It actually might be worse. I hypothesize that the kinds of interactions we have online are the social equivalent of "empty calories". They tweak the brain's reward mechanism for socializing without actually getting any of the real benefits.
Oh man, I think you hit on something there. You get all of the satisfaction of interaction, but don't have to worry about being challenged, learning from any mistakes, or really learning anything; you can block anything you don't like.
My father passed away around 11 years back and it wasn't til several years later that it really hit me that my mom was basically all alone for large portions of her day out on the a country property. I now call her and chat for about 20 minutes a day on my commute home. I know that it has made a huge difference in her life and I feel more connected to her than ever before. I highly recommend that others take some time to see if their loved ones are in a similar situation and if so, try and reach out on some sort of scheduled basis.
This is also why a lot of spouses pass soon after the other. They lose hope and the reason to get out of bed each morning.
I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.
In a perfect world we'd do this and the companions would be well-paid - better paid than they were for the automated jobs in that this new gig can't and shouldn't be automated.
In our actual world the funds saved would find their way to the caregivers but when does that ever happen? Some intermediary will be there capturing most of the value, as is the nature of 21st century America. Companions are rarely off the books highly paid no bennies, much more likely off the books underpaid undocumented immigrants or minimum wage workers hardly able to house and feed themselves much less compassionately care for their wards.
Why consume economic output to visit elderly people? Why not create societal structures so that elderly people have relationships like the 90 year old Italian men I see in the local park who smoke and yell at each other all day?
Bluntly put because our society would rather not think about age and dying. So the baby boomers thought they would live forever and built retirement home and assisted living facilities to shove their parents into once they became inconvenient and/or reminders of mortality, now they are the ones being moved in there and all of the support system (social, community, familial levels) of previous generations have almost all gone away. Building new ones would require a change in society and its values and that is a hard slow and expensive thing to change.
A big hope of the UBI movement is that it will "pay" people to take care of one another in a way that our usual monetary transfer for services rendered simply can't handle well. That is, someone taking care of their parent is not going to be paid for that service in our economy, but with a UBI, it allows one to get that economic support without it being a usual "job". The work of maintaining genuine social relationships is not a source of income, but it is what humans are most designed to do and it would be good to have a mechanism that supports that rather than hinders it.
My personal hope is that a UBI leads to real communities where the old and the young have a place in our lives and they stop being seen as problems and as burdens on the middle-aged.
Andrew Yang talks about this a lot in terms of his wife taking care of their children, but the idea equally applies to people taking care of anyone else.
I can think of some reasons that a UBI would not be a panacea here. Firstly, in many cases the younger generation has left their hometown for the big city, but the parents are left behind. Even if they got an UBI, few people are going to want to move back to the “middle of nowhere” to take care of their parents.
Secondly, it is now often observed that parents and children, in spite of living under the same roof, are interacting less because the parents are staring at their devices, and children get devices, too. Even if people have the time and money to take care of their parents, do they have the interest in socializing?
UBI would likely go much further living in the country than a major city. Cost of living adjustments are possible, but seem like a terrible idea.
I don’t think you need to be constantly talking with an elderly parent for regular visits to be beneficial. A short chat, taking care of a few minor issues, and watching a movie together can make a real quality of life difference. It also demonstrates you still care.
It's not hard to find purpose in life that doesn't revolve around sitting at a desk doing fuck all and pretending to work for 40 hours a week.
People will still work. Whether it's to get a leg up from the baseline or because it's something their passionate about, nothing will stop people from banding together to solve common goals. The current state of work is just a really shitty abstraction over that. I would have thought software engineers of all people would understand that.
That world doesn't and won't exist for most. In places where jobs are being lost and no one works people band together for crime more than innovation. The common goal being additional money.
If you look at the wealthiest innovation is not what they do with there freetime either.
I liked the idea of UBI, but once people have the ability to vote for for politicians who promise to raise the UBI, wouldn't they just keep raising it until capital exits stage left and the economy devolves into a poor socialist economy? It seems like it could be setting a dangerous precedent. Once you start giving people free money, its political suicide to take it away. Look at Greece and Argentina as examples.
I wouldn't worry about it. Lower class people have been voting for governments that give them the shaft for as long as democracy has been a thing. Why would UBI change that?
Because if one party is offering to double my UBI check, they're going to get my vote - and I have the advantage of knowing all the ways that is likely to make everyone poorer overall. Now I don't know how other people think, but it seems reasonable they would also behave like that, maybe even be more likely to do so.
Yeah, this is an area I've thought about a lot. I've designed an inverse closed loop anti-UBI concept. I haven't had the time to launch it. Basically charities (to start) list tasks that pay credits, business register to accept credits (like a promotion or advertising spend), volunteers earn credits from the charities and spend them at participating business. The businesses then donate the credits back to the charity of their choice. The system is closed loop and non designed to be fungible. You can read more about it here http://www.thegoodloop.org
> I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people.
You are much more optimistic than I am. On the contrary, I see the shift towards much more automation and "task outsourcing" as a huge factor when it comes to increasing social isolation. We no longer have to lean on our friends, neighbors and even random social acquaintances for help and support, and with all of the various delivery services it's much easier to be a shut-in than in the past.
I'd actually be curious to hear from folks younger than 25 or so: When I was a young adult, helping friends move was a common occurrence. Nobody really liked the task of moving, but it really did build a camaraderie and bonding between friends. These days, though, with the ubiquity of things like Task Rabbit and Thumbtack, it's a lot easier to just pay someone a small amount to help out. I'm curious if young adults these days have a lot fewer "help friends move" experiences because of this.
Men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after their spouse. My opinion: This is partly because women do most of "the women's work" of buying groceries, cooking and cleaning.
In many older couples, the wife is the one who keeps track of everyone's dietary restrictions. Older men often don't really know how to feed themselves properly. It's not their responsibility to keep track of the myriad types of info involved in that.
IIRC, about 90% of the time, when someone's spouse dies, it is a woman's husband.
Your stats are an excellent explanation for that statistic. But I can't see how it relates to a gender-based percentage difference in outcomes for the "widowhood effect."
The story is about a man who died 48hrs after his wife at age 101. There are not that much "buying groceries, cooking and cleaning" in 48hrs, and not many 101 years old in the grocery store.
"Often, it’s unrelated to any accident or cardiovascular incident, but sometimes it is related. That can be part of the stress reaction to grief."
"It’s just the difference between men and women and how we’re socialized,” she said. “Connection helps us negotiate old age. Independence does not do us well.”
Social relations, social support network, social contact, all of it is connected with stress management. Traditional gender roles where men prioritize work over their social live is correlated with smaller social network. If the goal is to live a long life with as little stress as possible then prioritizing time with children and spending time building social connections is much better than being at work.
However not being at work puts men at the lower end of the social ladder which also correlate to a smaller social network and increase stress. Social status is one of the bigger factors when predicting stress in both humans and animals alike.
The link do not support the suggestion that because women do most of "the women's work", men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after their spouse. It does however support that men has worse stress reaction to grief and thus men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after their spouse.
Stress management, and not some concept of "women work", is the likely culprit for why men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after the spouse. The link support it and so do also research which ask why some people live a long life and others don't, popular called successful aging in most of the research. As one researcher described it, stress is about margins. A stressful event occur and the body reacts and the older a person gets the smaller the margins becomes. Meaningful social connections reduces the stress response and thus a person can handle events which otherwise would kill them.
This is one of the insights why Sweden changed the elder care policy of moving old people into care homes. Moving a old person away from a trusted and safe environments induces stress, which has a very deadly result. As far as it possible it is much better to perform elderly care within the environment which results in the lowest amount of stress for the patient, ie the own homes.
In addition, buying groceries, cooking and cleaning is already guarantied through the social safety net provided by the state. By the time this kind of statistics is relevant the state is already taking care of all the so called "women work". It did not change the statistics that more men than women die shortly after their spouse.
This. My mom emails me once a day, as a heartbeat sort of thing, since she lives alone with her cat. She started this when she read a cat started feeding on her owner after she died.
However, it is often the start of a conversation, and I also call her on the way to work 2-3 times a week. I think it has really kept her mood up, compared to before we did this. She's 80.
Stop making assumptions about other people (they’re lazy/dangerous/whatever) and go out and be friendly.
This Wednesday I wandered around the city playing ukulele at 3 in the morning and I met all kinds of interesting people, everything from this beautiful female graduate student who just wanted to talk about schoastics to someone who wanted me to call his “friend in Florida.”
Just go out and be with people, they’re all lonely too.
I can't tell if you're actually interested in suggestions, but if you are, start with something less intimidating that late-night ukulele, and try reframing what you're doing. If you do encounter something negative when you experiment, try to treat it analytically as well as emotionally. Just how bad, objectively speaking, was feeling a little embarrassed around some folks you'll never see again?
Paradoxically, you may find that putting yourself out there a little can be a surprising source of strength.
You have to understand that this is more difficult for some people than it is for others. If it works for you, good for you, but it’s not an option for others.
I don’t have the ability to “just” go out and meet people and strike up a conversation.
I'm skeptical of this because the elderly are one of the most vulnerable populations out there, and it's hard enough to prevent elder abuse even on vetted, professional platforms.
Outsourcing elderly care to the gig economy (intentionally to college students) sounds like a step in the wrong direction for providing reliable, safe elderly care. I hope they're able to overcome that challenge.
Oooo, that is a platform just waiting to be exploited by conmen/women. The elderly are notoriously easy to scam and notoriously confused by technology; and you're collecting them in one spot to make it easier.
What do your controls on 'grandkids' look like? Because if I put on my black hat, I could absolutely feed an addiction for pills, valuables to pawn, or just straight up money through that service.
This seems like an area where technology would be well suited to help. I'm not simply saying "Just give 'em a Chromebook and a Facebook account" but VoIP and VTC would be ideal for helping the "alone elderly" be connected with the community around them... perhaps connecting with and mentoring children who are themselves frequently alone. Just a thought... it's certainly something I can easily imaging being in an Apple/Google/Microsoft keynote about how they are using technology to help improve the lives and communities of people.
Seems like more of a device than something meant to be a community effort/project which just happens to use technology, which is what I was trying to describe.
I'm 34 and once you add in the weekends I am and talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day.
At Gym1 I talk to my lifting coach but most of the time I'm in my head focused on training, after that at Gym2 I'm just trying to do my accessory work and conditioning and don't talk to anyone other than "hey" back to "hey Ryan" from the staff at the door. I go home and my retired mother that lives with me stays in her room and I go to mine, rinse and repeat.
Not entirely by choice but all my friends are married with kids and have zero free time.
I have found that truly open office plans act as significant discouragers of social contact at the office. Everyone except for the truly oblivious are hyper-aware of how any pleasant extraneous conversations they have are being heard by every single other person in the room. With a small team maybe that's not so bad if everyone has good chemistry, but not so with a large team.
When everyone has their own office or cube space, people aren't nearly as averse to friendly conversations because there is a sense of moderate privacy there. Additionally, you feel comfortable having social interactions in shared spaces, because you know you have the 'safety' of your private or semi-private cube to return to.
My last nightmare of a job was open office with ~100 employees. Even the kitchen was part of the open office, right in the middle, so even during lunch there really was no space where people felt comfortable having any sort of non-work-focused social interaction. I would go weeks without any friendly interactions at all despite being surrounded by people. It got to the point where I would walk out of the office building after 8+ hours onto the busy streets of downtown, and feel alienated/isolated/detached from all of the other people walking around. I was really getting concerned about it because I hadn't made the connection. I mentioned it to my therapist, and she asked me to describe my standard workday, and when I did she said "It's no wonder you feel like this at the end of the day, your working environment sounds like a nightmare."
Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.
>...Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.
Yea the research shows that open offices lower collaboration:
>...Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.
“talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day”
That’s the nutty thing about open office. The thing that’s officially supposed to encourage collaboration leads to people sitting there with headphones trying to isolate themselves and rules to not talk to each other.
Our open office isn't for fostering communication or anything, we don't need to communicate, if you have time to communicate you aren't working. Our open office is so the team lead at the back of each row can watch everyone. :/
A sort of paid-worker panopticon situation is how I see it. I did the cube farm thing back when I worked for UUNet, and it sucked. Everyone talking, prairie dogging talking to the guy in the next cube, people farting out loud, the stinky food, the phone conversations of the admin next to you trying to work out some awful multi-spoke VPN issue with a distant office, cursing all the while and everyone within earshot hearing it. Not a good scene. One of the senior admins got a talking to for one night on his shift printed out name tags with "Winston Smith" and taping them over the 90 cubes in the office.
I cannot work in an open office. I was forced to when I began my career in NOVA as a young Unix nerd, but now that I'm over 20 years into it, I won't work where I don't have my own office. I have one now that I share with one other person, but it's a massive office and our desks face each other from across the room. The lights are out and the trance is streaming. I cannot concentrate around people walking around, the jocks talking about fantasy sports, or silly gossip. And the smell of some people's food is truly off putting. Anyone with any kind of seniority needs an office to work. I just cannot fathom working around a dozen or more people.
You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.
depends on which one, at mine, the developers can often sounds like sales people with how chatty we can get. :D a few are annoyed by it, but that's what headphones or working remote are for.
First tech job: started out as cubicle work. Got in at 9, hour break for lunch with coworkers, then completely focused with extremely few social interactions for the rest of the day.
On occasion, I would meet 1-on-1 with a coworker in their cube for an extended period of time to discuss some large technical design I wanted to sort out.
A year into this, the company redid the building into open-office space (but where everyone still had their own L-shaped desks and they were only packed maybe 20% more densely than the cubes. Now you never talk with someone at their desk for more than a minute, because while you talk you’re distracting everyone. So even less collaboration.
Second tech job: this one has always been open office. It’s packed much tighter: I have a person four feet to my left and four feet to my right, more in front and more in back. At any moment, one of them might just pipe up a relatively simple question to me (“where do I look in the codebase to find X functionality”): something he could find out on his own, but asking me saves 5-10 minutes. The 5 people around me are on my team. The people behind me are on a different team. There’s conversation across the teams at least hourly, an even split between jokes/banter and technical talk. If you overhear a conversation, you’re totally welcome to insert yourself into it, and doing so is the norm.
In this open office, collaboration is more of a real thing. If someone left feedback on your code change, half the time the discussion on how specifically to address it is done in person without leaving your desk. I’m able to identify topics that are raised frequently and recognize where the real organizational issues are, because it’s all discussed right there in the open. And I’m exposed to a diverse range of ideas and solutions just by choosing to listen. A few times a week I might even pair program with one of my teammates and learn something (vim commands I didn’t know about, a new way to use one of our in-house tools, or just practice).
The difference between these two is stunning. And jarring: I’ve gone about a year now without reaching a state of flow at work. I’m not even sure if half the people I work with have ever experienced it in their life (while programming). But I’m learning to adapt. I tend to work in short bursts of productivity throughout the day which leaves me with more energy at the end than being heads down at my desk for 8 hours. The code I write is far more reliable than what I used to write —— undoubtedly because of the collaboration.
Not all offices of a particular style are equal. I think it’s silly to label open offices as either universally good or universally evil: the ideal work environment depends on the execution, the context of the work, and the individual.
I don't do Crossfit, but with all that time in the gym, I can see why their community spirit is very appealing.
Edit. I also live with my retired mother. For her simply having the option to socialize with me is enough. She knows she can watch a movie with me at home or ask me to go grocery shopping with her.
My church has tons of social offerings with tons of attendance. Men's groups, women's groups, teen groups. I recently went hunting with some men from my church for an entire weekend. A couple of weekends later, my wife went with the women on their retreat.
The issue is that most churches today in America are more or less social clubs. Christianity takes a back seat to less important things. Hence the mega churches in my area bleeding members in favor of small churches that focus on the Gospel, but yet do offer things for families.
I'm not quite sure whether you're saying you wish you were less alone, or that you're fine with how things are. But what strikes me in your comment is that once you leave your ("basically alone") work situation, you're choosing to spend a lot of your discretionary time doing "alone" stuff in a gym. Might it be healthier overall (even if less focused on specific physical outcomes) to spend some of that time and energy engaging in a more social activity?
>you're choosing to spend a lot of your discretionary time doing "alone" stuff in a gym. Might it be healthier overall (even if less focused on specific physical outcomes) to spend some of that time and energy engaging in a more social activity?
I'm not going to the gym for general health or to pump out bicep curls for the ladies, I'm a strength athlete. At gym1 if I'm not actively using a barbell, I'm sitting down trying to recover for the next set. At gym2 I'm trying to get my accessory work and conditioning done so I can get home 12 hours after walking out the door for work so I can have 3 hours before bed to eat/shower/read/watch tv.
The weekends are my free time, a childless couple that lives a half hour late rand I will go get food but that's pretty much down to quarterly because the weekend for them is also their downtime when they have to do everything, including see their families that both live an hour or so away.
The rest of my friends all have kids and the weekends is when their kids have the bulk of their events from birthday parties to sleep overs to sports/dance.
And as far as making new friends, I can't just walk up to strangers in public "Hello fellow biotic doing their groceries, I see you're buying beans, I too eat beans, let us be friends and go do something after we take our groceries home".
Add in the fact I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, where it's extremely abnormal to not be married with kids in your early 20s, and even there I'm the odd man out. Everyone there is busy with family stuff too constantly and the bulk of the social events are youth-centered.
Basically I walk around life getting excited when I think someone is waving to me only to be gut-punched with an operating chainsaw when they were waving to there stranger behind me. Or God help me, when someone does actually say hi or ask me how it's going my brain just starts flashing "error, does not compute" because I've been so long without regular social interaction I forget how to respond.
Join a club or get a hobby that is social outside from religion, or play a sport instead of lifting weights all the time. It’s definitely harder to make friends as you get older but shared interests and repeated interactions are the key, IMO.
>but all my friends are married with kids and have zero free time.
Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids, I have made it clear to my friends without kids that if you want to hang out, we're headed to the pool or to a park with the kids for the most part. Occasionally we'll have time for adult nights, but because of our geography, childcare is hard to find. Some were okay with that and we're even closer friends now, and my kids call them 'Auntie' or 'Uncle'. Some were not, and we grew apart. Which has to be okay.
The moral of the story is, it's not their fault 100% that they're busy, and if their friendship is important, you should actively work on it. Like an adult. That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds.
> That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds.
It does, probably because it's so asymmetric. Now, I guess it is expected that the one's own kids will be more important than friends. But this "if friendship is important" thing has to go both ways to at least some extent.
>thing has to go both ways to at least some extent.
That's correct, the problem, in my experience, is that people expect everything to be the same as it was before friend A had a kid. It's called growth and development, and it's healthy for many people.
So expecting them to hang out until 2 am and play video games and drink like you used to is probably not realistic. Maybe, depending on the person.
My point was that if the friendship is important, remember that children aren't a barrier to YOUR needs. That is a human, the care and development of which your friend is personally responsible for. Understand that you may have to hang out with them at a park while their kid plays, rather than in your living room drinking beers.
Does that make sense? I feel like I do a terrible job of explaining myself.
>Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids,
"Hey Michael, so, yeah, I'm just gonna show up to your kid's third grade graduation, what door do I enter the school in to look like a total creep?"
Er... a lot of that stuff is going to be like that, or going to the Children's museum, or a child's park, or family events with extended family, or family vacations/road trips. Kinda creepy to just show up at that stuff "oh hey, fancy that, how funny we ran into each other at Chuck-e-Cheese and I'm here without a kid and I think the police are now here to ask why I'm here as a single adult male with no child".
I mean, that's being purposefully difficult. Obviously there are places, like a school event, where it is not okay to go hang out.
But why can't you go with a family friend to Chuck-e-Cheese? I'm not saying follow them, obviously. Plan ahead. Why not go with them to hang out while they watch their kids?
Why not accompany the family to the park - if everyone (meaning friend, friend's spouse that sort of thing -
not everyone in the park obviously) knows you're there to hang out with your friend, what's the problem? And you get to play with a kid, which can be fun.
As an anecdote, I've lived the majority of my life in America (born and raised middle class on the east coast in a wealthy area) and if I was tasked with writing an account of my time here it would be focused around one thing: alienation.
American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that people are alone. Alone in life, alone at their apartment, alone when they struggle, alone when they die. It's to the point where we regard married couples that live a 20 minute drive from anything as not being alone when they really are.
Most adults I know have a relationship with their immediate family that I would regard as acquaintanceship.
Part of this is culture (Americans fetishize a sort of "rugged individualism" where you alone can solve every problem you're faced with or else it's not a real problem) and part of it is civil engineering. You need a car to live nearly everywhere, there's almost no public transit infrastructure, etc.
EDIT: Since this is popular I wanna surface something that people have been saying: it definitely doesn't require being far away physically from others to feel alone. I live in Manhattan and big cities can be extremely alienating depending on the person.
I agree entirely with this. I can only speak for myself and my wife (mid 30s), but we are making active efforts to combat this in our family and social circle. Our house is large enough to take in parents (parents still have hangups about how "they should be able to take care of themselves and live by themselves"; we'll be waiting if and when they change their mind), extended family, and friends, we host family dinners once a week (family friends are invited, all are welcome), and we prioritize interpersonal relationships over material possession acquisition and meaningless work (some possessions are required, and not all work is meaningless, but I hope I got my point across).
Fighting loneliness requires active effort. You are not going to care one bit if you bought that extra widget or got an extra story in on your sprint later in life. Put time into what matters: people.
There might not even be anything you can do if its systemic! Honestly as I get older (im 32) i find how fucking lucky i was to have been brought up in a really really strong family (half is italian, half is european jewish.) Its amazing the degree to which this has helped me be a normal person with good coping mechanisms.
Similar. I got to meet most of extended family at least once, some relatively often. We're spread out but in clusters. This helps if anyone wants to move and it helps keep in touch.
(Some went to another country, we haven't heard much of them - distance can still be a barrier and culture in Western Europe is different.)
I've always been envious of such families. Only one person in my family was really a quality person, and he passed long ago. I moved abroad for a time to a country where families are closer and while it was exhausting and intense in it's own way after my childhood, it was amazingly "safe" feeling. The relationship that brought me into that fold is gone, and while I don't miss my partner, I miss those people in their family greatly.
You might consider reaching out to that family and exploring if you can be friends without the relationship that brought them into your orbit. No downside to asking.
I live in a different country now and it's difficult to maintain long distance relationships in the best circumstances. When I lived there and saw them on the street (I lived nearby) it was always nice and they are wonderful people, but there was no way to have a relationship beyond that as my ex, the replacement relationship, and child that followed, were their family then, not me. It's always in the back of my mind as I adored the family and they treated me like one of them. It's just how it goes.
In my family and extended family, we keep parents with the kids as they age so that they’re never alone. Free babysitting too. Requires quite a bit of compromise though, but being able to afford a larger well insulated home helps.
>You are not going to care one bit if you bought that extra widget or got an extra story in on your sprint later in life. Put time into what matters: people
It's such a hack premise, but this actually happened to me - my mother used to work in a nursing home, and required all of her kids to volunteer there when they were old enough (12 to 21 if you still lived at home). My job, as the rambunctious ADHD youth was to give 'wheelchair rides'. Which was where I would push the elderly around the grounds looking at trees and what-not, and just generally being an audience while they talked.
The one thing that literally everyone I gave a ride to, when the topic inevitably turned to death (it always did, old people are so straight up about it) - the absolute only topic that everyone hit on was that they regretted doing 'x' instead of spending time with 'person y'.
I gave wheelchair rides to poor people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
I gave wheelchair rides to rich people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
And that made me into the 'I will work only 40 if that's what is required of me' beast that I am today. In my area of the US, we have a very 1950's 'work until you can't anymore' sort of mentality; the kind where work defines you.
I have left several positions in my career because they refused to understand that my time at home with family and friends is more important than my time at work, and that my time is so much more important to me than any financial incentive they could offer past my base salary.
> Most adults I know have a relationship with their immediate family that I would regard as acquaintanceship.
America is also _big_, which I think also contributes here. It isn't unusual for family members to move away within America but be far enough that frequent face-to-face interaction isn't possible.
“abandon” is an interesting word choice. Moving isn’t always about moving away from something, sometimes it’s about moving towards a happy prospect. Your family could respect the action.
Sometimes moving away is abandoning your family...or burdening one family member with having to care for elderly parents when nobody else is available.
I have been living alone for most of the past 5 years. I probably avoid loneliness by spending a ton of time on creative endeavors and artwork, and I am at peace with the solitude and do not need the comfort or attention of others. I have gone months only leaving the house to buy groceries and not visiting family or friends in person (working from home).
I do not think an average person would be able to live like this. It takes a certain type of driven, focused personality who can dive into their work or hobbies and be happy with their head below water for a while without seeing anyone. I suspect Aristotle and Nietzsche both had these qualities.
This seems right to me. I would point out that you don't have to live a 20 minute drive from anything to be alone. Loneliness is as much a problem in cities as anywhere else.
Also, isn't loneliness also a major issue in other cultures, like Scandinavian or Japanese cultures?
This is a very good point and im gonna update my comment. The distance between people physically is just something that really sticks out to me having lived in tokyo and manhattan. My party trick degree is in japanese lit and oh the giant book i could write on this topic. It's complex and yea they have a big loneliness problem.
I think there's another part of it: It is easier to sell things to people who are discontent, and the human animal is a social one that isn't usually content with isolation. I'm not saying this is some kind of conscious conspiracy, but along with fetishizing rugged individualism America also fetishizes the market. We encourage things that make the amount of money moving around increase, and discourage the opposite.
Often when I hear about the older generation of my family, who immigrated and lived in Brooklyn for years before moving to the "burbs", I think they had good intentions but didn't do any favors for the subsequent generations.
My parents grew up and stones throw away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - a lot even lived in multi family, multi generational homes. When my mom had kids she had a support system that included people from 3 different generations, all willing to lend a hand. Their social lives revolved around interacting with all different family members, and get together were happening almost daily just because of the inherent (lack of) distance between them all.
Now, we all live in the burbs, with long distances between each other. The grandparents see the kids a few times a year and we all have to make concrete plans to have get togethers. Interacting with most extended family is reserved for weddings or funerals and the lack of true support systems takes it toll on all of us.
I could possibly be romanticizing the past, but when compared to the current lifestyle, I truly believe it wasn't for the best.
It’s a consequence of our inability to predict the future and measure certain gains and losses. It’s easy to measure safety, comfort, convenience of single family detached homes with garages. It’s difficult to measure benefits of community and family, except perhaps the cost of babysitting versus leaving with grandparents. Not only is it hard to measure, but the trade offs are hard to compare and so we end up going with the easy, obvious choices.
My parents lived around all of their siblings. They're close, they make a point of seeing each other regularly. My generation? We all live in different states. I worry once my parents are gone, that the fabric of my family will no longer exist, because nobody puts the work into keeping us all together. When we do see eachother, it's because we have a meeting point (parent's home) and a holiday (e.g., Christmas) or something.
The hustler culture indicts us to a life of packing up and moving across the country just for a marginally better job offer or degree or cheaper mansions. You see this even on comment threads here discussing where to live in the US. People "shop" for the best city right now to move to because it has cheaper housing or taxes or whatever. Scan the entire thread and you don't see being close to family or community roots ever mentioned.
I'll also mention that when much of the population is transient like that, it'll even affect the people who aren't.
Most everyone I knew growing up doesn't live where we grew up anymore. They're scattered everywhere. Much of my family that used to live there has moved on too.
I was one of the last to officially leave (around 25) and there wasn't much left in my "hometown" for me when I left, because few people I knew were still nearby anyway.
To be clear, I'm not talking about rural Kansas. That's a story from suburban New Jersey, about an hour outside of NYC.
Guys, you need to move the frick out of the suburbs. They're soul-killing.
Cities are also atomized, but not to this extent. They're vibrant, booming, the schools are fine/good, and in my opinion, far worth the cut to house size.
In the suburbs I have many neighbors in similar life situations to me. With minimal effort I can make friends with people a block away with kids the same ages as mine. Just go to a park and start a conversation
I’m finding modern life requires tribal flexibility
Personally, I find cities to be excessively busy and annoying, full of folks I generally don't want to be around socially. But I'm an introvert, who enjoys being away from the crowds. I personally find suburbs to be a bit too crowded, if I'm honest.
I don't need a big house - I just need big personal space; I prefer my small 1000sq ft house, but I wish it was in the middle of a few acres.
Completely disagree. I don't think humans are meant to live in cities. Something about being around that many people and ongoings makes me and from what I can tell a lot of other people, on edge so to speak.
I grew up in a suburb and it was not at all isolating. We had close communities and nearby family. I was friends with kids on my block and had freedom to explore and be independent. I would say technology is what is driving people to isolation.
I love cities, structurally. But I find the people soul-killing. I just have very little in common with young, childless people anymore. Even when we're experiencing the same things, we're not really experiencing the same things. If I go to MOMA, it's because I want to show my daughter Starry Night. I'm scoping out tickets to take her to Hamilton, because I feel guilty for going without her. My kids are super well-behaved, but I hate going into a restaurant with them in tow and watching young childless people glare at me. I know brave souls who are toughing it out in cities with young children, and more power to them. Meanwhile, there are 8 small kids and two teenagers on my block of 15-20 houses. I walk into the Whole Foods, and see other parents from my kid's school. The default is people like me.
I think not finding things in common with young people isn't abnormal. My childhood was miserable partly BECAUSE of the sameness of it all. I find the suburban vanilla Stepford ways soul-killing. I had no exposure to culture. The internet didn't exist yet. I was ignorant and brainwashed in many ways. I felt out of place and like I was a freak because I didn't believe what I was told was "correct". The city was "bad" and "city folk" were "bad". The family and people in those places still have the same narrow beliefs and I am still "wrong". The people I know that grew up in multicultural cities had so much richer experiences and opportunities to grow and explore their beliefs and ideas without their parents ideologies infecting them as much.
Having rich experiences and exploring different ideas is admirable, in some respects, but I'm not convinced that's a good basis for sustainable, tight-knit communities. Your choice of phraseology is interesting--parents "infecting" kids with their ideologies. Most people would consider it a key function of parenting (and society) to socialize children in the community's values, rules, and orthodoxies.
One of the things I find ironic about "experience seeking" is how often people go to places like India or China to have "rich experiences." But people from those places generally would relate much more easily to people like your parents. Circling back to the topic at hand--people in my home country of Bangladesh, where there is a rigid social order and strict indoctrination of children, may suffer from many things, but loneliness is not one of them.
If the sustainable tight knit community is awash with horrible "values" like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, tribal bigotry and arrogance etc then I don't want to be a part of it. It's perpetuating the wrong things in my view and is like any bureaucracy just existing to serve itself. Kids should be taught the basics of human decency like honesty/empathy/kindness/sharing/helping etc, and then allowed to arrive at any specific spiritual or political views themselves through varied experience, not indoctrinated from a malleable age into mini-mes who never know anything else, as is usually the case in areas like I mentioned above.
Few tight-knit communities would consider those to be "values" (i.e. beliefs that are core to identity). Your view is also a bit of "throwing the baby out with the bath water." Humanity has lots of vices, and those vices are often amplified in tight-knit communities. But those shortcomings can be improved without undermining the social order or adopting pernicious individualism.
Again, I can't help but notice the irony of your assertion. What is the virtue in not being xenophobic against Bangladeshis, if you're going to condemn the way they structure their communities and raise their children?
> The people I know that grew up in multicultural cities had so much richer experiences and opportunities to grow and explore their beliefs and ideas without their parents ideologies infecting them as much.
I’m from rural East Texas and would agree with that statement 100%.
You're in the wrong city. I was at Longman and Eagle last week and the back bar was lousy with kids.
This probably sounds like a throwaway comment, but it's not; there are big cities that are more friendly and less friendly to kids. An advantage of places like Chicago is that the trendy areas are shared between people with families and single people, where in New York the family-friendly neighborhoods are specialized, like Park Slope.
I mean there is an element of that. Several of my friends have converged on the same neighborhood in Lakeview. My experience is colored by living in DC the last couple of years, which is mostly devoid of kids. (Of course, not in primarily minority area, where there are still kids, but those families are being pushed out by gentrification.)
Cities are the wrong direction, people need to move out to the country, spread out. Be out in nature, hunt, fish, gather; not just for a hike. Cities are soul-crushing.
> (Americans fetishize a sort of "rugged individualism" where you alone can solve every problem you're faced with or else it's not a real problem)
Nearly any attempt paint American Culture with broad strokes is going to fail.. but using absolute terms like you're doing here A) is wildly inaccurate, and B) negatively portrays a pretty neutral personal ideology. I value individualism for the same reasons I devalue conformity -- I generally want to be left to my own devices to do pretty much whatever I want.
This trope about detrementally fetishizing rugged individualism, which is unbelievably common and doesn't seem to ever be subject to a skeptical eye, is a subtle dig at people who want what I want: To be left alone and to be free.
I don’t think it negatively portrays any ideology. No one is alone in this world, and no one’s actions happen in a vacuum. The consequences can not be contained to those who commit the action, so while you might want to be left alone and free, the world you live in doesn’t allow for it. There are compromises to be had between freedom and lack of freedom for the benefit of the community.
>The consequences can not be contained to those who >commit the action, so while you might want to be left >alone and free, the world you live in doesn’t allow for >it.
Also nobody does it all alone, with the possible exception of some rare frontiersman who chops down trees and builds his own house in some wilderness. People want to be left alone, but still use the benefits of society that suit them. People aren't as independent as they imagine but want to feel as such. I live amongst people who happily use services and comforts and infrastructure, but take every opportunity to attack the communal systems that create them as evil and have some idea it should be hundreds of millions of individuals doing what they want how they want.
There aren't really any negative words in the comment though. It's correlating individualism with "atomized," "alone" and shallow family ties. To the extent that one fits into this so-called "rugged individualist" trope (which I agree is a little hackneyed, but also not totally unfounded), I would think those would all be and sound like positives. Because every friend, every relative - everyone you could possibly get into any kind of mutually non-hatred-based relationship with - is someone you have to please. You're no longer doing whatever you want; you're balancing that against what the other person wants, or what you might owe them, or what you might someday want from them (Golden Rule) etc. Relationships survive on mutual interest and mutual aid. It's about cooperating with people and doesn't have much to do with freedom. [Because hey, you're free to abandon those relationships. You can completely ignore those people and their concerns, desires and interests. But they'll soon start ignoring yours, and there you go, the units that were joined are now separate, but since they can't themselves be divided they are how do I say this, atomized.]
> Part of this is culture (Americans fetishize a sort of "rugged individualism"...
I seriously doubt it.
I think all modern rich cultures have this. Sweden certainly does. As everyone gets rich enough to get your own house, you end up lonely, as you're no longer naturally interacting with others, since you don't need to.
Huh. Maybe its paradox of choice then? In our past we were pretty much forced into a community, and this is still largely true of the impoverished, but once you have a certain amount of wealth you're able to choose your community, and so PoC kicks in and paralyzes you.
I can buy that. I thought it would be obvious what I meant from simply having read the words "paradox of choice" earlier in the sentence. Of course, that doesn't explain how anyone could have seriously thought that "Person of Color" made any sense at all in this context...
That's strange. Maybe it depends on where? I have rented my entire life and never knew a neighbor. Recently bought a house and immediately not only met all my neighbors but one helped us clean up after a major wind storm came through the day we moved in. There are people & kids walking around our neighborhood constantly. I feel part of a community a lot more than I ever did before.
You are comparing "bought your own house" to "rent your own apartment" while the prior post, I think, was comparing "have your own living space" to "shared or multi-generational living space".
It's not just this. It's more that you cannot get a home nearby your family nowadays. Everything's taken.
It can be even problematic to stay in the same city, especially if it's a small city with few opportunities. People tend to migrate for education... And stay where they left.
I see you say you’ve lived in America and it sounds like you’ve emigrated. May I ask why? I’m also from America and this couldn’t be further from my own experience. I come from a more religious family from the Midwest, but grew up in the suburbs of nyc. Through my community I’ve never felt alone and my dad is actively involved in the church. In nyc amongst the yuppies especially I see a dog eat dog mentality and how everyone is fighting for themselves. But once I step out of the hustle and bustle and go back home, I have the community that is there for me and our family. I don’t intend for this post to be an advertisement for the church, but I think in America it will be more and more important to form a community aspect, like a church, but not a church where people feel like they belong and get to know their neighbors. Without knowing your neighbors and community it’s easy to feel isolated.
I had a friend who moved to Texas with his family to take a job. He didn't go to church, and said that alone made it pretty hard to make friends there. He moved back to CA for that reason. So I guess going to church is one way to make friends, if you're into that.
I am not OP but I will answer as I have relevant experience. I grew up in Midwestern US suburbs and rural areas and find the problems he/she mentioned to be accurate. "Church" is always trotted out by people there as THE community but not everyone is a religious person or finds that arrangement suitable. Transportation is a huge problem regardless as there are no buses or trams or trains in large swaths of the country. Culture, politics, and lifestyles in the bulk of the Midwest, while possibly ideal for you or others, are NOT for equally as many people. My "neighbors" are not nearby, not sociable at all, and not people I would choose to be around anyway for a number of reasons. I have heard your opinion of cities my entire life growing up, and believed them until I lived in one. For me it was life changing and gave me access to people like me and culture I enjoyed and awareness that not everyone had the politics I was told were "correct", and being dragged back here was equally life changing in a negative way.
As someone who doesn’t practice any religion but grew up around them I’m confused about the role church seems to play for many folks. Instead of being about spiritual advancement it seems like a lot of the people are just interested in a very accepting social club with some fantasy elements. I saw very little of people sitting around talking about eg humility and how to mortify their desires rather than hanging out or reading an epistle and then interpreting it with (frankly) self-help ideology
Just get to know your neighbors and make an effort to spend time with them, even if it's just a 15 minute chat after work. I've made the effort and am now on weekly hanging out terms with nearly 20 people in my neighborhood. And that's literally just the people within a short bike ride of my place.
Exactly. Cooking your family a meal, or helping your neighbor repair their house doesn't increase the GDP. However, ordering food with Uber and hiring someone to work on your house does. Being involved in your community, helping your neighbors and family, etc, isn't a "productive" activity.
Another good example is programming side projects. How many people are looking to make money on their side project? Rather then just help people? Or how many people only have side projects because they feel like they have to in order to stay competitive in the job market? Probably the vast majority.
We've developed a culture where we fetishize productivity and always making money. People now feel guilty if they're not busy or productive all the time.
Nothing fetishized about it at all. The middle class is being destroyed, it's eat or get eaten. Society is more competitive than it's ever been. It's going to get much worse.
They don't have to, they're just greedy and "need" to have a new BMW and Lexus every few years, live in fashionable neighborhoods in expensive metros, and have "important" jobs. You don't need that shit in Cleveland.
Not everyone is how they appear and your disregard and assumption of greed is just sad. For example, I'm going to college, working 'and' working on a side project. I face the near future prospect of having to support myself and two parents, which hardly requires greed on my part. This situation is far from uncommon.
The public transit angle seems like a red herring to me. My wife and I lived in cities for several years after law school. (New York, Baltimore, Philly, DC.) We didn’t feel alone in school, but felt quite alone after we graduated and had a kid. By contrast, now we live in the ‘burbs near my parents, and we feel far less alone than we have for years. We’ve got neighbors with kids we see regularly. We see other parents at school, church, the park, birthday parties, etc. We see my parents multiple times per week. Sure, we have to drive everywhere, but that’s hardly a deal breaker. (I see people more now that I have to drive to see, than friends I had in DC who lived in the same apartment building.)
Yeah I lived in Manhattan, never geographically closer to so many friends and rarely saw them. Everyone's too tired or too scheduled. In the suburbs we were often bored and open to just hanging out and not stressing about optimising our time. I always say the burbs are where new culture is created and the big cities are where it is commercially consumed.
Living in the wrong cities. I live in (near) a middle-sized to small city. I can talk to nearly anyone on the street or in a shop, and I often do. I can make faces at strangers' babies and get them to smile, and get a smile back from the parent. I imagine if I cried "Is there a doctor here who can help?" while standing over an injured person, two or three people in the immediate vicinity would instantly respond (if they weren't already hurrying to the scene).
Yes big cities can be alienating. That's why I opted out.
I just want to pipe in here and mention that there is lots of evidence that Americans are moving around far less than they used to, and this has economist worried because of its implications for economic mobility. See: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541675186/fewer-americans-are...
Andrew Yang has even made that part of his policy platform.
Toronto is easily the worst city in Canada for this, but also has transit so I don't think that is the cause. Something broken in western culture, but I think it is a combination of factors.
I sympathize with your general sentiment, but your Manhattan example is a glaring contradiction to your point that this has anything to do with public transit options, the lack of which I do not think has anything to do with the alienation you describe.
They're even alone as babies. Americans have this weird obsession with putting babies to sleep in separate rooms as soon as possible, including newborns, as if this develops some rugged independence. All the research (and common sense) shows they need to sleep as close to the mother as safely possible. Yet this mentality persists. And then the move to kick them out of the house at 18, why?
18 is a good age to begin the transition from being dependent on parents to bearing responsibilities themselves. Keeping the kids in the house too much longer than that can make it more difficult for them to adapt.
When I was a yute my grandmother used to go to a senior center for cards, talk, company, and her three children lived around the corner or upstairs. In NYC that was possible: Everything walkable. She lived well into her 100s. I don't now how they do it down here in Fla where nothing's walkable and public transportation's laughable and social services can't keep up.
If you are someone who needs regular instances of social contact in order to feel connected to the world and to avoid depression and feelings of isolation, then yes. The important thing to remember is that many elderly are alone for such significant chunks of their days by force, not by choice. If you choose to be alone because you (like me) are an introvert and value your time to yourself to explore your interests, that is a very different situation than someone who is essentially house bound and has no choice in the matter.
My intuition is to say yes. We are, after all, social animals and throughout history have always thrived in groups.
I recognize that I am personally an extrovert so the thought of being alone and isolated like that really bugs me and other people might be introverted and perhaps loneliness and isolation is what suits them.
I just turned 40 and have done a complete 180 from extroversion to introversion in the last two years so don’t see this as a bad thing. Was checking up on the psychology of it and checks out as totally normal. Extroversion in youth was selected for to provide mating opportunities, but wears off as we age.
This resonates a lot with my experience and reminds me of a short book I read by Sebastian Junger called Tribe. His focus is more on the tribal aspect of military life and that the disassociation with a close knit group or a tribe is part of what leads to PTSD as there are quite a few people who have been in the military who have PTSD despite not ever being in combat. He claims that in smaller tribal communities mental illness is less common and that in times of extreme hardship or disaster people report decrease in symptoms of mental illness as they become more valued by their community as a helper during the hardship.
I interact with people normally at work, but outside of work I'm usually alone and it is hard to ignore the negative effects of it on my mental health. If I'm around people after work I generally feel more positive and have less anxiety, but left alone for too long and my anxiety will start to take over. I really miss my younger years where I had close groups of friends and we hung out all the time.
If I'm around people after work I generally feel more positive and have less anxiety, but left alone for too long and my anxiety will start to take over.
Interesting. I'm the exact opposite. When I have to do things like hang around with people from work for too long, my anxiety increases until I can get away and be alone. I'm not a social recluse, I have a wife and kid, and I enjoy spending time with them, I try to make time for my parents at least weekly, and I enjoy hanging out with my friends. But definitely anxiety builds as my time in contact with other people increases. Alone is often my "happy place".
I believe this is an "introvert" vs "extrovert" situation. I'm introverted and I'm like you - spending time with folks after work is a chore. I prefer to hang around "known associates" as it were - my wife, my kid, my in-laws, my friends. Spending time with folks outside those circles is draining for me; I dread doing it, and I look forward to getting home again.
However, I have a few folks in my close circles that are clear extroverts. They love going out with people after work, always seem to be somewhere doing something talking to someone. They never want to go home because home is "boring."
It's funny I used to think I was an introvert for so many years because I spent so much time alone. My therapist always used to tell me different and I just thought he was disconnected on that subject. How could I be an extrovert when I spent so much time alone? Wasn't until I started having managers tell me the same that I started to consider it. Turns out I really like being around people but I had a few painful experiences that made me avoid it.
Same here. I adopted introverted patterns of life because I had no one to spend time with most of the time. Now I get anxiety when going to meet people. I still do it or try to and once I'm there, I enjoy it a lot. Of course, it has to be with the right people otherwise I'd rather just stay in. It's interesting how society shapes us into what we don't want to become.
Alone is the happy place because you're not getting enough of it. I think it's a balance between the two. I too need alone time and don't seem to get enough of it. I have a wife, a kid and a 9-5. About 10 years ago I was single, lived alone and at some point spent too much time alone which for a while was great but then I realized I became somewhat savage and the anxiety started to become an issue. Now that I don't get too much alone time I cherish every opportunity I get but I'll always steer away from long periods of isolation. It's not healthy.
Yes, you've got a point about balance. In my younger, unattached days I'd spend quite a lot of time alone, and after about a week of not really being in contact with anybody else I'd start to feel a bit 'disconnected'. Though just an hour or so with somebody else would be enough to reset.
Yeah I think this is a pretty apt. When I was more social and hung out with people more I appreciated my alone time more but it wasn't really idle time because I was doing things that I like to do alone more. I guess it is more about having idle time where I don't do anything that can really ramp my anxiety up.
It's shockingly difficult to convert work people from "work friends" into real friends. The only success I had was when one of my startups got bought in a way where we all left on the same date because we fully vested. Then everyone was nostalgic and wanted to stay together. Even then only 1/2 of the group still meets :/
Where does he has the "less mental problems in situation of hardship" from? I used to read a lot of survivors accounts from WWII and Rwanda and such and there was not such thing. Mental issues did not get better, they were harder to deal with and caused additional risk.
Also, suicide rates were higher suggesting that mental situation was not all that great.
That's not a bad thing, people she embrace loneliness and learn to be able to enjoy it. What's the point of speaking about it like it's some kind of a problem with the person. If someone wants company then they can go socialize with whoever is available, otherwise maybe they don't wanna socialize with what's available and prefer to just chill on their own.
I may be in the minority, but the older I get the more I want to be alone. I love my wife and kids, but there is almost too much pressure anymore to do this, do that. There are too many hands on my time. I recharge only when alone. I cannot do it with the TV on, kids in the background, etc. It's one of the reasons I like hunting. Just me and the great outdoors. I really like getting up at 0430 and being in the deer blind by 0600, watching the night drain from the firmament and knowing I'm alone for several miles in any direction save animals. It's a great feeling. It's also why I tend to favor holidays in remote places with few to no tourists. My wife also likes this approach.
Editing to say that schools are now offering summer sports, which I hate, because it means less time in the evenings to relax after work. American culture is too busy. Too many games, too many expectations of parents to commit to this and that. Too many schools begging for money when I already pay taxes. It goes on and on...
Some people need lots of social engagement; I don't. I don't like parties. I do like two or three couples over for a BBQ and beer. It's intimate enough, but controllable enough that there are not competing voices in the background.
At work, I'm fortunate to be able to keep the lights out in my office, draw the blinds and stream my psytrance while working. My colleague I office with likes the same things, so it's a win-win for us. People think we're weird that we like it dark, but I've never worked in an IT office where the lights were preferred. I think this may be an IT thing. I also dearly miss when IT was in the data center and not accessible to the general office staff.
Introversion/extraversion is a spectrum. It's about recharging batteries and having a balance between a social life and a solitary life. You seem to get a good share of social life, so obviously you need to seek solitary experiences.
The problem is that for many, there is a trend where social life is hard to obtain for several reasons.
> I may be in the minority, but the older I get the more I want to be alone. I love my wife and kids, but there is almost too much pressure anymore to do this, do that. There are too many hands on my time.
Do you think that could at all be attributed that you are actually more alone now?
What I mean is, most families aren't interacting much with people outside their immediate family, whereas in the past the extended family was around and built a support system for those immediate families. If you had your parents, siblings, cousins, etc... around, you might actually have more time to recharge because child rearing wouldn't exclusively be put on the shoulders of the parents.
The way that our kids are raised now is incredibly different than the way I was raised. Although predominately raised by my parents, my grandparents, aunts, great aunts, etc... all had an influence and played a part in that upbringing due to the geographics of where everyone lived.
It might depend on the culture, but for a lot of people socializing is considered relaxing, and the more people you have around the higher the chances for any of them to have that belief.
Aside from going out and physically isolating yourself, having family around usually doesn’t help.
Now family could help looking after the kids when you take time away, but once your kids can stay aline for a few hours, having more people taking care of them might not help that much (now you’re managing a fleet of care givers, creating a “too many cooks” situation)
You are not in the minority. Everyone needs time to be alone. You will start feeling alone when you get back from hunting and nobody is waiting for you.
When I get home Saturday afternoons, I'm mobbed by my sons who are looking forward to riding on the mower. :) It's one of the things we all look forward to: lawn work. I pay my sons to pick up and rake. I pay them to use the blower and take out the trash. I teaching them that they should be paid for their efforts, but also that if they don't work, they don't get paid. One of my sons is eager beaver and on fire for anything physical involving power tools, riding mowers, tractors, 4-wheelers, etc. The other is very cerebral and prefers computers and gaming. I cater to both, liking both myself. I want, more than anything, for my sons (and daughter) to look back on their childhood and say it was really just one big daddy/son and daddy/daughter project that involved fun and learning. I don't coddle my children in any way, shape, or form. I grew up military and still abide in much of that lifestyle. My children know they are loved beyond measure, but they also know they have serious home expectations.
> It's one of the reasons I like hunting. Just me and the great outdoors.
Recently I watched the Liam Neeson version of "Cold Pursuit".
In its honesty and humor, both of which I appreciate to no end, Neeson's character's wife opines in grief on their dead son. "Did you even know his favorite movie? All of those hunting trips, what did you talk about?!?"
Hunting is a very social exercise. My sons are not yet old enough to go without prattling on about this or that, spooking any game worth taking. I'm planning on next season taking one at a time and teaching them the craft and all that goes into it, which is great bonding. My dad was not much of a hunter, but my grandfather was, and because of that, some of my fondest memories are of us hunting doves and rabbits, and the countless fishing trips we did.
My hunting trips are just day trips. I'm not like some guys I know who fly to Colorado and Alaska, leaving the family behind. I want my sons to be involved, but they are not quite ready. My wife will sit in a deer stand with me and like to shoot, but will not shoot at animals. She likes the resulting venison, however.
Our early ancestors hunted in parties of several to dozens of men, often for safety against predators, both two and four legged. I like the idea the British use, several people driving birds, a good hunt, and cigars and gin and tonics afterwards in the game room. Done it. It's great.
You realise “British hunting” isn’t egalitarian and the cigars and G&T aren’t going to the people driving game?
I also don’t think the person you replied to was doing down hunting as a social activity but that the movie makes it a stand in for anything done to avoid that social activity.
In the olden days you would be right, but today's drives are fair. Everyone takes turns driving and shooting. Everyone in the clubhouse after the hunt. It would be anathema to leave someone out and that would not be my scene.
I think everyone needs some time by myself. My wife takes the kids home for a few weeks in the summer and I get the house completely to myself. ITS THE BEST THING EVER. Its great to have them back at the end of it though.
I think I'm in a similar state as you. I loved living alone. Then I got married and had kids, so now I have three roommates, two of which frequently need interaction/help/etc. I crave solitude. The most blissful vacation I can imagine is just being alone in a cabin on a lake sitting coffee and reading. I spent two days driving to see the 2016 eclipse and living in my truck alone and it was absolute bliss.
At the same time, I find it easy to project that desire too far. I get less solitude than I would like now, so I feel that need, but I definitely don't want infinite solitude. While I liked living alone, I also remember getting quite lonely at times. It's easy for me to take for granted my social needs because they are being (more than) met right now.
One thing I do find a real challenge is a life that feels both socially full and shallow. With all of the tasks of being a full-time employee and parent today, my social calendar fills up quickly. I can really only see a couple of people a week. Kid birthday parties and other events like that overwhelm it. Because my kids are constantly making new friends, there is this parade of parents that enter and recede from my life. They're all nice people, but over time it gets harder to invest effort into friendship with them because I only see any given one of them every couple of months and even that may fade if our kids stop being friends. Not quite the "single serving friends" of Fight Club, but close.
At the same time, it's hard for me to maintain my own independent friendships on top of those acquaintances because there just isn't that much time. If I've already got a birthday party on Saturday and a playdate on Sunday, it's really hard to enjoy another social activity with my own friends on top of that. Even with people I consider close friends, I sometimes only see them once every couple of months.
I try to be mindful that this phase won't last forever. As my kids get older, they'll do more drop-off parties and eventually will get to their own social functions without me at all. They'll want less of my time until one day I'll wake up and the nest will be empty. I try to enjoy this time for what it is while it lasts.
My biggest worry is that by the time the kids are older and I have more room for my own close friends, those bonds will have withered along with my skills at socializing and I'll fail to reinvigorate them.
That was a fantastic post. I feel exactly the same way.
My kids sometimes feel too needy. Oftentimes I never get the desired downtime.
My wife got mad at me one day and said "You need to listen to Harry Chapin's Cat's in the Cradle. Then come talk with me." It's a shock to listen to that song, because it's true. It would be easy to end up like that and no one want it.
I've always thought the best thing would be to have a time-travel machine. You could spend a day with your kids as infants and enjoy it. The next day you could spend with them as teens and enjoy it. Then the third day spend with them as 11 year-olds and enjoy it.
Each of those ages are incredible and filled with irreplaceable experiences. It's easy to get jaded when you move through them so slowly.
What I wouldn't give to be able to bank days for my future self.
"You know, I feel like having a me day. I'll hand this one off to 60-year-old me."
My 60-year-old self magically time travels in and has a blast with the kids he hasn't seen as children in decades. Meanwhile I get to relax. Then, twenty years from now, when the nest is cold and empty, the memories of my kids' childhood is fading, and I long to feel their little arms wrapped around me, I get zipped back in time to live a whole day of it afresh.
They say youth is wasted on the young. Sometimes it feels like parenting is wasted on young parents too.
Yeah both parents have to work 40 hours plus, maintain a home, eat at least one sit down meal together, spend time with children, time with each other to maintain a relationship. I as introvert have no time for being alone. And I need that. I try to walk to and from work as often as possible now just so I can have a quiet 20 minutes to myself with no demands or obligations on me. I find myself staying up late just to have it quiet.
That was my first thought, as well - I have a wife and two teenaged kids, and they drain absolutely all of my free time. I keep reminding myself that I should be taking advantage and enjoying this time that I have to spend with them because in a few years, they’ll be away and I won’t see them very often, but I do feel like I would like just an hour here and there to pick what channel to watch and not have to debate about it. I wonder if I’ll feel differently when I finally get to that point, though - I am sure that I’m going to miss my kids when they move away, because I already miss having little kids running around the house (even though they sort of drove me crazy at the time then, too).
I've found it a hell of a lot harder to actually enjoy time with my kids since we went past one. It's frustrating because I'm not getting alone-time or doing exactly what I want to, as one without any kids might, but I'm also not getting to deeply, mindfully enjoy a very high percentage of time spent with my kids, as I could so easily when we just had one. All it took then was an occasional gentle reminder to myself to stay present. Now... man, it'd take some next-level Zen shit to achieve that with three kids on any kind of regular basis. Even two was a pretty big hit to that kind of quality time. It's achievable with some planning and luck now, basically, when it was just natural and almost constant before.
For me, I think that frustration's the source of my "oh god just drop me on a deserted island with some books and leave me" fantasies. I'd rather be around my kids and enjoying high-quality parent-kid time because it actually is pretty great, but that's so rarely and unpredictably available that the loner route becomes more appealing.
I certainly don’t, I chose the office with no windows on the opposite side the building to everyone else with the lights out and the AC cranked to the max I’m happy.
I have a small led desk lamp so I don’t walk into things and that’s it.
Many Americans own a lot of idle property. There is a problem now where baby boomers want to age in place in their suburban homes, which locks younger people out of those properties. However these suburban homes have huge yards by global standards, that could easily support the construction of grandparent/in-law structures. It seems like one solution is for the suburban elderly to, maybe with their children's assistance, build an outlying house in the back yard and downsize to there, and let their children occupy the main house for raising grandchildren.
Multi-generational housing is a good solution to this problem of elder isolation and general social isolation, and the friction associated with that can be eased given the amount of land many suburban properties contain.
I have always thought that the turn towards the nuclear family caused many of the social problems that began to appear in the 1960s. I think we should return to more extended family living situations.
A big obstacle to having extended families under one roof is that often the children don't want to live where the parents' home is located. I am certain I could move in with my mom tomorrow if I wanted--but it would mean leaving a city I've come to love and the career I've built here to live in a small town with little culture and zero opportunities.
I think this is what you see in many rural American towns where only a small elderly population remains, while the young people all moved to cities for economic opportunity.
There is no way I want to take care of anyone other than my own children, which is enough. I have three children in my house, which is more than enough.
Caregivers also spend tons of their own money on care giving, plus trips to the doctor, dentist, etc. I already don't get enough down time. I also want to actually retire on time and do what I want to do, not babysit the elderly. I don't want or need the hassle of being a care giver. It's not in my makeup to do that kind of thing. In addition, my children WILL NOT be living at home until they are 30. I will have earned my peace and quiet by then and I want to get it. MY job now is to make my children as independent as possible: learning to cook, mow, change a tire, be literate, good with math, critical thinking, and not rely on others for things that should be done alone. And most importantly, avoid debt like the plague. A man should owe no one if possible. My daughter already plans to pay for her own university by dint of military service. We explained to her that we made it on our own, she will have to do likewise. No parent should go into debt for their child's education. It prolongs the parents ability to retire and enjoy their own golden years.
> In addition, my children WILL NOT be living at home until they are 30 ...
I agree with you here -- independence is the ideal. But for reasons beyond the individual's control this is not always possible: misfortune, ill health, age. The community has a responsibility to take care of those within it who are struck by these things.
Personally, I have gotten somewhat use to being alone. I can only imagine what it must feel like too someone who has spent the majority of their lives with someone else. I think I will start visiting a senior living facility with some of my spare time each week. If you are alone and its weighing you down then my heart goes out to you.
My mother has been living alone for over a decade now. Luckily for her, she's very introverted--alone is her preference. Sitting in her rocking chair, reading a mystery novel, is exactly what she wants out of life.
I'm sure this isn't normal, particularly for extroverts. My wife doesn't understand it at all. But I take after my mom, and I 100% know that she feels fine with a minimum of human interaction. I do feel bad for the people who aren't like her, though.
A thing to remember, which psychology will remind you, is that there is a balance between having social experiences and having solitary experiences. Introversion/extraversion is a spectrum.
The problem is that modern, sedentary, good-living-standard, individualistic life tend to isolate people. That's the current model.
In more ancient times we were all living in communities because the infrastructure forced us to do so. Now the standard is individual housing, kitchen, toilets, bathroom, etc.
I'm okay to have a solitary bedroom for myself, but I wish activities like cooking and food were shared in neighborhoods. Similarly, fences exist for security but they also damage socialization.
I am an introvert but the isolation I experience is soul crushing. Half of it is location and culture, rural nowhere and no public transport. Half of it is poor health. I am not here by choice and it's sapping my will each day. Living in a city and having people all around easily accessible you wasn't mentally exhausting for me as one would think, it was lovely and energizing. I'd love to be able to move back. But one can still be alone in a crowd.
I recall an experience I had in a large city, a dense capital and no lack of people around. I knocked on an apartment door to meet up with someone but had gotten the number wrong. A lovely old woman answered the door in her nightgown. I apologised for my mistake and asked if she knew where the person I was looking for lived. She did not, but she invited me in for tea. I accepted and even thought she didn't speak English and my command of her language was poor, we had a human interaction that both of us needed. She was so incredibly alone there. You could tell by how she lived in this little 25 square meter flat and how things came pouring out of her to me, this stranger. We had our tea, I had my tour and saw the photos, and politely excused myself as I had "things to do". My life hadn't fully collapsed yet, and while I have always been empathetic and didn't rush out, I can't help but often think that I should have stayed longer, done more for her, gone back. I always intended to go back when I had more time, but shortly after my own life accelerated downhill and I never found the chance. It was many years ago and she was quite elderly then. I imagine she might have passed by now. But I often think of her and that little room and if by some magic I can get back there I will knock on that door. There are lonely people all around us.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadI think you're onto something with that.
I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.
In our actual world the funds saved would find their way to the caregivers but when does that ever happen? Some intermediary will be there capturing most of the value, as is the nature of 21st century America. Companions are rarely off the books highly paid no bennies, much more likely off the books underpaid undocumented immigrants or minimum wage workers hardly able to house and feed themselves much less compassionately care for their wards.
My personal hope is that a UBI leads to real communities where the old and the young have a place in our lives and they stop being seen as problems and as burdens on the middle-aged.
Andrew Yang talks about this a lot in terms of his wife taking care of their children, but the idea equally applies to people taking care of anyone else.
Secondly, it is now often observed that parents and children, in spite of living under the same roof, are interacting less because the parents are staring at their devices, and children get devices, too. Even if people have the time and money to take care of their parents, do they have the interest in socializing?
I don’t think you need to be constantly talking with an elderly parent for regular visits to be beneficial. A short chat, taking care of a few minor issues, and watching a movie together can make a real quality of life difference. It also demonstrates you still care.
UBI alone would strengthen the family unit and reduce external relationships.
I completely agree, but isn't a major motivation behind UBI a lack of job availability due to automation?
People will still work. Whether it's to get a leg up from the baseline or because it's something their passionate about, nothing will stop people from banding together to solve common goals. The current state of work is just a really shitty abstraction over that. I would have thought software engineers of all people would understand that.
If you look at the wealthiest innovation is not what they do with there freetime either.
Innovation requires motivation. Innovation requires resources.
Because they're being thrown into poverty with no way out.
The problem is not ennui.
> If you look at the wealthiest
Yeah sure, but UBI isn't going to make everyone multimillionaires.
You are much more optimistic than I am. On the contrary, I see the shift towards much more automation and "task outsourcing" as a huge factor when it comes to increasing social isolation. We no longer have to lean on our friends, neighbors and even random social acquaintances for help and support, and with all of the various delivery services it's much easier to be a shut-in than in the past.
I'd actually be curious to hear from folks younger than 25 or so: When I was a young adult, helping friends move was a common occurrence. Nobody really liked the task of moving, but it really did build a camaraderie and bonding between friends. These days, though, with the ubiquity of things like Task Rabbit and Thumbtack, it's a lot easier to just pay someone a small amount to help out. I'm curious if young adults these days have a lot fewer "help friends move" experiences because of this.
But you have to value social connections, they don’t come naturally.
In many older couples, the wife is the one who keeps track of everyone's dietary restrictions. Older men often don't really know how to feed themselves properly. It's not their responsibility to keep track of the myriad types of info involved in that.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/the-widowho...
Your stats are an excellent explanation for that statistic. But I can't see how it relates to a gender-based percentage difference in outcomes for the "widowhood effect."
"Often, it’s unrelated to any accident or cardiovascular incident, but sometimes it is related. That can be part of the stress reaction to grief."
"It’s just the difference between men and women and how we’re socialized,” she said. “Connection helps us negotiate old age. Independence does not do us well.”
Social relations, social support network, social contact, all of it is connected with stress management. Traditional gender roles where men prioritize work over their social live is correlated with smaller social network. If the goal is to live a long life with as little stress as possible then prioritizing time with children and spending time building social connections is much better than being at work.
However not being at work puts men at the lower end of the social ladder which also correlate to a smaller social network and increase stress. Social status is one of the bigger factors when predicting stress in both humans and animals alike.
Stress management, and not some concept of "women work", is the likely culprit for why men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after the spouse. The link support it and so do also research which ask why some people live a long life and others don't, popular called successful aging in most of the research. As one researcher described it, stress is about margins. A stressful event occur and the body reacts and the older a person gets the smaller the margins becomes. Meaningful social connections reduces the stress response and thus a person can handle events which otherwise would kill them.
This is one of the insights why Sweden changed the elder care policy of moving old people into care homes. Moving a old person away from a trusted and safe environments induces stress, which has a very deadly result. As far as it possible it is much better to perform elderly care within the environment which results in the lowest amount of stress for the patient, ie the own homes.
In addition, buying groceries, cooking and cleaning is already guarantied through the social safety net provided by the state. By the time this kind of statistics is relevant the state is already taking care of all the so called "women work". It did not change the statistics that more men than women die shortly after their spouse.
However, it is often the start of a conversation, and I also call her on the way to work 2-3 times a week. I think it has really kept her mood up, compared to before we did this. She's 80.
This Wednesday I wandered around the city playing ukulele at 3 in the morning and I met all kinds of interesting people, everything from this beautiful female graduate student who just wanted to talk about schoastics to someone who wanted me to call his “friend in Florida.”
Just go out and be with people, they’re all lonely too.
Paradoxically, you may find that putting yourself out there a little can be a surprising source of strength.
I don’t have the ability to “just” go out and meet people and strike up a conversation.
But if you wander past my bedroom window at 3am playing an instrument, expect to have something heavy thrown at your head. ;-)
I think maybe it's time we put tech where it belongs: in the damn trunk.
Going to a YC company to fulfill a basic human need is exactly why tech belongs in aforementioned trunk.
Outsourcing elderly care to the gig economy (intentionally to college students) sounds like a step in the wrong direction for providing reliable, safe elderly care. I hope they're able to overcome that challenge.
What do your controls on 'grandkids' look like? Because if I put on my black hat, I could absolutely feed an addiction for pills, valuables to pawn, or just straight up money through that service.
At Gym1 I talk to my lifting coach but most of the time I'm in my head focused on training, after that at Gym2 I'm just trying to do my accessory work and conditioning and don't talk to anyone other than "hey" back to "hey Ryan" from the staff at the door. I go home and my retired mother that lives with me stays in her room and I go to mine, rinse and repeat.
Not entirely by choice but all my friends are married with kids and have zero free time.
When everyone has their own office or cube space, people aren't nearly as averse to friendly conversations because there is a sense of moderate privacy there. Additionally, you feel comfortable having social interactions in shared spaces, because you know you have the 'safety' of your private or semi-private cube to return to.
My last nightmare of a job was open office with ~100 employees. Even the kitchen was part of the open office, right in the middle, so even during lunch there really was no space where people felt comfortable having any sort of non-work-focused social interaction. I would go weeks without any friendly interactions at all despite being surrounded by people. It got to the point where I would walk out of the office building after 8+ hours onto the busy streets of downtown, and feel alienated/isolated/detached from all of the other people walking around. I was really getting concerned about it because I hadn't made the connection. I mentioned it to my therapist, and she asked me to describe my standard workday, and when I did she said "It's no wonder you feel like this at the end of the day, your working environment sounds like a nightmare."
Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.
Yea the research shows that open offices lower collaboration:
>...Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
That’s the nutty thing about open office. The thing that’s officially supposed to encourage collaboration leads to people sitting there with headphones trying to isolate themselves and rules to not talk to each other.
You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.
On occasion, I would meet 1-on-1 with a coworker in their cube for an extended period of time to discuss some large technical design I wanted to sort out.
A year into this, the company redid the building into open-office space (but where everyone still had their own L-shaped desks and they were only packed maybe 20% more densely than the cubes. Now you never talk with someone at their desk for more than a minute, because while you talk you’re distracting everyone. So even less collaboration.
Second tech job: this one has always been open office. It’s packed much tighter: I have a person four feet to my left and four feet to my right, more in front and more in back. At any moment, one of them might just pipe up a relatively simple question to me (“where do I look in the codebase to find X functionality”): something he could find out on his own, but asking me saves 5-10 minutes. The 5 people around me are on my team. The people behind me are on a different team. There’s conversation across the teams at least hourly, an even split between jokes/banter and technical talk. If you overhear a conversation, you’re totally welcome to insert yourself into it, and doing so is the norm.
In this open office, collaboration is more of a real thing. If someone left feedback on your code change, half the time the discussion on how specifically to address it is done in person without leaving your desk. I’m able to identify topics that are raised frequently and recognize where the real organizational issues are, because it’s all discussed right there in the open. And I’m exposed to a diverse range of ideas and solutions just by choosing to listen. A few times a week I might even pair program with one of my teammates and learn something (vim commands I didn’t know about, a new way to use one of our in-house tools, or just practice).
The difference between these two is stunning. And jarring: I’ve gone about a year now without reaching a state of flow at work. I’m not even sure if half the people I work with have ever experienced it in their life (while programming). But I’m learning to adapt. I tend to work in short bursts of productivity throughout the day which leaves me with more energy at the end than being heads down at my desk for 8 hours. The code I write is far more reliable than what I used to write —— undoubtedly because of the collaboration.
Not all offices of a particular style are equal. I think it’s silly to label open offices as either universally good or universally evil: the ideal work environment depends on the execution, the context of the work, and the individual.
Edit. I also live with my retired mother. For her simply having the option to socialize with me is enough. She knows she can watch a movie with me at home or ask me to go grocery shopping with her.
The issue is that most churches today in America are more or less social clubs. Christianity takes a back seat to less important things. Hence the mega churches in my area bleeding members in favor of small churches that focus on the Gospel, but yet do offer things for families.
I'm not going to the gym for general health or to pump out bicep curls for the ladies, I'm a strength athlete. At gym1 if I'm not actively using a barbell, I'm sitting down trying to recover for the next set. At gym2 I'm trying to get my accessory work and conditioning done so I can get home 12 hours after walking out the door for work so I can have 3 hours before bed to eat/shower/read/watch tv.
The weekends are my free time, a childless couple that lives a half hour late rand I will go get food but that's pretty much down to quarterly because the weekend for them is also their downtime when they have to do everything, including see their families that both live an hour or so away.
The rest of my friends all have kids and the weekends is when their kids have the bulk of their events from birthday parties to sleep overs to sports/dance.
And as far as making new friends, I can't just walk up to strangers in public "Hello fellow biotic doing their groceries, I see you're buying beans, I too eat beans, let us be friends and go do something after we take our groceries home".
Add in the fact I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, where it's extremely abnormal to not be married with kids in your early 20s, and even there I'm the odd man out. Everyone there is busy with family stuff too constantly and the bulk of the social events are youth-centered.
Basically I walk around life getting excited when I think someone is waving to me only to be gut-punched with an operating chainsaw when they were waving to there stranger behind me. Or God help me, when someone does actually say hi or ask me how it's going my brain just starts flashing "error, does not compute" because I've been so long without regular social interaction I forget how to respond.
Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids, I have made it clear to my friends without kids that if you want to hang out, we're headed to the pool or to a park with the kids for the most part. Occasionally we'll have time for adult nights, but because of our geography, childcare is hard to find. Some were okay with that and we're even closer friends now, and my kids call them 'Auntie' or 'Uncle'. Some were not, and we grew apart. Which has to be okay.
The moral of the story is, it's not their fault 100% that they're busy, and if their friendship is important, you should actively work on it. Like an adult. That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds.
It does, probably because it's so asymmetric. Now, I guess it is expected that the one's own kids will be more important than friends. But this "if friendship is important" thing has to go both ways to at least some extent.
That's correct, the problem, in my experience, is that people expect everything to be the same as it was before friend A had a kid. It's called growth and development, and it's healthy for many people.
So expecting them to hang out until 2 am and play video games and drink like you used to is probably not realistic. Maybe, depending on the person.
My point was that if the friendship is important, remember that children aren't a barrier to YOUR needs. That is a human, the care and development of which your friend is personally responsible for. Understand that you may have to hang out with them at a park while their kid plays, rather than in your living room drinking beers.
Does that make sense? I feel like I do a terrible job of explaining myself.
"Hey Michael, so, yeah, I'm just gonna show up to your kid's third grade graduation, what door do I enter the school in to look like a total creep?"
Er... a lot of that stuff is going to be like that, or going to the Children's museum, or a child's park, or family events with extended family, or family vacations/road trips. Kinda creepy to just show up at that stuff "oh hey, fancy that, how funny we ran into each other at Chuck-e-Cheese and I'm here without a kid and I think the police are now here to ask why I'm here as a single adult male with no child".
But why can't you go with a family friend to Chuck-e-Cheese? I'm not saying follow them, obviously. Plan ahead. Why not go with them to hang out while they watch their kids?
Why not accompany the family to the park - if everyone (meaning friend, friend's spouse that sort of thing - not everyone in the park obviously) knows you're there to hang out with your friend, what's the problem? And you get to play with a kid, which can be fun.
American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that people are alone. Alone in life, alone at their apartment, alone when they struggle, alone when they die. It's to the point where we regard married couples that live a 20 minute drive from anything as not being alone when they really are.
Most adults I know have a relationship with their immediate family that I would regard as acquaintanceship.
Part of this is culture (Americans fetishize a sort of "rugged individualism" where you alone can solve every problem you're faced with or else it's not a real problem) and part of it is civil engineering. You need a car to live nearly everywhere, there's almost no public transit infrastructure, etc.
EDIT: Since this is popular I wanna surface something that people have been saying: it definitely doesn't require being far away physically from others to feel alone. I live in Manhattan and big cities can be extremely alienating depending on the person.
Fighting loneliness requires active effort. You are not going to care one bit if you bought that extra widget or got an extra story in on your sprint later in life. Put time into what matters: people.
(Some went to another country, we haven't heard much of them - distance can still be a barrier and culture in Western Europe is different.)
It's such a hack premise, but this actually happened to me - my mother used to work in a nursing home, and required all of her kids to volunteer there when they were old enough (12 to 21 if you still lived at home). My job, as the rambunctious ADHD youth was to give 'wheelchair rides'. Which was where I would push the elderly around the grounds looking at trees and what-not, and just generally being an audience while they talked.
The one thing that literally everyone I gave a ride to, when the topic inevitably turned to death (it always did, old people are so straight up about it) - the absolute only topic that everyone hit on was that they regretted doing 'x' instead of spending time with 'person y'.
I gave wheelchair rides to poor people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
I gave wheelchair rides to rich people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
And that made me into the 'I will work only 40 if that's what is required of me' beast that I am today. In my area of the US, we have a very 1950's 'work until you can't anymore' sort of mentality; the kind where work defines you.
I have left several positions in my career because they refused to understand that my time at home with family and friends is more important than my time at work, and that my time is so much more important to me than any financial incentive they could offer past my base salary.
America is also _big_, which I think also contributes here. It isn't unusual for family members to move away within America but be far enough that frequent face-to-face interaction isn't possible.
I do not think an average person would be able to live like this. It takes a certain type of driven, focused personality who can dive into their work or hobbies and be happy with their head below water for a while without seeing anyone. I suspect Aristotle and Nietzsche both had these qualities.
Also, isn't loneliness also a major issue in other cultures, like Scandinavian or Japanese cultures?
Often when I hear about the older generation of my family, who immigrated and lived in Brooklyn for years before moving to the "burbs", I think they had good intentions but didn't do any favors for the subsequent generations.
My parents grew up and stones throw away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - a lot even lived in multi family, multi generational homes. When my mom had kids she had a support system that included people from 3 different generations, all willing to lend a hand. Their social lives revolved around interacting with all different family members, and get together were happening almost daily just because of the inherent (lack of) distance between them all.
Now, we all live in the burbs, with long distances between each other. The grandparents see the kids a few times a year and we all have to make concrete plans to have get togethers. Interacting with most extended family is reserved for weddings or funerals and the lack of true support systems takes it toll on all of us.
I could possibly be romanticizing the past, but when compared to the current lifestyle, I truly believe it wasn't for the best.
Most everyone I knew growing up doesn't live where we grew up anymore. They're scattered everywhere. Much of my family that used to live there has moved on too.
I was one of the last to officially leave (around 25) and there wasn't much left in my "hometown" for me when I left, because few people I knew were still nearby anyway.
To be clear, I'm not talking about rural Kansas. That's a story from suburban New Jersey, about an hour outside of NYC.
Cities are also atomized, but not to this extent. They're vibrant, booming, the schools are fine/good, and in my opinion, far worth the cut to house size.
I’m finding modern life requires tribal flexibility
Personally, I find cities to be excessively busy and annoying, full of folks I generally don't want to be around socially. But I'm an introvert, who enjoys being away from the crowds. I personally find suburbs to be a bit too crowded, if I'm honest.
I don't need a big house - I just need big personal space; I prefer my small 1000sq ft house, but I wish it was in the middle of a few acres.
I grew up in a suburb and it was not at all isolating. We had close communities and nearby family. I was friends with kids on my block and had freedom to explore and be independent. I would say technology is what is driving people to isolation.
Edit:
For reference, this [1] was the "big city" to me growing up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_City,_Iowa
I think not finding things in common with young people isn't abnormal. My childhood was miserable partly BECAUSE of the sameness of it all. I find the suburban vanilla Stepford ways soul-killing. I had no exposure to culture. The internet didn't exist yet. I was ignorant and brainwashed in many ways. I felt out of place and like I was a freak because I didn't believe what I was told was "correct". The city was "bad" and "city folk" were "bad". The family and people in those places still have the same narrow beliefs and I am still "wrong". The people I know that grew up in multicultural cities had so much richer experiences and opportunities to grow and explore their beliefs and ideas without their parents ideologies infecting them as much.
One of the things I find ironic about "experience seeking" is how often people go to places like India or China to have "rich experiences." But people from those places generally would relate much more easily to people like your parents. Circling back to the topic at hand--people in my home country of Bangladesh, where there is a rigid social order and strict indoctrination of children, may suffer from many things, but loneliness is not one of them.
Again, I can't help but notice the irony of your assertion. What is the virtue in not being xenophobic against Bangladeshis, if you're going to condemn the way they structure their communities and raise their children?
I’m from rural East Texas and would agree with that statement 100%.
This probably sounds like a throwaway comment, but it's not; there are big cities that are more friendly and less friendly to kids. An advantage of places like Chicago is that the trendy areas are shared between people with families and single people, where in New York the family-friendly neighborhoods are specialized, like Park Slope.
Nearly any attempt paint American Culture with broad strokes is going to fail.. but using absolute terms like you're doing here A) is wildly inaccurate, and B) negatively portrays a pretty neutral personal ideology. I value individualism for the same reasons I devalue conformity -- I generally want to be left to my own devices to do pretty much whatever I want.
This trope about detrementally fetishizing rugged individualism, which is unbelievably common and doesn't seem to ever be subject to a skeptical eye, is a subtle dig at people who want what I want: To be left alone and to be free.
Also nobody does it all alone, with the possible exception of some rare frontiersman who chops down trees and builds his own house in some wilderness. People want to be left alone, but still use the benefits of society that suit them. People aren't as independent as they imagine but want to feel as such. I live amongst people who happily use services and comforts and infrastructure, but take every opportunity to attack the communal systems that create them as evil and have some idea it should be hundreds of millions of individuals doing what they want how they want.
I seriously doubt it.
I think all modern rich cultures have this. Sweden certainly does. As everyone gets rich enough to get your own house, you end up lonely, as you're no longer naturally interacting with others, since you don't need to.
It can be even problematic to stay in the same city, especially if it's a small city with few opportunities. People tend to migrate for education... And stay where they left.
If someone is interested in doing something, they find a way. The trick is to find the people that are actually interested in being part of your life.
Another good example is programming side projects. How many people are looking to make money on their side project? Rather then just help people? Or how many people only have side projects because they feel like they have to in order to stay competitive in the job market? Probably the vast majority.
We've developed a culture where we fetishize productivity and always making money. People now feel guilty if they're not busy or productive all the time.
People have forgotten the quality of Slack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...
Yes big cities can be alienating. That's why I opted out.
Andrew Yang has even made that part of his policy platform.
https://edition-m.cnn.com/2016/05/24/health/cry-it-out-sleep...
I recognize that I am personally an extrovert so the thought of being alone and isolated like that really bugs me and other people might be introverted and perhaps loneliness and isolation is what suits them.
I interact with people normally at work, but outside of work I'm usually alone and it is hard to ignore the negative effects of it on my mental health. If I'm around people after work I generally feel more positive and have less anxiety, but left alone for too long and my anxiety will start to take over. I really miss my younger years where I had close groups of friends and we hung out all the time.
Interesting. I'm the exact opposite. When I have to do things like hang around with people from work for too long, my anxiety increases until I can get away and be alone. I'm not a social recluse, I have a wife and kid, and I enjoy spending time with them, I try to make time for my parents at least weekly, and I enjoy hanging out with my friends. But definitely anxiety builds as my time in contact with other people increases. Alone is often my "happy place".
However, I have a few folks in my close circles that are clear extroverts. They love going out with people after work, always seem to be somewhere doing something talking to someone. They never want to go home because home is "boring."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Also, suicide rates were higher suggesting that mental situation was not all that great.
Editing to say that schools are now offering summer sports, which I hate, because it means less time in the evenings to relax after work. American culture is too busy. Too many games, too many expectations of parents to commit to this and that. Too many schools begging for money when I already pay taxes. It goes on and on...
Some people need lots of social engagement; I don't. I don't like parties. I do like two or three couples over for a BBQ and beer. It's intimate enough, but controllable enough that there are not competing voices in the background.
At work, I'm fortunate to be able to keep the lights out in my office, draw the blinds and stream my psytrance while working. My colleague I office with likes the same things, so it's a win-win for us. People think we're weird that we like it dark, but I've never worked in an IT office where the lights were preferred. I think this may be an IT thing. I also dearly miss when IT was in the data center and not accessible to the general office staff.
The problem is that for many, there is a trend where social life is hard to obtain for several reasons.
Do you think that could at all be attributed that you are actually more alone now?
What I mean is, most families aren't interacting much with people outside their immediate family, whereas in the past the extended family was around and built a support system for those immediate families. If you had your parents, siblings, cousins, etc... around, you might actually have more time to recharge because child rearing wouldn't exclusively be put on the shoulders of the parents.
The way that our kids are raised now is incredibly different than the way I was raised. Although predominately raised by my parents, my grandparents, aunts, great aunts, etc... all had an influence and played a part in that upbringing due to the geographics of where everyone lived.
Aside from going out and physically isolating yourself, having family around usually doesn’t help.
Now family could help looking after the kids when you take time away, but once your kids can stay aline for a few hours, having more people taking care of them might not help that much (now you’re managing a fleet of care givers, creating a “too many cooks” situation)
Recently I watched the Liam Neeson version of "Cold Pursuit".
In its honesty and humor, both of which I appreciate to no end, Neeson's character's wife opines in grief on their dead son. "Did you even know his favorite movie? All of those hunting trips, what did you talk about?!?"
"... Hunting."
So very true and honest in many respects.
My hunting trips are just day trips. I'm not like some guys I know who fly to Colorado and Alaska, leaving the family behind. I want my sons to be involved, but they are not quite ready. My wife will sit in a deer stand with me and like to shoot, but will not shoot at animals. She likes the resulting venison, however.
Our early ancestors hunted in parties of several to dozens of men, often for safety against predators, both two and four legged. I like the idea the British use, several people driving birds, a good hunt, and cigars and gin and tonics afterwards in the game room. Done it. It's great.
I also don’t think the person you replied to was doing down hunting as a social activity but that the movie makes it a stand in for anything done to avoid that social activity.
We become people who need help once again later in life.
At the same time, I find it easy to project that desire too far. I get less solitude than I would like now, so I feel that need, but I definitely don't want infinite solitude. While I liked living alone, I also remember getting quite lonely at times. It's easy for me to take for granted my social needs because they are being (more than) met right now.
One thing I do find a real challenge is a life that feels both socially full and shallow. With all of the tasks of being a full-time employee and parent today, my social calendar fills up quickly. I can really only see a couple of people a week. Kid birthday parties and other events like that overwhelm it. Because my kids are constantly making new friends, there is this parade of parents that enter and recede from my life. They're all nice people, but over time it gets harder to invest effort into friendship with them because I only see any given one of them every couple of months and even that may fade if our kids stop being friends. Not quite the "single serving friends" of Fight Club, but close.
At the same time, it's hard for me to maintain my own independent friendships on top of those acquaintances because there just isn't that much time. If I've already got a birthday party on Saturday and a playdate on Sunday, it's really hard to enjoy another social activity with my own friends on top of that. Even with people I consider close friends, I sometimes only see them once every couple of months.
I try to be mindful that this phase won't last forever. As my kids get older, they'll do more drop-off parties and eventually will get to their own social functions without me at all. They'll want less of my time until one day I'll wake up and the nest will be empty. I try to enjoy this time for what it is while it lasts.
My biggest worry is that by the time the kids are older and I have more room for my own close friends, those bonds will have withered along with my skills at socializing and I'll fail to reinvigorate them.
My kids sometimes feel too needy. Oftentimes I never get the desired downtime.
My wife got mad at me one day and said "You need to listen to Harry Chapin's Cat's in the Cradle. Then come talk with me." It's a shock to listen to that song, because it's true. It would be easy to end up like that and no one want it.
Each of those ages are incredible and filled with irreplaceable experiences. It's easy to get jaded when you move through them so slowly.
"You know, I feel like having a me day. I'll hand this one off to 60-year-old me."
My 60-year-old self magically time travels in and has a blast with the kids he hasn't seen as children in decades. Meanwhile I get to relax. Then, twenty years from now, when the nest is cold and empty, the memories of my kids' childhood is fading, and I long to feel their little arms wrapped around me, I get zipped back in time to live a whole day of it afresh.
They say youth is wasted on the young. Sometimes it feels like parenting is wasted on young parents too.
It's a very challenging balancing act especially in today's America which expects parents to spend tons of time with their kids.
That was my first thought, as well - I have a wife and two teenaged kids, and they drain absolutely all of my free time. I keep reminding myself that I should be taking advantage and enjoying this time that I have to spend with them because in a few years, they’ll be away and I won’t see them very often, but I do feel like I would like just an hour here and there to pick what channel to watch and not have to debate about it. I wonder if I’ll feel differently when I finally get to that point, though - I am sure that I’m going to miss my kids when they move away, because I already miss having little kids running around the house (even though they sort of drove me crazy at the time then, too).
For me, I think that frustration's the source of my "oh god just drop me on a deserted island with some books and leave me" fantasies. I'd rather be around my kids and enjoying high-quality parent-kid time because it actually is pretty great, but that's so rarely and unpredictably available that the loner route becomes more appealing.
I certainly don’t, I chose the office with no windows on the opposite side the building to everyone else with the lights out and the AC cranked to the max I’m happy.
I have a small led desk lamp so I don’t walk into things and that’s it.
If you ever find such a magical place again, please let me know if they're hiring!
Multi-generational housing is a good solution to this problem of elder isolation and general social isolation, and the friction associated with that can be eased given the amount of land many suburban properties contain.
I have always thought that the turn towards the nuclear family caused many of the social problems that began to appear in the 1960s. I think we should return to more extended family living situations.
I think this is what you see in many rural American towns where only a small elderly population remains, while the young people all moved to cities for economic opportunity.
I lived with my parents during college. It was expected because they couldn't afford to pay for a dorm for me.
I think it delayed my growth.
Caregivers also spend tons of their own money on care giving, plus trips to the doctor, dentist, etc. I already don't get enough down time. I also want to actually retire on time and do what I want to do, not babysit the elderly. I don't want or need the hassle of being a care giver. It's not in my makeup to do that kind of thing. In addition, my children WILL NOT be living at home until they are 30. I will have earned my peace and quiet by then and I want to get it. MY job now is to make my children as independent as possible: learning to cook, mow, change a tire, be literate, good with math, critical thinking, and not rely on others for things that should be done alone. And most importantly, avoid debt like the plague. A man should owe no one if possible. My daughter already plans to pay for her own university by dint of military service. We explained to her that we made it on our own, she will have to do likewise. No parent should go into debt for their child's education. It prolongs the parents ability to retire and enjoy their own golden years.
> In addition, my children WILL NOT be living at home until they are 30 ...
I agree with you here -- independence is the ideal. But for reasons beyond the individual's control this is not always possible: misfortune, ill health, age. The community has a responsibility to take care of those within it who are struck by these things.
I'm sure this isn't normal, particularly for extroverts. My wife doesn't understand it at all. But I take after my mom, and I 100% know that she feels fine with a minimum of human interaction. I do feel bad for the people who aren't like her, though.
The problem is that modern, sedentary, good-living-standard, individualistic life tend to isolate people. That's the current model.
In more ancient times we were all living in communities because the infrastructure forced us to do so. Now the standard is individual housing, kitchen, toilets, bathroom, etc.
I'm okay to have a solitary bedroom for myself, but I wish activities like cooking and food were shared in neighborhoods. Similarly, fences exist for security but they also damage socialization.
I recall an experience I had in a large city, a dense capital and no lack of people around. I knocked on an apartment door to meet up with someone but had gotten the number wrong. A lovely old woman answered the door in her nightgown. I apologised for my mistake and asked if she knew where the person I was looking for lived. She did not, but she invited me in for tea. I accepted and even thought she didn't speak English and my command of her language was poor, we had a human interaction that both of us needed. She was so incredibly alone there. You could tell by how she lived in this little 25 square meter flat and how things came pouring out of her to me, this stranger. We had our tea, I had my tour and saw the photos, and politely excused myself as I had "things to do". My life hadn't fully collapsed yet, and while I have always been empathetic and didn't rush out, I can't help but often think that I should have stayed longer, done more for her, gone back. I always intended to go back when I had more time, but shortly after my own life accelerated downhill and I never found the chance. It was many years ago and she was quite elderly then. I imagine she might have passed by now. But I often think of her and that little room and if by some magic I can get back there I will knock on that door. There are lonely people all around us.