Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.
In our actual world the funds saved would find their way to the caregivers but when does that ever happen? Some intermediary will be there capturing most of the value, as is the nature of 21st century America. Companions are rarely off the books highly paid no bennies, much more likely off the books underpaid undocumented immigrants or minimum wage workers hardly able to house and feed themselves much less compassionately care for their wards.
My personal hope is that a UBI leads to real communities where the old and the young have a place in our lives and they stop being seen as problems and as burdens on the middle-aged.
Andrew Yang talks about this a lot in terms of his wife taking care of their children, but the idea equally applies to people taking care of anyone else.
Secondly, it is now often observed that parents and children, in spite of living under the same roof, are interacting less because the parents are staring at their devices, and children get devices, too. Even if people have the time and money to take care of their parents, do they have the interest in socializing?
I don’t think you need to be constantly talking with an elderly parent for regular visits to be beneficial. A short chat, taking care of a few minor issues, and watching a movie together can make a real quality of life difference. It also demonstrates you still care.
UBI alone would strengthen the family unit and reduce external relationships.
I completely agree, but isn't a major motivation behind UBI a lack of job availability due to automation?
People will still work. Whether it's to get a leg up from the baseline or because it's something their passionate about, nothing will stop people from banding together to solve common goals. The current state of work is just a really shitty abstraction over that. I would have thought software engineers of all people would understand that.
If you look at the wealthiest innovation is not what they do with there freetime either.
Innovation requires motivation. Innovation requires resources.
Because they're being thrown into poverty with no way out.
The problem is not ennui.
> If you look at the wealthiest
Yeah sure, but UBI isn't going to make everyone multimillionaires.
You are much more optimistic than I am. On the contrary, I see the shift towards much more automation and "task outsourcing" as a huge factor when it comes to increasing social isolation. We no longer have to lean on our friends, neighbors and even random social acquaintances for help and support, and with all of the various delivery services it's much easier to be a shut-in than in the past.
I'd actually be curious to hear from folks younger than 25 or so: When I was a young adult, helping friends move was a common occurrence. Nobody really liked the task of moving, but it really did build a camaraderie and bonding between friends. These days, though, with the ubiquity of things like Task Rabbit and Thumbtack, it's a lot easier to just pay someone a small amount to help out. I'm curious if young adults these days have a lot fewer "help friends move" experiences because of this.
But you have to value social connections, they don’t come naturally.
In many older couples, the wife is the one who keeps track of everyone's dietary restrictions. Older men often don't really know how to feed themselves properly. It's not their responsibility to keep track of the myriad types of info involved in that.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/the-widowho...
Your stats are an excellent explanation for that statistic. But I can't see how it relates to a gender-based percentage difference in outcomes for the "widowhood effect."
"Often, it’s unrelated to any accident or cardiovascular incident, but sometimes it is related. That can be part of the stress reaction to grief."
"It’s just the difference between men and women and how we’re socialized,” she said. “Connection helps us negotiate old age. Independence does not do us well.”
Social relations, social support network, social contact, all of it is connected with stress management. Traditional gender roles where men prioritize work over their social live is correlated with smaller social network. If the goal is to live a long life with as little stress as possible then prioritizing time with children and spending time building social connections is much better than being at work.
However not being at work puts men at the lower end of the social ladder which also correlate to a smaller social network and increase stress. Social status is one of the bigger factors when predicting stress in both humans and animals alike.
Stress management, and not some concept of "women work", is the likely culprit for why men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after the spouse. The link support it and so do also research which ask why some people live a long life and others don't, popular called successful aging in most of the research. As one researcher described it, stress is about margins. A stressful event occur and the body reacts and the older a person gets the smaller the margins becomes. Meaningful social connections reduces the stress response and thus a person can handle events which otherwise would kill them.
This is one of the insights why Sweden changed the elder care policy of moving old people into care homes. Moving a old person away from a trusted and safe environments induces stress, which has a very deadly result. As far as it possible it is much better to perform elderly care within the environment which results in the lowest amount of stress for the patient, ie the own homes.
In addition, buying groceries, cooking and cleaning is already guarantied through the social safety net provided by the state. By the time this kind of statistics is relevant the state is already taking care of all the so called "women work". It did not change the statistics that more men than women die shortly after their spouse.
However, it is often the start of a conversation, and I also call her on the way to work 2-3 times a week. I think it has really kept her mood up, compared to before we did this. She's 80.
American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that people are alone. Alone in life, alone at their apartment, alone when they struggle, alone when they die. It's to the point where we regard married couples that live a 20 minute drive from anything as not being alone when they really are.
Most adults I know have a relationship with their immediate family that I would regard as acquaintanceship.
Part of this is culture (Americans fetishize a sort of "rugged individualism" where you alone can solve every problem you're faced with or else it's not a real problem) and part of it is civil engineering. You need a car to live nearly everywhere, there's almost no public transit infrastructure, etc.
EDIT: Since this is popular I wanna surface something that people have been saying: it definitely doesn't require being far away physically from others to feel alone. I live in Manhattan and big cities can be extremely alienating depending on the person.
Fighting loneliness requires active effort. You are not going to care one bit if you bought that extra widget or got an extra story in on your sprint later in life. Put time into what matters: people.
(Some went to another country, we haven't heard much of them - distance can still be a barrier and culture in Western Europe is different.)
It's such a hack premise, but this actually happened to me - my mother used to work in a nursing home, and required all of her kids to volunteer there when they were old enough (12 to 21 if you still lived at home). My job, as the rambunctious ADHD youth was to give 'wheelchair rides'. Which was where I would push the elderly around the grounds looking at trees and what-not, and just generally being an audience while they talked.
The one thing that literally everyone I gave a ride to, when the topic inevitably turned to death (it always did, old people are so straight up about it) - the absolute only topic that everyone hit on was that they regretted doing 'x' instead of spending time with 'person y'.
I gave wheelchair rides to poor people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
I gave wheelchair rides to rich people - who regretted not spending more time with their kids because they were busy working or whatever.
And that made me into the 'I will work only 40 if that's what is required of me' beast that I am today. In my area of the US, we have a very 1950's 'work until you can't anymore' sort of mentality; the kind where work defines you.
I have left several positions in my career because they refused to understand that my time at home with family and friends is more important than my time at work, and that my time is so much more important to me than any financial incentive they could offer past my base salary.
America is also _big_, which I think also contributes here. It isn't unusual for family members to move away within America but be far enough that frequent face-to-face interaction isn't possible.
I do not think an average person would be able to live like this. It takes a certain type of driven, focused personality who can dive into their work or hobbies and be happy with their head below water for a while without seeing anyone. I suspect Aristotle and Nietzsche both had these qualities.
Also, isn't loneliness also a major issue in other cultures, like Scandinavian or Japanese cultures?
Often when I hear about the older generation of my family, who immigrated and lived in Brooklyn for years before moving to the "burbs", I think they had good intentions but didn't do any favors for the subsequent generations.
My parents grew up and stones throw away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - a lot even lived in multi family, multi generational homes. When my mom had kids she had a support system that included people from 3 different generations, all willing to lend a hand. Their social lives revolved around interacting with all different family members, and get together were happening almost daily just because of the inherent (lack of) distance between them all.
Now, we all live in the burbs, with long distances between each other. The grandparents see the kids a few times a year and we all have to make concrete plans to have get togethers. Interacting with most extended family is reserved for weddings or funerals and the lack of true support systems takes it toll on all of us.
I could possibly be romanticizing the past, but when compared to the current lifestyle, I truly believe it wasn't for the best.
Most everyone I knew growing up doesn't live where we grew up anymore. They're scattered everywhere. Much of my family that used to live there has moved on too.
I was one of the last to officially leave (around 25) and there wasn't much left in my "hometown" for me when I left, because few people I knew were still nearby anyway.
To be clear, I'm not talking about rural Kansas. That's a story from suburban New Jersey, about an hour outside of NYC.
Cities are also atomized, but not to this extent. They're vibrant, booming, the schools are fine/good, and in my opinion, far worth the cut to house size.
I’m finding modern life requires tribal flexibility
Personally, I find cities to be excessively busy and annoying, full of folks I generally don't want to be around socially. But I'm an introvert, who enjoys being away from the crowds. I personally find suburbs to be a bit too crowded, if I'm honest.
I don't need a big house - I just need big personal space; I prefer my small 1000sq ft house, but I wish it was in the middle of a few acres.
I grew up in a suburb and it was not at all isolating. We had close communities and nearby family. I was friends with kids on my block and had freedom to explore and be independent. I would say technology is what is driving people to isolation.
Edit:
For reference, this [1] was the "big city" to me growing up.
I think not finding things in common with young people isn't abnormal. My childhood was miserable partly BECAUSE of the sameness of it all. I find the suburban vanilla Stepford ways soul-killing. I had no exposure to culture. The internet didn't exist yet. I was ignorant and brainwashed in many ways. I felt out of place and like I was a freak because I didn't believe what I was told was "correct". The city was "bad" and "city folk" were "bad". The family and people in those places still have the same narrow beliefs and I am still "wrong". The people I know that grew up in multicultural cities had so much richer experiences and opportunities to grow and explore their beliefs and ideas without their parents ideologies infecting them as much.
One of the things I find ironic about "experience seeking" is how often people go to places like India or China to have "rich experiences." But people from those places generally would relate much more easily to people like your parents. Circling back to the topic at hand--people in my home country of Bangladesh, where there is a rigid social order and strict indoctrination of children, may suffer from many things, but loneliness is not one of them.
Again, I can't help but notice the irony of your assertion. What is the virtue in not being xenophobic against Bangladeshis, if you're going to condemn the way they structure their communities and raise their children?
I’m from rural East Texas and would agree with that statement 100%.
This probably sounds like a throwaway comment, but it's not; there are big cities that are more friendly and less friendly to kids. An advantage of places like Chicago is that the trendy areas are shared between people with families and single people, where in New York the family-friendly neighborhoods are specialized, like Park Slope.
Nearly any attempt paint American Culture with broad strokes is going to fail.. but using absolute terms like you're doing here A) is wildly inaccurate, and B) negatively portrays a pretty neutral personal ideology. I value individualism for the same reasons I devalue conformity -- I generally want to be left to my own devices to do pretty much whatever I want.
This trope about detrementally fetishizing rugged individualism, which is unbelievably common and doesn't seem to ever be subject to a skeptical eye, is a subtle dig at people who want what I want: To be left alone and to be free.
Also nobody does it all alone, with the possible exception of some rare frontiersman who chops down trees and builds his own house in some wilderness. People want to be left alone, but still use the benefits of society that suit them. People aren't as independent as they imagine but want to feel as such. I live amongst people who happily use services and comforts and infrastructure, but take every opportunity to attack the communal systems that create them as evil and have some idea it should be hundreds of millions of individuals doing what they want how they want.
I seriously doubt it.
I think all modern rich cultures have this. Sweden certainly does. As everyone gets rich enough to get your own house, you end up lonely, as you're no longer naturally interacting with others, since you don't need to.
It can be even problematic to stay in the same city, especially if it's a small city with few opportunities. People tend to migrate for education... And stay where they left.
If someone is interested in doing something, they find a way. The trick is to find the people that are actually interested in being part of your life.
Another good example is programming side projects. How many people are looking to make money on their side project? Rather then just help people? Or how many people only have side projects because they feel like they have to in order to stay competitive in the job market? Probably the vast majority.
We've developed a culture where we fetishize productivity and always making money. People now feel guilty if they're not busy or productive all the time.
People have forgotten the quality of Slack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...
Yes big cities can be alienating. That's why I opted out.
Andrew Yang has even made that part of his policy platform.
https://edition-m.cnn.com/2016/05/24/health/cry-it-out-sleep...
I interact with people normally at work, but outside of work I'm usually alone and it is hard to ignore the negative effects of it on my mental health. If I'm around people after work I generally feel more positive and have less anxiety, but left alone for too long and my anxiety will start to take over. I really miss my younger years where I had close groups of friends and we hung out all the time.
Interesting. I'm the exact opposite. When I have to do things like hang around with people from work for too long, my anxiety increases until I can get away and be alone. I'm not a social recluse, I have a wife and kid, and I enjoy spending time with them, I try to make time for my parents at least weekly, and I enjoy hanging out with my friends. But definitely anxiety builds as my time in contact with other people increases. Alone is often my "happy place".
However, I have a few folks in my close circles that are clear extroverts. They love going out with people after work, always seem to be somewhere doing something talking to someone. They never want to go home because home is "boring."
Also, suicide rates were higher suggesting that mental situation was not all that great.
I recall an experience I had in a large city, a dense capital and no lack of people around. I knocked on an apartment door to meet up with someone but had gotten the number wrong. A lovely old woman answered the door in her nightgown. I apologised for my mistake and asked if she knew where the person I was looking for lived. She did not, but she invited me in for tea. I accepted and even thought she didn't speak English and my command of her language was poor, we had a human interaction that both of us needed. She was so incredibly alone there. You could tell by how she lived in this little 25 square meter flat and how things came pouring out of her to me, this stranger. We had our tea, I had my tour and saw the photos, and politely excused myself as I had "things to do". My life hadn't fully collapsed yet, and while I have always been empathetic and didn't rush out, I can't help but often think that I should have stayed longer, done more for her, gone back. I always intended to go back when I had more time, but shortly after my own life accelerated downhill and I never found the chance. It was many years ago and she was quite elderly then. I imagine she might have passed by now. But I often think of her and that little room and if by some magic I can get back there I will knock on that door. There are lonely people all around us.
Editing to say that schools are now offering summer sports, which I hate, because it means less time in the evenings to relax after work. American culture is too busy. Too many games, too many expectations of parents to commit to this and that. Too many schools begging for money when I already pay taxes. It goes on and on...
Some people need lots of social engagement; I don't. I don't like parties. I do like two or three couples over for a BBQ and beer. It's intimate enough, but controllable enough that there are not competing voices in the background.
At work, I'm fortunate to be able to keep the lights out in my office, draw the blinds and stream my psytrance while working. My colleague I office with likes the same things, so it's a win-win for us. People think we're weird that we like it dark, but I've never worked in an IT office where the lights were preferred. I think this may be an IT thing. I also dearly miss when IT was in the data center and not accessible to the general office staff.
The problem is that for many, there is a trend where social life is hard to obtain for several reasons.
Do you think that could at all be attributed that you are actually more alone now?
What I mean is, most families aren't interacting much with people outside their immediate family, whereas in the past the extended family was around and built a support system for those immediate families. If you had your parents, siblings, cousins, etc... around, you might actually have more time to recharge because child rearing wouldn't exclusively be put on the shoulders of the parents.
The way that our kids are raised now is incredibly different than the way I was raised. Although predominately raised by my parents, my grandparents, aunts, great aunts, etc... all had an influence and played a part in that upbringing due to the geographics of where everyone lived.
Aside from going out and physically isolating yourself, having family around usually doesn’t help.
Now family could help looking after the kids when you take time away, but once your kids can stay aline for a few hours, having more people taking care of them might not help that much (now you’re managing a fleet of care givers, creating a “too many cooks” situation)
Recently I watched the Liam Neeson version of "Cold Pursuit".
In its honesty and humor, both of which I appreciate to no end, Neeson's character's wife opines in grief on their dead son. "Did you even know his favorite movie? All of those hunting trips, what did you talk about?!?"
"... Hunting."
So very true and honest in many respects.
My hunting trips are just day trips. I'm not like some guys I know who fly to Colorado and Alaska, leaving the family behind. I want my sons to be involved, but they are not quite ready. My wife will sit in a deer stand with me and like to shoot, but will not shoot at animals. She likes the resulting venison, however.
Our early ancestors hunted in parties of several to dozens of men, often for safety against predators, both two and four legged. I like the idea the British use, several people driving birds, a good hunt, and cigars and gin and tonics afterwards in the game room. Done it. It's great.
I also don’t think the person you replied to was doing down hunting as a social activity but that the movie makes it a stand in for anything done to avoid that social activity.
We become people who need help once again later in life.
At the same time, I find it easy to project that desire too far. I get less solitude than I would like now, so I feel that need, but I definitely don't want infinite solitude. While I liked living alone, I also remember getting quite lonely at times. It's easy for me to take for granted my social needs because they are being (more than) met right now.
One thing I do find a real challenge is a life that feels both socially full and shallow. With all of the tasks of being a full-time employee and parent today, my social calendar fills up quickly. I can really only see a couple of people a week. Kid birthday parties and other events like that overwhelm it. Because my kids are constantly making new friends, there is this parade of parents that enter and recede from my life. They're all nice people, but over time it gets harder to invest effort into friendship with them because I only see any given one of them every couple of months and even that may fade if our kids stop being friends. Not quite the "single serving friends" of Fight Club, but close.
At the same time, it's hard for me to maintain my own independent friendships on top of those acquaintances because there just isn't that much time. If I've already got a birthday party on Saturday and a playdate on Sunday, it's really hard to enjoy another social activity with my own friends on top of that. Even with people I consider close friends, I sometimes only see them once every couple of months.
I try to be mindful that this phase won't last forever. As my kids get older, they'll do more drop-off parties and eventually will get to their own social functions without me at all. They'll want less of my time until one day I'll wake up and the nest will be empty. I try to enjoy this time for what it is while it lasts.
My biggest worry is that by the time the kids are older and I have more room for my own close friends, those bonds will have withered along with my skills at socializing and I'll fail to reinvigorate them.
My kids sometimes feel too needy. Oftentimes I never get the desired downtime.
My wife got mad at me one day and said "You need to listen to Harry Chapin's Cat's in the Cradle. Then come talk with me." It's a shock to listen to that song, because it's true. It would be easy to end up like that and no one want it.
Each of those ages are incredible and filled with irreplaceable experiences. It's easy to get jaded when you move through them so slowly.
"You know, I feel like having a me day. I'll hand this one off to 60-year-old me."
My 60-year-old self magically time travels in and has a blast with the kids he hasn't seen as children in decades. Meanwhile I get to relax. Then, twenty years from now, when the nest is cold and empty, the memories of my kids' childhood is fading, and I long to feel their little arms wrapped around me, I get zipped back in time to live a whole day of it afresh.
They say youth is wasted on the young. Sometimes it feels like parenting is wasted on young parents too.
It's a very challenging balancing act especially in today's America which expects parents to spend tons of time with their kids.
That was my first thought, as well - I have a wife and two teenaged kids, and they drain absolutely all of my free time. I keep reminding myself that I should be taking advantage and enjoying this time that I have to spend with them because in a few years, they’ll be away and I won’t see them very often, but I do feel like I would like just an hour here and there to pick what channel to watch and not have to debate about it. I wonder if I’ll feel differently when I finally get to that point, though - I am sure that I’m going to miss my kids when they move away, because I already miss having little kids running around the house (even though they sort of drove me crazy at the time then, too).
For me, I think that frustration's the source of my "oh god just drop me on a deserted island with some books and leave me" fantasies. I'd rather be around my kids and enjoying high-quality parent-kid time because it actually is pretty great, but that's so rarely and unpredictably available that the loner route becomes more appealing.
I certainly don’t, I chose the office with no windows on the opposite side the building to everyone else with the lights out and the AC cranked to the max I’m happy.
I have a small led desk lamp so I don’t walk into things and that’s it.
If you ever find such a magical place again, please let me know if they're hiring!
Multi-generational housing is a good solution to this problem of elder isolation and general social isolation, and the friction associated with that can be eased given the amount of land many suburban properties contain.
I have always thought that the turn towards the nuclear family caused many of the social problems that began to appear in the 1960s. I think we should return to more extended family living situations.
I think this is what you see in many rural American towns where only a small elderly population remains, while the young people all moved to cities for economic opportunity.
I lived with my parents during college. It was expected because they couldn't afford to pay for a dorm for me.
I think it delayed my growth.
Caregivers also spend tons of their own money on care giving, plus trips to the doctor, dentist, etc. I already don't get enough down time. I also want to actually retire on time and do what I want to do, not babysit the elderly. I don't want or need the hassle of being a care giver. It's not in my makeup to do that kind of thing. In addition, my children WILL NOT be living at home until they are 30. I will have earned my peace and quiet by then and I want to get it. MY job now is to make my children as independent as possible: learning to cook, mow, change a tire, be literate, good with math, critical thinking, and not rely on others for things that should be done alone. And most importantly, avoid debt like the plague. A man should owe no one if possible. My daughter already plans to pay for her own university by dint of military service. We explained to her that we made it on our own, she will have to do likewise. No parent should go into debt for their child's education. It prolongs the parents ability to retire and enjoy their own golden years.
> In addition, my children WILL NOT be living at home until they are 30 ...
I agree with you here -- independence is the ideal. But for reasons beyond the individual's control this is not always possible: misfortune, ill health, age. The community has a responsibility to take care of those within it who are struck by these things.
The problem is that modern, sedentary, good-living-standard, individualistic life tend to isolate people. That's the current model.
In more ancient times we were all living in communities because the infrastructure forced us to do so. Now the standard is individual housing, kitchen, toilets, bathroom, etc.
I'm okay to have a solitary bedroom for myself, but I wish activities like cooking and food were shared in neighborhoods. Similarly, fences exist for security but they also damage socialization.
Having painful experiences can either help you be more empathetic to others with the same kind of pain, or less. Why not try for more?
I think you're onto something with that.
I'm sure this isn't normal, particularly for extroverts. My wife doesn't understand it at all. But I take after my mom, and I 100% know that she feels fine with a minimum of human interaction. I do feel bad for the people who aren't like her, though.
This is less a binary question than a, can we provide outlets for both ways of thinking, kind of question. Of all the a-la-carte subscriptions many extroverts pay for (Netflix....), I bet they would be willing to pay for a "I don't want to be lonely" service (whatever that looks like).
At Gym1 I talk to my lifting coach but most of the time I'm in my head focused on training, after that at Gym2 I'm just trying to do my accessory work and conditioning and don't talk to anyone other than "hey" back to "hey Ryan" from the staff at the door. I go home and my retired mother that lives with me stays in her room and I go to mine, rinse and repeat.
Not entirely by choice but all my friends are married with kids and have zero free time.
When everyone has their own office or cube space, people aren't nearly as averse to friendly conversations because there is a sense of moderate privacy there. Additionally, you feel comfortable having social interactions in shared spaces, because you know you have the 'safety' of your private or semi-private cube to return to.
My last nightmare of a job was open office with ~100 employees. Even the kitchen was part of the open office, right in the middle, so even during lunch there really was no space where people felt comfortable having any sort of non-work-focused social interaction. I would go weeks without any friendly interactions at all despite being surrounded by people. It got to the point where I would walk out of the office building after 8+ hours onto the busy streets of downtown, and feel alienated/isolated/detached from all of the other people walking around. I was really getting concerned about it because I hadn't made the connection. I mentioned it to my therapist, and she asked me to describe my standard workday, and when I did she said "It's no wonder you feel like this at the end of the day, your working environment sounds like a nightmare."
Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.
Yea the research shows that open offices lower collaboration:
>...Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
That’s the nutty thing about open office. The thing that’s officially supposed to encourage collaboration leads to people sitting there with headphones trying to isolate themselves and rules to not talk to each other.
You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.
On occasion, I would meet 1-on-1 with a coworker in their cube for an extended period of time to discuss some large technical design I wanted to sort out.
A year into this, the company redid the building into open-office space (but where everyone still had their own L-shaped desks and they were only packed maybe 20% more densely than the cubes. Now you never talk with someone at their desk for more than a minute, because while you talk you’re distracting everyone. So even less collaboration.
Second tech job: this one has always been open office. It’s packed much tighter: I have a person four feet to my left and four feet to my right, more in front and more in back. At any moment, one of them might just pipe up a relatively simple question to me (“where do I look in the codebase to find X functionality”): something he could find out on his own, but asking me saves 5-10 minutes. The 5 people around me are on my team. The people behind me are on a different team. There’s conversation across the teams at least hourly, an even split between jokes/banter and technical talk. If you overhear a conversation, you’re totally welcome to insert yourself into it, and doing so is the norm.
In this open office, collaboration is more of a real thing. If someone left feedback on your code change, half the time the discussion on how specifically to address it is done in person without leaving your desk. I’m able to identify topics that are raised frequently and recognize where the real organizational issues are, because it’s all discussed right there in the open. And I’m exposed to a diverse range of ideas and solutions just by choosing to listen. A few times a week I might even pair program with one of my teammates and learn something (vim commands I didn’t know about, a new way to use one of our in-house tools, or just practice).
The difference between these two is stunning. And jarring: I’ve gone about a year now without reaching a state of flow at work. I’m not even sure if half the people I work with have ever experienced it in their life (while programming). But I’m learning to adapt. I tend to work in short bursts of productivity throughout the day which leaves me with more energy at the end than being heads down at my desk for 8 hours. The code I write is far more reliable than what I used to write —— undoubtedly because of the collaboration.
Not all offices of a particular style are equal. I think it’s silly to label open offices as either universally good or universally evil: the ideal work environment depends on the execution, the context of the work, and the individual.
Edit. I also live with my retired mother. For her simply having the option to socialize with me is enough. She knows she can watch a movie with me at home or ask me to go grocery shopping with her.
The issue is that most churches today in America are more or less social clubs. Christianity takes a back seat to less important things. Hence the mega churches in my area bleeding members in favor of small churches that focus on the Gospel, but yet do offer things for families.
I'm not going to the gym for general health or to pump out bicep curls for the ladies, I'm a strength athlete. At gym1 if I'm not actively using a barbell, I'm sitting down trying to recover for the next set. At gym2 I'm trying to get my accessory work and conditioning done so I can get home 12 hours after walking out the door for work so I can have 3 hours before bed to eat/shower/read/watch tv.
The weekends are my free time, a childless couple that lives a half hour late rand I will go get food but that's pretty much down to quarterly because the weekend for them is also their downtime when they have to do everything, including see their families that both live an hour or so away.
The rest of my friends all have kids and the weekends is when their kids have the bulk of their events from birthday parties to sleep overs to sports/dance.
And as far as making new friends, I can't just walk up to strangers in public "Hello fellow biotic doing their groceries, I see you're buying beans, I too eat beans, let us be friends and go do something after we take our groceries home".
Add in the fact I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, where it's extremely abnormal to not be married with kids in your early 20s, and even there I'm the odd man out. Everyone there is busy with family stuff too constantly and the bulk of the social events are youth-centered.
Basically I walk around life getting excited when I think someone is waving to me only to be gut-punched with an operating chainsaw when they were waving to there stranger behind me. Or God help me, when someone does actually say hi or ask me how it's going my brain just starts flashing "error, does not compute" because I've been so long without regular social interaction I forget how to respond.
Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids, I have made it clear to my friends without kids that if you want to hang out, we're headed to the pool or to a park with the kids for the most part. Occasionally we'll have time for adult nights, but because of our geography, childcare is hard to find. Some were okay with that and we're even closer friends now, and my kids call them 'Auntie' or 'Uncle'. Some were not, and we grew apart. Which has to be okay.
The moral of the story is, it's not their fault 100% that they're busy, and if their friendship is important, you should actively work on it. Like an adult. That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds.
It does, probably because it's so asymmetric. Now, I guess it is expected that the one's own kids will be more important than friends. But this "if friendship is important" thing has to go both ways to at least some extent.
That's correct, the problem, in my experience, is that people expect everything to be the same as it was before friend A had a kid. It's called growth and development, and it's healthy for many people.
So expecting them to hang out until 2 am and play video games and drink like you used to is probably not realistic. Maybe, depending on the person.
My point was that if the friendship is important, remember that children aren't a barrier to YOUR needs. That is a human, the care and development of which your friend is personally responsible for. Understand that you may have to hang out with them at a park while their kid plays, rather than in your living room drinking beers.
Does that make sense? I feel like I do a terrible job of explaining myself.
"Hey Michael, so, yeah, I'm just gonna show up to your kid's third grade graduation, what door do I enter the school in to look like a total creep?"
Er... a lot of that stuff is going to be like that, or going to the Children's museum, or a child's park, or family events with extended family, or family vacations/road trips. Kinda creepy to just show up at that stuff "oh hey, fancy that, how funny we ran into each other at Chuck-e-Cheese and I'm here without a kid and I think the police are now here to ask why I'm here as a single adult male with no child".
But why can't you go with a family friend to Chuck-e-Cheese? I'm not saying follow them, obviously. Plan ahead. Why not go with them to hang out while they watch their kids?
Why not accompany the family to the park - if everyone (meaning friend, friend's spouse that sort of thing - not everyone in the park obviously) knows you're there to hang out with your friend, what's the problem? And you get to play with a kid, which can be fun.
It seems from the comments here that solitude is equated with isolation and with loneliness but this is not necessarily the case.
I think the problem for many who are lonely is that they feel, perhaps correctly, that they have no choice, no power to change the situation. For me solitude is a necessity but of course if I cannot choose it but instead have it thrust upon me then it would eventually become a burden.
It's literally bad for you.
Also, having had grandparents who were quite lonely in their later years, a lot of this can probably be attributed to a reluctance to move out of their house and into group living situations specifically for the elderly (such as assisted living). If you are not very mobile and staying in a SFH, it can be a 30m ordeal just to get up and use the landline. And traveling outside your home requires someone else to drive and help you get in/out of the car.
I think maybe it's time we put tech where it belongs: in the damn trunk.
Going to a YC company to fulfill a basic human need is exactly why tech belongs in aforementioned trunk.
Outsourcing elderly care to the gig economy (intentionally to college students) sounds like a step in the wrong direction for providing reliable, safe elderly care. I hope they're able to overcome that challenge.
What do your controls on 'grandkids' look like? Because if I put on my black hat, I could absolutely feed an addiction for pills, valuables to pawn, or just straight up money through that service.
I recognize that I am personally an extrovert so the thought of being alone and isolated like that really bugs me and other people might be introverted and perhaps loneliness and isolation is what suits them.
This Wednesday I wandered around the city playing ukulele at 3 in the morning and I met all kinds of interesting people, everything from this beautiful female graduate student who just wanted to talk about schoastics to someone who wanted me to call his “friend in Florida.”
Just go out and be with people, they’re all lonely too.
Paradoxically, you may find that putting yourself out there a little can be a surprising source of strength.
I don’t have the ability to “just” go out and meet people and strike up a conversation.
But if you wander past my bedroom window at 3am playing an instrument, expect to have something heavy thrown at your head. ;-)