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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>More than half of survey respondents — 54 percent — said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Fifty-six percent reported they sometimes or always felt like the people around them "are not necessarily with them." And 2 in 5 felt like "they lack companionship," that their "relationships aren't meaningful" and that they "are isolated from others."

Well, chasing money and success as ultimate goals, glorifying individualism, being hell bent on branding oneself and selling it, valuing consumerism, and closing into comfort zones etc., comes with a cost.

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I'm willing to guess that the single biggest factor is the erosion of civil society i.e. any group someone is a part of and spends time with outside of work.

yeah. gotta have that "third place"

> Well, chasing money and success as ultimate goals, glorifying individualism, being hell bent on branding oneself and selling it, valuing consumerism, and closing into comfort zones etc., comes with a cost.

Yeah, must have been tough for 80s kids. Still, I wonder why the current generation are lonely?

Because the current generation is not doing any of that much less. In fact they continue on the same downward slope on these regards.

My relationships revolve around my activities. Football friends, business/programming friends, weight lifting friends, party friends, etc...

The only person that shares the same ideas universally is my wife, and that took a decade to find all the overlap.

I dont think there is anything wrong with individualism, but it makes it so I have many friends, but few close friends.

South Korea has had the highest suicide rate in the industrialized world for eight consecutive years. Their culture doesn't glorify/promote individualism, but conformity.

I would argue that "chasing money and success" is a trademark characteristic of what young people AREN'T doing, yet this study states they are the Loneliness age group.

It's almost as if you could arrive to similar results in different ways, not only one...

Seriously, though, your comment seems to assume South Korean suicide rate is motivated by loneliness. If that's the case, you might want to give the rest of us an argument to support that assumption.

How do you look at South Korea and conclude that people there aren't chasing money and success?

"In 2014 alone, some 840,000 companies sprang up, in a country with a population of 50 million. This high number of enterprises relative to GDP suggests that opening a business is a poplar economic activity for many South Koreans."

https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/what-entrepreneurship-means-...

>South Korea has had the highest suicide rate in the industrialized world for eight consecutive years. Their culture doesn't glorify/promote individualism, but conformity.

Did they used to have those suicide rates since forever? Because in the past they were even more conformist (or you think e.g. 50s or feudal Korea was more individualistic?).

And of course they chase after work and money like crazy there...

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