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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>Not too long ago, it was perfectly fine for people to turn up at your house unannounced, to pay you a visit, for no reason in particular other than to engage socially and you were expected to host them at your house (!).

Not really. Maybe for the particularly extroverted individuals, but I'm quite aware of people, both older and younger generations, who would love nothing more than to have nothing to do with anyone disturbing the peace of their homes.

Folks out in the countryside especially have such a tendency; people go out to live in the country in part because there's less god damn humans to deal with compared to city life.

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I definitely don't come from a family of "particularly extroverted individuals" but when I was a teenager, about 10 years ago, in the UK, it was VERY common on the weekend for family members to randomly appear without calling ahead. Now it is totally unheard of

I think that people are blissfully unaware of how different things were before we gained the ability to instantly communicate across long distances at all times. Even those who lived through it have forgotten, or have no wish to go back (as you said, who wants random people to arrive? Not many people. But still, THEY DID)

Of course. With the ease of communication we have, and considering we no longer have servants or a designated person in the family that is tasked with maintaining the house to a perfect standard at all times as their full time job, it goes without saying it's usually rude to try to do so. Not arguing we should go back to that.

I was attempting to drive the point that we've gone from "you can be interrupted at any moment when you're home in and be expected to host friends" from "I get severe anxiety if I get a phone call". Clearly there's a point in between, or do most people really like the hermit lifestyle? Even if some people in here are genuinely busy with hobbies, side projects or genuinely lead a busy life, most people I know that express this point of view are most definitely not doing anything remotely interesting with their free time.

The fact that extreme social isolation (either on purpose or not) is one of many factors that can lead to steep decline in mental health suggests that behaving like this is not good for us, yet a life of "do not talk to me ever, email me if you must" is always seen as the perfect end goal in most of these discussions.

why do people need to be doing something interesting by your or anyone else's standards to hate being interrupted? "people like to not be interrupted too much" is certainly a weird take.

yet, equating "likes to not be interrupted on someone else's schedule" with "likes extreme social isolation to the point of mental illness" is a weirder one.

just because i want people to text me that they're coming over, and waits till i see it and confirm that that's cool with me, doesn't mean i'm into driving myself crazy in solitary confinement. this is the default for most people agreeing with the article, and folks like you are just upset because you hate not being able to get your hit of extroversion in on your schedule but have to wait (more than in the 80s) for folks to agree to share their social energy.

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