Comment by iovrthoughtthis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iovrthoughtthis | Hacker News Reader

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iovrthoughtthis

I feel like a lot of this problem is to do with logistical convenience.

As we get better at traveling further for work / school we build relationships with people who are less convenient to maintain.

These relationships demand higher effort than a local relationship and are more fragile than relationships built on convenience (assumption).

IMO the solution to this is to somehow decouple where we work / learn from who we work for / which schools we go to so that local, convenient people can work and learn together on different jobs / courses and build relationships that are convenient to maintain.

Right now i think the neucleus of our social lives and the places we build the most of our relationships (school, work) are too far from the places we relax (home) for us to easily maintain longterm, social relationship because those relationships are often founded and maintined through convenience.

That or we need to spend less time working and officially dedicate much larger portions of our lives to maintaining social lives. We could do this trough reduced working hours, increased leisure time and perhaps some sort of “hanging out” subsidy so that people without disposable income can afford to travel to spend time together.

Earlier, we were depended on others (relatives and neighbors) for many things. Now dependency has reduced drastically, so there is no need for relationships. I have have seen strong bonding in neighborhood where they are economically weak.

Another way is for people to become more comfortable with digital communication. If you enjoy communicating with someone face to face, you'll probably enjoy communicating with them in written form too. For instance, I have some people I message very day, some I message every week, some I message every month, and keeping in touch like this allows the relationship to stay strong and grow, in spite of us rarely seeing each other in person. This approach is also ultimately more scalable: hanging out generally takes a lot more time than messaging someone, so you have time to hang out in person with fewer people than you do to message people, especially considering that it's possible to have multiple conversations simultaneously over instant messenging.

The alternative is to give up all your friends when you move overseas or change cities, which seems absurd given the wealth of communication tools the modern world offers us.

> The alternative is to give up all your friends when you move overseas or change cities, which seems absurd given the wealth of communication tools the modern world offers us.

But why continue communicating with old friends using, IMHO, a shallow form of building a bond when you can develop new relationships with people where you are now and can meet or have fun face-to-face?

I’m actually seeing an over reliance of people using digital communication for everything, to the point where they’re starving themselves and potential friends of a meaningful way to have a relationship.

This ties into the other comments that point out that we’re starting to favour global, weak ties to people instead of local, strong ties. I’m not a fan of that personally.

>But why continue communicating with old friends using, IMHO, a shallow form of building a bond when you can develop new relationships with people where you are now and can meet or have fun face-to-face?

Because relationships develop and grow over time? Why deploy your server on the Linux kernel, when you could just write your own operating system and deploy on that instead? Why essentially throw away the countless hours you've invested in building a relationship with someone? I imagine you wouldn't apply the same logic to a spouse or children: "sorry honey, I'm moving overseas now, but don't worry, I'll find another wife there."

Why do you consider bonding over text shallow? To me if anything it's less shallow, as you have to actually engage with somebody as a person. When hanging out in person, you can bond with anybody over movies, drinks etc. without ever developing a deeper understanding of them, solely by the biological nature of how spending time with people promotes bonding.

>This ties into the other comments that point out that we’re starting to favour global, weak ties to people instead of local, strong ties. I’m not a fan of that personally.

What don't you like about that? Statistically speaking, you're much more likely to find someone you get along with better along any particular dimension among the billions of people on the globe than the few people who by pure chance happen to be geographically proximal to you. If we assume people seek the most satisfying relationships possible, it's natural for these to be geographically diverse.

The new way also makes for weak societies easily seizable by capitalistic interests.

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