I spent 6 years in a job, lunched with the same few colleagues most days, thought they were good friends, knew their partners, met up out of work, that kind of thing. Left to start own business ... None of them offered any support, nor visited, nor anything. Completely floored me, I thought I had good friends at work.
One colleague, a very loose acquaintance, visited a couple of times, asked after us; I need to find that person and thank them ... [people I knew through a club, who happened to work in the same place continued to be friends however.]
Anyway, I'm now working with some of those people again, and talking with them it feels like they're friends... but in retrospect I think for them I was just like background noise to their jobs?
So, at least for me "carry on being friends" was the expectation but I was miles off.
The term "friend" is pretty worthless anymore, atleast compared to the definition I adhere to.
What most people call "friends" I'd call aquantiences but I prefer fewer high quality relationships than a large quantity of casual passings. I don't and never have valued such casual fleeting relationships of any kind outside those in the workplace (those are necessary to function in a modern workplace). I'd hardly call those folks friends: most are merely professional aquanteinces or colleagues, nothing more.
Good friends are and have always been difficult to come by. Many prefer loneliness with casual meaningless relationships than the work it takes to foster strong friendships. I'll never understand it but I was taught the value of meaningful human relationships exceed most other frivolities we often occupy ourselves with and it's been one of the most important aspects I followed through life as far as happiness is concerned.
As a man is pretty damn hard keeping friends after the age of 30, especially if you happen to go trough a divorce when suddenly more than half (if not more) of your friends get to “choose” the other side. Yeah, you get to ask your friends back from high-school or college out for a beer but chances are they’re also in a middle of a divorce or they’re too busy with family requirements (can’t blame them) or too stressed out because of work reasons. And then there are all those friends who have moved town or even country. All in all things are not so easy.
It is not just the US. 10 hour workdays (officially 7.8, but if you would actually 'just' do that and skip the 8am or the 6pm meetings you will not be keeping up with the Joneses and pay the piper) and spend 2-3 hours in commuting each day doesn't leave much for hobbies.
Meetings outside the working hours?! Where is this common?
Here we work 9-6, but even in the places I've worked on where unpaid overtime was common (otherwise you wouldn't keep up with the workload), no manager would have the gall to schedule regular meetings outside working hours.
I don't get it then - you asked when do people have meetings outside normal working hours as if it was some sort of travesty that nobody would 'have the gall' to do, and now you're saying it's absolutely fine you just move your hours around...
2-3 hours commuting is not the norm. The average commute in the US is around 25 minutes each way, so roughly 1 hour total. Super-long commutes are almost non-existent outside a handful of metro areas.
If you’re dealing with a very long commute, it might be worth it to move to a different metro, even if it requires a substantial pay cut. I think most people under-estimate the negative impact that a long commute has on their life.
Hobbies might not be sufficient for a social life.
I used to train seriously in mixed-martial arts. While I had no issue with any of my training mates, I also had zero interest in hanging out with them. Likewise for other, strictly cerebral, activities.
One thing that is valuable is activities with downtime where you’re forced to get to know one another outside of the activity. If you do something like martial arts or rowing (which I do), it’s when you travel for competitions that you bond. Activities like skiiing where you share housing for the season gives downtimebto get to know people between the activity. Hiking and camping is another good one where you spend time at the campsite at the end of the day preparing food together.
Maybe not as in 'having a beer at each others houses', but when you go to each others fights as a team, go to seminars/camps together, or just work through your fight prep together at 4 or 6 week periods at a time, you develop bonds that cannot be described any other way than 'friendships', wouldn't you say? I mean sure, training 2 to 5 times a week in the gym, saying hi when you come in and see you when you leave doesn't give you that, but you can't be a complete fighter without friendships. I mean if dripping sweat into another guys mouth and rubbing all over each other wearing tights doesn't build friendships, what does?
I moved to another country at the age of 30, which meant the number of friends I had dropped to 0.
What worked for me was starting dancing tango, where I built a newer, better and larger network than the one I previously had. I guess this can apply to any social activity where you can interact with people, be it social dancing or coocking classes.
I did the same. Moved abroad in my mid 20s, effectively restarting my life in several respects. It can be hard to make new friends when you're in your late 30s/early 40s, but I'm ok with just a few.
This is amazing, it really shows character that you take action to solve your problems and are successful in doing so.
So please know that this is not aimed at you personally...
But...
I am so freaking sick of people recommending others to pickup either salsa or tango! Not of the people that recommend this themselves but are there really no other options? Tango/salsa classes seem to get recommended again, again and again, I get that it's a fun activity with a good gender balance, forced interaction and just enough tension to naturally provide a fun atmosphere but is there nothing else??
There are like a million activities. Martial arts, team sports, crossfit. Volunteer work, soup kitchens, helping children and those with special needs, respite care. Outdoors activities like hiking groups. Oddball niche hobby groups like fan clubs.
Like whatever. Some of those are more gender balanced than others but the basic premise is get out there into a group and do something that scares you a little based around a common activity.
Things like this feel "hard" to do because of emotional resistance, it's actually super simple and straightforward from a logistical standpoint.
Tons. Most cities will have a social club with a range of activities.
Go look on meetup for "social" club type things, or choose a sport and Google for clubs, or whatever. Boardgame clubs, programmer meetups, kayaking, rambling, rock climbing, etc.
Volunteering is another option for meeting people.
Second volunteering. I moved to a completely different city with no friends and I felt purpose and community the moment I started doing volunteer work, everything a lonely person could ask for!
It doesn't have to be your favorite thing, it just has to be better than being lonely. Lots of people will be there actively or casually looking for new friends - there's nothing stopping you from going for a month then suggesting to a group that you check out some new activity next week.
> I am so freaking sick of people recommending others to pickup either salsa or tango! Not of the people that recommend this themselves but are there really no other options? Tango/salsa classes seem to get recommended again, again and again, I get that it's a fun activity with a good gender balance, forced interaction and just enough tension to naturally provide a fun atmosphere but is there nothing else?
If you see people in public doing something, try joining them. I discovered Archery that way, and others have joined my esperanto group like that. The important thing is to not drive between two destinations all the time. Sometimes try travelling in other ways or dawdling through the retail places and there's a good chance to find something.
I did this with Crossfit. Met people very similar to me who like beer, football (soccer), video games and got my diet and fitness together at the same time (except the beer:)
I see why friends who are busy with family would not have time to go out, but those in the middle of a divorce should be prime material for drowning a few beers together.
There is an incredible amount of stress following a divorce. What will happen with the kids. Where will everyone live. Can I afford to live the same life style. Who will our friends choose. And probably 100 things I have forgotten. I was not the same person after divorcing for I would say about 3 years. I felt out of place. Lost. Certainly not wanting to go grab a beer. It was not a celebration and if anything for a long time one feels like they had failed at something. So I can see how anyone going through a divorce is high risk for social isolation.
I sometimes wonder if I’m broken when I see comments like yours, which seem heartfelt and correct and as it should be (the desire for friendships that is). Maybe it’s because my wife and kids fill the void, but I just have no interest in making or maintaining friendships. My wife has a really cool coworker that tries to get me out of the house but i just kinda flop on him. I live in a secluded spot that you can’t see from the road and work from home 95% of the time.
I see it in my youngest daughter as well, and I do worry for her and am applying gentle pressure to get her to socialize...but I’m pretty much good to go. Maybe things will change down the road but I’m in my mid 40’s sooo.
The risk is what you'll do when your kids are grown and move out. I definitely recommend, for your own mental health, to build some kind of other life outside your kids before it hits you like a ton of bricks.
Think about it this way. If you find friends that vibe well with you, you're reducing the pressure on your family later in life to keep you connected. It is a real concern.
What is interesting is that most people understand the concept of a plan B when it comes to things like what university they will attend, their careers, their financial safety nets, etc. But they assume their marriage will last forever. As you imply, it’s a big mistake.
I don't think my marriage would be as good if I went into it with an exit plan.
For instance, it would be easier for some things, especially huge things, to be "her problem" instead of "our problem" if I had an escape hatch present in my subconscious.
I was more saying that people don't vow to be together "until I get a few promotions, you get fat, or I contract chronic FOMO-itis". Those who have expectations like that tend to be hurting themselves too.
I think that making the husband socially dependent on the wife is bad for the same reasons making the wife financially dependent on the husband is. You can say that it goes against the spirit of marriage, but I'd say that those things makes people stay in unhealthy relationships.
This is an important point for jcims' situation: If you want your kids to get out, then get out yourself. You have to be a role model for getting out - both in the sense that the kids see that you had fun doing so and as a model for the skills used to master the situation (e.g. casually talking to people, gift culture, helping each other out and so on. The specifics obviously differ for different (sub-)cultures).
The role model thing is often overlooked when parenting. If you want your kids to do sports, let them see you doing sports etc.
I sort of agree with this but my parents constantly had people over when I was a kid. That and my oldest daughter is a raging socialite at college, lead RA, secretary for the university student govt, just got invited to box seats with the university executive leadership for a football game, has 3-4 friend groups and a core couple deep friends that she meets constantly.
A little nature a little nurture, but to be clear I do agree with you that it's better to model than not.
Yes, we are in full agreement here :) The parental role model part won't override the Big Five in most cases. Parental behaviour does help in expanding the possibilty space a bit, though (e.g. an extravert can - to a certain degree - learn to relax while being alone and vice versa).
The other caveeat I conveniently ignored is that parents are usually adults, so the image they provide is for adult behaviour. Kids won't necessarily transfer that fully into their current situation. It does shape their inner image of adult behaviour, though (which starts to become more relevant as the kids enter the early teenager years).
>Maybe things will change down the road but I’m in my mid 40’s sooo.
My dad was like this, his free-time basically revolved around us kids when we were younger and we had a great time. Then we got a little older and I could tell he'd be a little disappointed when we'd be busy with friends/other stuff on the weekends, but we'd still be together most week nights. Then when we went off to college/adult life, he really had nothing to do. My mom had friends to hang out with, but for him, she was all he had really and I think at that point it was too weird/hard for him to branch out and make new friends.
I'm not saying you shouldn't put family first, but it's not a bad idea to maintain some relationships or else that empty nest is going to hit you HARD eventually.
I also really, really second this. I am currently studying and took some interest in how other parents managed the situation (because of how my parents dealt with it).
If your life revolves around your kids you have to keep in mind that this is not for life. Loosing all your hobbies and all your friends will lead to a bad awakening when you realize that your previously laughter-filled house is now quite, your children left for university and only you and your partner are sitting at the dinner table. Now the house is too big, there's nothing to do in the evenings and you're kinda lost.
A suprising amount of marriages failed and some parents really lost their way. When you don't have any real friends, friends that help when you struggle, it gets tough. You can't fill that void with half-assed hobbies. Eating out on wednesday and going to the gym on friday are probably not really helping.
Writing this, I think I realized something. I think one of the problems is that parents understimate the speed of change and are taken fully by suprise when they move out. One moment they are 16, quite grown up but you still notice the children in them. But then they turn 17 and then there's only one year left until they move out, until they live by their own and explore the world on their own. They maybe move to another city and that turns your complete life upside down. That's a rapid change and it's only 2 years.
You're not broken. I've always been the kind of person who's happy to have one to three close friends, and that's it. After getting married, I stopped feeling any need to reach out and try to make new connections.
There may be value to the perspectives given by others as to the value of making friends now before the kids grow up, but I just wanted to chime in and reassure you that you're not the only one who feels no need right now. :)
You're not broken. If your family is your number one interest and responsibility, then you're doing life correctly. Don't let anyone else tell you differently.
Just be careful not to smother your family with your interest in them. I've met some parents with broken relationships with their kids because they failed to recognize that they needed some space as they got older.
Yes my family is my number one interest, but not my only interest. My (step) sons who loved to spend time with me when we met and they were 9 and 14 - now one doesn’t live with us and the other is 17 with his own friends and interests.
My wife’s interests and my interests are well enough aligned that we like spending time together, but she has her own interests and own set of female friends.
I’m in my 40s also and I find most of my social needs are met by my wife. She has two groups of friends that she likes to spend time with but I’m okay spending time alone when she is out with her friends.
I have a couple of friends that we force ourselves to get together at least once every other month to at least have lunch but we are all in the same boat - married, jobs, hobbies, side projects or studying so we have to explicitly schedule it on our calendars.
I don’t think it is healthy to depend on only one person for your emotional support and my wife isn’t interested in hearing about the latest geeky stuff that we talk about it. I have another friend who is across the country but we try to catch up once a month.
> I sometimes wonder if I’m broken when I see comments like yours,
Or maybe other people have the wisdom to know that the kids will move out, the job will change, and that looking past the present moment and planning for the future includes developing hobbies and relationships outside of your immediate family
In this area, their mom. As i said elsewhere my oldest really couldn’t be more social. I just think our youngest isn’t catching that same wave so I’m stepping up my efforts to round out what she sees.
The problem is that it’s going to be fake, which gets back to the core of my question.
My parents were like this. I ended up feeling resentful of their attitude as a kid. They whenever I changed schools, it took me a long time to make friends because I didn't have good examples to follow. Even when I did, I always felt like the odd one out because all my friends parents hung out together, but I wasn't invited since my parents had no social interests.
> I sometimes wonder if I’m broken when I see comments like yours
I'd wager a guess that most of us feel broken, some way or another. But that's just a guess; I imagine that some psychology or sociology journal has empirical data on that.
But even if you're an outlier, it seems like you're pretty content and not making other people miserable, so I wouldn't really call that "broken".
The unsettling thing is how normal your comment makes divorce sound, and how much statistics back that up. As if it's just a thing that is an expected part of life.
People need to stop getting married, or at least not so early. Marriage is a very intensive (and rewarding) commitment that I think most modern people cannot make. Instead, foster relationships that matter for as long as they matter.
I was in a serious relationship from 19-25. These things end because people change a lot in those years. We both graduated and went in different directions. Which I think is perfectly fine. Relationships will change. You can absolutely start new ones. Join pretty much any club that meets in person. Commit time to those who enrich your life, cut loose those who harm it.
>Marriage is a very intensive (and rewarding) commitment that I think most modern people cannot make
If we're going to make generalizations about whole generations of people then: I wouldn't call staying in an abusive relationship because of stigma of being divorced to be a positive of the past or a sign of commitment.
So if they don't marry and then decide to split up after a long time, how is that really different from the same happening to s married couple? It's not the word "divorce" that makes the breakup painful.
This is an American thing. I'm European, 27 and I'm regularly shocked after conversing with people my age on the other continent casually mentioning their 'husband' or 'wife and kids'.
Also keep in mind that this age is inversely correlated with education level, so among the typical HN crowd and their social circles (among which I expect people often have a college degree or even a PhD) it's even higher.
The issue is that people end up at age 40 with no ltr, no marriage, and no kids, and end up as fodder for this article. Because it gets a lot harder to find your ltr then; women generally are at the "last chance kid" stage and have been around the block, so LTR steve usually gets a very cold eye unless he sees the light and wants a marriage too.
Here's the thing: divorce is much less common in first time marriages than in all other marriages. That is to say, divorce is much more common among those who have divorced already.
While relationships can change, those in them can chose to grow together or to grow apart. Well, it's not always a choice, but the sense of fatalism regarding change isn't necessarily warranted.
Even without going through a divorce it's hard. Most of my friends over the years and I have mostly lost touch other than happy birthdays and the occasional 'hey what's going on? We should hang out some time when we're both not busy' But, understandably, people are tired or busy with things and it never really works out. My coworker's lives are all pretty different from mine. Either they're young, early 20's and I can't really relate to them and they're doing their thing or they're older and spend their time with their families. I've tried making friends online in different places, it sort of ends up being the same though, you talk for a while frequently, then you both get busy or whatever.
An important post-30 strategy that I use is to assume that all friends with children are prisoners in their own home. You know exactly where they are. You know they don't have plans. They are desperate for adult conversation. That means you can invite yourself over, bring takeout, and basically make their day. I'm coupled but this should work as a single.
Our parent friends say it's actually easier to be friends with child-free people because they don't have the complications of arranging around the kids. We arrive just as the kids are going to bed so that we can say a perfunctory hello and then usually leave by 10:30p.
They maintain an air of exclusivity with gaggles of beautiful women around them, and self preservation would tell you not to dare approach any of the women or the table and that the promoter - usually male - would be disinterested or aggressive towards you.
But a reality is that the promoters are also desperate for casual conversation. All those beautiful women around and if the promoter gets close to any one then they lose entire cliques, and then lose the other clique when the relationship is over. The promoters are also prisoners. Introducing yourself and partying with them lets you act just like the models on the table, and access to all models on the table because remember: you aren't a promoter :) but you have inherited the clout just from being there and competition has been completely removed. The selection of women have been pre-selected by several people (the model agency, the state department, the promoter, the doorman, the man/men that subsidize them) otherwise that woman would not be at the table. This results in a heavy selection evolution of consensus-based attractiveness but the exact same distribution of whether two people will be interested in each other. Very advantageous compared to the general population in being around consensus-attractive people (as in, even if its not your ideal you still know what other people find attractive and the social benefits that come with that).
Because women are not pieces of meat that can be processed and marinated before being consumed for a night of fun, regardless that both parties are seeking the same pleasure. the downvoted are not in this club and so they feel left out
> regardless that both parties are seeking the same pleasure
I see this a lot in the tech community.
People want to be allies of inclusiveness [in the context of corporate professionalism, while trying to apply it everywhere], but the current iteration of this results in still infantilizing women that make different choices and vicariously assuming they're victims when that woman's current aspirations have nothing to do with an executive role in a corporate environment. My non-compliance with that idea is easy to villify, people can choose to assume that I'm perhaps perpetuating some unilateral toxic masculinity, or something, distinct from what I and the other people involved perceive to be a respectful consensual environment. A reality is that context is important, people can exist in different modes and states and feel very respected.
I've had overwhelmingly positive experiences from approaching people with this understanding
It wouldn't be ok to refer to a woman as a piece of meat at say a corporate board meeting.
However, if you're at a savage orgy and everyone is naked and fucking it is hardly a faux pas to see a woman as just a piece of meat, hell it may even be desirable by the other party.
It’s totally true. I actually started a little get together based on exactly that premise in my neighborhood.
Me and some other dads get together on Wednesday night at 9pm to step out and get 1 drink at a local pub. Usually doesn’t last more than an hour because we all have work the next day, but it gets us out after the kids are in bed on a day and time when none of us have scheduled plans.
It is fairly common for a man to marry a woman who does not like his friends. Then, the wife does not want the husband’s friends at their home. So, you cannot invite yourself over, and the man is so busy with giving his wife sufficient attention and with childraising that he cannot easily go out to meet his friends in another location.
> if you experience this then you are: bad at setting your own boundaries, bad at mate selection, or bad at friend selection.
Indeed, many men are bad at some of those things. Attraction to a partner can be such a powerful motivation that one rushes to establish the relationship without thinking or caring about the effect it will have on one's social life. Then, once one is already married, there is a fairly widespread expectation that one’s social life has to acquiesce to what the spouse is comfortable with, and attempting to "set boundaries" in this matter would be inappropriate.
> Men are not victims here.
My post above concerned men because the linked article is about men, but it is people in general who are the victims here. I suspect that many women face the same problem in being unable to freely interact with their friends due to husbands who don't like their friend group.
I understand your perspective because I've been there but you can always start taking responsibility for codependence now by taking a hard look at how you place blame (regardless of your gender).
In most cases, both parties will contribute to the problem but someone needs to lead themselves and their partner out of the complementary neurosis and you do that by taking responsibility for your contribution then setting boundaries and working compassionately with the other person/people.
I don't even think it's people generally who are victims. I don't like victim mentality because it robs "the victim" of agency.
Definitely. A lot of people in these threads seem stuck when they aren't actually stuck. Not particularly surprising since that's all people all the time at least somewhere in their lives. But always worth reminding people that they have agency. Decent first stop if you are in patterns with your mate that make them out to be the enemy would be the book Crucial Conversations. A better first step would be therapy for yourself, followed by couples therapy. It's achievable to have a relationship where "I want X, how can we make this happen together?" is not a fraught conversation. Maybe the answer is an easy yes. Maybe the answer is that you need to bargain, offering something to get something. Maybe the answer is that your one friend is a jerk, but your other friend would be a welcome and hilarious guest. But nothing in that conversation should be scary if you put in a little bit of work on yourself and your relationship.
> Decent first stop if you are in patterns with your mate that make them out to be the enemy would be the book Crucial Conversations.
It is not necessarily a case of the husband considering his wife the enemy. It may well be that the husband is content enough with his marriage and parenthood that he simply accepts the wife’s dislike of having his friends over and other obstacles to socializing. Rather, the group that suffers from this circumstance is his former friends.
If you remain single, a noticeable part of the gradual loss of old friends in adulthood – as mentioned by others in this discussion – is your longtime friends getting married and then no longer being unable to maintain the friendship from their end. Obviously you cannot dictate to your friend and your friend’s spouse, and the onus is on you to look elsewhere for other sources of a social life, but it is natural to mourn the loss of a longtime friendship.
I know lots and lots of people in very similar situations to what Mediterraneo described.
I’m not sure if I’d describe it as common, but having a partner who either directly, or passively aggressively, undermines your ability to maintain external friendships is a very real phenomenon.
It’s certainly not a healthy pattern, but it’s also pretty understandable. Relationships of all sorts need care and feeding. Sometimes intimate partner priorities push out friendships.
Different people experience this as more or less of a tragedy.
yeah that's really interesting, i'm wondering if you're in the US (or that's where your friends are)
in my experience in the US couples tend to basically turn into a military style cornered unit with an us vs the world attitude as soon as children come, where the focus becomes some mix of family:work to the exclusion of all other activities, to include hobbies, fitness, eating right, etc. i hear jokes about "date night" as if that's somehow abnormal, so it seems people have to move mountains just to get dinner together.
i wonder if in the US there just isn't any sort of community setup so couples feel like any energy shared outside that is somehow hostile to their survival, e.g., you hanging out with your friends means you're not "all in" on your family or something.
it could also be a signaling thing, e.g. if you signal you don't have time for friends, perhaps the world views you as really virtuous and family oriented.
Not from US, have noticed this too. It’s to the point that I don’t even hit up most of my old US friends anymore, because to do so would feel like encroaching.
The US and the UK (probably less so now than in the past) have a more extreme focus on the nuclear family than other countries.
There have been all sort of explanations offered from the Church promoting the nuclear family to reduce the power of extended family/clans to the black plague creating a housing surplus in England.
Part of it is the difficulty of the spread out suburban living situation. Growing up, most of my parents friends lived around 15-30 mins away by car. If they lived on the opposite side of town, an hour drive or so, we basically never saw them outside of big events like graduations or weddings.
In college, it was easy for me to maintain a lot of close knit relationships. No one was any farther than a 20 minute walk, usually half that, which made drinking pretty painless too. Bars, movies, food was all in between, and cheap.
Now I live in LA for grad school, and getting people in my classes to hang out on the weekends is like pulling teeth. As dense as the city is, it basically functions as one massive suburb from back east. Everyone is at least 20 minutes by car in every direction, there is zero parking, one of the worst bike lane networks in the U.S., and rarely a transit line. There's also the costs of doing literally anything. A night out could be $30 in ubers alone, and it doesn't help that I've yet to find a well drink in LA for under $10 that wasn't watered down. It's a recipe for apathy. At least hiking is free.
The wife doesn't have to like his friends, just respect him enough to allow him scope to choose who he associates with: That's surely the majority situation?
If your wife doesn’t like your friends, there is usually a reason. Your friends may be not respecting the marriage or trying to get you to do the same types of things you did when you were single.
In our relationship we both don't really care for the friends of each other, it's just how it shook out and nothing we'd leave another over as we both allow each other as much time with our friends as wanted.
BUT this obviously reduces occasions to mingle anyway as it's just a bit awkward of a situation every time as it feels like we impose a burden on each other and our friends don't feel very welcomed in our home compared to other places.
We've just received our second son so it's currently time again to have all our friends come over which makes it very visible how uncomfortable this is.
Finding new friends is possible, but it is something that just has to fit in a schedule that barely has any space for even the bare necessities of life as parents.
Child-free couples, unless of course you're talking playdates which is a social tree climb all its own. But single, disagree from experience. There's even a line from Nora Ephron's Heartburn, the book not the movie:
Exactly. My wife and I have a grown son and a 17 year old. We won’t go over to couples houses with small kids or go out to dinner with couples that don’t have reliable babysitters where they bring their kids along.
I never had small kids - my “sons” are my stepsons - they were 9 and 14 when I met my now wife. She feels the same way. She’s raised her kids and now she wants to do “adult” things without kids running around and interrupting us.
Something weird happened in middle class culture when it became uncouth for married persons to go out without the spouse to see friends. Being a single parent is rough, but there's no reason to avoid socializing if you have a spouse -- unless you are shy and hiding behind your spouse, or are content to lean on your spouse and kids for your whole social life (which is a huge risk of long-term downside potential)
>especially if you happen to go trough a divorce when suddenly more than half (if not more) of your friends get to “choose” the other side. Yeah, you get to ask your friends back from high-school or college out for a beer but chances are they’re also in a middle of a divorce
That's really interesting, because so few of my friends are even married at that age. But a lot of that may be where you're from.
I think this can be a cultural phenomenal, and what culture enforces who or how we ought to act at a certain age. I've traveled a lot in Europe. And it is amazing different kinds interesting people you meet. It makes movies and netflix boring.
I find people there tend to maintain more close relationship male and female. I person know someone way beyond his 30's, have many many groups of close personal male and female friends. He once told me that having these close relationship and maintaining them has tremendously improved his quality of his life and it is something he would NOT trade for any amount of money in the world.
The idea that one must marry at certain age have career at certain age is insane. Do what you like when you want to do it. Timing is important.
I moved to Japan when I was 39 and because I decided to stay here, it basically meant losing all my close friends (well, they are still friends, of course -- but it's not a "Let's hang out on a Wednesday night" type of friendship anymore).
When I first moved to Japan, I spent a lot of time trying to make friends. Because there are a lot of lonely expats, I found it easy to do. However, there was one thing that I didn't really take into account: the main thing we had in common was loneliness.
Over time, the relationships didn't work out. I even had some really bizarre (and extremely troubling) experiences with people denouncing and shunning me because I decided to adopt Japanese culture (apparently a betrayal of my original culture and appropriation of my adopted culture -- some people really are seriously screwed up.... :-( ).
What I realised was that when I was young, because the population of potential friends is large, I could choose friends who liked me for who I was. When I moved to this new population, the only potential friends I had (especially with my lack of Japanese language skill at the time) were being picked out of a population of lonely people. Most of them didn't care about me. Some of them even hated me (even the idea of me was repugnant to them). It is seriously weird to have "friends" that hate you.
Being alone is definitely better than being in an abusive relationship, IMHO (though it takes quite a lot of effort to see this). I realised that it was virtually impossible for me to find real friends the way I had been approaching it. It was best to just hang out with people I enjoyed and to stay away from people I didn't enjoy -- even if that meant being alone.
It can be tough, but really I think the secret is to just fill your life with activities that you enjoy and that bring you closer to other people with similar interests. Eventually you will happen to meet someone who is in a similar place to you. But if not, at least you are having a good time in the process.
I read here that loneliness is a significant problem for people in general within the modern world, and somewhat moreso for men. Headline seems a bit clickbaity, as the issue is clearly not exclusive, and the percentage difference relatively small.
Agreed that it's clickbaity. I already felt bad for the (smaller) proportion of women who would be turned off by this headline, and then when you read the actual article, it's 12% of women and "almost one in five which would be 20%) of men.
So, men's rate is not even double womens'.
Don't get me wrong, both numbers are serious, and I agree it's a lot harder for us men. It's just that, particularly in the case of such an isolating feeling, excluding people and minimizing them is truly damaging.
Why do you think that? As a man I think we are the victims of our culture where as a man you need to be tough and not reach for help or chat about things.
Yes, this is the important part. A lot of men lack the tools to be able to go through a hard situation but instead turn into drugs, violence or other negative coping mechanisms.
I think when I feel lonely I watch old TV shows like Star Trek or House and a ton of youtube (mostly educational/scientific channels) I avoid drinking, I only got drunk 2 times in my life , without intending it, and a lot of unhappy feelings surfaced, I seen this in my father too, maybe other get violent but me I get extremely sad (last time was 15 years ago so now I would probably be 10x worse)
While at the same time a counter-culture push exists for men to refuse all of that or risk getting called out as "toxic" and/or "mysogonistic" over some of the most mundane behaviors.
That's funny. My first thought was that the narrative being fed here was "men are victims of the patriarchy", and my second thought that maybe The Times would now on be considered "a platform for the man's rights movement's narratives".
Once upon a time under the patriarchy, men’s social clubs were a common phenomena, but then it became unacceptable for such places to exist because of “power structures” yada yada yada. It’s not a coincidence that loneliness for men rose as spaces for men declined.
> It’s not a coincidence that loneliness for men rose as spaces for men declined.
This assumes that men can only congregate in "spaces" which exclude women, which is obviously untrue. I also assumes that men primarily socialized in such spaces to begin with, despite them also typically discriminating by class and race, as well as gender.
That such spaces have declined should have no effect on the ability of men to congregate and form relationships with one another. Gaming as a culture, which is primarily (albeit not exclusively) male-oriented, wouldn't exist otherwise, as one example.
>>>This assumes that men can only congregate in "spaces" which exclude women, which is obviously untrue.
While male-exclusive bonding isn't men's ONLY option/method, it most definitely yields different results than any gender-integrated environment. Anyone who has spent time in an all-male combat arms unit can attest to this.
>>>That such spaces have declined should have no effect on the ability of men to congregate and form relationships with one another.
Should we eliminate female-only spaces as well? If not, why? A subsection of feminists have fought to keep bathrooms exclusive to biological females. Why does the Girl Scouts still exist if the Boy Scouts has been gender-integrated? Women must be deriving some sort of bonding utility out female-exclusive zones. Why shouldn't men also have such options?
You are illustrating the problem which is that men are “not allowed” to have problems.
There are plenty of things, such as unrealistic body image portrayed by the media, that affect both men and women, yet women claim it exclusively as theirs, because men aren’t supposed to. Can’t men have a thing?
This way of putting things, as if groups like "women" or "men" were clubs with decision making processes, is absurd and only serves to cause division and infighting.
Call it emergent behavior then; whether through uncoordinated coordination of the media/marketing world, or uncoordinated coordination of peer/social pressures, these expectations exist.
I have literally been shut down in a conversation, in person, at work, more than once, because I was a white male in tech.
It certainly takes a special kind of mental gymnastics to figure that a problem that disproportionately affects men is another example of men excluding women from something...
ah, looks like admins fixed the title. this comment is in relation to the title the article uses: "All the lonely people ... are men", which is unsupported by the data in the self-same article.
The article states 18% of men had no close friends, significantly higher than women at 12%. Honestly that’s doesn’t sound hugely different to me. For every two women with none, there’s three men with none. The gap is a bit smaller for best friends too.
It's not: 32% for men, 24% for women. Also, this attitude is why "men are the disposable gender" is a thing. Real problems that are correlated with men are dismissed and ignored as not significant.
It’s not that significant though. For every 4 men with no best friend there are 3 women in the same position. If being a man is so difficult, this is a small part of it relative to being a woman; and I would wager that women do better here simply because they put in more effort.
Acknowledging a real problem facing men is not the same as claiming "being a man is so difficult," and you immediately jumping to that conclusion makes me question your motives.
Do you also dismiss the assertion that women make 75% of the wage men do solely because men put in more effort? By your own words, this should also not be significant but many people would argue the opposite.
That... isn’t true. Men are not x% more productive across the board, nor do they put in y% more effort across the board.
If you disagree with the premise that women put more effort into social relationships be my guest. But there’s another aspect at play here whereby your friends are largely chosen by you whereas your salary is chosen for you. They’re not the same.
Could this also have something to do with how men define “close” vs women? Women are better at being emotionally vulnerable with friends so they may be able to obtain a deeper relationship faster. Co-workers and gym buddy’s might be considered close friends by women whereas they will never crack surface level interactions for men.
Total isolation is literal torture and is why we should discontinue solitary confinement in our prison system. That fact is relevant to this discussion, we're only talking about a matter of degree.
Pay is not the same for a variety of reasons. You have one employer, you have infinite potential friends. Pay concerns are also normalized to things like your job, your education, and experience.
If men have fewer friends then must be because they don’t know how to make new friends, they don’t put in the effort to make new friends, or they don’t have the time to make new friends.
While the latter may be a genuine concern, women are almost certainly likely to have less spare time due to the various societal requirements on them. So it’s probably a mix of the first two.
I don’t see it being a large barrier. Some men like the image of self sufficiency and don’t seek new friends. But plenty don’t. So if you’re a man desiring to make new friends I find it hard to believe that you are unable to find the opportunities.
I just switched from a job where I could work from home anytime I wanted (which meant everyone on my team did so 100% of the time) to a job that requires everyone to be in the office 90% of the time because I want more face-to-face human interaction in my life. The convenience was great but, on the whole, it made me less happy.
I’ve been going to the gym at least 4 days a week for years. Unless you’re into a specific niche thing it’s hard to socialize. I’ve found it easier to talk to others after getting into powerlifting.
Most people at the gym have headphones in and are grinding out a workout as quickly as they can because they’re busy. At least that’s how it feels in SF.
Oh sorry I didn't mean that kind of gym. I joined a martial arts (muay Thai) gym and it was a great life changer.
I don't want to fight, but I train hard with actual fighters and it's very bonding.
Sharing "pain" and passion with others created common ground with people that I had very little in common in the beginning (i.e. non tech, different age)
I've been working from home for nearly five years now; it's been fantastically convenient while I raise my daughters.
While I have found that my adult social interactions are severely limited, I am no worse off than my old friends; one of whom remarked that after moving to Montreal he's seeing friends and family just as often as he did before.
Where I find adult interaction is in more traditional venues: I made an effort to get to know my neighbours, and am acquainted with some staff and patrons at the local pub.
The key was not to rely on scheduled events; too many adults will ghost or reject because they feel too busy or weary to attend. Impromptu social interaction works better; have a beer with your neigh bour.
Talking about the weather, remarking on their gardens, and wishing them happiness and good health; these are all acceptable openers.
Most people love to talk about themselves, so if they give you some personal information it's safe to inquire further about it, most of the time. Cut it off before you turn it into an interrogation.
Isolation at the job is a problem too. As a programmer in a famous startup who’s grown to thousands employees, we discussed by Slack and didn’t shake hands in the office. I felt less lonely alone at home than at the office...
So I became independent and the same happened at the first coworking: More lonely when surrounded with « commercial friends ». The second coworking had a great group spirit and I deeply loved them, but unfortunately they also didn’t like my capitalist stances (most of them were employed) or the fact that I don’t adhere to ideas like « men can’t do two things at once, while women can » so they ended up rejecting me (it perhaps has to do with autistic traits I have, I don’t seem to say what the group wants me to say, when it is demonstrably false). So again: in a group, if you feel no solidarity from the group, then you’re alone.
It got better since I accepted loneliness as a part of life. Because searching and not finding was definitely my most heartbreaking period. But it definitely feels like I’m in a hole and reducing my prospects in life.
I've had the complete opposite experience. For a while, I was in a situation where I went into the office one or two days a week, and worked from home the rest of the time - now I work from home one day a week, sometimes not at all.
It's made me really, really hate dealing with other people, and when I go home, I want to go out in the woods or work in my garage or basement, completely, blessedly alone.
Human interaction is great if it is voluntary and purposeful, but when it is just a shitty default constant, it's a prison.
I start a new job on Wednesday for this exact reason. My remote gig was awesome until the depression kicked in. I didn't know that about myself; I need to physically be around other people.
Somehow we just all “decided” that two parent families, where we work jobs we hate (and that if we get fired we’re on our own), where the social space is dominated by corporate interests, where if we get sick we are forced into poverty - this is society. Of course everyone is alone and terrified.
I find it interesting that men seem to be at the polar ends of the friendship spectrum. When lonely, they are the most lonely, and also when they have friendship claim higher levels of trust in those relationships than women would.
Women who express feelings of loneliness tend to have more human connections than men expressing similar feelings.
Women claiming to have good friendships still do not indicate high levels of trust like men reporting that they have good friendships.
I wonder why though?
It’s like men are either destined to be lone wolves or a tight knit squad.
I think making friends is similar to wealth. Easier to make friends once you already have friends than if you have nobody. I think men specifically suffer from this dynamic because they're more closed in communication than women.
If you're an average single man the world hates you. The public considers you a liability that has to be written off in order to stay consistent and most people expect you to hurt them in some way.
He is talking about the UK. There is a huge bias against single males here.
To give one example: the number and size of tax benefits aimed at families is massive. Spending on these is something like £33bn...that may or may not sound huge to you but the total NHS budget (i.e. healthcare costs for 70-80m people) is ~£115bn.
Not everyone thinks this. But it is definitely far to say that is the general view (and it is why Daily Mail skews female, which basically doesn't happen with right-wing news outside the UK).
Yes. I am not sure exactly what proof you are expecting but that is all the proof that exists (for obvious reasons, surveys do not generally ask specifically...do you hate X group of people? In the UK, saying that you do has legal implications besides anything else).
It is equally true to say this of lone single female parents but that doesn't appear to have quite the same effect on tilting the Daily Mail crowd (because poor powerless women aren't seen as a threat whereas young single males are).
This is silly and naive. Tax benefits for families exist to help and encourage families. Society is better off when people can afford to raise a family. To twist it into an anti single man view is way off base.
Yes, when a powerful, politically active group forces another less powerful, politically inactive group to subsidise them it is definitely not discriminatory. You should tell that to India, those idiots thought making them pay for their own colonisation was bad...their society was better off. I can see now, it is so obvious.
> Society is better off when people can afford to raise a family.
Alternate theory: society is better off when people act like adults, and raise a family when they can afford to do so. No subsidies. No govt holding your hand. Even if you ignore the fiscal effect - it is huge because it is politically impossible to cut welfare that such a substantial amount of people receive, that is why govt spending in areas serving truly vulnerable people like care had to be slashed so aggressively - that is not what the policy is intended to do.
The (original) focus of the policy was to increase labour force participation amongst single parents. This worked. But, as you are showing, it has become something totally different. And it is now a big feeding trough for a huge share of the population (something like 10%+ of the working population receive WTCs).
Govt is not there for social engineering, it is there to help people who cannot help themselves. If someone is poor then they should get help. And this should be through focused policy that is aimed at poverty, not these insanely complex systems that backfire (tax credits are the prime example of this kind of policy). The system we have now means that the govt cannot actually take care of people who need help because of the obscene cost (again, tax credits alone are 30% of the NHS budget) of helping those who don't (but now feel deserving because they are helping society or whatever bollocks you are trying to say).
It is extraordinary to totally ignore how this policy has actually worked out (esp. the cost and esp. against the original aims), offer some half-baked inaccurate theory of govt (govt should be involved in the sex lives of citizens), and then call an interpretation that is based in reality naive...but that is basically where we are with govt spending now. Greedy middle-class people scraping the bottom of the poor person's barrel.
It is impressive that you feel justified in making no arguments but will try to bring down people who do. Are you British by any chance?
Inability to argue? Check. Inability to reason? Check. Becomes defensive when asked to think about closely held but illogical views? Check. Judges a person's argument based on their identity/background (I am assuming that is what "who told you" is about)? Check.
Uh, no, not British. Nor do I really know what your background is? Are you British?
I’ll confess I was kind of trolling in asking you what pundit you get your stuff from, but I’ll be really frank here. Your post reads as sort of obsessive and out of touch. You’re bringing in talking points to support your anger but they’re really not related. You’ve taken a very benign issue and reframed it as a huge deal. Then you went very aggressive in what seems to be some sort of anti-British worldview.
You’re trying to position yourself as a better intellectual but it really, really doesn’t appear that way to others.
Saying things like I can’t argue, reason, and am unwilling to put up an argument is a really aggressive thing to say, and I’m not sure if you understand that you’ve set up a really tiresome premise for having a conversation.
Gov certainly has to incentivize good behavior, at the very least in areas gov will pay for down the line. That's easily the case for family planing, as children are an option to support the elderly. And then gov also doesn't have to let all the "evil brown people" into the country to staff hospitals and nursing service, so you can even pretend this to be about national security.
So yeah, i also think there are many strongly held but badly justified beliefs in your post. Not everything is black or white. There is a huge leap from "gov incentivizes families" to "world is against single males because apparently some shitty tabloid is" and equating the two misses many shades of gray.
Become an alcoholic... Join AA.. Boom!!! More friends than you can imagine :)
In all seriousness... I hear this all the time in the rooms... loneliness is a killer. What's crazy is I have a sponsee, who specifically wanted to get sober cause the loneliness was driving him insane. Any reason to get sober and stay is a good reason in my book.
What is the point of posting articles that are behind paywalls? Why isn't it against HN rules? Is it a test of just how many people actually try to read the articles they're responding to?
I disagree with the apparent premise (article's paywalled) that having no friends means you are lonely.
I have no friends that I'm not also in a romantic relationship with, and I wouldn't call myself lonely at all outside of a rare fleeting feeling here and there.
This very difficult to interpret, esp. as the article has over-simplified things for reporting purposes. How many of the respondents without friends wanted to be that way? Was family counted as friends? And what counts as a friend anyway?
Is being lonely really that bad? I like being lonely, not that it makes me happy, as a matter of fact it may be opposite but I really didn't like when I was not lonely (or) say when I had to socialise, indulge in the small-talk just for the sake of it; I felt like having to constantly fake emotions and have insincere conversations.
I've almost completely cut off any realtime communication and my current lifestyle seems like a luxury which I had been missing earlier. This has helped me to focus on things which I would like to do.
More so when you're physically challenged, having interests which are alien to the locality and with opinions which are not synonymous with the society.
Don't move out of desperation, though, with no clear head. Moving costs energy (and money) as well. So be sure, that the new place is a better fit for you.
On the other hand .. do not overthink it. If you find a new place and it feels good - do it.
I moved this year with my pregnant wife from hell to maybe not paradiese, but pretty close, compared to the last place. It was a very sudden decision, quite close to birth and then action, action, action.
But it was worth it, staying in the safe, but miserable comfort we had there .. it would have been misery.
Now I enjoy ever day running woth my baby through the forest...
You are describing being "alone", not being "lonely".
Lonely, is defined as "sad because one has no friends or company". Which I would say is unfortunately common in the modern world, where we believe the internet to connect people, but in reality it socially isolates.
Alone, simply meaning "having no one else present", is not that bad, no, until you start to feel lonely. I enjoy alone time for the same reasons you describe. However, too much of it leads to feelings of loneliness.
An ironic aside. I think many people, deep down, would rather feel slightly annoyed by turning down or avoiding social situations with friends, than to not have those situations available to them in the first place.
You're correct, by your definition I'm both alone and lonely. Lonely makes me sad but has improved productivity, where as socializing gave me what I would describe as 'Short term happiness which seemed fake & ridden with guilt later'.
That doesn't sound like a very healthy outlook on life. Trading social belonging for productivity is a Faustian deal if I've ever seen one, and a deal likely to lead to burnout and depression.
If socializing leaves you ridden with guilt for lost productivity, I'd recommend a paradigm shift.
Not guilty for lost productivity, but for having to fake emotions, showing interest in conversations which I have no real interest and most of all feeling powerless to cure problems of people when they tell about it.
Food for thought. Have you tried interacting socially without faking your emotions, pretending to be interested in things you aren't, and not trying to cure other peoples' problems?
It is fun to be productive. Being the best performer on your team can make work very enjoyable. Also it is not fun to be unproductive. Being the worst performer on your team can make work very stressful.
Also it helps with promotions and therefore money if you work at a decent place. If you work on your own project your productivity matters even more.
I was running a startup quite successfully for 5 years as a single founder, single executive from an environment without a startup ecosystem. I recruited and trained employees personally; productivity became a necessity and a habit.
Had to close the startup due to physical health problems, now that I'm rebuilding my life I guess productivity has become more important.
Of course productivity is important, but it isn't an end in itself. Neither are high incomes or appearences of success. If you are lonely and have to sacrifice your health you really have to start thinking about what it is all for.
I agree completely, I'm cautious about physical health now and doesn't trade it for anything. But, that has resulted in me having very little time for productive work and hence I'm in a situation where I need to optimise every bit for it.
Can’t find it right now, but I recall some research showing that friendship for men is basically with whatever other men you’re around the most. If you’re a man and want more friends, you probably need to get a new job. Or make a long-term commitment to showing up to the same place where other men are also committed to showing up (AA meetings, church, sports team, etc). Or just be friends with the husbands of your wife’s friends.
The good news is you don’t need a sparkling wit or anything, you just have to show up.
> some research showing that friendship for women is basically with whatever other women you’re around the most. If you’re a woman and want more friends, you probably need to get a new job. Or make a long-term commitment to showing up to the same place where other women are also committed to showing up (AA meetings, church, sports team, etc). Or just be friends with the wifes of your husband’s friends.
I replaced "men" with "women" and it still feels true. Think this is just in general how humans build friendships with each other. Maybe also add "making an effort to hang out with your already existing friends friends"
Or perhaps men and women are innately different after hundreds of thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic evolution, and this affects the manner in which they socialize?
It seems we've brainwashed an entire generation into believing that all differences in male and female are purely social constructs - which is total nonsense.
I'm not saying that there is no difference between men or women at all, you're jumping to conclusions here, way too quickly.
From my point of view, this particular social behavior doesn't seem to differ too much though, but I would agree with you that there are other behaviors/attributes that are very different between men or women.
My experience has been that men and women have far more things in common than we have things in difference. There are of course differences between men and women, but I think that if I had a rigid belief that how men and women socialize was this large, unbreachable, genetically determined gulf, I would have lost out on a lot of really great friendships and relationships.
We don't think much about evolution or biological determinism on so many other subjects - for example, we were hunter-gatherers for most of our history, but we don't seem to discuss that very much in our post-agriculture society, or think that it limits us from building civilizations the way we do today. So why say on this subject that we are biologically limited in this specific way?
No, it does not work like that. I can say "I love your earrings" and have nice friendly idle conversation about bullshit. It takes waaay more to get a friend you can really talk with or open up.
The equivalent is a guy saying something about soccer and the two having nice idle chat about match or something. Not a friend, but conversation happened.
Not earrings, but I’ve done it with clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, etc. and it’s brought out us being friends. I don’t think it’s that uncommon between men.
At the same time, I’ve met women that haven’t made as many friends with other women, and find it hard to do so. I don’t know if it’s so clear-cut like that.
Very interesting numbers. Of those men who indicated that it was difficult to find friends, 26% responded that the reason was that they didn't feel that they needed friends. Only 14% of women responded the same. (Page 43)
Others have commented that the gender gap in having no friends is much smaller then the headline implies, and this difference may account for a good chunk of it.
I sometimes feel guilty having the few friends I do, because I feel I can never give them enough time, between work and family commitments.
Work is the easy one - it’s easy to say “I’m done working today because I want to spend more time with my family”. It’s not so easy to say “I’m done with family time today because I want to spend more time with my friends”. I’m conditioned to feel selfish at such thoughts.
It's not possible to form genuine friendships under capitalism. The system is just too competitive, especially if you're in a decent income bracket; the kinds of people who make it in that bracket (which you spend the most time with; e.g. at work) tend to act selfishly. They're only loyal to the extent that you have some kind of leverage or interdependence within your work environment. The instant you lose that leverage, they won't hesitate to throw you under the bus for their own benefit.
I think this kind of ruthlessness is necessary though; in fact, it's the only ethical way to operate under a capitalist system. If you have any economic leverage in society or in your workplace and you choose to make friends based on someone's personality instead of based on their ability, you will probably end up giving that person access to opportunities at the expense of someone else who is more talented, more worthy and more capable of creating real value for customers.
Not only is this kind of nepotism unfair, but if the environment keeps becoming more competitive, you will risk your company's survival.
Under capitalism, if you want a friend, get a dog.
I run 300 forums, and I had a startup for them. The lofty goal of the startup was to "cure loneliness" but I never told the users that.
My path to doing this was to encourage interest based communication, in a way that would allow them to take it offline. How? Well to make it interest + geography, i.e. horology nerds in Cumbria, cyclists in London, petrol heads in Cornwall, audiophiles in Suffolk.
By binding together an interest, and a geography, it naturally encourages trade, showing off, having a beer... and coming together. But not in a way that ever was to "cure loneliness" (which few people admit to feeling, and frankly most people find lonely people unattractive people from the perspective of wishing to hang out with someone like that).
By providing a space to share a passion, the forums brought people together.
I had to make our own software to achieve this, i.e. a forum with events built-in by default, etc. But it worked.
Except I couldn't get it funded beyond the crowd-funded angel round :shrug . But still, 250k monthly users, hundreds of marriages, tens of thousands of friendships, and still people meeting weekly for beer and chatting with others.
And like all love, when the lust is gone what remains is something special... these forums are evolving now, from the original interests, into just a group of friends for life.
If I were lonely today, I would say... identify a hobby or interest you could get into, start looking for entry things to dive in, and then look for groups on MeetUp, or forums online, that will help you find other people.
I feel like it would be appropriate to share some of these forums in this thread, I think the immediate need outweighs anyone calling it out as self-promotion.
Not all of them are applicable, the platform has also been used for forums that connect old-age pensioners homes (it's easy to use), and support networks for victims of domestic sexual and violent abuse in South London.
One of the newest is a sustainability forum for a group with a core around Cambridge but spread over the UK https://onething.is/
Some of the forums are private, and I'm fine with that as they can permission it the way they want and pull members from elsewhere as they see fit, i.e. the petrolheads in Cornwall.
But I help nurture and guide, and show them how to do it.
Without funding I've slowed everything down though. It's funded by donations from users across sites today, but expansion risks cost cliffs as I'm just below the threshold for a few services I would need to pay for (auth0 free tier) and don't have time to engineer my way out. With neither time or money spare, it's stagnated.
But if someone wants a startup idea... this does work. Not wildly profitable, but it works.
How did it make money? I'd barely scratched the surface, but conversation around interest contains a lot of intent to purchase, and there are classifieds and meetups. So it's affiliates, a challenge against eBay (people into an interest have emotional attachment to the items and would rather sell to others into the interest), and ticketing for events, etc. And because it's all a platform, one instance, the traditional highs costs associated with running a forum were avoided. Lower costs, and actual revenues :)
I love what I do for work now, but I still believe this was an idea that is good for society.
Any plans to open source / open core this software? I've always been interested in forum software (my first real web project was a Reddit clone in Flask and the complexities and edgecases abound - moderation tools, rate limiting, scaling write-load, finding the minimum front-end that doesn't make users puke).
The only thing that isn't is the very old puppet script that managed the deploy as it was rather bespoke for our setup.
To my own regret I focused far too much on making it an effective platform rather than an easy install, so that bit might feel gnarly but at least the errors are sane and guide you.
Our legal policies for forums on this platform (expensive to produce, but perfectly fitting a forum platform with minimal exposure for the platform owner/admin and minimal but some liability for a forum owner) https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal
There is also a newer thing, I was (/am?) intending to replace the Django layer with a Go frontend and templating, and then moving the API into this, such that the forum could become a single binary install and thus gain a new lease of life: https://github.com/buro9/microcosm . Once in a while I chip away on that.
Just wanted to say that your microcosm code was a huge inspiration/invaluable reference when I was learning go and developing my own forum like thing. Thanks!
When I was an awkward teenager with no social skills, one of the places I found a social ingroup was on a video game forum on AOL. Roughly the same group of mostly teenage boys posted to this forum for 2-3 years before we all gradually moved off AOL. But we would later reconnect through Facebook and I still consider these guys good friends of mine even though I've maybe only met 2 of them in person.
This is awesome. I've long felt a nostalgia for the close-knit forums I participated in as a kid. One was a worldwide group centered around an online game (CyberNations), the other was just a group of kids with similar interests in one metro area who met up occasionally. Both were vital for me in coping with feeling like I didn't fit in at all at school.
It's great to see that that kind of close, friendly, personal Internet dynamic didn't completely die with Facebook's rise.
Supports maybe, but doesn't encourage or promote them. The money is in the endless news feed from your 300+ acquaintances, not in quiet, thoughtful conversation between a group of close friends.
Of course it can't promote them. All of the best groups are secret, and with good reason. They are spread via word of mouth which allows group admins to vet new users. Facebook even added a flow to support a "before you join, submit your answers these questions" workflow.
Maybe that's not where the money is, but these private groups are so sticky that I don't currently see any alternative. People already know how to use Facebook, they don't know how to use Discord or Slack.
Facebook has currently bought out the entire advertising space of one of the downtown SF subway stations with ads for their groups product. Seems like they are trying to promote it.
I’m an introvert. People drain me. I find fulfillment in the world around me and my hobbies. I’m on HN not to be social but to learn things. I don’t need validation from others.
I don’t hate human interaction either. I have friends. I just don’t NEED them, and don’t need to go seeking them or be especially close.
I would say you're the biological anomaly. Humans are social creatures. Much or our society is defined by our achievements as a group then individually. I would say the op very accurately describes a general problem.
Calling me a racist stinks of accusatory witch hunting. You can lose a job for this kind of thing and you dare to call me that? You don't go around accusing people people of smelling like a nazi yet you can go around saying that I smell like a racist?
Let me be utterly clear with you. I am not racist. Not one bone of my body is. And it is an extreme and personal insult to suggest that I am. There will be no further communication between us.
You second paragraph seems to continue onto an informed discussion that's not going to continue because of the immature comment in your first sentence.
i can wiggle my ears at will... most of the population can't... thats a biological anomaly.
This is an entirely different thing then Racism. Know the difference. Let's not let political correctness erase our ability to state things we believe to be biological facts.
If I were to say that you are an inferior race because you can or can't wiggle your ears and therefore must have inferior treatment.... THAT is racism. But the fact that I can wiggle my ears... well there's no denying that this ability is anomalous as I am simply describing a feature of reality as we know it..
Unfortunately most people don't realize or understand that almost all the variables of being human lies on a spectrum. This includes length, weight, body type, colour, gender, sexuality, gregariousness, aptitudes, interests, intelligence, etc.
Calling someone an anomaly for falling on one end of any of these traits is definitely ignorance and discrimination akin to racism.
Uh no it is not. I can wiggle my ears and I'm double jointed. That makes me and those features a biological anomaly because these feature are rare. There is no racism going on here because I am a statistical anomaly.
Let me be utterly clear again. In the real world, in reality as we know it. There will ALWAYS exist things that are outside of the norm. Things that are "anomalous." To deny the existence of anomalies, or to deny the existence of REALITY is WRONG. This is not racism. To let political correctness control your dialogue and beliefs is as ignorant as letting religion do the same.
You are making two grave errors in your interpretation of reality.
First, what part of nature says EVERYTHING human must be a spectrum? There is no hard rule about this AT all. Things can have binary states, trinary states OR CAN exist in a spectrum. For example. I have a penis. Many people do not. That is binary. Perhaps a hermaphrodite lives on a spectrum but the scientific reality is, that the hermaphrodite is so few in number that it is in actuality a statistical anomaly. Lets get even deeper. Your DNA has 2 types of chromosomes. An X and a Y chromosome. There is no W chromosome and therefore these two chromosomes are binary DO NOT exist in a SPECTRUM. Get it?
Second, you don't even know what a "spectrum" really is. Even in a "spectrum" there can be anomalies. If you know about statistics you'd know that spectrums are usually bell curves: A hump in the middle with two tails on both sides.... The hump in the middle of the bell curve is the most populous and most "normal" part of the spectrum and the tail ends are the most rare and therefore "anomalous."
What disgust me is the twisting of words by people who are ignorant. There is NOTHING wrong with being anomalous... an anomaly is neither wrong or right it is just a word that illustrates rarity. A person with an IQ of 342 is an anomaly on the tail tail end of the bell curve and while it is an anomaly there is nothing wrong with being crazy smart.
This accusatory BS of calling me a racist is disgusting and vile and gravely serious. You better take back your statements, what your saying is not trivial or true and is a deeply personal insult. My ancestors were asian americans and victims of white supremacy and racism. If you're white and calling me racist well...
Dude, it is really unhealthy to get this angry at an anonymous stranger on the internet. I have definitely become overly invested in internet conversations before and suffered needlessly because of it, so I can relate. I wish you the best.
P.S. Most people don't want to be called an "anomoly". It sounds quite negative. I know you didn't mean it that way, but that is how other people interpret it.
>P.S. Most people don't want to be called an "anomoly". It sounds quite negative. I know you didn't mean it that way, but that is how other people interpret it.
Ok maybe I made mistake here. But the reaction to my mistake is that they decided to call me a racist. The difference here is that although I did not mean to convey what you implied... @AstralStorm and @Hermandw meant what they said 110%.
They accused me of being racist.
There is no one more guilty of racism against my race then the white man. So unless any of you are not white... back off.
And I would say you are the victim of pro-extravert brainwashing.
The most shocking thing I've learned from the book "Quiet" that there was an general attitude towards intrawerts that they are somehow deficient, and, what's worse, actual discrimination against them at universities.
Being introvert does not mean you are antisocial, you just don't need to socialize that much.
It may be very enjoyable but it is also so draining.
There's no brainwashing going on. I myself am an introvert. I'm not discriminating. However despite being an introvert, i still do desire to interact with other people.
There is a social aspect to my and human nature that cannot be denied.
One example: 99% of introverts want to have sex with the opposite gender and interact with them despite your introversion. A good number also want to have kids and interact with those kids. You may value your "recharge" time but despite this most introverts also seek to socialize and interact with other people. It's a conflicting desire, but to be human is to be social, you cannot deny biology.
Look at the way humans live. We live in cities, towns or tribes. A very very small amount of us live in isolation outside of towns, tribes and cities. I would argue that most introverts live in a community and are unwilling to go far enough to live in total isolation. We are animals that live in groups. We are herd animals. My guess is that introversion stems from defensive instincts designed to deal with creatures outside of the herd.
Introverts are often harassed with "why are you so quiet?" and "why don't you <do activity xyz>?" questions that seem innocent, but are actually attacks by people who are unable to let them be themselves.
The well meaning extrovert person who introduces you to someone by saying, this is x, he's really shy. Anyone had that, ever? They might as well dig a hole for you.
He is on a self-professed quest to cure loneliness, and seems to equate that with not having close friendships. I just want to make sure he is aware there is a distinction and not everyone classifies that way.
If so, I misread it. But going back I still can't see that interpretation.
> The lofty goal of the startup was to "cure loneliness" but I never told the users that.
And then he talks about building features for users to take their conversations offline. I mean maybe it was all for himself, but it seems like the goal was to get users to build long-lasting relationships.
Which is commendable, and I commend him for it. It sounds like an awesome project.
Platform is still active, the 250k monthly uniques is the current number.
But I haven't been able to do much other than keep it in maintenance mode for the last 4 years. I've let other forums be created and expanded it, but haven't had time to address it's flaws and improve it.
439 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadOne colleague, a very loose acquaintance, visited a couple of times, asked after us; I need to find that person and thank them ... [people I knew through a club, who happened to work in the same place continued to be friends however.]
Anyway, I'm now working with some of those people again, and talking with them it feels like they're friends... but in retrospect I think for them I was just like background noise to their jobs?
So, at least for me "carry on being friends" was the expectation but I was miles off.
What most people call "friends" I'd call aquantiences but I prefer fewer high quality relationships than a large quantity of casual passings. I don't and never have valued such casual fleeting relationships of any kind outside those in the workplace (those are necessary to function in a modern workplace). I'd hardly call those folks friends: most are merely professional aquanteinces or colleagues, nothing more.
Good friends are and have always been difficult to come by. Many prefer loneliness with casual meaningless relationships than the work it takes to foster strong friendships. I'll never understand it but I was taught the value of meaningful human relationships exceed most other frivolities we often occupy ourselves with and it's been one of the most important aspects I followed through life as far as happiness is concerned.
For them the weekends are for recovery; there is no physical or emotional energy for social engagement or self care.
Here we work 9-6, but even in the places I've worked on where unpaid overtime was common (otherwise you wouldn't keep up with the workload), no manager would have the gall to schedule regular meetings outside working hours.
If you have people in, for example, London and San Francisco, how can you possibly have a meeting inside both people's 9-5 working hours?
Don't have 9-5 working hours? Having a meeting at 8 is okay, but that should mean people get to leave earlier as well.
In the modern international economy you’re going to have to be a bit flexible with hours.
I don't see why is it hard to understand the difference between having a 10 hour workday or having a shifted 8 hour workday.
In all FAANG companies I worked at when I had geographically distributed teams.
If you’re dealing with a very long commute, it might be worth it to move to a different metro, even if it requires a substantial pay cut. I think most people under-estimate the negative impact that a long commute has on their life.
I used to train seriously in mixed-martial arts. While I had no issue with any of my training mates, I also had zero interest in hanging out with them. Likewise for other, strictly cerebral, activities.
What worked for me was starting dancing tango, where I built a newer, better and larger network than the one I previously had. I guess this can apply to any social activity where you can interact with people, be it social dancing or coocking classes.
So please know that this is not aimed at you personally...
But...
I am so freaking sick of people recommending others to pickup either salsa or tango! Not of the people that recommend this themselves but are there really no other options? Tango/salsa classes seem to get recommended again, again and again, I get that it's a fun activity with a good gender balance, forced interaction and just enough tension to naturally provide a fun atmosphere but is there nothing else??
I don't wanna tango :(
Like whatever. Some of those are more gender balanced than others but the basic premise is get out there into a group and do something that scares you a little based around a common activity.
Things like this feel "hard" to do because of emotional resistance, it's actually super simple and straightforward from a logistical standpoint.
Also just going to tech meetups or something related to an actual hobby? There are definitely things going on.
If you’re looking for something with a decent gender balance then yeah something sports-y will probably work out better
Go look on meetup for "social" club type things, or choose a sport and Google for clubs, or whatever. Boardgame clubs, programmer meetups, kayaking, rambling, rock climbing, etc.
Volunteering is another option for meeting people.
I’ve always enjoyed games like Pokémon, Age of Empires, WoW so my friends and I schedule time to play together.
We played AoE II together recently and it was super fun, even though we repeatedly get stomped by the hard AI.
What do you want to do?
How about contra dance? https://trycontra.com
(I maintain that site, and play in https://freeraisins.com and https://kingfisherband.com)
For example, I can't stand bachata music and so I pass on bachata dancing. But I like cuban music, so I'm a casino dancer.
Start with the music.
I see it in my youngest daughter as well, and I do worry for her and am applying gentle pressure to get her to socialize...but I’m pretty much good to go. Maybe things will change down the road but I’m in my mid 40’s sooo.
This is pretty common among men, but what happens if you get divorced? Any plan-b?
But I don't think that has much effect on the marriage itself. If that is how it ends, then the marriage truly did last "forever" in a way :)
For instance, it would be easier for some things, especially huge things, to be "her problem" instead of "our problem" if I had an escape hatch present in my subconscious.
I was more saying that people don't vow to be together "until I get a few promotions, you get fat, or I contract chronic FOMO-itis". Those who have expectations like that tend to be hurting themselves too.
It's good that you worry. As children of staunch loners, my siblings and I all turned into loners as adults. Edit: We don't even talk to each other.
The role model thing is often overlooked when parenting. If you want your kids to do sports, let them see you doing sports etc.
A little nature a little nurture, but to be clear I do agree with you that it's better to model than not.
The other caveeat I conveniently ignored is that parents are usually adults, so the image they provide is for adult behaviour. Kids won't necessarily transfer that fully into their current situation. It does shape their inner image of adult behaviour, though (which starts to become more relevant as the kids enter the early teenager years).
My dad was like this, his free-time basically revolved around us kids when we were younger and we had a great time. Then we got a little older and I could tell he'd be a little disappointed when we'd be busy with friends/other stuff on the weekends, but we'd still be together most week nights. Then when we went off to college/adult life, he really had nothing to do. My mom had friends to hang out with, but for him, she was all he had really and I think at that point it was too weird/hard for him to branch out and make new friends.
I'm not saying you shouldn't put family first, but it's not a bad idea to maintain some relationships or else that empty nest is going to hit you HARD eventually.
If your life revolves around your kids you have to keep in mind that this is not for life. Loosing all your hobbies and all your friends will lead to a bad awakening when you realize that your previously laughter-filled house is now quite, your children left for university and only you and your partner are sitting at the dinner table. Now the house is too big, there's nothing to do in the evenings and you're kinda lost.
A suprising amount of marriages failed and some parents really lost their way. When you don't have any real friends, friends that help when you struggle, it gets tough. You can't fill that void with half-assed hobbies. Eating out on wednesday and going to the gym on friday are probably not really helping.
Writing this, I think I realized something. I think one of the problems is that parents understimate the speed of change and are taken fully by suprise when they move out. One moment they are 16, quite grown up but you still notice the children in them. But then they turn 17 and then there's only one year left until they move out, until they live by their own and explore the world on their own. They maybe move to another city and that turns your complete life upside down. That's a rapid change and it's only 2 years.
There may be value to the perspectives given by others as to the value of making friends now before the kids grow up, but I just wanted to chime in and reassure you that you're not the only one who feels no need right now. :)
My wife’s interests and my interests are well enough aligned that we like spending time together, but she has her own interests and own set of female friends.
No Silicon Valley billionaire's fortune can compare to the responsibility and reward of raising a good family.
There's a possibility that bowling alone often becomes so common that its hard to imagine bowling with others.
I have a couple of friends that we force ourselves to get together at least once every other month to at least have lunch but we are all in the same boat - married, jobs, hobbies, side projects or studying so we have to explicitly schedule it on our calendars.
I don’t think it is healthy to depend on only one person for your emotional support and my wife isn’t interested in hearing about the latest geeky stuff that we talk about it. I have another friend who is across the country but we try to catch up once a month.
Or maybe other people have the wisdom to know that the kids will move out, the job will change, and that looking past the present moment and planning for the future includes developing hobbies and relationships outside of your immediate family
Sitcom characters? Lord of the Flies our schools are?
The problem is that it’s going to be fake, which gets back to the core of my question.
I'd wager a guess that most of us feel broken, some way or another. But that's just a guess; I imagine that some psychology or sociology journal has empirical data on that.
But even if you're an outlier, it seems like you're pretty content and not making other people miserable, so I wouldn't really call that "broken".
People need to stop getting married, or at least not so early. Marriage is a very intensive (and rewarding) commitment that I think most modern people cannot make. Instead, foster relationships that matter for as long as they matter.
I was in a serious relationship from 19-25. These things end because people change a lot in those years. We both graduated and went in different directions. Which I think is perfectly fine. Relationships will change. You can absolutely start new ones. Join pretty much any club that meets in person. Commit time to those who enrich your life, cut loose those who harm it.
If we're going to make generalizations about whole generations of people then: I wouldn't call staying in an abusive relationship because of stigma of being divorced to be a positive of the past or a sign of commitment.
Also keep in mind that this age is inversely correlated with education level, so among the typical HN crowd and their social circles (among which I expect people often have a college degree or even a PhD) it's even higher.
While relationships can change, those in them can chose to grow together or to grow apart. Well, it's not always a choice, but the sense of fatalism regarding change isn't necessarily warranted.
I just want to nit-pick and put the emphasis on the modern world rather than the modern people ^^.
Our parent friends say it's actually easier to be friends with child-free people because they don't have the complications of arranging around the kids. We arrive just as the kids are going to bed so that we can say a perfunctory hello and then usually leave by 10:30p.
They maintain an air of exclusivity with gaggles of beautiful women around them, and self preservation would tell you not to dare approach any of the women or the table and that the promoter - usually male - would be disinterested or aggressive towards you.
But a reality is that the promoters are also desperate for casual conversation. All those beautiful women around and if the promoter gets close to any one then they lose entire cliques, and then lose the other clique when the relationship is over. The promoters are also prisoners. Introducing yourself and partying with them lets you act just like the models on the table, and access to all models on the table because remember: you aren't a promoter :) but you have inherited the clout just from being there and competition has been completely removed. The selection of women have been pre-selected by several people (the model agency, the state department, the promoter, the doorman, the man/men that subsidize them) otherwise that woman would not be at the table. This results in a heavy selection evolution of consensus-based attractiveness but the exact same distribution of whether two people will be interested in each other. Very advantageous compared to the general population in being around consensus-attractive people (as in, even if its not your ideal you still know what other people find attractive and the social benefits that come with that).
A lot of benefits in recognizing these things.
sometimes people disagree with the content, or sometimes they don't see how it relates to the topic being discussed
in this case, my conclusion to round it out is that it is nice to see how assuming other people's loneliness can be used in multiple environments
I see this a lot in the tech community.
People want to be allies of inclusiveness [in the context of corporate professionalism, while trying to apply it everywhere], but the current iteration of this results in still infantilizing women that make different choices and vicariously assuming they're victims when that woman's current aspirations have nothing to do with an executive role in a corporate environment. My non-compliance with that idea is easy to villify, people can choose to assume that I'm perhaps perpetuating some unilateral toxic masculinity, or something, distinct from what I and the other people involved perceive to be a respectful consensual environment. A reality is that context is important, people can exist in different modes and states and feel very respected.
I've had overwhelmingly positive experiences from approaching people with this understanding
It wouldn't be ok to refer to a woman as a piece of meat at say a corporate board meeting.
However, if you're at a savage orgy and everyone is naked and fucking it is hardly a faux pas to see a woman as just a piece of meat, hell it may even be desirable by the other party.
This is a pretty gross way to describe a group of people.
The subset of patrons that are being discussed are overwhelmingly women that have been through multiple rounds of selection by the time they got there
Me and some other dads get together on Wednesday night at 9pm to step out and get 1 drink at a local pub. Usually doesn’t last more than an hour because we all have work the next day, but it gets us out after the kids are in bed on a day and time when none of us have scheduled plans.
It is fairly common for a man to marry a woman who does not like his friends. Then, the wife does not want the husband’s friends at their home. So, you cannot invite yourself over, and the man is so busy with giving his wife sufficient attention and with childraising that he cannot easily go out to meet his friends in another location.
Men are not victims here. Have a hard look at why you think this and fix the problem.
Indeed, many men are bad at some of those things. Attraction to a partner can be such a powerful motivation that one rushes to establish the relationship without thinking or caring about the effect it will have on one's social life. Then, once one is already married, there is a fairly widespread expectation that one’s social life has to acquiesce to what the spouse is comfortable with, and attempting to "set boundaries" in this matter would be inappropriate.
> Men are not victims here.
My post above concerned men because the linked article is about men, but it is people in general who are the victims here. I suspect that many women face the same problem in being unable to freely interact with their friends due to husbands who don't like their friend group.
In most cases, both parties will contribute to the problem but someone needs to lead themselves and their partner out of the complementary neurosis and you do that by taking responsibility for your contribution then setting boundaries and working compassionately with the other person/people.
I don't even think it's people generally who are victims. I don't like victim mentality because it robs "the victim" of agency.
It is not necessarily a case of the husband considering his wife the enemy. It may well be that the husband is content enough with his marriage and parenthood that he simply accepts the wife’s dislike of having his friends over and other obstacles to socializing. Rather, the group that suffers from this circumstance is his former friends.
If you remain single, a noticeable part of the gradual loss of old friends in adulthood – as mentioned by others in this discussion – is your longtime friends getting married and then no longer being unable to maintain the friendship from their end. Obviously you cannot dictate to your friend and your friend’s spouse, and the onus is on you to look elsewhere for other sources of a social life, but it is natural to mourn the loss of a longtime friendship.
I’m not sure if I’d describe it as common, but having a partner who either directly, or passively aggressively, undermines your ability to maintain external friendships is a very real phenomenon.
It’s certainly not a healthy pattern, but it’s also pretty understandable. Relationships of all sorts need care and feeding. Sometimes intimate partner priorities push out friendships.
Different people experience this as more or less of a tragedy.
in my experience in the US couples tend to basically turn into a military style cornered unit with an us vs the world attitude as soon as children come, where the focus becomes some mix of family:work to the exclusion of all other activities, to include hobbies, fitness, eating right, etc. i hear jokes about "date night" as if that's somehow abnormal, so it seems people have to move mountains just to get dinner together.
i wonder if in the US there just isn't any sort of community setup so couples feel like any energy shared outside that is somehow hostile to their survival, e.g., you hanging out with your friends means you're not "all in" on your family or something.
it could also be a signaling thing, e.g. if you signal you don't have time for friends, perhaps the world views you as really virtuous and family oriented.
It’s hard to explain the vibe, but it’s there.
There have been all sort of explanations offered from the Church promoting the nuclear family to reduce the power of extended family/clans to the black plague creating a housing surplus in England.
In college, it was easy for me to maintain a lot of close knit relationships. No one was any farther than a 20 minute walk, usually half that, which made drinking pretty painless too. Bars, movies, food was all in between, and cheap.
Now I live in LA for grad school, and getting people in my classes to hang out on the weekends is like pulling teeth. As dense as the city is, it basically functions as one massive suburb from back east. Everyone is at least 20 minutes by car in every direction, there is zero parking, one of the worst bike lane networks in the U.S., and rarely a transit line. There's also the costs of doing literally anything. A night out could be $30 in ubers alone, and it doesn't help that I've yet to find a well drink in LA for under $10 that wasn't watered down. It's a recipe for apathy. At least hiking is free.
The wife doesn't have to like his friends, just respect him enough to allow him scope to choose who he associates with: That's surely the majority situation?
When someone is controlling, they usually aim to isolate the person they’re trying to control so that they don’t realize what the free world is like.
Both scenarios occur at about the same rate in my circle.
BUT this obviously reduces occasions to mingle anyway as it's just a bit awkward of a situation every time as it feels like we impose a burden on each other and our friends don't feel very welcomed in our home compared to other places.
We've just received our second son so it's currently time again to have all our friends come over which makes it very visible how uncomfortable this is.
Finding new friends is possible, but it is something that just has to fit in a schedule that barely has any space for even the bare necessities of life as parents.
Wow, that sounds harsh, yet so true.
That's really interesting, because so few of my friends are even married at that age. But a lot of that may be where you're from.
I find people there tend to maintain more close relationship male and female. I person know someone way beyond his 30's, have many many groups of close personal male and female friends. He once told me that having these close relationship and maintaining them has tremendously improved his quality of his life and it is something he would NOT trade for any amount of money in the world.
The idea that one must marry at certain age have career at certain age is insane. Do what you like when you want to do it. Timing is important.
When I first moved to Japan, I spent a lot of time trying to make friends. Because there are a lot of lonely expats, I found it easy to do. However, there was one thing that I didn't really take into account: the main thing we had in common was loneliness.
Over time, the relationships didn't work out. I even had some really bizarre (and extremely troubling) experiences with people denouncing and shunning me because I decided to adopt Japanese culture (apparently a betrayal of my original culture and appropriation of my adopted culture -- some people really are seriously screwed up.... :-( ).
What I realised was that when I was young, because the population of potential friends is large, I could choose friends who liked me for who I was. When I moved to this new population, the only potential friends I had (especially with my lack of Japanese language skill at the time) were being picked out of a population of lonely people. Most of them didn't care about me. Some of them even hated me (even the idea of me was repugnant to them). It is seriously weird to have "friends" that hate you.
Being alone is definitely better than being in an abusive relationship, IMHO (though it takes quite a lot of effort to see this). I realised that it was virtually impossible for me to find real friends the way I had been approaching it. It was best to just hang out with people I enjoyed and to stay away from people I didn't enjoy -- even if that meant being alone.
It can be tough, but really I think the secret is to just fill your life with activities that you enjoy and that bring you closer to other people with similar interests. Eventually you will happen to meet someone who is in a similar place to you. But if not, at least you are having a good time in the process.
Even stupid tasks with low wage can impact your health tremendously (positively) compared to isolation.
So, men's rate is not even double womens'.
Don't get me wrong, both numbers are serious, and I agree it's a lot harder for us men. It's just that, particularly in the case of such an isolating feeling, excluding people and minimizing them is truly damaging.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This assumes that men can only congregate in "spaces" which exclude women, which is obviously untrue. I also assumes that men primarily socialized in such spaces to begin with, despite them also typically discriminating by class and race, as well as gender.
That such spaces have declined should have no effect on the ability of men to congregate and form relationships with one another. Gaming as a culture, which is primarily (albeit not exclusively) male-oriented, wouldn't exist otherwise, as one example.
While male-exclusive bonding isn't men's ONLY option/method, it most definitely yields different results than any gender-integrated environment. Anyone who has spent time in an all-male combat arms unit can attest to this.
>>>That such spaces have declined should have no effect on the ability of men to congregate and form relationships with one another.
Should we eliminate female-only spaces as well? If not, why? A subsection of feminists have fought to keep bathrooms exclusive to biological females. Why does the Girl Scouts still exist if the Boy Scouts has been gender-integrated? Women must be deriving some sort of bonding utility out female-exclusive zones. Why shouldn't men also have such options?
There are plenty of things, such as unrealistic body image portrayed by the media, that affect both men and women, yet women claim it exclusively as theirs, because men aren’t supposed to. Can’t men have a thing?
This way of putting things, as if groups like "women" or "men" were clubs with decision making processes, is absurd and only serves to cause division and infighting.
I have literally been shut down in a conversation, in person, at work, more than once, because I was a white male in tech.
I don't see how your solution of "men hav[ing this] thing" helps men who have body image issues, nor women who don't feel they have close friends.
It's not like the dude with body image issues is saying "oh, thank god my problems would be recognized if only my issue were a lack of close friends."
18% of men, 12% of women; 18/30 is... 60%? huh?
It's not: 32% for men, 24% for women. Also, this attitude is why "men are the disposable gender" is a thing. Real problems that are correlated with men are dismissed and ignored as not significant.
If you disagree with the premise that women put more effort into social relationships be my guest. But there’s another aspect at play here whereby your friends are largely chosen by you whereas your salary is chosen for you. They’re not the same.
Women only get 66% of the loneliness men get. This is a national crisis and I demand equality for women.
If men have fewer friends then must be because they don’t know how to make new friends, they don’t put in the effort to make new friends, or they don’t have the time to make new friends.
While the latter may be a genuine concern, women are almost certainly likely to have less spare time due to the various societal requirements on them. So it’s probably a mix of the first two.
Most people at the gym have headphones in and are grinding out a workout as quickly as they can because they’re busy. At least that’s how it feels in SF.
Sharing "pain" and passion with others created common ground with people that I had very little in common in the beginning (i.e. non tech, different age)
While I have found that my adult social interactions are severely limited, I am no worse off than my old friends; one of whom remarked that after moving to Montreal he's seeing friends and family just as often as he did before.
Where I find adult interaction is in more traditional venues: I made an effort to get to know my neighbours, and am acquainted with some staff and patrons at the local pub.
The key was not to rely on scheduled events; too many adults will ghost or reject because they feel too busy or weary to attend. Impromptu social interaction works better; have a beer with your neigh bour.
I wouldn't even know how to approach that. Feel like this requires a lot of knowledge/skill that my path through life didn't teach me.
Most people love to talk about themselves, so if they give you some personal information it's safe to inquire further about it, most of the time. Cut it off before you turn it into an interrogation.
I am specifically asking every one of my future employers for more of the office hours. I can’t stand the lack of everyday interactions.
So I became independent and the same happened at the first coworking: More lonely when surrounded with « commercial friends ». The second coworking had a great group spirit and I deeply loved them, but unfortunately they also didn’t like my capitalist stances (most of them were employed) or the fact that I don’t adhere to ideas like « men can’t do two things at once, while women can » so they ended up rejecting me (it perhaps has to do with autistic traits I have, I don’t seem to say what the group wants me to say, when it is demonstrably false). So again: in a group, if you feel no solidarity from the group, then you’re alone.
It got better since I accepted loneliness as a part of life. Because searching and not finding was definitely my most heartbreaking period. But it definitely feels like I’m in a hole and reducing my prospects in life.
It's made me really, really hate dealing with other people, and when I go home, I want to go out in the woods or work in my garage or basement, completely, blessedly alone.
Human interaction is great if it is voluntary and purposeful, but when it is just a shitty default constant, it's a prison.
Women who express feelings of loneliness tend to have more human connections than men expressing similar feelings.
Women claiming to have good friendships still do not indicate high levels of trust like men reporting that they have good friendships.
I wonder why though?
It’s like men are either destined to be lone wolves or a tight knit squad.
There's a difference between feeling lonely and actually being lonely.
Might be another aspect to gather more information for the ongoing research into the variability hypothesis [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
To give one example: the number and size of tax benefits aimed at families is massive. Spending on these is something like £33bn...that may or may not sound huge to you but the total NHS budget (i.e. healthcare costs for 70-80m people) is ~£115bn.
Not everyone thinks this. But it is definitely far to say that is the general view (and it is why Daily Mail skews female, which basically doesn't happen with right-wing news outside the UK).
> that is the general view
You should prove that.
It is equally true to say this of lone single female parents but that doesn't appear to have quite the same effect on tilting the Daily Mail crowd (because poor powerless women aren't seen as a threat whereas young single males are).
> Society is better off when people can afford to raise a family.
Alternate theory: society is better off when people act like adults, and raise a family when they can afford to do so. No subsidies. No govt holding your hand. Even if you ignore the fiscal effect - it is huge because it is politically impossible to cut welfare that such a substantial amount of people receive, that is why govt spending in areas serving truly vulnerable people like care had to be slashed so aggressively - that is not what the policy is intended to do.
The (original) focus of the policy was to increase labour force participation amongst single parents. This worked. But, as you are showing, it has become something totally different. And it is now a big feeding trough for a huge share of the population (something like 10%+ of the working population receive WTCs).
Govt is not there for social engineering, it is there to help people who cannot help themselves. If someone is poor then they should get help. And this should be through focused policy that is aimed at poverty, not these insanely complex systems that backfire (tax credits are the prime example of this kind of policy). The system we have now means that the govt cannot actually take care of people who need help because of the obscene cost (again, tax credits alone are 30% of the NHS budget) of helping those who don't (but now feel deserving because they are helping society or whatever bollocks you are trying to say).
It is extraordinary to totally ignore how this policy has actually worked out (esp. the cost and esp. against the original aims), offer some half-baked inaccurate theory of govt (govt should be involved in the sex lives of citizens), and then call an interpretation that is based in reality naive...but that is basically where we are with govt spending now. Greedy middle-class people scraping the bottom of the poor person's barrel.
Inability to argue? Check. Inability to reason? Check. Becomes defensive when asked to think about closely held but illogical views? Check. Judges a person's argument based on their identity/background (I am assuming that is what "who told you" is about)? Check.
At the very least, try to make an argument. Weak.
I’ll confess I was kind of trolling in asking you what pundit you get your stuff from, but I’ll be really frank here. Your post reads as sort of obsessive and out of touch. You’re bringing in talking points to support your anger but they’re really not related. You’ve taken a very benign issue and reframed it as a huge deal. Then you went very aggressive in what seems to be some sort of anti-British worldview.
You’re trying to position yourself as a better intellectual but it really, really doesn’t appear that way to others.
Saying things like I can’t argue, reason, and am unwilling to put up an argument is a really aggressive thing to say, and I’m not sure if you understand that you’ve set up a really tiresome premise for having a conversation.
So yeah, i also think there are many strongly held but badly justified beliefs in your post. Not everything is black or white. There is a huge leap from "gov incentivizes families" to "world is against single males because apparently some shitty tabloid is" and equating the two misses many shades of gray.
Like I barely know the marital/relationship status of people I talk to all the time!
Maybe I’m naive or lucky, but seriously anyone who’s making major value judgements on that point of information sounds like a not great person
Who would hate me or expect me to hurt them solely because of my relationship status? And why?
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims?
Women have friends, with all the emotional baggage that entails.
In all seriousness... I hear this all the time in the rooms... loneliness is a killer. What's crazy is I have a sponsee, who specifically wanted to get sober cause the loneliness was driving him insane. Any reason to get sober and stay is a good reason in my book.
Wait, no, I'd need a full body suit, because I do not want to get my clothes reeking of that crap. :)
Have fun conversing about a headline...
I have no friends that I'm not also in a romantic relationship with, and I wouldn't call myself lonely at all outside of a rare fleeting feeling here and there.
I've almost completely cut off any realtime communication and my current lifestyle seems like a luxury which I had been missing earlier. This has helped me to focus on things which I would like to do.
But yes, when you are also physically challenged, that is even more hard.
On the other hand .. do not overthink it. If you find a new place and it feels good - do it.
I moved this year with my pregnant wife from hell to maybe not paradiese, but pretty close, compared to the last place. It was a very sudden decision, quite close to birth and then action, action, action.
But it was worth it, staying in the safe, but miserable comfort we had there .. it would have been misery. Now I enjoy ever day running woth my baby through the forest...
Lonely, is defined as "sad because one has no friends or company". Which I would say is unfortunately common in the modern world, where we believe the internet to connect people, but in reality it socially isolates.
Alone, simply meaning "having no one else present", is not that bad, no, until you start to feel lonely. I enjoy alone time for the same reasons you describe. However, too much of it leads to feelings of loneliness.
An ironic aside. I think many people, deep down, would rather feel slightly annoyed by turning down or avoiding social situations with friends, than to not have those situations available to them in the first place.
If socializing leaves you ridden with guilt for lost productivity, I'd recommend a paradigm shift.
Also it helps with promotions and therefore money if you work at a decent place. If you work on your own project your productivity matters even more.
Had to close the startup due to physical health problems, now that I'm rebuilding my life I guess productivity has become more important.
The good news is you don’t need a sparkling wit or anything, you just have to show up.
I replaced "men" with "women" and it still feels true. Think this is just in general how humans build friendships with each other. Maybe also add "making an effort to hang out with your already existing friends friends"
It seems we've brainwashed an entire generation into believing that all differences in male and female are purely social constructs - which is total nonsense.
From my point of view, this particular social behavior doesn't seem to differ too much though, but I would agree with you that there are other behaviors/attributes that are very different between men or women.
We don't think much about evolution or biological determinism on so many other subjects - for example, we were hunter-gatherers for most of our history, but we don't seem to discuss that very much in our post-agriculture society, or think that it limits us from building civilizations the way we do today. So why say on this subject that we are biologically limited in this specific way?
The equivalent is a guy saying something about soccer and the two having nice idle chat about match or something. Not a friend, but conversation happened.
At the same time, I’ve met women that haven’t made as many friends with other women, and find it hard to do so. I don’t know if it’s so clear-cut like that.
True of many things in life
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume...
Others have commented that the gender gap in having no friends is much smaller then the headline implies, and this difference may account for a good chunk of it.
Work is the easy one - it’s easy to say “I’m done working today because I want to spend more time with my family”. It’s not so easy to say “I’m done with family time today because I want to spend more time with my friends”. I’m conditioned to feel selfish at such thoughts.
I think this kind of ruthlessness is necessary though; in fact, it's the only ethical way to operate under a capitalist system. If you have any economic leverage in society or in your workplace and you choose to make friends based on someone's personality instead of based on their ability, you will probably end up giving that person access to opportunities at the expense of someone else who is more talented, more worthy and more capable of creating real value for customers.
Not only is this kind of nepotism unfair, but if the environment keeps becoming more competitive, you will risk your company's survival.
Under capitalism, if you want a friend, get a dog.
My path to doing this was to encourage interest based communication, in a way that would allow them to take it offline. How? Well to make it interest + geography, i.e. horology nerds in Cumbria, cyclists in London, petrol heads in Cornwall, audiophiles in Suffolk.
By binding together an interest, and a geography, it naturally encourages trade, showing off, having a beer... and coming together. But not in a way that ever was to "cure loneliness" (which few people admit to feeling, and frankly most people find lonely people unattractive people from the perspective of wishing to hang out with someone like that).
By providing a space to share a passion, the forums brought people together.
I had to make our own software to achieve this, i.e. a forum with events built-in by default, etc. But it worked.
Except I couldn't get it funded beyond the crowd-funded angel round :shrug . But still, 250k monthly users, hundreds of marriages, tens of thousands of friendships, and still people meeting weekly for beer and chatting with others.
And like all love, when the lust is gone what remains is something special... these forums are evolving now, from the original interests, into just a group of friends for life.
If I were lonely today, I would say... identify a hobby or interest you could get into, start looking for entry things to dive in, and then look for groups on MeetUp, or forums online, that will help you find other people.
https://www.lfgss.com/
However the largest example is the London cyclist one https://www.lfgss.com . I started with cycling and the plan was to saturate one sport/recreational interest before branching out. So I run a lot of the cycle forums in the UK, from the Rapha one, through to Islington http://forum.islington.cc/ , Brixton https://forum.brixtoncycles.cc/ tiny clubs like Grupetto https://csgrupetto.microco.sm/
One of the newest is a sustainability forum for a group with a core around Cambridge but spread over the UK https://onething.is/
Some of the forums are private, and I'm fine with that as they can permission it the way they want and pull members from elsewhere as they see fit, i.e. the petrolheads in Cornwall.
Each forum is like a startup itself, they all have to find their first 10 users, then to get to 100 users, and to be aware of the 1% rule of internet culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
But I help nurture and guide, and show them how to do it.
Without funding I've slowed everything down though. It's funded by donations from users across sites today, but expansion risks cost cliffs as I'm just below the threshold for a few services I would need to pay for (auth0 free tier) and don't have time to engineer my way out. With neither time or money spare, it's stagnated.
But if someone wants a startup idea... this does work. Not wildly profitable, but it works.
How did it make money? I'd barely scratched the surface, but conversation around interest contains a lot of intent to purchase, and there are classifieds and meetups. So it's affiliates, a challenge against eBay (people into an interest have emotional attachment to the items and would rather sell to others into the interest), and ticketing for events, etc. And because it's all a platform, one instance, the traditional highs costs associated with running a forum were avoided. Lower costs, and actual revenues :)
I love what I do for work now, but I still believe this was an idea that is good for society.
The only thing that isn't is the very old puppet script that managed the deploy as it was rather bespoke for our setup.
To my own regret I focused far too much on making it an effective platform rather than an easy install, so that bit might feel gnarly but at least the errors are sane and guide you.
The Go API and PostgreSQL schemas: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microcosm
The Django frontend (the client is nothing but a thin client over the API) https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb
The Bootstrap derived theme for the Django fronted https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb-bootstrap
And then other miscellaneous things:
The Go HTML sanitizer for user generated content https://github.com/microcosm-cc/bluemonday
Our legal policies for forums on this platform (expensive to produce, but perfectly fitting a forum platform with minimal exposure for the platform owner/admin and minimal but some liability for a forum owner) https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal
There is also a newer thing, I was (/am?) intending to replace the Django layer with a Go frontend and templating, and then moving the API into this, such that the forum could become a single binary install and thus gain a new lease of life: https://github.com/buro9/microcosm . Once in a while I chip away on that.
It's great to see that that kind of close, friendly, personal Internet dynamic didn't completely die with Facebook's rise.
Maybe that's not where the money is, but these private groups are so sticky that I don't currently see any alternative. People already know how to use Facebook, they don't know how to use Discord or Slack.
I don’t hate human interaction either. I have friends. I just don’t NEED them, and don’t need to go seeking them or be especially close.
Most people are not extroverts either, but extroverts in western culture get a pat on the back and a raise. Not as much elsewhere.
It's not a binary variable, but a spectrum.
Let me be utterly clear with you. I am not racist. Not one bone of my body is. And it is an extreme and personal insult to suggest that I am. There will be no further communication between us.
You second paragraph seems to continue onto an informed discussion that's not going to continue because of the immature comment in your first sentence.
This is an entirely different thing then Racism. Know the difference. Let's not let political correctness erase our ability to state things we believe to be biological facts.
If I were to say that you are an inferior race because you can or can't wiggle your ears and therefore must have inferior treatment.... THAT is racism. But the fact that I can wiggle my ears... well there's no denying that this ability is anomalous as I am simply describing a feature of reality as we know it..
Let me be utterly clear again. In the real world, in reality as we know it. There will ALWAYS exist things that are outside of the norm. Things that are "anomalous." To deny the existence of anomalies, or to deny the existence of REALITY is WRONG. This is not racism. To let political correctness control your dialogue and beliefs is as ignorant as letting religion do the same.
You are making two grave errors in your interpretation of reality.
First, what part of nature says EVERYTHING human must be a spectrum? There is no hard rule about this AT all. Things can have binary states, trinary states OR CAN exist in a spectrum. For example. I have a penis. Many people do not. That is binary. Perhaps a hermaphrodite lives on a spectrum but the scientific reality is, that the hermaphrodite is so few in number that it is in actuality a statistical anomaly. Lets get even deeper. Your DNA has 2 types of chromosomes. An X and a Y chromosome. There is no W chromosome and therefore these two chromosomes are binary DO NOT exist in a SPECTRUM. Get it?
Second, you don't even know what a "spectrum" really is. Even in a "spectrum" there can be anomalies. If you know about statistics you'd know that spectrums are usually bell curves: A hump in the middle with two tails on both sides.... The hump in the middle of the bell curve is the most populous and most "normal" part of the spectrum and the tail ends are the most rare and therefore "anomalous."
What disgust me is the twisting of words by people who are ignorant. There is NOTHING wrong with being anomalous... an anomaly is neither wrong or right it is just a word that illustrates rarity. A person with an IQ of 342 is an anomaly on the tail tail end of the bell curve and while it is an anomaly there is nothing wrong with being crazy smart.
This accusatory BS of calling me a racist is disgusting and vile and gravely serious. You better take back your statements, what your saying is not trivial or true and is a deeply personal insult. My ancestors were asian americans and victims of white supremacy and racism. If you're white and calling me racist well...
P.S. Most people don't want to be called an "anomoly". It sounds quite negative. I know you didn't mean it that way, but that is how other people interpret it.
Ok maybe I made mistake here. But the reaction to my mistake is that they decided to call me a racist. The difference here is that although I did not mean to convey what you implied... @AstralStorm and @Hermandw meant what they said 110%.
They accused me of being racist.
There is no one more guilty of racism against my race then the white man. So unless any of you are not white... back off.
Being introvert does not mean you are antisocial, you just don't need to socialize that much. It may be very enjoyable but it is also so draining.
There is a social aspect to my and human nature that cannot be denied.
One example: 99% of introverts want to have sex with the opposite gender and interact with them despite your introversion. A good number also want to have kids and interact with those kids. You may value your "recharge" time but despite this most introverts also seek to socialize and interact with other people. It's a conflicting desire, but to be human is to be social, you cannot deny biology.
Look at the way humans live. We live in cities, towns or tribes. A very very small amount of us live in isolation outside of towns, tribes and cities. I would argue that most introverts live in a community and are unwilling to go far enough to live in total isolation. We are animals that live in groups. We are herd animals. My guess is that introversion stems from defensive instincts designed to deal with creatures outside of the herd.
From your phrasing, it sounds like a pet peeve.
Curious, why you took offense to OPs post? If you are enjoying not having close friends, then good for you, really. This thread doesn't apply to you.
You remind me of Ricky Gervais' Guitar Lessons bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dxMGzt5mU
In summary, it's like calling up a guitar teacher and telling them you don't want to learn guitar. Why call?
He is on a self-professed quest to cure loneliness, and seems to equate that with not having close friendships. I just want to make sure he is aware there is a distinction and not everyone classifies that way.
It seemed to me that he was on a quest to cure his loneliness.
Point is: It's interesting (perhaps even revealing) that you read it differently.
If it's not a problem, then it's not a problem. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
> The lofty goal of the startup was to "cure loneliness" but I never told the users that.
And then he talks about building features for users to take their conversations offline. I mean maybe it was all for himself, but it seems like the goal was to get users to build long-lasting relationships.
Which is commendable, and I commend him for it. It sounds like an awesome project.
> If I were lonely today, I would say...
But I haven't been able to do much other than keep it in maintenance mode for the last 4 years. I've let other forums be created and expanded it, but haven't had time to address it's flaws and improve it.
Thanks a lot