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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

Whatever it is today, I fear the future will be much worse. The most devastating existential consequences of loneliness can take decades to manifest. You feel a little lonely in your day to day life now, but wake up twenty years from now and realize you're socially isolated with no meaningful relationships or community and it's "too late" to make up the lost time. Most dangerous of all may be that online social networks provide participants with the feeling of deep social and community engagement that turns out to be a surface-level mirage beneath which we were just each staring at ourselves in the mirror the entire time.

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Suicide rates have skyrocketed for middle-aged white men in the US. They are now the highest statistic. [0]

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/

> men died by suicide 3.54x more often than women

That's a very interesting statistic considering women attempt suicide 1.2x more than men.

Men tend to use firearms more often when attempting suicide whereas women tend to use medication more often. The latter is easier to treat and ambulances are better equipped for overdoses than gunshots.

Firearms is one possible explanation. An other is that women get treatment more than men, particularly for depression. Treatment greatly reduce the risk of completed suicide.

There is a large uncomfortable area within suicide data. In a study, about half who attempt suicide said it was a cry for help. While we can't ask those that die, we do have data that say that those people usually have both a history of suicide attempts and a lack of treatment for it. This combination has a gendered aspect.

So it can be firearms, the culture around treatment, both, or other aspects which explains why men die by suicide 3.54x more often than women while at the same time women attempt suicide 1.2x more than men.

I think the best action to reduce suicide is with the medical profession. Treatment of drug and alcohol addiction, depression, and those who have attempted suicide in the past. We can try to reduce the number of firearms and adding barriers on bridges and subway platforms, but I have my doubts that areas which implement such action actually see a reduction in completed suicides. At best it gives the health care system a bit more time to provide treatment.

Another observation made by a few clinical physiologists I watch was that men are more likely to have a higher propensity for violence, so when they attempt suicide they are more effective at it. A man is more likely to take the more violent "way-out" and by extension the more lethal approach (rope, gunshot etc.), as opposed to a woman who takes the perceived less violent approach (overdose, suffocation etc.)

Whether that is the truth, my verdict is still out, but the literature seems to point that way.

A plausible theory but it smells a bit like the idea that women care more about how they will look when they are dead so they apply suicide methods that won't deform their face.

My verdict leans heavily that suicide is always a failure in treating the underlying issue. Depending a bit on who you ask the wast majority of suicides is caused by untreated mental or emotional disorders, most commonly depression. A untreated disease which definition is the inability to feel happy and recover from feeling sad seems quite relevant in the context of suicide, and when we know there is a difference in treatment and see a difference in outcomes then that should be our first stop in our logical conclusions.

But we have data that show how people die and what sex they are, and we see that some methods are mostly preferred by men and some methods are mostly prefered by women.

Threads about suicide on HN are suboptimal because most people don't really know what they're talking about and the CDC data is fucking impossible to use (compared to data from the UK).

DanBC, no one is contesting the data in outcomes. The data show a clear difference in how women and men die from suicide.

What is discussed is the cause for it. The theory smells that men are violent thus they choose violent methods and women are vain and thus choose vain methods. It just conveniently fit our gender stereotypes perfectly which should be a rather big red flag for anyone looking at social science with a critical view.

There are several contending theories. To the degree that suicide attempts are a cry for help the difference in how society react towards men and women likely impacts the method of choice. An other theory is convenience where more women get opioids prescriptions then men, while more men are involved in activities with high gun ownership.

There are more. Gender differences in mental health, differences in alcohol consumption, and difference in social support networks are all additional suspects in explaining why we see a gender difference in outcomes and methods.

One of the data point that looks a bit odd is that even if we account of difference in method, men are about 60% more likely to still die in the attempt. As far as I know this difference is still there for methods like self-poisoning which is the most "preferred" method for women. Unless we want to go into the bucket of stereotypes again and simply state that men are more competent with suicide regardless of method it seems like we should entertain the idea of other causes for gender differences.

Just because stereotypes exist, does not invalidate them. Most exist because of a common perception, correct or not. While I agree they should be challenged, they likewise can reveal things as well.

Is that an unreasonable assertion, when society pressures women much more heavily to place importance in their physical appearance?

It reads like kitchen psychology. "Wants to leave a pretty corpse" also seems like the worst possible motive, among many. Access to firearms would be a far easier explanation. Just with in the "pretty corpse" theme, I would consider "does not want those finding her to be shocked for life" to be far more important than vanity.

Huh. Didn't know that. The firearm thing makes a lot of sense.

I left out the statistic that mentioned in 2017, firearms accounted for 50.57% of all suicide deaths. Didn't want to get misconstrued because I support the 2nd amendment and people like to use this fact as ammunition against it.

But now I would like to see a breakdown of that statistic by gender, to see how many firearm-related suicides were men vs women.

Poland has virtually no guns, yet there is 6.7:1 male to female suicide ratio.

But the same thing applies - in Poland men will be chosing more violent methods (such as hanging) while women will be chosing poisoning.

The 4th is protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. I assume you meant the 2nd.

I'm curious what the breakdown is in Japan where suicide rate is high but firearms virtually non-existant. However, I understand suicide statistics from there may be unreliable.

Government stats for Japan are here[1]. While there is a stigma around suicide here (particularly families wanting a death to be 'accidental'), I don't think it's common enough to really affect the statistics.

To quote the source: "For men, the most common method is hanging (首つり, 69.3%), followed by jumping (飛降り, 8.8%), and suffocation by burning charcoal or a similar substance (練炭等, 7.3%), and for women the most common method is hanging (59.8%), followed by jumping (14.2%) and drowning (入水, 6.3%)."

For both sexes, jumping appears to be significantly more common for children under 19 than other groups. Train jumping (飛込み) is much less common than you might think, but is common for the "age undermined" (不詳) group (men 14.3%, women 42.9%), presumably because the remains are hard to identify.

[1] https://www.mhlw.go.jp/wp/hakusyo/jisatsu/18/dl/1-6.pdf (page 30)

Thanks for providing this. It's the sort of info that's virtually impossible to find as someone who doesn't speak Japanese. (I tried and only found sources that weren't official or were overly general like WHO stats.)

These all seem like pretty awful ways to die. I don't even know how you go about drowning yourself. I'm surprised medication isn't more common.

do you happen to know how the gender gap works in Japan?

is it still the case that women try more and men die more? By what ratios?

Wow that's an embarrassing typo. Thanks for catching that.

> I understand suicide statistics from there may be unreliable.

Why is that? I know suicide rates are high there, but isn't there information to glean from it?

My guess would be social stigma.

Well there are two possible conclusions from this:

1- Women can't figure out how to effectively commit suicide and fail at the attempt at a rate that is 400% greater than men because they aren't capable - I don't believe this for a minute.

2- Women engage more in the cry for help attempt, while men go through with it all the way more often.

Personally I'd go with 2, but I'd be open to hearing any other alternative explanations.

The 'women do it wrong because they want to look pretty when dead' or 'women can't figure out violence' (a version of #1) seem like condescending conclusions drawn to avoid having to deal with the probability of #2, which sounds simpler.

Some people 'attempt' suicide to attract attention, compassion, whatever. Obviously, dying is not in their plans.

I read once that women tend to do it for attention; like a cry for help in ways likely to fail such as pills, wrist cuts etc.

Men to do it to end their own existence and choose things like hanging, gunshot, jumping off a bridge etc.

Are you assuming that all those suicides are linked to loneliness? What about people with money issues, incurable diseases, mental conditions, etc?

Why would I assume that 100% of suicides are linked to loneliness?

What bearing does that have on whether or not loneliness is a contributing factor to overall depression in the US?

Often life issues are linked to depression so I'd argue yes indeed.

> Whatever it is today, I fear the future will be much worse.

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.

Have you heard about transgenerational stress inheritance?

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.

I agree with your first point — like other structural problems, loneliness adds up over time.

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.

Yes on the second point, I think there's likely a distribution - perhaps 20% of participants use it as a helpful tool and 80% use it as a harmful crutch. I don't know what the actual ratio would be, but anecdotally I know quite a few young people in the latter group for whom many casual relationships seem to have replaced fewer serious ones.

I think the key is how social networks are used. You notably met your spouse online, which means at some point things presumably transitioned to an offline relationship which can't be terminated just by hitting a block button. Online networks can be great ways to meet new people, but there's ample evidence which suggests that having a purely digital social life is bad for mental health.

If we look at Tinder, there was a study of millennial users a while back which found that about 70% of them had never met anyone through it and didn't intend to. Moreover Tinder has economic incentives to keep you on their platform, swiping, texting, paying subscription fees, and viewing ads, all things you stop doing when you meet people and enter into a committed relationship.

Most social networks unfortunately follow this model; they have monetary incentives to keep you as engaged as possible in their all digital, all the time lifestyle, rather than unplugging and physically sharing space with other humans.

Healthier business models can certainly be imagined and maybe they'll even be implemented someday, but they aren't prevalent right now.

The opposite over here. Met less than a dozen at most of people exclusively through various online interactions. Use various online media and platforms only to sustain existing relationships and even this not always works. Dating and social networking applications from the FB platform are so full of attention absorbing people, inflencers, and similar that I have quit these long time ago.

Can't agree more with this. Social media apps kind of force people to post(show off) about their lives constantly; with people feeling the need to broadcast even trivial things in their life like a morning coffee. Things like stories makes it even worse as people viewing/commenting on stories gives you that dopamine fix throughout the day and you crave for more of the same by constantly posting.

I like the idea of these platforms for content creators like photographers, athletes etc. but overall I see a lot more negative than positive for common users.

Online dating apps are the worst and I even found myself getting sucked into the whole attention thing. I quit it when I realized a lot of women I was talking to/went on dates, was just to get the ego boost. It was very unhealthy for me and definitely not fair for the other person.

> Whatever it is today, I fear the future will be much worse.

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.

On the other hand, we're now facing situations that we've never faced before, both as a species and as individuals. Increasingly, we're moving towards a future where you will never need to leave your home or interact with anyone. Netflix, and Amazon deliveries. Self-driving cars. Kids will eventually get their education online. Virtual reality is under active development.

Then there's AI, and sex robots. Why bother with a real boyfriend/girlfriend when you can talk to your phone and have an artificial companion? Real humans have their own wants and needs and may not do what you want. Worse, they might leave you. Your robot girlfriend on the other hand, you could have endless conversations with her in which she tells you exactly what you want to hear and never challenges you.

That's far-fetched, you say. In the near term, I tried Tinder and it's pretty addictive. An endless stream of new people I can meet. Most of them want nothing serious though. They don't even want to sleep with you more than once or twice for the most part. It's all about novelty-seeking. It seems to me like increasingly few people want a sustained relationship. Breakups hurt, so let's never risk having one, a constant stream of lovers is emotionally safer in a way, I suppose, but I can tell you it definitely leaves me feeling lonely.

> Humans have faced lots of problems over the millenia, but the reality is that our lives continue to improve as a whole

That's untrue. Human civilizations tend to go through cycles. They rise, eventually stagnate, and then decline over the span of hundreds of years. The Akkadians, the Mycenaeans, the Romans, and the Maya all collapsed and the lives of people living in those empires got worse, often for a very long time.

It's reasonable to think that a similar type of decline is happening in the west today.

I think comparing modern day civilization to the rise and fall of the Roman empire is a mistake, particularly European civilization. We learned our lesson. We’re not building empires, not waging expensive wars, not succumbing to armed revolution. People are for the time being mostly happy and prosperous.

That isn’t to say we don’t face challenges, but they’re fundamentally different from those of the empires of old. Something changed with true global markets, and mutually assured destruction.

I'm using ancient empires as an example because pretty much everyone agrees on what happened in ancient history. It's not a controversial / political issue to talk about Rome falling because nobody who was involved in those empires is alive today.

> We learned our lesson. We’re not building empires, not waging expensive wars

I don't know where you live, but here in America we've been at war with various Middle-Eastern nations for the last 2 decades. About 90% of the history of our nation has been spent involved in some kind of a war. Those are expensive wars too. We've spent trillions on Afghanistan alone. We have around 800 formal military bases in 80 foreign countries.

I think that we are far more imperialistic than the Romans, even though our culture doesn't acknowledge it.

> global markets, and mutually assured destruction

Yeah, we have better technology too and a very different financial system. However, this hasn't saved us from expressing many of the same symptoms that ancient collapsing empires had... Especially the social issues that this article talks about.

> 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.

I think this is no longer true. Life expectancy is actually on the decline in developed countries, driven by (among other factors) the loneliness epidemic described in this article.

You can argue over 5,000 years or something things have improved, sure, but in the present day there's a strong argument that quality of life is getting worse.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the reason they continue to improve, is because of our fear that it won't?

A little fear, and skepticism of the future, is a good thing.

> but the reality is that our lives continue to improve as a whole..not get worse.

This is true for some, not others.

"as a whole"

Lookup steven pinker. The short of it is even if there are certain things that seem like a big problem, overall right now is the greatest time to be alive in human history, and in 10 years, or 20 years, or 30 years the same is likely to be true.

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