Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

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It's my opinion America's social fabric has been thoroughly destroyed by it's relentless commercial focus, and it will take at least a few more decades before Americans will rediscover the need to connect with each other.

I have been going to the same coffee shop for 13 years. It is one of the only coffee shops in Atlanta that has comfortable chairs and couches that one is happy to spend hours socializing in. Almost every single other coffee shop in the city has succumbed to the frigid tyranny of aluminum and plywood. If you spend significant amounts of time at one of these "coffee shops," your only companionship is likely to be your laptop.

Its bars are a little better, but in general our country has turned our traditional watering holes from places where you could go to find a social group, to places where you must bring your social group with you if you are to have any kind of interesting fun at all. It's becoming difficult to find bars with an active social scene of regulars which doesn't feel obnoxiously cliquish. Americans, even when they are social, often fail spectacularly to be inclusive.

The only place left where you can go to reliably dispel your loneliness anymore is church. Sadly, even if you're religious, the atmosphere can feel oppressive. My mom all but gave up her quest to find a church where she could fit in with, and she is not a picky lady in this regard.

If you were to trace all three of these phenomenon down to a single underlying source, it's consumerism. If Americans aren't immediately getting what they want in any given situation, they leave and go back to their ivory tower / nest that they've constructed out of well-meaning, but myopic products / services that leave Americans feeling catered to, but not fulfilled. We don't want to sit and painstakingly build friendships any more. We want friendship-in-a-box. And our 'third places' have increasingly surrendered to those wishes.

Everything you’ve said agrees with my experiences. Though I’m not sure I would attribute this phenomenon to consumerism.

After speaking with my older relatives and being a part of more closely knit communities while moving around as a child, I would say the fall of churches is the single biggest cause here.

It used to be that every week you’d see your neighbors for 3-4hrs supplied with discussion material, the culture/doctrine encouraged using your gifts to help your neighbors out, and other purely social events would be organized through the church. That combined with belonging to the same “tribe” as everyone is a recipe for a strong social community.

In my current experiences, churchs are some huge corporatized production with some hype man spewing what the people want to hear then everyone goes home. These churches focus on growing numbers and building their campus without think of the community’s needs. It’s hard to build a strong social community with a sea of people.

The smaller churches are filled with aging congregations sadly watching their culture die with them as younger generations fail to build any sense of community.

I hope that we can find a way to replicate the good parts of our church going history. America could definitely use some stronger communities.

It's not consumerism, it's just beautiful, unadulterated capitalism. The incredible thing about the evolution is that nobody planned it. The invisible hand magically produced a society of lonely, desperate, and paranoid people who must work and study all the time less they become poor and be totally ejected from polite society. Most Americans don't even get two weeks vacation time. It's absolutely appalling but, as an investor, it's also kind of amazing.

In the end it's difficult to imagine any kind of fundamental reevaluation of America's economic model and so the culture won't change. Instead I suspect we'll see more and more people turning to often toxic online communities to manage their anxieties. The problem here is that it's very easy for lonely, desperate people to be radicalized and this could put significant downward pressure on profits. I'd really like to see something done to address this issue before it's too late. The market can over commit on stuff like this and it introduces significant volatility into long term returns.

I agree. I think a more nuanced assessment would be better, but for my part, i work in consulting and am moving from Australia to the us. All i have heard from my us counterparts is that they are lucky to get two paid weeks off a year. I get 4 minimum, and generally end up taking about 6 weeks paid leave a year. No questions or issues taking it provided i request it in advance.

Do my us colleagues get paid more? Yes, about 10-30% when adjusting for col and ppp. But the inability to take time off sounds terrible.

America's working culture and general work life balance sounds like it needs a hard reset.

I find your consumerism narrative unconvincing as you've laid it out here. I am, however, curious how much you blame mobile devices and social media, because that seems like (a) the Big Thing that's recently changed, and (b) because narratives and my experience around why people choose superficial connection or social disconnection through the use of social media and mobile devices seems very convincing and common.

Wish we had more rigorous data on causation here though.

There's certainly a role to play there, but I subordinate the technological roles underneath the commercial ones. Our mobile devices and social media, like the rest of our society, leave us feeling catered to, but not fulfilled.

We can go to Instagram and see lots of beautiful photographic artwork, and even contribute to it yourself, but taking a beautiful picture is not the same as having a beautiful life, and can indeed blind you to the amount of effort it takes to construct it behind the relatively much much smaller amount of effort it takes to snap a decent picture.

We can go to Facebook and discover what us tech kids figured out way back in the nineties, that interacting with people outside of meatspace removes our inner filters and simultaneously removes the all-important communication channel of tone of voice, leading every sentence to feel like an attack to be defended from. We get an intense "intellectual" experience without having to do the work of actually understanding not just our own positions, but also how to best communicate and distill those positions to others. Catered to, not fulfilled.

We can pick up our phones and obtain, on tap, video games that engage our minds with an experience that's compelling enough to hold attention without the work of slowly building up skills or having to coordinate sit-down time with our fellow humans to hone those skills with. Catered to, not fulfilled. If you get good at Candy Crush, what bragging rights have you earned?

Technology has finished the job of driving us apart from our peers, but it didn't begin it. It's the proximate, not underlying cause. Technology used to bring us together, we used to prioritize that which allowed us to spend time and engage over a greater surface area than 'mere' conversation. We all watched network, then later cable, news and then talk about what we all saw at the diner or bar.

Now every single social interaction we have has been gamified and monetized to a far more granular degree, and our third spaces sit ossified in the corner like a beaten step-sibling.

Technology, the phone in our pocket, only has a small role to play. If Americans wanted more and deeper and harder social interaction, we'd demand social media and phone apps that would give it to us. I believe China's mobile app ecosystem is pretty good at providing technology that brings them together rather than drives them apart. But Americans don't want that, we want to be catered to.

> China's mobile app ecosystem is pretty good at providing technology that brings them together rather than drives them apart

What makes you think of that? Please elaborate. IMO people chat, share stuff, pay and do others things in the same app(wechat) is neither necessary nor helpful for bringing them together.

It's less about what they provide and more about how they use it. Americans use technology to wall themselves off from others, Asia in general with the exception of the unfathomable Japanese, uses technology to assist and facilitate, the same way we used to use it until the last few years.

If an American wants to connect with a fellow American, they must first find a convincing reason to. We don't just talk to each other anymore. The rest of the world is not like this. China is merely one example. It's America that's the exception. China is the rule.

You might want to check out Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" which makes similar arguments as the OP and was published in 1995, well before mobile phones had really taken off.

(I see now the article has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, too.)

I don't follow your logic about consumerism being the problem. America has been consumerist for a long time, longer than your 13 years of observation. Is there perhaps another advancement other than "consumerism" in the last 13 years which could account for your observations?

I speak more in a sibling comment, but basically, the sheer number and quality of the services available provides for anyone to retreat from challenging situations to ones in which they need expend no personal effort to get rewarded.

In the past even those escapes required effort. Anyone who grew up in the eighties playing Nintendo knows just how much effort was required to obtain mastery, and thereby fulfillment, over a video game. Now the games are laser-focused on removing all obstacles to that feeling.

I'd like to give this phenomenon a better name to distinguish it from 'mere' consumerism, but there's definitely been a shift over the last 10 years or so as the Internet has gone mainstream. The Pandora's Box it opened up had real knock-on effects on the rest of society.

Consumerism hardly unique to America. There are societies far more status-oriented and focused on consumerism than America and they don't exhibit pervasive social isolation. (Often it's just the opposite.)

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