Half of Millennials say they often feel isolated even when surrounded by friends | Hacker News Reader

Half of Millennials say they often feel isolated even when surrounded by friends

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17 pointspaulpauper13 comments

We jammed a ton of intermediate layers and hacks into social interaction. Of course they are removed from a natural social habitat. And they will rebel against it. There will come a generation who completely discards everything tained by valley tech.

It's easy to blame tech. I'm someone who is borderline Millenial/Gen Z and I'm actually finding myself, both internally and externally, through the use of Twitter. Still very alone at times, think Mr. Robot, but I've actually found hope through the internet. Strangely enough, I had actually wasted time and developed maladaptive traits by trying to find myself in the "real" world, as in the people I was forced to bond with through school and sports.

My take on this is different and many people will disagree. Here it goes. The "intermediate layers and hacks in social interaction" you speak of isn't technology but actually our myths of diversity and multi-culturalism. Real multi-culturalism is really REALLY hard, might be impossible given human nature. The only diverse thing we can all agree on is ethnic food. The other is probably college, careers, etc. Everything else is gone. Our culture is absent of anything internal or metaphysic. Religion and local communities are gone. Political correctness destroyed art.

I'm happy that some people can thrive in this world and good for them. There's the other half who pretend to be part of the trend; the ones that feel isolated. Then there are those like me who are lost in this world. Don't need pity, I've decided to make my own.

Here's a short video capturing the loneliness of the young today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uuYm7KDm_A

Sorry to link to a scrappy 4-Chan esque video but Hollywood isn't exactly getting the people at the bottom.

s/Millennials/People/g -Seriously, although its perhaps stronger in young people, has this not always been a "thing" and had we a time machine, what would we find asking this of the same age cohort in times past?

Memory imparts a rosy hue: you can't ask people now about the past and expect an un-biassed answer.

I think I can give an unbiased answer - I remember The Offspring wrote a song about the same thing back in 1994 (ie pre-modern-internet, pre-smartphone) called So Alone.

"Look at the crowd and tell me whether / All are surrounded / But none are together / If you're awake, look all around / At all of the people / Still you're so alone / So alone"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-fFflDhuVuA

Could it be that this general truth about the difficulty of maintaining close bonds as we grow older clashes with the myth of social media -which is to be more connected to people that matter to you?

I think the superficiality of such tools is becoming more and more apparent. It has become so effortless participate in the social game (for a lack of a better word) such as wishing an happy birthday or some words of support for grieving folks that it's getting hard to gauge whether people do actually care about you. It's about the work you put in.

Personal anecdote: Had to hire a guy with a van on a public holiday as I was moving to a different part of the city (Dublin). Asked my fellow French friends for help and sure enough we were loading the van at 11 am. The driver admitted that he wouldn't have had as much help if he had asked his own -Irish- friends because they'd be too hangover to bother.

I found that quite sad, especially given that all my friends are not lifelong friends, we've know each other for 5 years or less.

>we were loading the van at 11 am.

>he wouldn't have had as much help if he had asked his own -Irish- friends because they'd be too hangover to bother.

6pm might work with irish folks, though.

I mean, I love my friends but moving their furniture at, say, 9am on Saturday is just... not gonna work.

Nah, at 6 they're back on the piss ;)

We probably got started with the van later than 11 actually, they were around from 11 to help get stuff out of the flat. But my point still stands.

I wish I had more time to write about this, because it's an important topic to me, but I think this actually has shifted over time. I believe it's not a smart phone / social media thing per se, it's a modernity thing, and that if you go back into premodern times, you'll find it was significantly different, and that loneliness was pretty rare.

The part I don't have time to write here is why I think that's true, but I'll say in a too-brief summary: the same tools that allow us to organize ourselves en masse into nations and industries, also necessarily create divisions and isolation that just didn't exist in most of human pre-history, which involved close-knit family and tribal units existing and interacting together and doing meaningful work together throughout their entire lives.

Several years ago I worked with a young intern who grew up in the suburbs of the bay area but was going to school in NYC. She said there was nothing in the world so lonely as being surrounded by thousands of people in a big city. I think it has to do with our assumption that everyone around us is more connected than we are.

Has any study been done on how food and diet changes in the past twenty years is affecting our minds, the whole gut brain axis?

I have a hunch this might be related to the way American friendships work. The structure of the educational system encourages many weak friendships rather than a couple strong friendships. This then translates into other life.

Facebook is fundamentally a tool for managing these weak friendships.

I generalize of course.

> The structure of the educational system encourages many weak friendships rather than a couple strong friendships.

How so? Please elaborate.

In Europe, you basically share 8 hours a day for how ever many years with the same group of 20-30 people.

In the US, every class is with a different group of people and also your classes change periodically.

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