Senior Citizens Struggle with Suicide as Loneliness and Isolation Set In
npr.org
npr.org
With current societal trends, I suspect that human interaction and emotional labor will become quantified and decoupled from the health care sector. A large fraction of the population - from children, to teens, working adults and the elderly - need more face to face interaction. Volunteer organizations, social clubs and other forms of physical 'social infrastructure' (parks, libraries) need additional funding to help fill the gap in so many of our lives.
He talks at length how he was struck by American's social connections. Everyone was in at least one social club. Organized for every purpose conceivable. Some were purely social, others were for some political advocacy. One huge difference between this and the medieval guilds is these associations weren't (near as I can tell) exclusive. People might belong to several.
It sounded a bit ... intense, but I do think we've lost something in the intervening centuries
One aspect of the problem is face to face interactions can be tedious and boring. E.g. if you have a particular interest, you can easily find a virtual community with people from all over the world, but you may not be able to find people close to you.
If that's the case then you may think you'll go to some local organized event for more face time with people, but if you are not interested in that activity then you'll just hang around bored.
That's why virtual connections are so rewarding, because you can easily find people with similar interests, and also you can be there whenever you feel like it, unlike in real life when you can't just leave the group for several hours, returning when you are in the mood, like you can do with an internet forum.
A generation or two ago, family was everything. Today, less so. My grandparent's entire social circle was their family, children and grandchildren. My mother was half and half. My entire social circle is made out of people I met through speciality interests and made friends with (board games, videogames, engineering meetups, etc).
I'm honestly at capacity: I could not really afford to keep touch with any more people than I actually do. But unlike family, those people are "replaceable". Don't read this as "disposable". Rather, with family, if they move away or die, you can't (easily) get more. With friends though, you always can.
If you have extensive channels to tap for to meet more people and potential friends, you'll never be lonely against your will. The new generation is more and more that way, and there's a clash with the old one. Once the majority's like that though, it won't be an issue. The old people 30-40 years from now will be playing MMORPGs, board games and going to Pax together when they need to see friends. It's already happening.
If the only thing you live for is going out to the local bar's happy hours with the bros, yeah, you probably will have some social issues later down the road.
Then, design a type of self-governing community 'constitution' that would direct operation of the community by the community. An expanded home owners association of sorts.
The community would be funded by the social security income of the residents. All residents who are still able work in some capacity to offset the costs of operation. Those who are no longer able to work would still remain and be assisted by other members and skilled nurses.
Professional services such as legal and counseling can be provided on site. Perhaps add a medication dispensary.
A single community could have, I don't know, 1,000 people? The average social security benefit in 2019 is $1,461. This would yield a $17,500,000 annual budget for the community to operate [3].
This is a similar concept as a Kibbutz, which works as an organizing approach in Israel [1]. One difference is that this community would be primarily funded by social security receipts, rather than industrial or business activities. Many costs of operation can be offset by growing their own food, making their own beer and wine, doing their own maintenance, managing the finances using standard corporate control policies.
Such an arrangement would have all the opportunities that seniors need: Social engagement, valued work, friendships, privacy when they want it, people watching out for each other, a feeling of contributing.
More importantly, it would be available to seniors who hit retirement with no wealth, and no income other than their social security check. There are 25 million Americans in this situation today [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
[2] https://www.ncoa.org/news/resources-for-reporters/get-the-fa...
[3] https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...
You cannot force people to like something: for any initiative to be successful long term, it has to be accepted naturally and organically.
What you are proposing, your idea of a community, counseling, engagement, friendships are very good and a natural way of living life - that's how it used to be forever and still remains to this day, across most of the world where people live truly fulfilling and meaningful lives.
Except mostly for the U.S. and the countries that try to emulate it.
I wrote in some details about the challenge, the U.S. faces, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557757
Communities arise spontaneously when a group of people find themselves together with a common purpose, common values, common moment in time, or they just enjoy each others' company. If those elements aren't present, you just have a bunch of individuals sharing space. If they are, a small group forms, they invite others who share their values, and the community grows organically. The physical plan and organization can affect whether a community develops, but nearly all interventions appear to be negative. You can kill community, but only its members can grow it.
Lots and lots of people have tried to engineer community, from everyone who failed at building a Web 2.0 social-networking startup to colleges that manipulate their housing & dining arrangements to apartment complexes with "community rooms" and scheduled events to the huge planned Chinese & Soviet megacities that were supposed to house millions but basically got nobody.
Community always starts with individual humans, authentic emotions, and a time and place. A lot of people think that by supplying the time & place they'll get the community, but it doesn't work that way. People and emotions come first.
Matrix is the result of paperclip optimization process on a retirement home concept.
If the community voted to sell at any point, then I suppose yes, they could wind up in The Matrix. Though, most of them saw the movies, so I’d guess they’d know to void that fate.
2) Helping others is another thing that is incredibly rewarding, mentally at least.
There was a man at the church I grew up in who was seriously disabled in an industrial accident who volunteered 40 hours a week at the local library. Similarly my grandmother volunteered at a hospital into her 90s. In her case it actually saved her life when she had an aortic aneurysm that almost certainly would have killed her if she hadn't already been at the hospital when it happened!
Even with the three other things you mentioned, not feeling like a contributor to society must be really hard.
Might have to get a niece or nephew to crawl behind a desk to plug in the odd dongle, I suppose. Whippersnappers.
I would find those videos fascinating. You might be able to set up an AMA-style thing where people ask questions about what he did, how he did it, why things were done in that way.
Do you have anything similar to U3A where he is? It's a nice way to meet other people and keep your brain ticking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_the_Third_Age
I will look into U3A and similar options locally, thanks for the idea!
It's honestly a very good way to keep your loved ones updated on your life and deliver some joy to their day. From experience, phone calls with my grandma before she passed away were much more interesting once she started getting regular photos too because we had new topics to talk about each time.
Want to be up front that I have no financial incentive to post this and am not involved with the product at all apart from helping to build the initial prototype. Just a proud of younger brother and happy customer.
You grow a community. Your community is what you make of it
I wrote in some details about the challenge, the U.S. faces, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557757
It's not "my" link. It's a hyperlink to a comment that I made here elsewhere that I think a person might like.
Are you upset that I'm trying to hyperlink to a comment that I made here elsewhere that I feel the person I responded to might find interesting?
Or are you upset that the text of the link itself is too long?
Or is your concern that the comment I hyperlinked to is irrelevant?
I would like the feedback of the person whose response resonated with me and thus placed the link there.
I don't like repeating myself over and over again. I prefer not having fragmented conversations if it can be helped.
Hyperlinking is the killer feature of the web, I think, so I use it.
How would you go about this yourself?
The rate is high, but the actual numbers are very low, because there aren't many people over the age of 85.
This is an ongoing tragedy, but not because the rate is high. It's because suicide is mostly preventable, and many of these people will be in closer contact with health care providers. It seems like there are years and years where action could be taken.
I can't speak to the US's approach to suicide prevention (other than to say it appears mostly incoherent from outside) but they should be paying some attention to depression, social isolation, and suicidal thinking in older people, and I'd be surprised if this was absent from the strategies. But they will be putting it in context: not many people over the age of 85 die by suicide. Thousands and thousands of people between the ages of 25 - 50 die by suicide.
So, from what I can tell over the age of 80 there were about 2500 deaths by suicide in 2017. For the ages 45-49 it was over 4000 people. For 50-54 it was over 4000 people. And for 55-59 it was nearly 4500 people.
One of the problems with suicide articles being posted to HN is that most people here have no idea how suicide is defined across the US, nor how it varies by counties and states. I certainly don't, and it makes talking about the data really hard.
I'm not personally all-in on IRAs, but it seems like an accepted strategy.
Like over 75% of all full time workers in America. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck you're much better off than the vast majority of the nation.
The median American has around $10k in savings and 30% of us have less than $1000. The median savings for people of retirement age is a mere $100k, which isn’t enough to live on for more than a few years in most cities. I’m not sure how self-funded retirement is really expected to work.
All of the people I know who are comfortably retired are on old school defined-benefit pensions. AFAIK 401k-dependent retirees have not yet hit critical mass, so we haven’t seen the financial catastrophe that may be coming.
The author was horrified when he found out that employers were then dropping their plans and moving employees to 401k-only.
That should tell you all you need to know.
There are end of life issues beyond languishing in retirement (or a lack thereof) and loneliness. No matter how much money you save or how well your physical body holds up, eventually your mind will dim. If you're lucky you'll just slowly fade away in pain that's really only obvious to those close to you, if you're not you'll go the way of the late Sir Michael Atiyah.
At least for me, spending time with people in the final stages of their lives has made me believe that euthanasia may very well be the more humane way to pass. The thing that was the actual person is very often long gone by the time their body ceases operations.
https://twitter.com/Drmarkredmond/status/1155399943831597056...
https://twitter.com/Glos_CareNHS/status/1079757130431893504?...
It's not a financial thing - I am generally quite frugal, have built up decent investments, and don't think I'll ever have to worry about food/shelter/etc. I am citizen of a country that provides free healthcare, so that's one worry off my mind as well.
But the past year or so, I have seen my 93 year old grandmother slowly lose all of her mental capacities and with it any trace of a personality. Her life now is spent in a barely conscious/awake state, and she can't even recognize those who gave her the most joy when she was younger.
Who would want 5, 10, 15 years of this? Of course I'd rather die peacefully in my sleep after a long day filled with things I loved doing, but that's not the case for many. Medical science has advanced to the point where we can take care of the human body way beyond what the human mind can follow.
In the years after my grandfather's death, while my grandmother's mental decline was beginning and she slowly became aware of it, she said that her only wish was that God would take her then. She lives in a country where legal assisted suicide is not a thing.
If I ever find myself in a similar situation (something not unlikely - people in my Mediterranean family tend to live well into their 80s and 90s), I hope I have the clarity of mind to end it on my own terms.
An easy thing to say when it is still some distant future event.
Looming large is the idea that healthcare costs can burn down an entire lifetime of toil, saving, and planning in a matter of months. Some people would prefer to leave something of value to their survivors, rather than give everything that's left to their last physician, and then be a charity case or family burden for all their remaining days.
Gen X and Millennial cohorts are even less secure than Boomers financially as they age, so the problem will only grow worse. If you have a tiny nest egg, and a fixed income, it doesn't take much math to calculate the amount of time one can afford to continue to live, given a certain expense profile. When the choices come down to the number of additional weeks you can eke out by switching from Spam to store-brand cat food, it may also become attractive to look into eating a nice steak dinner, saving the last big chunk of meat to be aspirated, so your survivors don't know, for certain, that you committed suicide.
If you were staring down the barrel of a life where nothing joyful or worthwhile will ever happen to you again, and every day will be slightly worse than the last, and is marked only by the angle of the shadows and the color of the pills, with no hope of reversal, I can't reasonably argue against suicide. In that sense, denying the methods and opportunities for suicide without addressing the root causes of motive, as the facility is paid for every day the person lives, seems a bit like torture for profit.
I have personally changed domicile cities four times in my career, looking for gainful employment, and each time I came away with fewer people that would even notice if I die this evening. I expect that my children will soon leave me, hopefully to find work that allows them to support themselves, and if I don't die first, I will one day lose my spouse as well. I see no way to avoid this. I can't afford now to worry about whether I will be lonely later.
My lack of lifetime financial security has translated into a smaller social support network of friends, and has definitely resulted in choosing to have fewer children. And it has reduced the amount of time I can spend renewing family relationships. My parents see less of me when I am 400 miles away than they did when I was 150 miles away. I'm certainly not alleviating their loneliness. If either committed suicide, I'm not certain how I would even find out about it.
In Western cultures, people have become isolated and atomized - by trends such as technology, changing social norms (and family structures), diversification of demographics, and the gradual decline of social structures like religion - as a result, people feel more lonely and feel as if they have less support or purpose.
It seems as if people are more genuinely kind in places that are remote and not densely populated. Folks in cities have so many interactions on daily basis and see so many people (some of those people in dire situations, like homeless people or drug addicts) that they seem to become almost numb to it. If you fell on the sidewalk in New York City, how many people would step over you and how many people would offer to help you up and/or see if you're okay? Would this change depending on the age of the person who fell?
I have a grandfather who is old enough to remember betting with friends on Nazi battles with the Soviets that were broadcast over the radio (details of the battles and the progression). So much has changed since he was a young man - I imagine it's startling and quite unsettling for older people. The rate of change seems now faster than it's ever been and they certainly can't keep up with it. I've talked with older people that simply feel like for this reason, among many others, they've been left behind and forgotten about. This could be a possible contributor to elderly suicide rates as well.
There needs to be a third place# where it's expected to have polite conversation and interactions that can lead to "being social".
In smaller communities maybe that's a town square or a park between things, but that just doesn't scale and can't cope with decentralization (which is one of the driving forces behind the tech revolution).
I don't really have an answer, but I do know that actual civic planning a re-organizing society so that we actually move towards having more free time and less "work time" will be beneficial to this and many other problems.
Well, grow a community. Your community is what you make of it!
The community you need might not thrive right now where you live, so look around and move to where you find real genuine happiness
I wrote in some details about the challenge, the U.S. faces, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557757
As boomers age it'll get worse.
Yet another reason we need to redesign our cities.
This won't change until/unless civic participation in government increases.
Home builders making individual houses and possibly therapists and pharma making anti depression pills. Did I miss any?
>Why is this a problem now, rather than say, 50 years ago?
People shared bedrooms, went to communal bath houses for example and there was a stronger family unit most likely due to societal customs.
The state of Florida used a simple hack to solve this problem. They just let 'em keep driving no matter what.
Driving through my granny's subdivision is like a game of bumper cars lol.
Small (walk-up-sized) apartment buildings and co-housing arrangements seem to be some of the best for striking a balance between meddling and isolation.
My entire life I have heard the excuses, but it boils down to the reason that most other things here that are wrong...are wrong...because individualism is seen as proper and better than social systems of all types.
However, driving my car in Toronto is so, so much nicer than even the best public transit I've experienced (Hong Kong or Tokyo). I felt a decent amount of friction going places because "ugggh, I have to take this line and switch lines there and then walk and oh, btw, it's raining and 33 degrees celsius outside".
They've introduced a novel banking scheme in which retired care volunteers “deposit” hours worked looking after elderly people. In return they can use any time saved up for their own care provision later in life.
Not to mention the psychological benefits that might come from a healthier image of dying for young people.
She requires 24/7 caretaking and most conversations with her end with "I don't know why the lord hasn't taken me yet". She's very physically weak and struggles to just walk around the house, etc.
This has been more or less her state for the past 15 years. Despite the best efforts of the family she is 95 and ready to go and not sure what else we can do.
In 2016, people over 55 years old accounted for 56% of healthcare spending even though they make up 29% of the population [1]. If you allow for an assisted suicide option, you will give this population another option instead of healthcare. Right now, when they get sick, their only option is to engage with the healthcare industry. Instead of grandpa going for his third triple bypass, he will opt for suicide. The doctors and nurses will not get to perform that operation. The hospital will not get to loot grandpa's savings. The insurance companies will not get to bill the hospital.
Old people are the lifeblood of the health care industry. Not only that, but terminally ill patients as well! If you let them kill themselves, that entire industry dies too. They will not let this happen. They will argue for morality but behind the scenes what they're arguing for is their bottom line.
[1] - https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
To take it a bit farther, why wait for them to decide to go themselves - some of these people don't have a lot of get-up-and-go in the first place, maybe they just need a little helping hand. Why not off those who are _demonstrably_ providing little value to {others, the state, the corporation}?
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In case you don't do sarcasm, this is how we wound up with Nazi Germany's death camps. They were (from the Nazi's perspective) humane solutions to the problems of untermensch polluting the gene pool. s/gene pool/society's emotive context/g.
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Life is worth living. No matter how worthless you feel, no matter how how alone you seem. You are not alone. You are not worthless. You Are Loved. [1]
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Left-Tell-Discovering-Rwandan-Holocau...
Life is generally worth living. You can have loving family. But you can also be doing nothing but waiting to die in a retirement home away from friends and family, in pain and hopped up on drugs.
It’s really not an empathetic thing to assert that people who are comfortable with the end of their life must believe they are not loved. Ending your life does not have to come from grief. It is BETTER to have acceptance and die than to die alone in fear. It is BETTER if people talk about this difficult subject rather than stave it off as long as possible. People will be happier if they can do this.
If your doctor tells you that you’re going to have an uncomfortable 3 years, it may make sense to you to just say no thanks and have an honest good bye with your family, saving you and them from the uncomfort to come.
It is ok to die. Even without (but for 99% of people only with) medical circumstances.
Dying is the one part of life we are guaranteed - I absolutely agree with you that it is okay to die. I also agree that you don't need to take extraordinary means to preserve your life - you don't have to take the chemotherapy, for example, or have your heart kept active after all other vital signs have ceased.
I also know that our lives our not our own. We do not choose to pick them up and we may not choose to lay them down ourselves. People are happier when they accept this (I assert, as an _ad contra_ to your assertion).
Why do you say that "for 99% of people only with medical circumstances is it okay to die"? Is it just that you think most people _will not_ choose death? Or that they _should not_ choose death?
I think it depends on how you view the importance of your feelings. Dying of a heart attack on the toilet is pretty common (I think?) and probable majorly sucks. But... you also die immediately after so you don’t really dwell on it. Conversely dying peacefully surrounded by friends and family with a celebration of your life is pretty cool. One could argue that the moment of death doesn’t matter because it’s shortish and final, or you could argue that your final thoughts are going to be important to you and thus desire for them to be controlled. I’m going to bet that while people generally want to maximize time alive, they also like the idea of a warm and peaceful exit- and would value that over the assumption that you will have more days of life but a sudden and frightening exit.
And while I think your point of view is also reasonable, my contention is that nobody has the ability to pick my point of view.
> Why do you say that "for 99% of people only with medical circumstances is it okay to die"? Is it just that you think most people _will not_ choose death? Or that they _should not_ choose death?
I’m saying 99% of people would probably not choose to end their life without a medical problem as the alternative. But there’s nothing saying you can’t decide you’ve had enough while healthy. Differentiating this from impulsive decisions made in stress and grief.
Edit: I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. This seems like a good post.
Completely agree. The question is, "should the point of view matter"? In general, in morals, we distinguish between that which is acceptable to have differing opinions on (having red shades in your bedroom) and that which it is _not_ acceptable to have a differing opinion on (killing Gypsies because they are Gypsies). Morally neutral vs. morally charged.
You seem to be of the opinion that killing oneself is a morally charged act, but that it can be morally good. I agree with you that it is morally charged. I hold that it is always morally evil. We do not receive our life freely and we may not let it go freely. It is ours to put in the service of others, even at the possible expense of it, but not to reject.
Suicide's main issue is the sudden and unexpectedness of it all for those that remain. We like to say that there is help, that we need to talk, but every time someone like me reaches out, the ones that espouse the most of saying life is worth living, that there's someone willing to listen...are often the ones that swiftly step back when they realize that execution is more costly then rhetoric. If you're lucky you find only silence, if unlucky, becoming ostracized from people that cannot or do not want to understand.
A medically program would help would negate this. Being able to say definitively that you're going to kill yourself with an open way of doing it means that at least the family has some time to prepare themselves. And perhaps bring some comfort in a person's last minutes; the moment of dying is terrifying, even against the greater fear of living.
And as to your last point... it's a nice thought. But for many that simply is not true. There are people's who's lives have no value, even to their family. There are people that die without any to mourn them, even among the very young. You never see them because they are often invisible unless you look carefully; the one looking tiredly out the window of the bus, or the one shuffling down a street asking for change. And the systems that collects the unmourned dead is rarely ever thought of by the living.
Pressure that if you're not worth 7 figures or famous is poisonous...
I guess the question I have is how have suicide rates changed over the past century.
I'm an early (the term I sometimes see is elder) millennial with excellent household income for my area, but if I ever retire it'll either be on a meager income or very late, because I had kids. Took me from probably a comfortable, but not extravagant, early retirement or a pretty good "normal"-timed retirement to maybe-never retirement. Those with lower income (so, most) aren't even getting that choice. Kids and lifelong near-poverty and debt struggles, or maybe, maybe a so-so retirement more or less on time, but no kids.
Generally trending upwards after 2000. Interestingly when split by race, Black, Asian and Hispanics are at a much lower rate than White and American Indian. I know in Asian and Hispanics (and probably Black) households it is common for multiple generations to live and take care of each other.
45-54 seems like the age group that's burdened most with their future and the consequences of their life choices catching up to them.
That's a bit harsh. If you are a post baby boomer, you're in the minority if you think you can retire comfortably. I frankly don't see how the majority of gen-x/millennials can retire - except to not have kids and save >50% of our salary, and pray the stock market doesn't blow up.
Here's my hypothesis - the work life "balance" in the U.S. is incredibly messed up - like real bad.
The assumption most people make is "Let's work real hard while we are young so we have all the money we need when we are older. We will have fun then".
So right out of college, with six figures in debt, people are working 40+ hours/week (typically 60+ hours/week), working weekends without blinking an eye.
Everyone's doing it, it's the norm, so what's wrong with doing what everyone is doing.
No one has time to make meaningful relationships.
Most people spend less than 3 years at a job, so what's the point anyways. You can't get a good salary hike without quitting your existing and joining a new company.
That model bleeds into one's personal life as well - people are so busy working hard that they miss the opportunities to build a meaningful relationship with their spouse and children.
Guilt sets in so the spouse and children get showered with expensive gifts and vacations but they have nothing much to talk about during those vacations either so they spend most of their time visiting random places, taking tons of photos, posting them on social and handling the barrage of comments they get for those photos.
The emptiness does not resolve though - and when it gets intolerable the spouses file for divorce.
Maybe it will work out with someone else.
Once they retire - they have two big problems:
1. yes, they do have money, but don't know what to do with it
2. they also don't know what to do with the free hours they now have available!
As a result, they hand over their money to fund managers who proceed to loose all or most of that money because they are sure they can beat the market.
In the meantime, they have been so frigging busy most of their adult life with the one thing they did for their employers that they did not develop social skills (outside the fake "professional" facade) or general skills - and everyone's so fake that it gets down under your skin because deep inside you can feel the fakeness so you hesitate to make more social ties.
With the money depleted and being bored out of their minds, what's the next step?
It's easy to blame everyone else for this, but the reality is the time is past for deep introspection.
Money and consumption is put above relationships and growth. (I almost said "experiences" but, in my opinion, people use that term to justify shallow, expensive pursuits like traveling so they can show off how great their lives are. I think experience is valuable, particular leaving your comfort zone so that you can adapt, learn and grow.) Instead of leaning on relationships to provide for each other, and enduring hardships together, we want to individually achieve for ourselves, and remove any sense of inconvenience or boredom from our lives.
I completely understand and agree with the spirit of your response but here's my pedantic take on the specific ways you put it because I have heard it many times before and I do feel being pedantic about these will force you to introspect further.
I feel deeply about this and have seen not only people's life change for the better when they go down this path of introspection, but people around them, so bear with me.
> If I understand you correctly, we don't have our priorities straight.
We are all very smart people. We do have our priorities straight.
The issue seems to be that these are extremely short term priorities that are, most of the time counter productive for the wellbeing of a person over a span of 50 or so years.
Its like getting really good and efficient at digging your own grave.
You see, you're going to die eventually, so why not work hard at ensuring that your final resting place is as nice and comfortable as you can possibly make it?
> Money and consumption is put above relationships and growth
Of course and it's good for the economy. Think about it - without money and consumption, we would be in deep recession!
So what exactly are we missing?
> to justify shallow, expensive pursuits like traveling so they can show off how great their lives are
Travelling is extremely valuable and educational. It also means different things to different people.
However, I believe, the mainstream interpretation of travelling seems to be a vacuous method of distraction from the emptiness of the regular grind.
Now, at best, I think that's extremely sad and at worst, can force someone deeper into depression.
> Instead of leaning on relationships to provide for each other, and enduring hardships together, we want to individually achieve for ourselves, and remove any sense of inconvenience or boredom from our lives.
Sorry this comment is already very large but without being more pedantic, you have made excellent points.
The last bit is simply brilliant.
Inconvenience is such a great teacher and enabler!
You're either a successful entrepreneur or well on your way to being one. I really enjoyed this discussion and you have added a lot for me to think about.
Thank you!
Or not. Maybe we're fucked.
By the way, the last time I ran the numbers only about 10% of HN users turned out to be in the Bay Area.
That last bit is a pretty interesting stat, though.
> Maybe this weird era of SV-type a-social-life-and-sleep-is-for-pussies work mentality is actually starting the begin of its end. > Or not. Maybe we're fucked
Well, we are very smart here. We have all worked through challenges, adversity and naysayers and landed on the top.
However, we still have a long way to go.
We still have to ask ourselves - so what's next?
Each of us run FIRE simulations on our wealth, set our objectives on how much money to make next quarter so our conservative withdrawal rate on retirement still gets us the money we need to enjoy life.
Why don't we run simulations on what happens when we get there?
What do we do then?
Who all do we spend it with?
We can engineer complex systems that scale to a million users: we sure can engineer our own lives to scale to a dozen or so people if we give our future equal priority as the JIRA tickets on our plate this week.
Surely?
It's a measure of how closely you correlate with the typical HN reader and that itself changes over time.
I have made more friends just through HN than the 200 odd HN karma points I have.
Have learned infinitely more thanks to HN.
As a person who believes that gun, healthcare and education are unalienable rights, people have a very tough time agreeing with me on all things, and me with them!
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It's an outcome of reflecting off input from hundreds of other people with the same story over and over again.
Once I started to write on Quora, I had the fortune of getting in touch with thousands of people. It was like magic and I was able to live through the lives of these people all around the U.S. and a pattern started to emerge.
Back to your dad - you sound resigned about it
No. He's your dad. Help him. That will soon enable him to help others. Dont give up! It's never too late. otherwise you will really regret the outcome for the rest of your life.
Another factor, as I stated in another comment, is families don’t live as close as they used to. Most of the families I grew up around have at least one kid in a city 4+ hours away. Before, one cousin could take Mom and Aunt Sue to an event and then other cousin could do it two weeks later due to everyone (or at least Mom and Aunt Sue) living close to each other. Siblings could jointly care for an ailing parent. Now, those burdens tend to do fall on an increasingly small percentage of the next generation of the family because everyone is a half day of travel or more away. (EDIT: And to note, I didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh that is a 15 minute drive to downtown. I wonder if it is an even larger attrition rate for small towns.)
Finally, grandparents played a big role in raising me. I was with my Nana nearly daily through high school when my parents were working or busy. I saw my other grandparents weekly. Now most of my friends are grateful to be living within an hour or so of one parent. You know who else that kind of interaction is good for? The grandparents! My Nana wasn’t as lonely because she interacted with or was around my siblings and I daily. When you are hours away, a 5 minute skype call every few days isn’t the same.
The numbers are similar, because this article has chosen to use a misleading presentation of the data.
The rate is high. But the numbers of people dying by suicide over the age of 85 is very small. The reason the rate is so high is because there are so few people over the age 85.
Of course, any death is a tragedy, and most suicide is preventable, especially in groups who are in close contact with health care providers, and so we should be working to prevent suicides in this group.
But if you look at the actual numbers you'll see many more thousands of people in the younger ages dying by suicide.
From a western European country with way more holidays and worker's rights than the US here. It's just as bad; I immediately found 2 studies and 3 newspaper articles detailing similar or worse problems. I think it's actually harder to make friends here, because people are way more reserved than in the US and it's hard to become a member of local communities. I'm 21 and I've been lonely my whole life.
If your loneliness bothers you, I recommend the following two things:
1. Get clinical help. Immediately. Take this very very seriously. Depending on your social setup, you might feel this is an insult, but I do not mean it that way, so please, follow this input
2. You write well. I looked at your comments and they are all very insightful and enjoyable. If you are unable to find people who enjoy your company, you're probably looking at the wrong place. I have recommended people to blog. You will be surprised how many good friends you can make this way. However, blogging attracts negative people too. It comes with the territory.
For example, you comment from 4 months ago about Art and how modern journalists are failing at their job was an interesting read as was your concerns about the GDPR
I think another issue is that those without career oriented / rich lifestyles live in a society that is not designed for them. Almost all land in areas where people live is privatized, so the area they can realistically use for social activities is limited to mostly parks, and in the US getting most places quickly requires some form of private transport. Digital media gives the most entertainment/$ so a lot of poorer people actually spend more time in front of screens than rich people, moreso for children. And much of that time is spent on social media which makes many people feel insecure or inferior.
Further, most people don't have any sense of progress or improvement or even purpose in their lives - which can be a foreign feeling to those of us who are better off. Religion used to be a cornerstone of people's lives, and is quickly losing popularity. Social mobility in the US is very low, and most people don't have any meaningful sense of "career progression".
Especially the ratio of
> Digital media gives the most entertainment/$
But church leadership would rather spend their resources waging a war against people’s sexual choices and getting involved in political positions. It’s sad to see religious resources so widely unused to help those in society in this time of need.
I wonder if you or the grandparent happen to know of some convincing evidence of this that I'm not aware of?
I often wonder when I read claims like this if they are fact-based, and to what degree (usually never mentioned), or if they might instead be examples of the propogation of memes, similar to those related to race.
The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.
Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.
https://www.kiva.org/teams?queryString=%28A%2B%29+Atheists%2...
The Atheist team is one of the top donors. There has been a significant surge in secular charity work over the past decade.
I posted elsewhere that my first date with my now wife was volunteering at a hospice care center to provide some company to an elderly lady; she ended up dying before our eyes within a few hours. We spent another hour comforting her husband.
Sidebar - sometimes it makes me sad to see people stereotype people so easily online. Kind of feels like I have to carry the weight of and associated judgment of all those who did bad things in God's name or whatever. This is probably how good police officer, teachers, oft criticized good public servants feel.
Oh well, we all do what we can do. Thanks to all who continue to serve.
It's almost a little strange from my perspective how many churches are now almost secular in nature. Yes, they talk about god, good and evil, and read scripture. But it's much less prescriptive than it used to be and almost sounds like a pep-talk about being a good person, good spouse, and a good parent.
Obviously this is from the rare interactions I have with churches -- usually in support of extended family.
My mom does volunteer to spend time with people in nursing homes via the local Parish, but a once a week visitor isn’t much. Many of the people tell her that their kids rarely visit (or are too far away to visit) and their friends are also not mobile or have passed away. Even if the Parish had a mountain of volunteers, to visit everyone in even one 90 person home 3 times a week for an hour means 270 hours. That is a part time job for 10 people and that is only one small nursing home!
It's interesting to look at Jesus's actions in the area. A mob brought him a woman caught cheating on her husband. Asking, should she be put to death? They wanted to trap Jesus: if he said "Yes", he would violate Roman law, if he said "No", he would violate Jewish law. Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her." (John 8:7). After that disbursed the mob, Jesus told the woman: "Now go and sin no more."
There's nothing harder to convince a man of than the fact that he's a sinner. And yet, when I finally realized that fact and asked Jesus for forgiveness, it was more liberating than anything else in this world, more liberating than I could ever have possibly imagined. When you experience something like that, you realize: the kingdom of heaven is near.
I guess it depends on what you define conversion therapy and other 'bible camp' type activities.
In the future, things you and I do today will be considered as barbaric as the intolerant things you're talking about there. Also, in the future, things will become accepted which you and I today think are barbaric.
None of Jesus's disciples do a good job of following Christ's teachings such as "Judge not, lest you be judged" (Matthew 7:1), myself included. Discipleship is a lifelong process. Now as for myself, I love LGBTQ people, and because I love them, I hope and pray they too will know the joy and love of Christ as I know it. Some of them may be offended when I say something like that, and we Christians should try (although it is difficult and we often stumble) to continue to love them even in spite of their taking offense at our loving them.
The very first Christians were told the same 2000 years ago.
I wonder what they would think if they were told that they should wait at least 2000 years.
When asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, 'Look, here it is,' or 'There it is.' For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst." (Luke 17:20-21)
Your comment would have been fine without the second paragraph.