Study: To Beat Loneliness, Visits Must Be Real, Not Virtual
wsj.com
wsj.com
Re: "why everyone is questioning why you are there by yourself": This may depend on the area. I lived in Boston for a while and people seemed openly hostile about solo guys. I remember I went to the Enormous Room (RIP: http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-enormous-room-cambridge) one night by myself and got questioned multiple times why I was alone there... The funny thing is that 2 friends I know randomly showed up there on the same night, so I didn't actually end up alone after all... I just go alone sometimes because it is freeing.
Doing the same things in the states, you feel the aloneness more and it is much more rare for folks to do.
This sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_effect In reality it's likely that nobody noticed you much at all, and almost certainly didn't care to analyze why you're by yourself or even if you really are by yourself.
It can be actually liberating to realize that random strangers you're not interacting with couldn't care less about you short of some kind of medical emergency (and sometimes even then...)
It can be more fun to go to events with people. It can also be more fun to go by yourself. Just realize either way people around you are unlikely to care or even notice either way.
One way to tackle this to just view everyone as your friend when you go somewhere. Some of your friends might have bad day, but you know you are friends so you are okay with that and move on to talk with your other friends. "Know thyself" might be appropriate here.
This is from someone who has been sick for several years due to physical illness, has no friends and spends 99% of time by himself.
But you need to look at this from different perspectives.
The very fact that people from around the world can meet so easily virtually today is in itself a value regardless of whether it's better to meet in person.
In other words, being able to meet virtually isn't about replacing actual physical visits it's about allowing you to meet a much larger group of people and perhaps find more likeminded people and at much greater distance.
So I am not sure I buy into the premise of this study.
I also am not so sure that I believe we are getting more lonely. I would need to see harder evidence than the typical qualitative studies that are done to determine this. Would love to see how they are actually getting to that conclusion.
I went to high school in Vancouver but left for college to Waterloo, which is on the other side of the continent. The only way I could have kept in touch with friends from high school who went to college in BC was through virtual mediums like Facebook, online gaming and voice chat.
Now that I'm back in Vancouver again, we naturally started hanging out physically again, but I'm fairly certain we would all have had a much more difficult time doing that had it not been for all the time we spent together virtually over these years.
So the standard reply to this is because we are fine tuning our meetups we are missing out on serendipity.
Travelers stay in touch with home so much they don't need to meet people.
We are connected on the bus and at a restaurant such that we are not pushed to meet people.
Then when we go to the fine matched event there is too much pressure to make friends.
I would say I'm the same, I'd need harder evidence that we are not getting lonelier.
Without a doubt we are changing, so it is troubling we don't know for sure if it's better or worse, I doubt such a big change is neutral.
As someone that struggles greatly with loneliness -- what kinds of systems have people found to address it as an adult? (Presumably there's an interest on this site, since this article is here.)
I've for years found it to be an utterly crippling problem that I just can't really get on top of. I scrape by by having acquaintances at work, and trying to stay in touch with remote friends (which works quite badly). But I haven't been able to find a good balance with it for many years.
Sometimes I think maybe I'm trying to solve the wrong problem, but it seems to be an unnatural state for a person to feel alone.
Do you exercise regularly?
curious, how do you find your sports leagues?
While I'm now in a local job, the department I'm attached to is in a satellite building far enough off campus to make it impossible to just meet up with my peers. My co-workers are nice, but they're not really colleagues or peers in terms of my professional development. I'm a technical person in a functional/business analyst role where I support a group of non-technical users. I almost never have the opportunity to discuss implementation details with the developers and I rarely meet with other analysts face-to-face. Online interactions will have to scratch that itch, for now at least. Though I do fear with the spread of the 'gig' economy, the ease of outsourcing, and increasing availability of remote work, this loneliness is only going to be a growing problem.
I'm fairly introverted but I think the secret to why going to a bunch of meetups worked for me is I just kept showing up and did some small talk that people eventually got to know me and became friendlier and started inviting me to things due to familiarity.
In fact my closest friends right now I made by taken a chance at a random invite to a weekly game night by someone I met once at a meetup, and just kept showing up to his weekly events, and over time I became friends with everyone there.
Most people find a "permanent friend" aka significant other aka spouse. I realize this is hard for some people, but that is what the majority of humans do.
Shared struggle/suffering is a known catalyst for friendship. You could look at public works type volunteering, such as volunteer trail crews, if that kind of thing interests you.
Working hard together to build or care for something is a way to bond, and gets you physically active too which is good for happiness & mood.
I keep organizing parties at my place 3 times a year, for stupid reasons (Hey guys I'm a CEO now! It's like I'm king of the world, let's make a party for my sacre and all dress like Napoleon) (half-birthdays when you're >32.5 years old are another legit reason for a party). Because I have hard times making friends, the people I invite are very random: Two gay guys I've dated, a gym friend, a judo friend, a workmate, a guy from church, three girlfriends of a former flatmate... It's sometimes awkward but they have in common that they're rational people with an understanding for empathy. Yesterday was my 6th party and this little group got acquainted with each other, so they do enjoy coming. And two of them have dated, which means I upgraded to being a platform ;)
But it's a slow process. I still feel like shit depending on the season. I find it hard to manage my levels of hate (hate against the people who abandonned me, hate against the current system which privileges others, hate against smokers who are responsible for my asthma, etc), and hate is a separate thing which makes you actively wreck social bonds, in addition to depression itself, if you have any. A psy may be important.
Ah and do some sports-camp holidays, many times a year. UCPA in France is awesome for that, until 39 years old.
The article doesn't seem to mention that while online meeting isn't as good the internet can make meeting people who want to meet people much easier.
If you live in a modern city and have moved you often don't have the friendship and family groups that people used to have by default. Prior to the internet this was a lot harder. With the internet you can find people who are going to a bar, going dancing, going climbing, playing board games, going to listen to speakers or whatever much more easily.
I can't comment on video chat, could never get that working at the other site because their machines were locked down to the point of uselessness without special permission from ITS requiring 5 pints of blood and a signature from god. I'd be interested to see whether actual VR could fill a void.
I don't mean Meetup.com ... you don't use Meetup to go to dinner.
What we need is a more open society where it's okay to speak with- and call people again. We also need the Internet where humans get to know each other without going to some dedicated "social" or "dating" service. In the past I've been on websites where over the years people made real friends - naturally, without trying. People formed groups, met in real life, maintained long-term contact internationally. Problem is, Web 2.0 destroyed most such websites.
But they're only tools. They merely facilitate, they don't force it to happen.
I did have a few very good friends, but was still lonely. This changed drastically when I found a few friends online (via an online game, Dungeon Siege) and we played and chatted every day. I was taken aback by the way I was able to bond with people and how easily they accepted me for who I was, when they didn't see my nervous physical form.
During this period I entered into a long-distance relationship with a girl I'd never met. She helped me overcome a lot of my social awkwardness and issues with self-confidence. We ended up meeting a year later and spent seven years in a long-distance relationship. We spent time together each major holiday, though plane tickets were expensive. In-between these visits we chatted on various IM services. This was great, but I still often felt lonely, being apart.
We're now married and have been living together for six years. Being together for real each day is an incredible improvement. Still, our time together but apart was invaluable. I also recently realised that the majority of my close friends are people I met online.
I'll cosign all these findings because they correlate exactly to my own experience. It's the tragedy of the 21st century that we happily nuked existing social structures in favor of a "build your own social network" mentality that it turns out doesn't work that well.
Social networks actually have the potential to help restore local social structures as at root they are about connectivity. A local volunteering group can easily keep its members up-to-date via its FB group. A local Councillor can update his constituents via his Twitter account. I'd like to see a new batch of startups which work on channelling social media usage to properly social ends.
Is there evidence that this actually happened?
At least in America, I think the forces of social atomization predate the rise of social networks. The classic "Bowling Alone" was published in 2000, and it was an expanded version of a 1995 essay.
If anything, I expect that the Internet is helping. I left my home town (pop 200k) because my professional and cultural interests were too esoteric. Now I know know youngsters in towns of 500 that have an encyclopedic knowledge of anime. I see technologists working from anywhere and everywhere. Some will use that to rove, but I know many use that to stay close to family and friends.
And personally, the on-line social networks are how I arrange a lot of my meatspace social time. There are a lot of people I am now back in touch with that would have been lost to me without social networks. That isn't to deny the points of the article, which I agree with. But as much as Facebook irritates me, I don't think I can blame it for this.
I've never had the experience of being accepted socially in these so-called social structures. My parents went to church and forced me to go. I've generally worked, and had school and stuff. It is nearly too bad I don't believe in God enough to withstand such things. I might as well been invisible at school, and I only rarely have made any sort of friendship at a workplace that carried over outside of work. Living away from family has been normal, and sometimes would go a few months in between visits due to money issues. I'm the weird one in the family - my brother in law said I was the weirdest person he'd ever met... until he met my spouse.
However, I have met friends online that I have kept for years. I interact with folks that aren't turned off by my weirdness. Met my spouse over the internet, and talking to him, though overseas, eased loneliness. The same lack of extensive social network at home allowed me to more easily move overseas when we married. Oddly, being an immigrant has made my weirdness easier and people tend to be a bit more accepting (minus the anti-immigrant folks).
At least geeks have the Net though. Huge portions of the population have no genuine social group as they get older. It is no wonder the Japanese are obsessed with high school. It's the last time their peer group was together. Things like participation in sports, religion and other quasi-social affairs are in decline.
I've spent my teens and beyond on text/voice chat with friends and it feels exactly the same as being with them in person. Maybe slightly less with text.
Or could it be because we play games instead of just talking?
Dedicated IM channels for small talk and sharing internet-nonsense are pretty good too. Can't really do that on the company-IMs, it just clutters serious discussion, but you get to know co-workers on a different level. That's usually just on all day. Not sure how much chat reduces overall loneliness levels, but it's fun.
Phone calls are neither here nor there for me. It's just business. It's hard to have casual conversations over the phone. "so, now that we got these expense reports sorted out, how's Timmy doing, still playing soccer?"
I do need to make an effort to step out and do some social things during the work-day (coffee-&-lunch, sports, ...). These people are not colleagues, but we're all full time telecommuters. For me personally, these can't be evening dates, the atmosphere is just wrong, it needs to be somewhat business-like. It took a while to get a routine schedule with that. Took a lot of "cold calling" people, like, `hey, we met at this Meetup about BuzzyMcBuzzword.io, you want to hangout?` (luckily, getting the cold shoulder from some bearded JS-ninja is not as bad as from that cute med-student at happy hour, but dang, it gets old after a while).
In my experience so far, remote workers I see doing well seem to fall into two camps. Either very reserved and just not social, and doesn't really mind being alone, but with strong work-ethic, they're often abrasive too. Or pretty easy-going and pleasant company, so the channels of communication are kept open on both sides. If you're sort of in-between, it can be a hard slog. You need to ensure colleagues keep reaching out, which requires you to be pro-active and upbeat, and you can't tire of that either, that energy needs to come from the remote worker first, because at the other end, it's easy for colleagues to just kind of check out on that.
Biggest thing about remote work and loneliness in my experience, isn't necessarily about being physically alone for a large part of the day, or about what communication medium is best to substitute for real life interaction. A big factor seems to be how the work is going, and how the team as a whole communicates about it. Sometimes, projects just take a bad turn, and it's much more difficult to not have that be a millstone, when you have other people to commiserate with, through whatever medium. But it takes buy-in from all sides. If colleagues bitch&moan in the break-room, but don't take it to IM, you're missing out on that. So you kind of have to get people in the habit to bitch&moan on chat too. That's the hard part, getting remote-working etiquette (rule 1, there's no such thing as using too many emoticons) be shared by the non-remote workers. Because when challenges arise, you need to be part of how the team is dealing with it. If you're left out, it opens the door for loneliness to creep up on you.
The results are inconclusive:
"Two studies examined Internet-based video communication. Tsai and Tsai (2011) focused on the efficacy of videoconferencing to improve nursing home residents’ social support. Participants in this study were asked to make contact with family or loved ones at least once a week via services such as Skype or MSN. After regression, the authors concluded that videoconferencing was effective in reducing loneliness (p < 0.01).
Meyer et al.’s (2010) study on web-based communication included a nine-item instrument that examined social contact and interaction. Using a sample of 33 participants, the authors did not find a statistically significant relationship between loneliness and the use of webcam."
Maybe it's partially depends on the technology(quality and eye-contact establishment, viewing full body language[which research says both help with trust]), and maybe on other on the social aspect of the interaction - contacts with family members should help more than chatting with people you have much stronger bond with .
[1]http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13607863.2013.875...
If you are feeling lonely, and don't like. Stop. On the other hand if you are enjoying feeling bad, which happens more frequently than most people seem to realize, then don't complain.
But please say it when you are affiliated.
What a man. Next to him everybody looks like a wuss.
I am merely saying that Winston Churchill is a forthright character and a particularly resilient one at that.
trigger warning: Churchill did have a lot to be depressed about, one of them being the firebombing of German cities.
http://www.onlinemilitaryeducation.org/posts/10-most-devasta...
edit: It looks like I upset yet another precious snowflake ..
edit #2: Oh, why don't all you precious snowflakes go fuck yourselves ..