The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

Bounce around until you find one that feels right: a good amount of regulars, people doodling, and bullshitting with baristas.

Show up a couple times a week, drop into the odd conversation. And be ready to say “anyone want to grab a beer” come quitting time.

This is just about the fastest (week to a month) way to find yourself a new in person social circle.

I always have flashback about the time I moved to another city without family bondings. Then I smiley because it's over.

libcinder, openframeworks, pure data, faust, three.js, tone.js, there are a multitude of things regular musicians could use but don't know about.

Invite someone over!

>If anyone in Providence, RI wants to hang, let me know!

I actually live in Cranston, lol. You like biking? Cryptocurrency? Music production?

I've found biking to be an exceptional way to meet new people and break out of the lonliness funk I fell into after moving to a new city where I knew no one. Most shops organize group rides at all skill levels, and most cities have bike groups. It's a wildly social sport, and most rides end at cafes or breweries. It gets me out of the house and there's an instant camaraderie that comes with sweating with a group of people for a couple hours on a long ride.

I like and enjoy my coworkers but our respective interests are too dissimilar. The interactions at work never go deeper than the current objective or niceties. This is completely fine (for now) but in the future I would love to be on a true team.

Going home is indeed meh. As much as it feels nice to unwind, I'd much rather unwind with my gang.

I used to be on a sports team and lived morning, day, and night with my boys. Even though life was chaotic, it was incredible to have a gang. One thing I know for certain is that I could do more to gain that back. Short-term I plan on (1) joining an adult sports league and (2) hit up the super interesting people I've met since moving.

But long-term I believe lifestyle redesign is the only solution to our highly atomized world. I look to the past for ideas.

You lack family, you have coworkers, you have random humans in the area, you didn't mention any sort of buddy. So have 2 or 3 out of those 4.

I'm bummed about spending the last quarter century without a buddy. Family and coworkers and random humans do not substitute. Maybe I have no time for it, but I also think it takes a certain kind of environment. The shared environment of an Internet-free childhood neighborhood and school created the right conditions.

You're in a phase of life where you could live with others, although there's no guarantee of there actually being a good opportunity near by.

I spent a chunk of my 20s living in a student housing cooperative in Ann Arbor, MI, and for the most part it was a great experience. It was big enough, and enough of the population was grad students, that it was easy to be left alone when that's what you wanted. But it was also plenty easy to find someone up for a game of chess or whatnot at pretty much any time of day.

It was also inexpensive, I still had some space of my own, and while some work was owed to keep the house running it was in practice substantially less than I spend on my own apartment with typically better results.

The other thing is to get involved with social physical activity, clubs, or volunteering. I played hockey and went to a group fitness gym. I made long term friends there. I am into ham radio and the club where I live is pretty good. I used to volunteer at a kids camp and that was great for making friends with the staff members and doing social things outside of camp.

To me, find where your interests align with social/community activity. Currently, I am trying to get the ham radio club to be more out in the community. We are doing radio communications for a running race this weekend. It is exciting.

Unlike sports or gyms there's a lot more hanging around and chatting, plus you can end up with new destinations. Meanwhile the exercise gives you endorphins.

In my similar sized city there's enough cyclists that there are many different "scenes" depending on what you are looking for, but many overlap so that you'll almost always have a familiar face at one.

Riding a bike for transportation also lets you feel a little more human getting around your city. You may run into people you know.

Edit: (start by investigating social hobbies)

A couple years ago I bought a used bass and amp (again, craigslist) for cheap, dusted off my old skills, then found some other people on meetup.com who want to play music socially for fun and improvement, but don't have the ambition to actually be in a performing group. It is nice to socialize for couple hours every couple of weeks with new people on a non-programming activity. One of the guys is especially compatible with me, and we've met up a couple of times outside of the band.

The flip side of this is that when you do actively seek out opportunities to share, you can instantly meet a lot of people in one go if you're the one sharing, instead of a spectator.

It does take effort, but opportunities are out there. I went to a "bring your own art" event in SF a couple weeks ago that was a public event on Facebook. I took a photography work I had made. I took a robot I had built to Maker Faire. For tech projects, email event organizers, meetup organizers and ask if you can present at their next event. For art projects consider sharing a unique or interesting story or journey, not just a single piece of art. If you actually do make something cool or you have a good story, you'll be surprised how easy it is to get a few yeses.

When you are the creator/presenter/speaker, you meet people quickly because it's not awkward for others to approach you and ask questions. It's a lot harder to meet people as a mere participant.

Seeking out events you can present or exhibit at is not that easy for everyone. But since you're in Providence, you should be able to find plenty of events an hour away in Boston.

Also, if you have a hard time finding events but you have a critical mass of a few friends in the area, consider hosting an event. It can be as simple as a potluck, which means you basically have to do no work except maybe make 1 dish yourself and clean up afterwards. Let your friends know it's okay to bring +1 or +2. Many times they will. You'll meet a lot of new people that way too.

I think I just got used to it. I was lucky that I inherented a small flat, although in bad condition and location. I score some freelance gigs time to time to keep myself alive. I have tried online communities or friends so to speak but I don't really get it how it's done. I didn't have a problem in real life.

I read HN always every night before I fall asleep. In 2008 or so my show HN made it to first page. I was very happy that say. Genuine happiness. I might have lacked being a human now.

The internet was just getting started then, so that experiment might work out differently now, but it's worth considering how much of our modern isolation is just a matter of choices.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bxat83/people_wh...

  * be resourceful. For example, reach out to old co-workers or people you enjoyed being with and ask them to lunch or coffee
  * go to coffee shops just to be around people
  * go out to a movie
  * use a dating site or app, if for nothing else but to meet and talk with another person

I am in relatively similar situation : I have moved from Europe to SF.

I probably work too much and my main hobbies are movies, video games, books, etc .. all pretty lonely occupations.

Most of the time I don't really mind being alone, not at all, but sometimes it is a painful feeling.

I also have a pretty established routine : -working a lot -working out -watching some movies/playing -sleep

rinse and repeat.

I know I should probably volunteer to some associations doing good.

I do have a girlfriend .. but we are in a long distance relationship, so we can't always be there for each other.

Open to tips in orer to meet new people in San Francisco !

Best of luck!

But on the second point, I'm really not sure that online social networks are just a "surface-level mirage." I met my spouse online, and many of my closest friendships have developed online, by instant message, etc. I don't think the alternative to "online communication" is necessarily that we will all socialize in person. If we got rid of the internet and instead (just for a random example) we were all alone in our houses reading books by ourselves, I think that would be a step back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_stress_inher...

We are also still learning about the gut-brain axis. The human microbiome is inheritable, and many modern practices (infant formula, C-sections, antibiotics, processed foods) having detrimental effects.

What's worse is humans seem to have an instinctive trend of self-isolation in the face of psychological distress, which worsens the condition.

Add the inevitable downstream effects of climate change (economic uncertainty if not another world war)... and, yeah, it's bleak.

People sleeping in their car at the airport to make their current gig(s) possible in the gig economy are already living in the future. Especially now that Uber has a STFU option. And not all gigs involve face to face clients.

This is an easy trap for humans to fall into. "The sky is falling" type stuff.

Humans have faced lots of problems over the millenia, but the reality is that our lives continue to improve as a whole..not get worse.

It's happening already.

• Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US.

• The age-adjusted suicide rate in 2017 was 14.0 per 100,000 individuals.

• In 2017, men died by suicide 3.54x more often than women.

• White males accounted for 69.67% of suicide deaths in 2017.

[0] https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

― Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Industrialized nations mistake comfort and wealth for happiness

Hell, my girlfriend has zero sidehustle and she does just great for herself.

Working all day erryday is a choice you are making. I make that choice because I didn’t move here to coast and I’m okay, even happy, with the tradeoff.

Food for thought :)

The older I get, the more certain I am that people come first. No one sits around in old age wishing they had spent longer hours at the office.

Maybe you should give up that part and have fun instead.

You are the master of your life! Make a block party to make neighbor friends, go to a park on a weekend, take a bus (yes, you can't start a conversation at a bus station if you only drive), travel to different US cities.

Everything but security which, unfortunately, is worth giving up a lot of other things to have.

I'd move to my wife's home country tomorrow if we could live without fear of our child being kidnapped. My wife's uncle was kidnapped and murdered, another aunt and cousins bound in their home by robbers, and another cousin held for a day by a group of illegally armed militiamen from a neighboring country.

Other than that it's paradise!

I've experienced more of this in the U.S., than in the Indian culture I grew up in. Hanging out with friends, having dinner together, inviting new people you don't know to dinner -- are all very much a part of American culture. People in the U.S. quite intentionally go out of their way to make new friends. It's one of things I love about the United States. In Indian culture, people often stick to just family, and a small circle of friends that rarely changes through life. Compared to that, American openness is wonderful.

> You can strike up a conversation with a total stranger at a bus station and it doesn't feel weird and awkward.

Ironically, the U.S. might be one of the only countries where this is common, and quite socially acceptable. Even in New York, I've broken norms, talked to strangers, and made new friends. In many countries, if you try to strike up a conversation with a stranger, you'll likely get a strange look, followed by silence or a curt unfriendly reply. I'm thankful that in general, people in the U.S. are so friendly, and happily willing to talk to and befriend total strangers.

I similarly moved to the west coast. My parents have passed away, and my sister (and her family) still lives on the east coast. I've made myself a family of sorts out of a group of very close friends, but I do feel the lack of family sometimes, especially when I see how close some friends are with their (local) extended family members.

It's something I never expected to have, especially given the small nature of my family while growing up, and yet I still feel like I'm missing out on something.

There is coming a point (it has already passed, in my opinion), where we can no longer justify our purpose for existence as "creating more humans."

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations...

This alone would encourage me to fly with my kids as often as possible.

> The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40

Hrm, I question the circle of people you're surrounded by. Many millennials are struggling to afford the basics, let alone travel or have a family!

This is a contentious and potentially unpopular opinion, but I posit that having children borders on unethical at this point in history. We've wrecked the planet and have growing anti-intellectual culture.

I'm happy you're happy though.

that's a wrong dichotomy. There's no fundamental reason why 35 year olds don't socialize, or why our education system stops at 25, why we have no communal institutions, and so on.

The alternative isn't just between individualism and the family, what is needed is building out communities in ways that gives people the ability to connect in new ways that reflect our changes in work and living arrangements.

As the article mentions the UK has introduced a minister for the problem of loneliness. What we need is to put policies into place that develop new modes of social life and to expand the public sphere.

The nuclear family isn't really that attractive any more for a reason, so just asking to go back isn't really a great idea. People like the freedom that comes with having no or fewer children, being able to move, and being financially independent.

young people go to the cities for high status, high paying jobs to pay off student loans and/or save up for the future in an increasingly uncertain world

competition is extremely high for these jobs, compounded 1000x due to the rise and use of social media among my generation, which always suggests that next thing to buy or that next vacation to go on, either from corporations or your "friends" (it's hard to tell which is which after a while) - get that raise so you can unlock the next tier of stuff you see wealthy people doing

gone are the days of getting an intellectually stimulating and well paying job with IBM/Ford/GE and building your career off it while having a family young, people my age usually stay in a job for 2/3 years then on to the next startup/job/"adventure" (if they have the right degree to get a job in the first place)

then there's a completely separate cohort of people my age who have settled outside the city, gotten married, looking to have kids in low cost of living areas and figure out job stuff as they go (very risky unless you own your own biz or work for a family biz)

dating is a similarly competitive game in the big cities, one that warrants its own 10 page essay per city based on the conversations i've had with single friends in LA/NY/London/SF

the gap between generations is growing more and more pronounced/quicker due to technology grouping similar people together and amplifying their cultures...it takes effort but you need to continuously bridge this gap with those younger than you, otherwise their needs, desires, motivations will be completely alien to you - i almost don't understand the fortnite meme generation, but i make efforts to

most young people are acutely aware of life outside work and money (especially asians/immigrants due to pressure from conservative parents), but it's getting harder and harder to find the middle class/balance between earning enough to have a family comfortably and affording a place to live while keeping your job options healthy/open for whatever BS is coming next down the economic chain

I think we hear about the bad stuff, some flight attendant or passenger complains, and the logical conclusion of a family with a crying baby is booted is the end result. My counter-anecdote is the exact opposite, my fourteen month old daughter cried the majority of our 3.5 hour return flight and she was quietest (not quiet but quietest) was when I was standing and holding her in the middle of the aisle. Any dirty looks, and I scanned for them occasionally, were non-existent (or I missed them and they never vocalized) and most people either had noise-cancelling headphones or just rolled with it. When we apologized for the noise there was a lot of "Oh ours our teenagers now, we've been there, you're ok!"

Some of it maybe the bigger stink they make the longer it all takes, but a lot of it is probably shared communal experiences. If some baby was wailing their lungs off next to me on a plane, I'd roll with it, the parent(s) is having a far tougher time of it then I am.

I know you're just describing your personal impression and don't claim them to be universally true.

But allow me to present some evidence, er, anecdote to the contrary: I have also traveled the world and lived on three continents. I met lots of cool people and was lucky enough to make friends with some of them in all the places that I visited. I never observed the same as you apparently did, namely that they invested themselves in nothing but their career, traveling, parties, etc.

As a matter of fact, coming to think of it, a lot of the people I know (most of them college age) were also from abroad and made sure to stay involved with the family business back home as much as they could. Also, a lot of my friends were actually couples, showing that they cared for more than just work and individual leisure. Some of them got married since.

Of course, differences may be due to a number of reasons. What area of work you're in, for example. What geographical location you're in. And naturally, you probably tend to make friends with people that are to some degree similar in some respect. Also, there's varying degrees of peer pressure to like the same things if you want to be part of the in-crowd (or any crowd you like, really). Oh, and let's not forget: cultural background.

So I don't think you can generalize as much as you did in your post.

Reminds me of this passage from The Brothers Karamazov:

> “I heard exactly the same thing, a long time ago to be sure, from a doctor,” the elder remarked. “He was then an old man, and unquestionably intelligent. He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but with a sorrowful humor. ‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,‘ he said, ‘I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.’”

The speaker goes on to say:

> Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.

I say that when someone having extremely hard time doing something, he/she just doesn't need that something hard enough. Most of the people rarely have hard time eating or drinking or watching interesting movie or spending time with friends.

Before XX century it was extremely hard to live alone, unless one have stable source of income or an inheritance. For lay people family was just a question of survival. Children was the only recipe of aging in dignity.

It is still valid in XXI century, but now there are other ways to live one's life. Forties is not an age of retirement, but a most active age of reaping rewards and even starting a new ventures. There are other means of self realization besides family and children. I don't see anything particularly bad about it.

My interpretation is that we finally have the freedom from cultural norms to really do whatever we please, but with great freedom comes great responsibility, not just to society but to our own long-term selves. Perhaps these people you talk about have chosen poorly, very poorly indeed, with this freedom. Nothing to do but advise the ones who might listen, and build a moat (physical or mental) that can protect you and your loved ones from them when shit hits the fan.

There's also something to be said for averting hookup culture and actually trying to build a relationship as opposed to ejecting at the first sign of inconvenience.

I say both of these things as a twice divorced 40-something that hasn't had kids of his own and deeply regrets it.

This could be selective though. If you're living in expat communities in global hubs, everyone knows people are there for only a short time, so its not worth investing in long term commitment.

A coworker of mine who is in his 30's (PhD in engineering, doing tech work) is thinking he'll move back to the Midwest where his family is after 2-3 more years here (West coast). He loves it here (especially the weather), but all the niceties in culture and weather here don't compensate for the lack of having family and cousins nearby. His kids will grow up there, just as he did.

(Just in case anyone is wondering, he's not white, and so will be moving back to a much less diverse part of the country).

Having experienced both sides, there are definitely down sides to close family ties, but I view family as a wider spectrum. If your relatives are horrible (or way out of sync with your mindset), then it's much worse than the individualist mindset. But if you get along with them, it's way better than anything you can achieve as an individualist.

Source: was homeschooled, starting to homeschool my own children (well, mostly my wife is, but I help where I can).

European cities are very different but we face similar problems. We have parks, you don't need to travel far (I grew up in a large city, now live in a small one right next to it, and have never had a car and never needed one) to get places, most people live in multi-family-homes and overly long commutes are the exception, not the rule.

I do agree with your last sentence though, and maybe it's the individualism that expresses itself more strongly in US cities because they are much younger, and more purpose built.

I honestly think the invention of cars is to blame for the loneliness issues. All the other things like social media are just background noise compared to the invention that made it very incontinent to just casually meet other people.

My wife isn't worried, she believes things will work themselves out somehow.

I don't think people who don't have kids can understand how concerning shift in values and attitudes is and can be for parents.

So, we're a couple that doesn't want to / plan to have children and we've discussed the "getting old" thing before. What I regret about our American society is that it's no longer common to live together as an extended family. Why couldn't he live with his sister (or near her), after you're gone? What about other relatives?

I think it's possible that, in the future, we'll see more communal living situations because I have a feeling there's a lot of GenX and younger people who aren't going to end up having children. Communities can be remade if people make the effort to come back together and live around one another again. I'm thinking of communities like the elderly have in Florida, but maybe people will start living together at a younger age? Just some thoughts I've had.

I've seen the pain and the struggle around this (personally) and I'm hoping it's something that people start taking seriously soon.

I understand disabilities and disorders can hold adult children back, if that isn't the case I'm curious where things went off the rails, as a soon to be first time dad myself. This stuff worries me, that regardless of all the investment and good parenting in the world, that my kid(s) can fail to thrive.

A family member of mine smoked pot and lived in a van a skiied the backtrails for 10 years (!!!) and then poof got his CA way late in life and is not 'caught up' in his career.

Another peer worked in marketing, hated it, went to work stoned. Then one day 'poof' he got serious, was a manager (it was a rapidly growing company), Director then VP within a few years.

Sometimes I think 'guys need a reason', and for many it just comes along.

If your kids are safe, healthy, decent people and not in existential trouble with the law etc., consider yourself fortunate in a way, it could be much worse.

'20's are the new teens' anyhow. 25 is still very young.

This all came about when I was getting married.

This was about 10 years ago now. Fast forward to wife + kids and I did something I never thought I'd do. I moved home to be close to family again.

I'm still fully self reliant but my kids get to grow up near gma and gpa which is amazing.

It wasn't until I entered into the group of my friends with kids that I realized there's a fair amount of isolation there.

Anyway, I followed a similar path. I moved across the country to get away from my family man, and now that I've learned to set boundaries I'm back and happy with our new relationship. Maybe that'll work for you and your family and maybe it wont.

We did have friends who were family where we used to live. The kind of friends you call when you're going into labor and they pick your kid up from daycare after driving for an hour. I miss them more than almost anyone else in the world. So, while you can make it work with family and it might be great, you can also make it work without them. That's just what I chose to do.

This is an often repeated point but I don't see how it has any credence. Most people who attend churches may talk with each other for just a few hours -- and personally I've found most churches don't really foster a socially-healthy atmosphere. And that's fine, that's not the goals of churches, never has been and most likely never will be.

Churches if anything have never played a role in a healthy community -- and to this day if we map church attendance to social ills there's a pretty good correlation between the two: steady church attendance in areas tends to correlate with heavy drug problems, domestic abuse, and suicide.

However you want to dice that up, good or bad, it simply means one thing: church attendance and socially healthy communities probably aren't really related, and if they are, it probably doesn't have the effect you think it does given the available evidence.

I'm 25, and recently started studying at university where most of my peers are 18-20. After getting to know them for a bit, from everything I've gathered most of them have not been in youth groups of any kind (that topic recently came up during lunch), and are also not involved in any other communities at the moment. Also no bands. The contrast to my friends from high school at that age is crazy.

The difference might be more pronounced due to other factors: They are mostly straight A students vs. I was basically the opposite (though my friends did well in school). They mostly grew up in metropolitan areas vs. us in a semi-rural setting.

But even if those are significant factors, that doesn't make the outlook any better, with more and more pressure being put on children to perform well in school and more and more people moving to big cities.

Long term cohabitation is dismissed because it is not marriage.

The idea that historically people (especially women) where UNHAPPILY stuck together because of societal norms is dismissed.

Attributing the cause of the decline of marriage and all the negative effects to the pill strikes me a especially strange. The alternative of forcing people into a family they didn't want because of an unexpected pregnancy doesn't seem better for people's mental well-being.

While they are brought up, the article seems to downplay the decline of the community institutions like the church as you mention. It also seems to downplay economic forces like 24 hour work culture and stagnating wages.

I think there's some truth and good ideas in the article, but I find some of the choices strange.

Though moving around did help me in one thing. Despite being an introvert, it forced me to try to talk to new people.

The studies I'm familiar with didn't mention loneliness, but rather the social responsibility.