Hacker News Reader

I (along with many others) have been saying it for a while; there just isn't the same infrastructure for physical community as their once was. The church, the mall, the rotary club... these were bumping hot beds of socialisation.

I'm the last person to denigrate the importance of online communities, most of my closest friends don't live in my city. There is, however, a very real and important role for communities tied to your geography.

For one, the "self-sorting" effect is less exaggerated in IRL communities. Sharing a space with people, not because you are similar, but because you live near by and perhaps share the same interests, anchors you to your physical reality. Now, that comes with hardy cons as well as pros (especially if you are like to be discriminated against), but the cons of aggressively self-sorting online are pernicious as well.

If this resonates with you, I have a humble suggestion. If you can mentally/physically afford it, join _any_ IRL community. Volunteering is a good way to do this, organised sports, join a amateur radio club, go to a hackerspace meet-up. If you're in NA and most places in the EU, COVID restrictions might make this more possible than you think.

All of this so much. My problem though is that I just don't know which IRL community to join. I've tried a few, it was not for me. Our hackerspace is heavily into identity politics, which I'm not. So I end up reading books, which is fine too I guess. I'm just not really part of society.

I’m also going through this and there are a lot of (weird) spaces out there, latest example: archery club. I’m currently looking into what it takes to break into 24h of Lemons which is dirt cheap amateur car racing and partying with nerds who like cars.

>24h of Lemons

Completely gratuitous comment, but thanks for this. I'm in tears.

> break into 24h of Lemons

Highly recommended fun. I owned a LeMons car with a group of friends for 4-5 years, tons of fun.

> Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital". Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civil engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.

[Bowling Alone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone)

Three years ago a HN user named Dexwiz wrote something that hit me hard. I'd felt this, but I never saw it put in to words so well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470085

""" The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom.

The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.

The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.

No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else. """

> Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else.

This resonates with me (on both receiving and dealing ends). The lack of physical immediacy that IRL communities offer means it's easier to let relationships die off.

One way to combat this that I've taken: Whenever I have a fond memory of someone I don't talk to as much as you used to, drop them a line. Send an email/DM, check-up on them, maybe share the memory. Then, have a call to action. If they're in your vicinity, invite them for a pint/warm beverage.

If I don't have the courage or time at the moment, I make a calendar event in the near future.

The key is to treat it as something important. Even if catching up doesn't mean you'll be meeting up every weekend or have a lively chat, you've reduced the friction of starting up a conversation then next time you feel like reaching out.

The major discovery I made is that in every single case, no matter how long its been, I've never regretted this. Things have never been weird or awkward between friends. After I finished my master's degree, I realised there was a host of friends I'd left behind for over 3 years while I focused on my studies. My fear was that the ship had sailed with them, that they had moved on. I was so crazy wrong.

With real connections, every time you pick up the phone, you just pick up where you left off.

I ended up choosing to move closer to friends.

I saw them "virtually" for the first 4 years of my career because I was the one who left, but then the pandemic happened. Lived with my parents for the first two years of it so I'd have someone to talk to, but the fully remote work life either changed me or gave me new perspective.

Maybe it was going into the pandemic having just turned 27 and spending the previous year having a blast and coming out of it having the "almost 30" anxiety, but after the vaccines I started seeing friends regularly I hadn't seen in years. Eventually decided to just stay back. My employer had an office up here so I "transferred" even though I'm still by and large a remote employee.

I stayed inside playing video games for a number of reasons as my primary hobby during the first few years out of college. It was mainly me being depressed about not having any physically local friends, unfounded health anxiety, etc. Either way, 2019 (age 26) felt like a new dawn. I started making drastically more money, I started travelling - sometimes alone and sometimes with friends, etc. Started going to meetups. Then the damn pandemic. Next two years locked inside. Then I started regretting all those weekends spent inside.

So I got an apartment with an old college buddy around a dozen or more friends and am finally having a good time again. Not going to use video games as a replacement for a real social life. I'll keep playing them with remote friends, but it's a supplement to a healthy social life, rather than the only outlet.

Well, not entirely. I moved to be able to have a family (more child-friendly & car-friendly environment) and found a better job.

But then I realize I'm extremely privileged as a programmer and that most people don't have that choice (and even for me, the choices are limited, NYC > London > Zürich > Ljubljana with each step at least 2x difference in compensation)

>Ljubljana

Can I ask what Ljubljana is doing on that list? Every Slovene dev I met was driving 2h/day to work in Austria at a 50k/year job, so the local market must be really depressing if that's what they're willing to go through.

It’s where I’m from originally.

Low salary and miserably low bonuses aren’t the only issues; others are high taxes and poor healthcare (no private insurance).

Though from a local perspective even a “modest” salary of 2500€/month net enables an average quality of life, which is actually very high compared to other European countries (provided you own property, which many people do).

So, tradeoffs.

Interestingly Ljubljana is on my shortlist of livable cities. I didn't mention it in my original comment but car-dependent suburban design patterns also increase isolation, I think. When I lived in a flat in the middle of Dublin I became friends with several of my neighbours. Where I am now (which is admittedly countryside, not suburban) not so much.

Great insight! Another thing I came to realise is that current "social" media is extremely de-personalized (lack of a better term): back in the 80s and 90s, I participated in many public online places (I have always been shy in person). Those places (irc channels, WBS.net, ICQ, BBSs) were actually very social in that you actually made friendships. I travelled half the country after being invited to a Linux User Group!

Nowadays must public "social" media interactions do not promote that sort of affinity. Like, I'm replying to you... but not really, I'm just replying to your comment in this page. It is very rare to establish even a loose relationship with people in today's online pages.

And it doesn't have to be super close. I still have 2 acquaintances I made in the 90s, one is a girl that we happened to stumble upon in WBS chat, we were from different countries so it was exciting to chat. We just say hi from time to time.

The second is a person in Norway with which we shared metal music joy. We met after we both signed a "guest book" , shared Live Messenger accounts and sporadically chatted.

Even a cursory view of subreddits like /suicidewatch were people are supposed to be close, you read a lot of comments like "I care for you friend" which are hollow.

I miss those sort of interactions.

Small dedicated communities where people know each other by (user)name are still around, but you have to hunt a little more.

The bigger issue is seemingly any community made up of nice people eventually pushes them all out when identity politics cry-bullies show up. It's happened to multiple communities I've been part of.

Especially with BBSs there was a lot broader focus than on the thing they were formally about. For years I was active on a retrogaming forum. The forum of course had topic areas related to retro gaming, but more than half of them had nothing to do with that. We had movies, video games, quizzes, music, off-topic and probably a bunch more that I cannot remember. I think that led to people to actually form a community rather than only interacting on a narrow subject where you are supposed to stay on topic. I learned so much random stuff about people there. There of course were get togethers every other year or so. I think things have gotten too focused and purpose-driven. Seems like a continuation of a general trend in society

> I think things have gotten to focused and purpose-driven.

If you are looking at something like a subreddit, yeah, it's pretty focussed. On other hand, sites that have their own forums, despite often nominally being as focussed or more than a single subreddit in terms of the nature of the community, are often open in the same way BBS’s were, because they can have multiple forums tied to the same community. Consider r/rpg vs. https://www.rpg.net for instance.

Those interactions moved to discord (and telegram, although that's second-hand info).

I fully understand what you describe, and once I realized the truly abysmal return on time spent I cut my time on public social media by ~100x. It's just not worth it beyond an occasional comment.

"The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions." this is very true and the most terrifying part is I see it in my kids, addicted to their video games. They play online games with their friends and actively communicate but I when I tell them no games today they have lost the ability to entertain themselves. They just kind of hang around hoping I am going to let them play. Its pretty sad and I working on figuring it out but also trapped in my own screen working 9 - 10 hours a day.

We're nineteen years into the project of digitally reifying human relationships - one that's snowballing into an unmitigated catastrophe.

Social media circa 2003 began as a codification of existing human relationships. One's first digital friends records generally were a product of social relations, but as the marginal cost of digital reproduction tends toward zero, so did the cost of digital records of friendship untethered from the supervenience of social reality.

The digitization of friendship as a signifier of the friendship replaced the latter forming a simulacrum - the signifier replaced the signified. “the simulacrum is never that which conceals truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”[1] It's this very digital simulacrum completely detatched from social reality that leads to "Would things get strange if I hit it off with someone and she asked to meet my friends and I said I have none?"

While a reflexive, "log off. go outside. touch grass. meet people," is easy to respond with, it ignores the real problem with the magnitude of the problem: there are few people doing the same - the world's social energy is hoovered up and mediated by the systems of digital social capitalization. There isn't a surplus left to interact with.

What's even worse is that offline interactions themselves are mediated by the online. The process of initiating friendships itself has been digitally systematized either implicitly by digital chance encounters or explicitly in the form of friend finding apps. The online world gatekeeps the offline world. The world has undergone a psychic migration and the former world is in ruins. Truly "we have abandoned living."

1. Baudrillard 1981

Very insightful comment... however, I'd argue that there are still people out there that aren't social media users, and you can find these communities and regain this as an individual, even though it is massively less available than it once was

I agree that those communities exist, but a person who has been digitally domesticated faces not only a greater challenge finding them, but also of in integrating with them. Digital domestication represents not only cultural gap, but a social gap in skills, perception, norms, and values that makes social integration a multifaceted issue. I think we both agree the benefits associated with doing so while being aware of the unique challenges. Live and drink, friend.

"The digitization of friendship as a signifier of the friendship replaced the latter forming a simulacrum - the signifier replaced the signified". We've moved our lives onchain and exchanged real connections for a social media nft.

I'm happy to announce that I'm minting my social relations as non-fungible tokens. Get in early for the best relationship airdrops. Lucky participants may even be able to snap a mom, dad, or poppop token.

I have schizotypal personality disorder, so I love solitude 90% of the time, but even I'm starting to miss having friends. I watch shows like Derry Girls or Detectorists and I'm thinking damn I know my childhood and teenage friends were just "friendships of convenience", but I miss being part of a group or posse with "no holds barred" friendships. The relationships with colleagues at work aren't the same... always seem to have some kind of "wall"; I guess it's because the friendship going badly will have a detrimental impact at work and you have to interact with these people every day whether you want to or not.

It's crazy how hard it is to not only make friends, but keep them. My wife and I meet another couple that even have kids the same age as ours. We get along very well, they like us and we like them. We managed to have dinner once and we see each other occasionally at outings or birthdays. We have fun each time, but then we go months in-between without any communication. It's like there's some kind of threshold or tolerance preventing us from making it a more permanent bond.

EDIT: after thinking on it a little bit, I can't remember my parents nor friend's parents having friendships either. That makes me second-guess the technological influences on loneliness. I'm sure technology is making it worse, but I don't think we can point at it and say "this is the cause" because the loneliness epidemic seems to have started even before my generation.

> I guess it's because the friendship going badly will have a detrimental impact at work and you have to interact with these people every day whether you want to or not.

The book Impro characterizes friendship as a relationship in which one can freely and safely play "status games" without any actual stakes or chance of status-shifts. If that's true, then it's definitely more challenging to have a "real" friendship with a co-worker.

[EDIT]

> EDIT: after thinking on it a little bit, I can't remember my parents nor friend's parents having friendships either. That makes me second-guess the technological influences on loneliness. I'm sure technology is making it worse, but I don't think we can point at it and say "this is the cause" because the loneliness epidemic seems to have started even before my generation.

Bowling Alone[1] was published in 2000 and is an expansion of a 1995 essay, which makes it about 27 years old now. It was not observing a new trend, but one that had been going on for decades, when it was published.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

I think remote work has an enormous effect on this. I've been working remotely for over 20 years and this is one of the biggest reasons I've remained in major cities throughout. Don't get me wrong, I _love_ the city, but more importantly, without the city, I would have almost no in-person social life. I wouldn't have met my wife, or all the friends I've made over the years - most of whom don't really know what I do for a living.

I've found that I prefer this life - where I choose my friends rather than having acquaintances thrust upon me by my occupation, as they were in school.

I'm hoping that with a shift to significantly more remote work, the options open up for more ways to meet people outside of work - which is seriously one of the _worst_ ways to meet people; Especially in a romantic sense.

It's become more of our own responsibility to meet people. That can be hard. But it also means that we can be more selective about the kind of people we meet. Don't like talking about work? Don't meet people who do what you do. Don't like to drink? Find meet-ups where alcohol isn't the main event. Love [whatever]? Find [whatever]. Cities tend to be great for this.

> I am happily married but have zero friends

Are you sure this is entirely the modern lifestyle's fault? When I look deeply into my past I realize I messed up high school and college a bit socially (for various reasons) and that's the time most people acquire their best friends. I have 1-2 good friends but I'm pretty sure it's on me its not more than that.

Perhaps you went through something similar?

The real annoying thing is making friends after mid 30s is very difficult. I am very choosy about who I want to meet because I'm a parent and my time is valuable and I put up with less bullshit than when I was young. Alas, all "older" folk are like me - so we barely try to create friendships.

Modern lifestyle includes moving to different cities.

So this still comes down to our inability to make friends past our 30s... we move more than in the past but its definitely not a new phenomenon.

Its probably my fault. Once I had kids I completely lost the ability to manage them and a social life. I felt bad just leaving my wife to go hang out with friends and then as they got older I have replaced IRL friends with doom scrolling. Definitely a mental thing I need to fix. I did delete twitter the other day so that's one small step :)

Deleting Twitter is amazing. I am contentmplating moving to a dumb phone. Extreme I know.

On my old nokia C3, there is a kind of App Store that is not working for a while as the servers are shutdown.

Everytime I "joke" that I live in the future of smartphones.

What is Twitter ?

I am not at the dumb phone point yet, really just for the maps feature on smart phones. Even typing that out make me realize how pervasive technology is. I don't know how to navigate anywhere without my phone because I never had to learn because I could always rely on the voice in the phone to tell me. I am going out to buy a little table this weekend to keep my phone on in the entry way. Phone lives there when my kids and wife are awake. There is nothing happening online that wont be there after they are asleep. The internet is not going anywhere.

I'm a parent of a 2.5yo. What I've learned from other parents around me is to make _sure_ both parents maintain their social lives. I strongly encourage my spouse to call a friend and get out the house at least once every couple weeks, and then I do the same.

It's so easy to forget that relationships require maintenance and having them keeps us both sane - especially when things get hard.

I don’t know… I had really, really good friends in high school and college… but then after I graduated, we all just drifted apart. We moved to different places, got married, had kids… the things that brought us together during college weren’t there anymore.

I wonder what solution autocratic centralized societies will leverage so as not to collapse? Import populations ala US, or somehow "motivate" locals to reproduce?

Singapore and Japan have been unsuccessful at getting people to voluntarily engage in producing larger families.

They may have to do some serious "motivation". Because not just is having and raising kids a big burden, they also force a lifestyle change a lot. Especially if you do not want to shove them off to daycare.