr is not liveable within 10+ miles of the city) workers. Unless you live in the city, traveling to a friends house can be 45min - 2 hours by public transit. Employers don't give vacation time unless you're corporate and are a $100k+ salary worker. Employers needed to be mandated by the city to just give 5 paid sick days. Seattle is very exploitative and fisically right wing; its not this socialist paradise everyone makes it out to be.
I'm personally exhausted on my weekends. My week ends up being ~60 hours with my commute and none of that is at home.
Denver was a totally different scene. Oakland, is pretty amazing. Berlin, in the acroyoga scene, incredible.
Don't let yourself stay in cities that make you really unhappy!
I feel like I'm now part of the Seattle freeze after 3 years, but it's not exactly hard to make friends here. I'm extremely shy and have bad social anxiety, but managed to make quality lasting friends when I got here by using Reddit, Facebook groups, and meetup (no longer use any of these, so add +50 depression points). Most still talk to me and hang out with me frequently. It's also rainy, dark, with crippling depression for 9/12 months.
In the course of the last 12000 years, we've evolved from small, hunter-gatherer tribes, to highly dense, highly competitive, modern human establishments, and in the process have created a world perhaps too complex to successfully navigate without properly augmenting our intellects and social abilities. It seems that much of the technology we have developed recently hasn’t worked in our favor, but rather against us, and one consequence might very well be loneliness.
No matter what we decide the proper course of action is to successfully address the challenges of modern life, we must not forget that the only way forward is to accept our shared destiny and the need for collaboration.
After all, we’re in this together. There’s no need to fight.
Tell that to my insulin, my grandma who had a kidney transplant, my coworker conceiving via IVF, the kid down the street who called 911 on his iPhone when somebody tried to kidnap him...
- The diabetes and obesity crisis in America can't be cured by technology.
- IVF is often due to advanced aging, due to pressure to work later
- There was a time when kids could be left unattended 100 years ago. I'm curious why this has changed so much.
Kids can be left unattended right now in Japan, it's also a cultural thing. There was a great Citylab writeup about this a few years back. It's typical for Japanese children to run errands alone via the subway at age six. FTA "'[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others.'" [3]
[1] http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2018/03/20/dc...
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170223124259.h...
[3] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/09/why-are-littl...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm from Europe, and I agree. Not everyone, but most people look at a job as just a means to a salary, regardless of what they do.
But I'm actually critical of this mindset: if you see things that way, then you are spending a great amount of your time doing something 'because you have to', slogging through the work day just to get to the stuff you like to do.
I know I'm generalizing, but I perceive Americans as more intense workers than Europeans. Maybe it's worse for their health, but look at what it's done to the world: space travel, computers, the internet, smartphones: all things that dominate the world (and are ultimately good, even though they have bad sides) and were made / greatly developed in America.
So hyper-capitalism isn't all that bad :)
And even there, not for the huge majority of the people not doing anything creative. http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Not to mention, even for creative people who love their job, nobody stops you from working on things on your own free time (e.g. if you're a programmer you can do open source, build stuff you like as side projects, etc, the most "meaningful work" does not have to be your pointy-haired bosses mandated projects at work).
That's even if they have a decent money flow from some pension or whatever. The social isolation and lack of purpose turn a lot of people into lonely couch potatoes, just waiting for death.
I had a bad attitude to work in my youth, until I figured out how to think about it:
A ton of people work to make everything I enjoy. The food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc. Millions of people who get up in the morning and work through the day and come home exhausted make all of this possible. To me, the only decent way to react to this is that I must join in and contribute my part to this system.
That's one of the saddest aspects of the current setup - even if you manage to escape the system (say, retire very early), you'll still have no one to hang out with, because everybody else is working all the time.
That's only when they have been raised in cultures that teach them that their work is their ultimate purpose, and have them structure every aspect of their lives around it.
Nobody dies from not having to work in Mediterranean culture's for example...
>A ton of people work to make everything I enjoy. The food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc. Millions of people who get up in the morning and work through the day and come home exhausted make all of this possible.
Besides the food, the buildings, the vehicles, roads, appliances, etc, that people do want and depend on, billions of people are also forced to work to make all kinds of crap they don't care about, that makes no difference, is marked up 5 to 100 percent, for others to be unhappy consuming them, and to kill the environment with externalities in the process.
E.g.:
https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/
http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
I’ve seen some individuals, once retiring, take up hobbies and volunteer and enjoy time with friends at cafés. I think they were aware that they could spend a retirement doing nothing, and that was likely a big motivator to find pastimes.
I would be fine with just relaxing in public places like parks without actually having to interact with anyone, unless some people appear to share interests.
Sadly, safe, clean public places seem to be an exception rather than the norm in the world at large, at least from what little I've seen of it.
So we go back inside enclosures that are commercial establishments (coffeehouses, restaurants etc.) in order to be around other people, but interacting with other patrons there is kind of a social taboo.
From my time on the planet I can only think of video game arcades from my childhood as the best examples of places where people got together to have safe fun and often interacted with each other out of choice and had even more fun in doing so.
Visit Central/Eastern Europe. These places are a norm in there.
Edit: I realized I wrote this outside of a small cafe in my neighborhood, with people talking, relaxing on their own, and having breakfast. I consider myself an introvert but always seem to work better in cafes like this, with people around (especially if those people are also working). I always thought it was due to the tentative time limit making me focus better on the task at hand (since it would be rude to stay too long in a cafe), but now I'm wondering if just the proximity to other people might also be helping.
As much as I loved '80s arcades (and wasted way too much money in them), "safe" is not exactly a word I'd use. Many of them, in Italy, quickly became drug markets or money-laundering operations (or both). Arguably, the few surviving ones are even worse today. They were not very healthy either, with no natural light and people smoking.
But yeah, it was a place to go with friends, and I have great memories about those times. Our furious NBAJAM challenges were the stuff of legend.
Not that one culture easily translates to another, but from a health perspective maybe we can learn from them.
Thus, fixing the underlying cause of the Seattle Freeze is the only thing that can fix the Seattle Freeze, not layering tech-based fixes on top.
As someone living in Seattle since 2011, I hypothesize that most people here are sufficiently affluent that they do not need to interact meaningfully (read "make friends") with people other than their family. IMHO, this is the root cause, and I don't think that technology can change this state of affairs.
"It showed that mice experiencing the stress of spending two weeks in social isolation had elevated levels of a brain-signaling molecule called Tac2, which in turn increases levels of a neuropeptide called NkB. The abundance of this molecule, the researchers write, might be responsible for all of the stressed-out behaviors they noticed in the mice"
https://www.inverse.com/article/44885-social-isolation-menta...
Now maybe we could create a medicine to target those. But on the surface , it sounds like a terrible idea - because psychiatric medicines have a lot of side effects in general.
But also, even if found an ideal method to remove loneliness, loneliness does seem to serve a role - without loneliness people won't create connections between each other, and probably won't care about other people(as we currently seen with smartphones, social skills and empathy declined).
And sounds like a terrible way to build a society, far different from that of the hermit monk(at least in buddhism), that, while alone, is training to increase his compassion towards all other living beings.
- Be open to strangers
- Be open to chance conversations (ie: remove your damn headphones once in a while)
- Introduce yourself to your neighbours and help them
https://youtu.be/VR5nyQmfG7Q
What do y’all think of this solution? We spent years on it and it is almost ready to launch. This was a kickstarter campaign video we had put together.
Constructive (good and/or critical) feedback is welcome. Here is our roadmap: https://qbix.com/docs/presentation.pdf
I'm reminded of people who do the "if we're not in relationships at thirty, let's get married" thing. It seems absurd to most of us because it seems like you need an established romantic relationship. But maybe that's a mistake - maybe it's just as good to commit to making things work with someone you know you're compatible with. Likewise, I see people on the subway or bus looking at their phones, and I know many of them have to be lonely. It seems absurd for two lonely people to sit beside each other silently for half an hour. But maybe that's the problem: with modern technology we lack the pressure to create social bonds. If it's the 1930s I probably need to be on good terms with my neighbors. We're so independent now - I can even avoid interacting with a clerk if I want because people are willing to ship groceries to my door.
What seems to be needed is a way for many of us to blindly push a button that says "commit", and get randomly matched up with a compatible group of friends. Is that the best way to form social bonds? Probably not, but it's so much better than what we have currently that to go on as we do seems like madness.
There is an event starting in LA that might exactly do that [1]. At least in Lisbon, this works very well.
Disclaimer: I co-organize in Lisbon and build the app for this.
[1] https://www.meetup.com/LA-Digital-Nomads/events/254211266/
There's a few options in there.
It didn't happen because people were happy with how things were.
People aren't always glued to their smartphones by choice, or because they were less happy before.
I have been going to the same coffee shop for 13 years. It is one of the only coffee shops in Atlanta that has comfortable chairs and couches that one is happy to spend hours socializing in. Almost every single other coffee shop in the city has succumbed to the frigid tyranny of aluminum and plywood. If you spend significant amounts of time at one of these "coffee shops," your only companionship is likely to be your laptop.
Its bars are a little better, but in general our country has turned our traditional watering holes from places where you could go to find a social group, to places where you must bring your social group with you if you are to have any kind of interesting fun at all. It's becoming difficult to find bars with an active social scene of regulars which doesn't feel obnoxiously cliquish. Americans, even when they are social, often fail spectacularly to be inclusive.
The only place left where you can go to reliably dispel your loneliness anymore is church. Sadly, even if you're religious, the atmosphere can feel oppressive. My mom all but gave up her quest to find a church where she could fit in with, and she is not a picky lady in this regard.
If you were to trace all three of these phenomenon down to a single underlying source, it's consumerism. If Americans aren't immediately getting what they want in any given situation, they leave and go back to their ivory tower / nest that they've constructed out of well-meaning, but myopic products / services that leave Americans feeling catered to, but not fulfilled. We don't want to sit and painstakingly build friendships any more. We want friendship-in-a-box. And our 'third places' have increasingly surrendered to those wishes.
Wish we had more rigorous data on causation here though.
(I see now the article has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, too.)
We can go to Instagram and see lots of beautiful photographic artwork, and even contribute to it yourself, but taking a beautiful picture is not the same as having a beautiful life, and can indeed blind you to the amount of effort it takes to construct it behind the relatively much much smaller amount of effort it takes to snap a decent picture.
We can go to Facebook and discover what us tech kids figured out way back in the nineties, that interacting with people outside of meatspace removes our inner filters and simultaneously removes the all-important communication channel of tone of voice, leading every sentence to feel like an attack to be defended from. We get an intense "intellectual" experience without having to do the work of actually understanding not just our own positions, but also how to best communicate and distill those positions to others. Catered to, not fulfilled.
We can pick up our phones and obtain, on tap, video games that engage our minds with an experience that's compelling enough to hold attention without the work of slowly building up skills or having to coordinate sit-down time with our fellow humans to hone those skills with. Catered to, not fulfilled. If you get good at Candy Crush, what bragging rights have you earned?
Technology has finished the job of driving us apart from our peers, but it didn't begin it. It's the proximate, not underlying cause. Technology used to bring us together, we used to prioritize that which allowed us to spend time and engage over a greater surface area than 'mere' conversation. We all watched network, then later cable, news and then talk about what we all saw at the diner or bar.
Now every single social interaction we have has been gamified and monetized to a far more granular degree, and our third spaces sit ossified in the corner like a beaten step-sibling.
Technology, the phone in our pocket, only has a small role to play. If Americans wanted more and deeper and harder social interaction, we'd demand social media and phone apps that would give it to us. I believe China's mobile app ecosystem is pretty good at providing technology that brings them together rather than drives them apart. But Americans don't want that, we want to be catered to.
What makes you think of that? Please elaborate. IMO people chat, share stuff, pay and do others things in the same app(wechat) is neither necessary nor helpful for bringing them together.
If an American wants to connect with a fellow American, they must first find a convincing reason to. We don't just talk to each other anymore. The rest of the world is not like this. China is merely one example. It's America that's the exception. China is the rule.
In the past even those escapes required effort. Anyone who grew up in the eighties playing Nintendo knows just how much effort was required to obtain mastery, and thereby fulfillment, over a video game. Now the games are laser-focused on removing all obstacles to that feeling.
I'd like to give this phenomenon a better name to distinguish it from 'mere' consumerism, but there's definitely been a shift over the last 10 years or so as the Internet has gone mainstream. The Pandora's Box it opened up had real knock-on effects on the rest of society.
In the end it's difficult to imagine any kind of fundamental reevaluation of America's economic model and so the culture won't change. Instead I suspect we'll see more and more people turning to often toxic online communities to manage their anxieties. The problem here is that it's very easy for lonely, desperate people to be radicalized and this could put significant downward pressure on profits. I'd really like to see something done to address this issue before it's too late. The market can over commit on stuff like this and it introduces significant volatility into long term returns.
Do my us colleagues get paid more? Yes, about 10-30% when adjusting for col and ppp. But the inability to take time off sounds terrible.
America's working culture and general work life balance sounds like it needs a hard reset.
After speaking with my older relatives and being a part of more closely knit communities while moving around as a child, I would say the fall of churches is the single biggest cause here.
It used to be that every week you’d see your neighbors for 3-4hrs supplied with discussion material, the culture/doctrine encouraged using your gifts to help your neighbors out, and other purely social events would be organized through the church. That combined with belonging to the same “tribe” as everyone is a recipe for a strong social community.
In my current experiences, churchs are some huge corporatized production with some hype man spewing what the people want to hear then everyone goes home. These churches focus on growing numbers and building their campus without think of the community’s needs. It’s hard to build a strong social community with a sea of people.
The smaller churches are filled with aging congregations sadly watching their culture die with them as younger generations fail to build any sense of community.
I hope that we can find a way to replicate the good parts of our church going history. America could definitely use some stronger communities.
The original "inventors" of social liberalism (and arguably its most vocal supporters today) did have replacements: strong friend circles where they were popular, political parties with strong ideological roots, cultural clubs, societies of shared interests, etc. They fought for auto-determination precisely because they wanted equal dignity for their preferred replacements, in the face of institutional snobism. At the end of the day, even anarchists have clubs.
The real problem is that very little is done in education, in most countries, to let kids explore different social groups and perspectives in order to choose the one they fit best; and even less is done for lonely adults. They are usually grouped per age and along fairly omogeneous class lines, which is a complete crapshoot.
As we get better at traveling further for work / school we build relationships with people who are less convenient to maintain.
These relationships demand higher effort than a local relationship and are more fragile than relationships built on convenience (assumption).
IMO the solution to this is to somehow decouple where we work / learn from who we work for / which schools we go to so that local, convenient people can work and learn together on different jobs / courses and build relationships that are convenient to maintain.
Right now i think the neucleus of our social lives and the places we build the most of our relationships (school, work) are too far from the places we relax (home) for us to easily maintain longterm, social relationship because those relationships are often founded and maintined through convenience.
That or we need to spend less time working and officially dedicate much larger portions of our lives to maintaining social lives. We could do this trough reduced working hours, increased leisure time and perhaps some sort of “hanging out” subsidy so that people without disposable income can afford to travel to spend time together.
The alternative is to give up all your friends when you move overseas or change cities, which seems absurd given the wealth of communication tools the modern world offers us.
But why continue communicating with old friends using, IMHO, a shallow form of building a bond when you can develop new relationships with people where you are now and can meet or have fun face-to-face?
I’m actually seeing an over reliance of people using digital communication for everything, to the point where they’re starving themselves and potential friends of a meaningful way to have a relationship.
This ties into the other comments that point out that we’re starting to favour global, weak ties to people instead of local, strong ties. I’m not a fan of that personally.
Because relationships develop and grow over time? Why deploy your server on the Linux kernel, when you could just write your own operating system and deploy on that instead? Why essentially throw away the countless hours you've invested in building a relationship with someone? I imagine you wouldn't apply the same logic to a spouse or children: "sorry honey, I'm moving overseas now, but don't worry, I'll find another wife there."
Why do you consider bonding over text shallow? To me if anything it's less shallow, as you have to actually engage with somebody as a person. When hanging out in person, you can bond with anybody over movies, drinks etc. without ever developing a deeper understanding of them, solely by the biological nature of how spending time with people promotes bonding.
>This ties into the other comments that point out that we’re starting to favour global, weak ties to people instead of local, strong ties. I’m not a fan of that personally.
What don't you like about that? Statistically speaking, you're much more likely to find someone you get along with better along any particular dimension among the billions of people on the globe than the few people who by pure chance happen to be geographically proximal to you. If we assume people seek the most satisfying relationships possible, it's natural for these to be geographically diverse.
- nobody shares common roots.
- it's difficult to travel to meeting places.
- order a pizza home without talking to the pizzeria and their staff
- get a car drive to your destination without knowing the language of the driver
- get your shirts washed and ironed without going to the laundry
- have your grossery delivered home skipping all steps of the purchase process in the grossery store
- write code for your customer without ever meeting him
- and so many things more
As a friend uses to say, the need for warm hearted and human body contact in a broad sense is built into our DNA. Not being exposed to it will make us suffer.
Something doesn't add up here.
Are we more lazy than social? We kind of want to socialize at the pizzeria, but we'd prefer to sit on the couch and eat pizza while watching Netflix? If that's true, then why not embrace our lazy selves?
Are we scared? We want to socialize at the pizzeria, but we're concerned we might say the wrong things, or not be attractive enough. It makes us nervous and causes anxiety, and we can avoid those feelings by staying home.
Or do we just selectively want to socialize? We might not value conversation at the pizzeria, but we just need a partner at home, and a good friend as a neighbor, and that meets our requirements. If we don't have that partner or friend, we feel a need to socialize, but at the same time, we know that pizzeria can't fulfill that need, so we stay home and remain lonely.
I really don't know what's going on, but there are lots of opportunities to socialize, so either we're not that social, or something is holding us back.
We're also tribal, and we don't see those people (pizza worker, grocer, etc.) as part of our tribe. People need a central rallying "thing." Historically this has been genetics, religion, that sort of thing. This is one of the downfalls of multiculturalism, we have not yet figured out what to put as the central "thing" for us to feel like we're all part of the same tribe.
As an adult, if you live the "American Dream" and end up with a nice house in the suburbs, it's possible to not see anyone outside the office, except through the windshield of your car. Your car will deposit you back inside your garage at the end of the day, so there's not even a chance to interact with your neighbors (something Bin Laden pointed out in his plans for people to blend in without notice). In the name of convenience, schools and other activities have drop-off and pickup lines of cars, so there's no real social interaction there. We have scheduled and optimized our way to a lot of unhappiness.
It reminds of me of creatures in the zoo, out of their natural environment, looking sad and lonely and bored. Except we often work really hard to put ourselves in the zoo.
I know the "+1" comments are against rules, but I just wanted to say that this is absolutely spot on.
When you struggle through challenges with others, like in school, that's already a great way to relate and bond. When you compete with others like at work, you can't be close, you need to play smart, don't goof around, be serious, present yourself to others always with your strongest and smartest stance.
Then you mention parties, ya you can go to a party as an adult, though they're rarer. That said, you have less incentive. A lot of parties in college are motivated by people looking for romance. Love and attraction plays a huge role in bonding. Ya, even for friendships.
I guess it goes to ask, what are the ingredients to a deep relationship? For me, it has always involved being vulnerable, showing my true colors, being goofy, trying things, failing, struggling, making a breakthrough, succumbing to my desires, being playful, etc.
If you manage to do all that with someone else, and grow comfortable, and feel safe. That will be a deep and meaningful relationship.
Grown up work life seems conductive to none of those things.
College and suburbia have a lot in common: they're both curated for some level of having one's life together, where that's making the grades and test scores, or qualifying for the mortgage and car loan. They both self-select for similar values and life circumstances, whether teenaged career ambition or middle-aged middle-class desires for family life. They both guarantee a certain set of shared experiences.
In a city you get none of that. Everyone is welcome whether he sleeps in the doorway or the penthouse, works 9-5 in a cube or scrapes by in a punk collective. That gives cities their dynamism and creativity but also means the person next to you on the subway is exceedingly unlikely to meaningfully inhabit the same community. I've lived both ways, and I have to say I found the city a lot more alienating.
On HN its usually the control-problem. Any relationship is loosing a part of your life you control. Hard to accept that for some personalities.