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Comment by grasshopperpurp | Hacker News Reader

Many reasons for this, and many good ones have already been noted, but I haven't seen anyone mention time yet. Americans work a lot. If you don't make friends at work, or you don't maintain friendships from high school or college, you're working on limited time and energy - as are the people you hope to befriend (though you don't know who they are yet). If you have a family, it's even harder.

I don't have kids, and while I don't have a ton of friends, I'm lucky to have some good, close friends, who I don't (imo) have enough time for and don't get to see enough.

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> Many reasons for this, and many good ones have already been noted, but I haven't seen anyone mention time yet. Americans work a lot.

This one is kind of easy. I work A LOT too, but when I’m not, I’m also not: 1. Sitting at the computer, 2. Watching TV/Netflix, 3. Buried in my phone playing Candy Crush

A lot of things I used to say I couldn’t do, I started doing—purely by turning off the screens.

Here [1] is a list of nations by hours worked. The US average is just about squarely average here. The OECD average is 1763 hours per year. Americans work 26 hours longer than that per year, so half an hour per week, less than 5 minutes a day, longer.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho...

One think that can lead to loneliness is material abundance namely the abundance of houses. Here in Portugal we have 40% more houses than families. For instance the building that I live has 8 apartments and it was build 60 years ago. I have some neighbors that live here since the beginning. They told me there was a time it had 50 residents. Now there are only ten residents. We are so surrounded by abundance that we are more and more apart from each other. But we cannot stop building houses because that would mean less jobs and the end of economic growth.

I think the solution for your country may be the inverse of the one I recommended for America in a different post in this thread.

The construction workers should become destruction workers driven by supply side regulations aimed at keeping the price of housing 'stable' by encouraging the retirement of the lesser quality housing and the conversion of those areas to more socially productive uses. (Maybe parks, nature, or buildings more suitable to society's needs.)

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