The Social Recession: By the Numbers
novum.substack.com
novum.substack.com
There's nothing on the horizon to replace it as a socializing force. Even if you WFH those ~8 hours a day, 40 days of week of sitting alone can't be made up for by socializing outside of that time, something you could already do before WFH.
I'm not saying you should therefore be forced to go to the office. Rather I'm just pointing out WFH will arguably make this worse, maybe not for your specific situation, but in aggregate across the population, if WFH is the new normal then we'll need to social institutions to fix the lack of socialization opportunities that are being discarded.
My social life has improved massively since WFH became the norm. I eat lunch with my neighbors most days, I work from friends places/they work at mine on the reg, and it is way easier to have the energy to go out for dinner/drinks/other activities after work. I went to Chicago for a week last month to hang out with my friend and his wife and no one had to take any vacation days to make it happen. Everyone's situation is different, but I have a tough time imagining that WFH is going to lead to a reduction in socialization on balance if people are now able to control their schedules more easily.
I go work at a coffee shop and coworking spaces and have made more friends then going into an office and seeing the same 10 people everyday.
How could you extrapolate that seeing the same office people everyday all day is good for.yiur social life.
Because it's easier to interact with someone when we are dealing with the same project / sharing the experience of being an employee for the same company?
How do you deal with meetings? work info that's not public? etc..?
The only people who really “give me a chance” because I’m a little weird are people I work with because I’m useful I guess? So there’s time for me to grow on them.
My social life has definitely suffered since WFH. In fact the only people I see regularly are people I used to work with by inviting them to lunch.
I guess that’s how MOST people are. A lot of people just want their socializing handed to them.
Hiring a housekeeper and an exterminator were in retrospect the best decisions we’ve made in the past year. It’s super important for both mental and physical health that you keep your house clean and free of pests folks!
This was the main reason for people to go to church. The congregation gets a built-in social club, and the leaders get rich and the ability to control people's lives in various ways. Now that more and more people abandon religion, people are having to find other ways to socialize.
The fact is that now people, across all aspects of society (not just referring to work from home) have much less opportunity for these kinds of serendipitous interactions: we can order tons of stuff online instead of shopping at retail stores, we can order food from a bajillion places instead of going out to eat, we can stay in and watch Netflix instead of going to a movie. And while all of these conveniences, individually, may be very nice, overall they have the effect that we just have a ton fewer in-person interactions, on average, with other people.
If you're talking about "volunteering at the PTO", my guess is that you are married with children. Most people who are married with children already have most of their social framework "set", and often times (at least in the US) so much of their free time revolves are child rearing and their childrens' activities such that most of their "neighborhood friends" revolve around the serendipitous encounters they have with other parents - the PTO as you mention, sports games, etc.
But for people at an earlier stage of their life and career, I think you'll find they often have a different outlook. They're often looking for a spouse, they have much more free time without kids so they're looking to meet people, etc.
For me personally, I'm also at a stage where my social connections are pretty set. But I got so many of my early workplace connections when I joined a job that had a "bootcamp" 2 month training program for new grads. I've gotten nearly every subsequent job over a couple decades from that first job, not to mention many close friends. I know I wouldn't have had those close connections if I had been solely WFH in my first job out of college.
Now, of course, there could be people who work at an office, say, as a security guard in an industrial facility where they never see anyone, have friends who they can't see and are depressed about it, and if they can WFH watching surveillance feeds, it makes them better off. Don't doubt that this can exist, but my gut feel is that Category 1 is bigger than Category 2.
I wrote several versions of this response including one that touched on how quickly "we are in this together" morphed back into the usual "got mine, fuck you" during start of Covid. I hesitated several times. Ran it internally against HN rules about taking stuff at face value, but I think at the end of the whole process only one real question came back to me.
Is it really my responsibility to live somebody else's life?
To me answer came back quickly. It is not.
You want to avoid sniping. It is typically frowned upon.
That said, believe it or not, we are not that far apart on that front. The issue I have with the argument presented is that senior decision makers do not set policies that broadly benefit the populace ( as evidenced by reality itself ).
Apart from that, why are senior decision makers even a consideration here? The recession in the article is that of the mind. It is spiritual in nature ( and that is assuming we are assuming posited argument ).
If you are going to throw suicides at me again, I will ask you a simple question.
Why are suicides are inherently a bad thing? People want to die. Why do you feel you have an obligation to stop them?
I think you should remember that all of our lives affect each other. We have a social responsibility to pursue a society where those effects lead to happy, healthy people.
If you think you’d rather live in a survival of the fittest jungle there are plenty of countries you can move to. In the west, we consider the progress away from such things as one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments.
That is not accurate. Just the other week I had to pay people do complete a task for me. The task in question I could not do on my own simply due to its nature and my lack of skill in that domain. I absolutely needed help. I fully accept I live in a society and there will be times, where my skills will simply not be enough to face every situation thrown at me.
<<We have a social responsibility to pursue a society where those effects lead to happy, healthy people.
Do we? Why is that thrown as an axiom of some sort? I am looking at the history of human race and the history of various societies is at odds with that statement.
<<If you think you’d rather live in a survival of the fittest jungle there are plenty of countries you can move to.
I am relatively certain I live in one of those countries now ( US ). I think most would argue it is considered part of 'the west'.
<<In the west, we consider the progress away from such things as one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments.
Who is we in this statement? There are entire groups in US devoted to the exact opposite position.
It's easy to poke holes in peoples reasons why they can't do xyz, I'm still struggling and eating shit with this as an expat after some years. It's hard, but if that's your challenge and you can convince yourself it's an option, I think it's probably an option.
Absolutely. No way we are stripping 8h of daily socialization without any adversal effect on our social lives. I can feel it myself. And no, "finding other places to talk to people" is not a solution, because work time is 50% of my waking hours, and removing that social connection is terrible by itself.
Yeah, I agree.
Those who started WFH during the pandemic may not realize, but WFH stands for work from anywhere. You may have needed to lock yourself in your bedroom during the height of the pandemic, but those days are coming to a close. Venture out into the world.
If you have no existing friend group that wants to work alongside you, head to the coffeeshop, the bar, the park, the library. You'll soon find people to socialize with.
You have made yourself clear. We are talking about during work hours. That is the very freedom that WFH allows. Again, WFH is short for work from anywhere.
> how do we create environments that allow these types working hours interactions in a WFH setting?
Why do you think they don't already exist? I have WFH for 20 years now and have never found much difficulty to find people to work with, save the pandemic period. And I am based in rural area. Imagine how much easier it would be to find people to work with in a city!
As I alluded to earlier, I think the pandemic being the introduction to WFH for a lot of people has skewed perceptions. They went WFH because they had to stay home alone. But those days are quickly moving behind us. You can work anywhere again now.
Venture out into the world. There are people out there. If the cafe isn't working, try another venue. You are only limited by your ingenuity.
This sounds like a very convoluted workaround for something which, for some people, is solved by having an office to go into.
I think what is very clear every time this WFH topic comes up is that different people have very different strong opinions on it, which is fine. I wish people would respect each other’s opinions a bit more though.
For some people, working from an office works well from them. Personally, having worked from home for three years (2 pandemic, 1 in a remote job), I’ve found I really miss that “casual” social interaction with people at work and I don’t believe I could replace that by going into a cafe - maybe it’s a personality thing and/or a location/cultural thing but it’s very rare for me to just strike up meaningful conversation in a cafe here in London. Maybe a coworking space would be better but I still think there’s a lot of value to social interactions with your actual colleagues.
Others obviously feel differently, whether that’s because they want to live somewhere outside of a major metropolitan area, or because they don’t enjoy that kind of interaction, or whatever, and that’s also fine.
I guess the challenge is how companies reconcile the two into something that works. “Hybrid” only works if you have a decent number of people actually coming in to the office otherwise yeah, you might as well just go to a coworking space. I suspect we’ll see companies starting to align more to one model or the other as time progresses, and I think that’s fine - people can choose companies whos model works for them.
Not having a defined office to go into is the apparent problem, not the solution.
> I wish people would respect each other’s opinions a bit more though.
Where does this come from? I've never seen anyone's opinion disrespected as it pertains to this conversation. In fact, the beauty of WFH is that it gives you the full freedom to form your own opinions. Want to work at home? Do it! Want to work in an office? Do it! Want to work from the middle of a field? Do it! Want to work at sea? Do it! Nobody cares. The world is your oyster.
> I guess the challenge is how companies reconcile the two into something that works.
Does matchmaking need to be a business concern? There were periods of history where transportation, housing, even shopping, was dictated by a company but we eventually move away from those in favour of personal choice. All arguably practical necessities in their time, but considered a hinderance of freedom once the landscape changed. Is matchmaking not just that again?
WFH means work from anywhere. It does not preclude working in an office. But if you are respecting of opinion, as was asserted as being important earlier, then offices will only come into being if people wish to be a part of them. That does not require a third-party middleman to be involved. Workers who want to work in offices can easily coordinate that kind of thing themselves, just as they've come to coordinate transportation, housing, and shopping.
WFH does NOT mean 'Work From Anywhere'. The first hint is that "Anywhere" does not start with an 'H'. Many, if not most corp employees are compelled to stay within state (US) and border (EU) limits due to tax code restrictions. It's literally illegal for many to just work from outside their jurisdiction. It probably gets even more complicated for employees on a VISA. But I digress, It's really ironical that you chide OP that you see no disrespect while simultaneously dismissing and disrespecting their opinion.
In case you truly don't get it. Working physically from the office while a vast number of their peers are at home does not make it work from office. The location isn't the factor here, it's the medium of interaction. Sitting on zoom calls all day in the office has no discernible difference than sitting at home. What the OP and TFA posits is that the lack of real human interaction, the social cues, the energy or more informally 'the vibe' is very different when working remotely vs working in-office with everyone else there.
Again, this isn't trying to spark yet another debate on RTO/WFH/Remote preferences, but to underline that empathizing with the opposing point of view is a virtue that earns the respect you speak of.
It's just annoying how so many 'smart' people on HN keep pedantically hammering the point that you can just totally just work from the office. Sure, you're technically correct, but just comes off of as socially clueless. I feel it tends to be the same kind of people that are surprised when the more affable, but average engineer is promoted over them, the misunderstood genius. Turns out people like to work with people they like over some opinionated rando who happens to close JIRA tickets a little bit faster than others.
Sadly, while your amusing pedantry is technically correct in a vacuum, it completely fails within the prior context given. Did you forget to the read the comments up to this point or were you aiming to give us a good laugh?
> Working physically from the office while a vast number of their peers are at home does not make it work from office.
Agreed. Hence the idea of venturing out into the world to meet with peers. If what you are struggling to say is that nobody wants to work with you, I guess that's life. Slavery is a thing of the past. You can't force people to do things they don't want to do.
> Sitting on zoom calls all day in the office has no discernible difference than sitting at home.
If you are using Zoom (or similar) all day you're not doing WFH. WFH brings very different operating semantics and doesn't just try to duplicate the office over the internet. What you describe is work from office. Location isn't the factor here.
> but to underline that empathizing with the opposing point of view
What points of view are you referring to? All we have is reality. Trying to ascribe emotions to attempts to understand the world is bad faith participation. Granted, this may be the result of not having read the prior comments as suggested above. But replying without having read the comments is also bad faith participation.
> Turns out people like to work with people they like
Seems they don't else they would work together. WFH encourages people to work together in the flesh so if it is not happening what does that tell us? That certain individuals are best avoided? I can agree with that, although I have to wonder why that was worth pointing out if that was your goal.
I think daily about this issue but working again for a national company would mean earning 50% less of my salary probably... so tough choice.
Any advice or recommendations from other contractors/freelance workers are appreciated.
As I see it, the energy of the youth is gradually being sapped away from political movements made on private terms - blaming an other to justify further division of public space - towards the idea of revitalizing the commons, an idea which has a kind of inevitability behind it coming from this low point, since it satisfies a huge diversity of needs.
Remaking the public space is, in fact, stunningly easy: close a few roads in urban centers, near destinations, to auto traffic, and put out some seating. Times Square did this; JFK Drive as well. Both are transformed places. When the cars are cleared out and you have "eyes on the street", the perceptions of cities as fundamentally anonymous places disappear, as well. This only becomes more true as alternate modes of mobility are introduced; the huge uptake of ebikes nationwide has exceeded every expectation and has created a flywheel of demand for more urban bike infrastructure, and therefore more public space.
Unless of course you treat public spaces like Americans treat buses. If it becomes a miserable experience only the destitute would use, those who can will avoid it, and those who can't will perpetuate it.
But where I live everyone uses public spaces. The wealthy don't retreat to private backyards.
But in practice, the leave-it-at-the-door delivery-or-no-touch-pickup world is not one I'd describe as higher trust and more social. Times Square? Other similar "close a few roads and have a mall" places? There's nothing there revitalizing socialization compared to the previous generation of indoor malls.
I have an axe to grind about interaction-free delivery services, but it's a different debate. Public spaces are for when you intend to see other people.
Public spaces as I've experienced them are much better than malls. For one thing they're outside. It's not easy to be outside for many city dwellers. They're also a place where you're not expected to spend money. You can bring your own food, drinks and entertainment. You can do nothing at all and not be perceived as a threat. You aren't screaming over the noise of car traffic. The silence is a revelation when you experience it for the first time.
I spent my summer in public spaces. I miss them dearly when I travel to concrete jungles and sleepy suburbias.
You’re making the point for them. Interaction with service providers shouldn’t be a primary social outlet for people (as much for the sake of the service provider as the customer); previous generations’ choices just made it one of the most important outlets since it’s one of the most convenient, especially if you’re willing to pay for it (they major driver of almost all 20th century social trends).
Even happenstance “excuse me, pardon me” type small talk to peers is worlds better than a forced corporate smile from a waiter who relies on tips to survive, because at least then, you’re forced to have some amount of empathy/introspection (since the other party isn’t being paid to be nice).
The rub of this, though, is then plenty of people only like to interact with service providers (especially as they get older) and this new world can feel isolating to them, but I don’t think that’s a measure of Gen Z or whatever’s commitment to civic socialization.
This is where we met all summer. Grilling in the park, cycling around, swimming in lakes etc.
You meet your friends and their friends too. You bring your dates there. You have hard conversations there. You play sports together there.
It's not just about socialisation. It's a place where you can be not-home. You don't have to eat or drink alcohol or pay. You can just linger there and be left alone.
Public spaces are so incredibly important, but I don't imagine the political class as people who go to parks a lot.
And cursed with a terrible housing market, especially for newcomers.
>Public spaces are so incredibly important, but I don't imagine the political class as people who go to parks a lot.
So much this on both fronts. In many countries, like Austria and others I'm sure, the political class really has neglected public spaces that aren't for tourists, as they're not the users of it. Public parks have mostly been relegated as places for the "poor" and "working class" to hang out who can't afford a house in the green suburbs with a nice big garden surrounded by forests. Which is ironic since the rich kids are always driving their cars from their suburbs to the parks downtown to hang out as that's where the best parties are. :)
That isn't exactly unique to Berlin you know. And IIRC at least the local government tried to do something about it (but was struck down in higher courts).
What the local government tried to do was freeze the rents which only made the situation worse, not better.
Contrast (any city in) Australia which is stuck in a nightmare loop of homelessness and political pressure to keep the house prices high (from homeowners) and affordable (from everyone else).
Or London, where house prices are now so high it is mostly owned by absent foreigners.
Sorry, but trying an obviously populist measure that further sinks housing availability and makes thing worse for everyone does not get you any points anywhere.
The key point that Berlin seems to realise, but Australia definitely doesn't, is that the purpose of houses is for people to live in them, not make money investing in them.
I know! I help people settle in Berlin, and I don't know what to tell incoming students anymore. I'm not sure how they can find a place to live in a reasonable time frame.
I hear that it's worse elsewhere, but it's no consolation.
Out of curiosity where is it worse? What if it's like the "grass is greener" effect but in reverse, where people use the "it's worse elsewhere" argument to comfort themselves for their bad living conditions or other discomforts in life.
I mean, I'm sure there are cities where it's worse, but like you said, that doesn't improve the situation for those wishing to live in Berlin so it's kinda pointless to look at places that are worse instead of fighting to improve the location you live in.
If not, consider that the best minds in the 50 and 60 were considering subtle form of propaganda and manipalution by intelligent and adapted design of environment.
Outside conscious detection, the human herd in urban envIronment are manipulated, nudged, and controlled the same way cattle are milked in modern factories.
Those parks you seems to worship are just existing in your environment cause someone decided that you should worship those parks in your environment.
The remaining question is: for what ?
I would guess, happy and voluntary self alienation.
Nobody question the paradoxal stupidity of feeling lonely in the most dense areas existing on the surface of earth.
How can you feel lonely when you have more than a thousand peoples surrounding you in a range smaller than 100m away from you.
Parks are there so you can have a breather. There's no propaganda written on the trees, in the grass or in the sky.
You know, happy healthy people are good for the economy. That's all.
If a conspiracy is so nebulous that you can't define it's motives, perhaps you're grasping at straws.
And the cities that kept growing are places that are not urbanist at all: Phoenix, Fort Worth, etc.
Forgive me if your comment was meant as sarcasm, but I think solving even this problem could take more than four years, and it is only a fraction of the puzzle for equivalency to in-person interactions.
I've never noticed anyone doing that when on calls with friends. I have in meetings at work, but there people hide on mute because they don't really want to be there in the first place and are probably off aimlessly browsing the web or trying to catch up on actual work. In the scant few work meetings that are purposeful and engaging, however, I've found plenty of laughter.
And yet school, university, college is also bad, because that's the time to Experiment and Fall In Love multiple times, and Date Around, and Make Friends, and if you don't do the Prescheduled Infantile Erotic Socializing like you're required, you're defective and should go back to the vat.
And yet Discord and Reddit are also bad, because if you meet someone on there and develop a romantic relationship with them, you must be a groomer, or a pedophile, or a Nazi.
And yet Tinder is bad, because it provides a short-term dopamine hit to get you addicted to swiping and looking at ads, stealing your time without actually giving you anything.
And yet dating college students after you've graduated is also bad, because everyone knows a friend of a friend whose son/daughter dated a graduate and it ended horribly with tears and fisticuffs all around.
What you should be doing is hitting people up at the library. Wait, no, I saw a reddit post about how that's cringe and disgusting. Ok, I'll try to meet people at the gym. Oh wait, no, I've seen even more Reddit posts about how horrible that is; people at the gym are trying to get healthy, not date! Ok, I'll blindly message people on Instagram. Hold on... I don't have an Instagram. How about I just go to the bar with some friends? Unfortunately, none of my friends go to bars, because they're over 40, too busy getting their degrees, or don't exist. Ok, so the solution is to go out in the street, strip down naked, and run around doing cartwheels until someone declares me a romantic interest.
And people wonder why YouTubers are some of the loneliest, most stressed people, and why the loneliest, most stressed people seem so interested in starting a YouTube channel.
And yet... most millenials and Gen X and Boomers are doing fine. So this is all a hullabaloo invented to let the zoomers/iGen know, with force, that if they don't shut up and elope, and keep the babies flowing, all the markets are going to crash all at once when the Boomers finally decide they're done being alive and hook up the helium breathing mask.
t. Zoomer
I suppose the first answer most people would give is “stop listening to Reddit,” but that still leaves me with the question of, well, then what?
To illustrate that last point, I am hetero male. I've had gay guys tell me they thought I was cute, I told them politely I wasn't interested, but appreciated the compliment. I believe this generalizes.
As an example of the first point, I tend to like fit girls, so I go train Olympic weightlifting and do acroyoga. I also like artsy girls, so I go party at places where they tend to congregate (certain 'alternative/queer' or 'techno/EDM' nightlife venues, generally).
Also, I've gotten laid off random outfit compliments - e.g. "I like your blouse" when the girl was wearing a nice blouse and I walked by her on the street.
Your lense is only working for job in office like environment.
You have to create most of the time the opportunities to really meet new people. Hoping to get that randomly at your job Is not the best way I think.
In work you have no friends, you have colleagues. Maybe 1% of them really care about you. Even those who seems like they care about you, are so used to see you by default every day, that you never develop a way to communicate otherwise - so when you will change jobs, they will disappear.
These fake relationship in the workplace are the main reason you'll find yourself alone in your 30s.
But WFH allow me to cultivate REAL friendships with people that choose to communicate with me without being forced by "being in the same office". Long term, this is the only way not to end up alone.
Starting with religion. I'm not religious myself, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge it as a powerful community builder. You'll get to know everyone in the community. Neighbors, business owners, friends, possible spouses. And their families and all their life events. There's no real replacement for this "forced" social bonding at scale.
Meeting friends used to require physical co-location. You'd ring their doorbell and asks if they're available to play. It would all be in-person. Now this happens occasionally but far less, a lot of this is digitized.
Early teenager years: boys live in their bedroom, gaming with a headset. Girls spent their time chatting or posting on social networks.
Later teenager years (party years). Far less in person. Some gatherings of friends at home, much less in public settings where you can meet new people.
Work: from home but even when in the office: increasingly virtualized due to outsourcing, complicated vendor models, etc.
Leisure: at home. Not just spending time on passive entertainment, also shipping shit to your door so that you don't have to go out and actually interact with people.
In the case that people do go out in the physical world, they see disengaged people. In a rush, unapproachable (always on phone).
We've become self-centered, anti-social. The old way which forced you to interact with the physical world and its people produced far healthier human beings.
Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today's technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as 'problems' and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.
Is societal self-obsolescence how you define “progress?” How successful can your society really be if your people don’t seem to want to raise kids in it and perpetuate it? If you have to import people from collectivist societies just to take care of your elderly?
[1] The inverse is not true—many collectivist societies are also facing population walls—but for quite different reasons.
American culture and attitude seeping into most of those countries kicked into overdrive the 21st century, but birthrates were already low by then.
Prior to birth control, having a genetic predisposition toward liking sex was enough. In the future, most people will also have a genetic or cultural disposition towards wanting kids.
More like:
It's just nature's way of filtering out people who like sex but don't want [more] kids [right now].
That’s a lot of people, and thus, less kids.
Uhoh.
Most likely, there is an enormous selection pressure right now for any genes that predispose people (and in particular women) to want to have (many) kids. If those genes are as common as I believe, they should be dominant within about 10 generations (counting from approximately 1970).
edit: I mean, you're not wrong, but I'd posit that there is enormous selection pressure for memes that promote fertility.
Not at all. For most of evolutionary time, organisms didn't even have any kind of cognitive capacity at all (being single celled organisms). Even after brains started to develop, mating behavior was primarily instinctual. And even up until this day in humans, the sexual drive may easily overpower any desire to prevent pregnancy if people (and women in particular) doesn't have access to birth control.
Arguably, the sexual drive may have been so strong that there may have been a selection pressure favoring INHIBATION of reproductive behavior (K selection).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
Especially so in females, as under some conditions, having fewer offspring and investing more in each may provide a higher number of surviving offspring than giving birth to more, but with less investment in each. Without birth control, even K-selection strategies ended up with 5 or so offspring per woman, on average, with about 2-3 surviving children on average.
With child survival rates near 100%, K-selection strategies are now strongly disfavored compared to r-selection strategies, even without birth control. (So r-selection has probably been selected for at some level for the past 150 years or so in the West). Birth control simply multiplies this effect.
> because we are not living in a "state of nature"
This, I'm sure, is a fallacy. The rate of genetic adaptation is directly linked to the strength of selection pressures, where "selection pressures" are not just survival rates, but rather the number of surviving offspring.
To quote wikipedia: "Contrary to popular belief, not only are humans still evolving, their evolution since the dawn of agriculture is faster than ever before"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
> "meme" to refer to the units of cultural lineage that clearly influence evolutionary fitness by altering the behavior of the people who hold them.
Memes (as coined by Dawkins, not the pop culture use) are their own replicators. They code for the replication of thoughts and ideas.
Memes are not very tightly coupled to the physical fleshbags they inhabit. Like regular viruses, they often pass from host to host laterally, even though some forms are often transferred to children.
But there is no reason to think that this has limited genetic evolution (meaning adaptation, not necessarily "improvement"). This is basically orthogonal to whatever the memes are doing. (Though there is an interaction term where genes and memes form part of the natural environment of each other as replicators).
Genes may not be the dominant factor in reproductive fitness right now, but unlike for memes, the relative frequency of genes depend directly on reproductive fitness, meaning whatever variance DOES ALREADY exist in the genome for reproductive fitness are under a massive selection pressure right now.
For many, if not most memes, reproductive the reproductive fitness of the hosts has little impact on the ability of the meme to replicate. For some memes (or meme-plexes) like religions, one _could_ argue that they attach themselves strongly enough to families that they are inherited in a way similar to genes.
However, I would argue that memes can lose this power much more quickly than genes can. Just consider how quickly Christianity have been losing power over most Western linages lately.
Meanwhile, genes will continue to build up momentum for as long as the selection pressure remains. Currently, that pressure is for women to WANT to have children. While cultural effects may come and go, any genes coding directly for that will be reinforced. If these genes already exist, this will take a few hundred years. If mutations are needed, it could take 10x longer.
Eventually, though, if the selection pressure persists, having babies will have the same pull on female brains as sugar, sex or serotonin-inducing social affirmation.
At some point, though, REAL overpopulation is likely to be a limiting factor. Real, as in famine or disease will place a hard cap and re-introduce child mortality rates of 50%+.
Which is why the most successful memes are those which induce an artificial coupling, e.g. religious beliefs that infuse culture so thoroughly that they are passed from parent to offspring essentially by default. All the major world religions do this to some extent, and it's on vivid display in the more cult-like sects.
> Currently, that pressure is for women to WANT to have children. While cultural effects may come and go, any genes coding directly for that will be reinforced.
Perhaps the fundamental disagreement here is about whether or not the extent to which a woman "wants" children is encoded primarily in genes. I have trouble believing that, on the whole, genes have anything more than a marginal influence on birth rates in the presence of freely available contraception. I could be wrong. But there's probably a reason why at least one major religion forbids the use of contraception. That looks a lot like a meme that has taken matters into its own hands, genes be damned.
The population won’t collapse. It’s just that it’ll be Muslims and Mormons doing the laughing.
In other places, like China and Japan, I don't find it likely at all that Muslims or Mormons will be allowed to do so.
Still, given enough time, genes will adapt to the new pressures of female choice and birth control. That could be a few hundred years (at most) for genes already present in the gene pool, or a few thousand if mutations are needed.
I believe desire to procreate is just as much caused by environmental factors.
In particular, living in cities vs living in the country. If the organism sees "resources and space and hard to come by" (like, say, living in NYC), it will put the fertility program "on hold" until it finds sees "there is an abundance of space and resources" (for example, living in a bucolic countryside with ample food around).
The drop in birth rate since the industrial era has nothing to do with genes, and everything to do with urbanization, at least from where I'm standing. :)
Not at all. I'm merely assuming that there is a non-zero genetic component.
> The drop in birth rate since the industrial era has nothing to do with genes, and everything to do with urbanization, at least from where I'm standing. :)
I completely agree. Well, urbanization and other, related environmental factors (even farmers have fewer kids than before).
When you change environment for any species, there is a possibility that reproduction rates go down, sometimes radically. For instance, if you put cheetahs in a zoo, you're not likely to get many cubs. From a reproductive perspective, a zoo is a very hostile environment for a cheetah, even if they are guaranteed enough food, a qualified vet and have no risk of being killed by lions.
Still, over time (and unless the population goes to zero), when facing an environmental change that is hostile in the short term, the species will adapt to the new environment. When this adaptation only requires a change in relative frequency of already existing genes in the genepool, this can go very quickly. (Which is perhaps the greatest benefit of sexual reproduction.) If it requires a string of mutation, it can take a very long time.
“You don’t understand evolution unless you understand how contraception could cause overpopulation.”
I do wonder if this falling population in developed countries trend will last more than 1-2 more generations. We’d better have the rockets ready to go by 2100.
Maybe re-read that a few times. Is it reasonable to believe that a significant portion of the population would not like sex? Is there any possible evolutionarily-sound explanation for that?
So? It's not the most populous groups that dominate, quite the contrary. The world had half the population just 50 years ago.
World population: (1804) 1 billion, (1927: 123yrs) 2 billion, (1960: 33 yrs) 3 billion, (1974: 14 yrs) 4 billion, (1987: 13 yrs) 5 billion, (1999: 12 yrs) 6 billion, (2011: 12yrs) 7 billion, (2023: 12 yrs) 8 billion.
Naturally, it does not help that discussion of it almost invariably brings a question of overpopulation and all the baggage that brings.
[1]https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?langId=en&catId=1246&ne... [2]https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/poland-populatio...
A society with many old people and few young people will suck
As it is, many of the costs for elderly people seem to be about medical inventions to (arguably artificially) prolong life. I'd suspect that will become increasingly expensive, to the point that expectations around how much it's reasonable to spend on such treatment may change. As it is, COVID caused quite a significant increase in mortality among elderly populations - it was undoubtedly pretty awful for those directly involved, but society as a whole seems to have adjusted since.
Compare the cost of elder care to child care.
Old people can be very expensive, can still vote, and most will have a economic power for this specific generation.
In the past when you were a working couple with kids, you hoisted your kids into your grandparents to help raise and there was no opportunity cost. There’s no converse here.
Good luck passing legislation to reduce care for the old while they’re the largest chunk of the population.
I've traveled a lot, in particular Asia and I would struggle to name one country that actually deserves to be called collectivist.
My son just started 2nd grade here in Japan after being born and raised in the US (spouse is Japanese). It's really clear that here, children are socialized to think of the group to which they belong before themselves when contemplating their actions. Stated differently, people are socialized to identify strongly with the groups to which they belong.
Does this mean the society is "collectivist"? I don't really know. I do observe that many of the social activities involved in group cohesion here are viewed as somewhat burdensome obligations. I believe it was de Tocqueville who first observed the seemingly novel and unique way in which Americans viewed social association:
"When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it.
When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it."
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/tocqueville-on-the-spirit-...
A generalization that's often made about East-Asian countries is that they have weak civil societies and strong states and it's the latter I think that leads people in the West too easily to think of them as collectivist. But it's really the lack of spontaneous association (I like the Tocqueville quote) and the passivity that enable that situation.
The US in that sense is much more collectivist than we generally think, and one case for this in my opinion is the surprising energy that they can quickly gather to rally people behind a cause ,for example militarily. Americans are very quickly to mobilize and pursue quite abstract collective goals.
As for shopping malls and other hardcore evidence of "Americanism", from what I've read the US still leads the world in retail shopping space by an embarrassing amount if anything.
As for K-pop, this is one I don't understand. How is it different from western boy/girl bands or for that matter J-pop, other than being export-oriented it seems.
Personally I suspect giant US companies arise out of courtroom victories more than any other factor. I'm not sure where to categorize that exactly. Maybe Beurocratism. At least it has a kind of impartiality to it, though also tending to benefit the market leader the most in its own way.
In China we are seeing the Lay Flat movement as a response to 996[1]. One could argue that the loneliness is forced upon these people because of their working hours, but I don't think that as different as you make it out to be. There definitely is a linkage to higher work hours and lower number of friends.
[0] https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/growing-n...
Both suffer from exactly the same set of problems:
(1) Massive numbers of people living in densely-packed, high-rise apartments. Population density inversely correlates to birthrates in developed countries.
(2) If you factor in Forced Fun Time and commuting, salarymen in Japan often work nearly all of their waking hours, six days per week. Korea is worse, from what I understand.
(3) The male population is deeply unfit here in Japan. This correlates strongly with low birthrates.
(4) Pay is very low. It is exceedingly difficult to raise a family on the average Japanese or Korean salary until you are in your late 30s or early 40s, by which time you don't have the energy or inclination.
(5) Whatever time, capital, and energy that remains is commonly spent on games, porn, and booze, all of which are highly profitable.
It's a downward spiral, and would take drastic action, most of which would cause significant short-term pain for the wealthiest chunk of the population. Ergo, it's not going to happen.
There are massive government programs to suppress the birth rate in India, the Middle East, and Africa, for development reasons. My dad spent his career working on those programs.
These are only two examples of "collectivist" societies. The idea that you are either strongly individualist or China/Russia seems like a false dichotomy.
Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).
My intuition is that the solution like probably in the middle ground at a political level, while adapting to our new digital reality.
The argument that our society must embrace full individualism or fail, feels a bit like the red-scare lite.
Generally when people say "collectivist", they mean "bad guys in black hats and also I liked Ayn Rand"
Calling Russia (heck or even China) "collectivist" is just repeating propaganda from expired times and show a horrifyingly poor education.
You haven't met rich Nordic people, IMHO.
Nordic societies are the most individualist societies on earth. Their policies are all about individual people and their wellbeing. They have no collectivist concept of a greater good that is above the individual. In Russia and China the concept of national rejuvenation is paramount above the individual. These nationalist visions are maximally collectivist. Trump is a lite version of this. The sociocultural construct of "America" and the sociolegal construct of "freedom" is supreme over the actual positive freedoms and negative freedoms of the individual. Self-described right-libertarians are often very collectivist in actual practice. You can't be anti-immigration and call yourself an individualist, it's a nationalist (and therefore collectivist) position.
I don't neccessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but the above seems obviously false. Most anti-immigratio people are not for it because of some abstract ideas, but because they see immigrant as direct competitiors for their jobs. That was one of the biggest reasons behing Brexit votes for example.
Anti-immigration that comes from fear of crime is collective guilt and collective punishment. Only a small minority of individuals will be criminals, but the entire collective is punished all the same. Anti-immigration that comes from fear of racial diversity or fear of cultural change, is also a collectivist motive, it's a more nationalistic and nativist iteration of collectivism than fear of crime.
If the earnest reason is jobs protectionism, I'd still argue that protectionism isn't individualist. It's not explicitly collectivist, but it's a suppression of individual rights for cynical reasons. At least, it's anti-individualist, if not collectivist.
In the Brexit case, it was white Eastern Europeans coming in to UK and taking over low-paying jobs. So, neither a threat of terrorism nor racial supremacy (they're all white). I guess one could be afaid of some regions losing its inherent British culture though.
Perhaps true in many people's minds, but it largely seems to be the case that native Brits do not want to do those jobs. Either Brits tend to see themselves as "above that", or there is a serious shortage of workers in those areas (structural problem). Therefore, such jobs were left undone or severely delayed. The UK got what it literally asked for and is now finding out that it didn't actually want that.
Brexit was partly fear of Muslims, not just job competition with Eastern Europeans. You see this in the discussion around Syrian refugees from people like Nigel Farage, Douglas Murray and Sargon of Akkad. They wanted to exit the system that enabled that. This particular motive was collectivist.
In addition, Brexit was partly the typical arrogance and wounded ego you see from declining and fallen empires. The glory days are still fresh in people's minds. There's a feeling that Britain is on the decline. People couldn't accept the egalitarian terms and low status of being just another ordinary EU member state. This also is collectivist through and through.
I'm not sure what you mean by "trust", beyond small interactions like say...taking a photo with a phone for them or helping them with the door. I can say, confidently, the vast majority of American's do not trust strangers. FUD permeates every news outlet and as economics get more desperate (most live in economic long tail) opportunists are rightly feared and seen everywhere. Litigation is unusually high in the US. US society has even begun to socially monetize the predictable nature of humanity with baited porch pirate prizes and hazard-trapped bike theft, etc.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32844573
https://metro.co.uk/2016/02/19/gang-of-disneyland-child-pick...
Disneyland has active cameras over every visible square inch of the part (including along the floors, dark corners, under the trash cans, et al). The Disneyland agents acting as tourists also roam the park and monitor suspicious activity. Anaheim's Disneyland is easily the most monitored public space on the planet. Pickpockets can still move about, but they don't tend to take phones from people in the open and then run with them. My comments were in the context of existing overt trust, not the gamut of every possible criminal activity. Pickpocketing, confidence schemes, violence, etc notwithstanding. The movie, "Welcome to the Giftshop", which is partly about Banksy, makes note of how Disneyland is harder to do something overt than the manned wall between Israel and Palestine.
Rushmore National Memorial is a difficult place to commit crimes in for other reasons. First, there are very few roads that come in and go out. The walkway up, that is commonly traveled, is lengthy, not very densely populated, and requires going through the giftshop. It's remote in a practical way, making it a very simple place to lockdown (just like Disneyland). Second, it's got enough federal employees to quickly act and they tend to do so with wide authority. Any sort of overt activity at the park, would be far more risky than going down the road to one of the bordering tourist trap towns 10 minutes away in multiple directions.
That kind of trust, trust in institutions. people litigate and trust that teh state will resolve things, and they also trust that the law will prevail. Not trust in the sense of safety , that only happens in very homogeneous/cohesive societies
America is very high trust. It still has something that resembles a democracy, private property rights, businesses, etc. All of this signal that Americans can have shared ethical values - a fundamental point of high(er) trust societies. None of these would be possible if people fundamentally didn't trust each other. Despite what the media portrays Americans as almost none of it is true.
Nevertheless, doesn't the US have the highest murder rate in the developed world? Again, it does not sound like something I'd associate with high trust.
A couple questions occur to me as well - how does gun ownership correlate with high and low trust society (by your definition). And I'm sure this exists on a spectrum and societies will change over time, so which way would you think the US is trending?
Gun deaths have trended down dramatically since the 60s (source: FBI) and with all but a few unfortunate locations in the US you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than shot. Ignoring suicide, the US is a very safe place much to chagrin of the yellow journalists. This sounds exactly like a high trust society to me. If it was low trust, every street corner would be dangerous. Chicago, for example, is a microcosm of a low trust society. Most of Africa is low trust. Afghanistan is low trust. Clan-based warfare is a sign of low trust. China, for example, is a (somewhat) high trust society yet has incredibly restrictive firearms laws.
> And I'm sure this exists on a spectrum and societies will change over time, so which way would you think the US is trending?
According to the actual FBI data released in the last several years gun deaths continue to decline from record highs 60 years ago. The vast majority of murders are gang related (a cultural problem), and the vast, vast majority of remaining data is taken up by suicides. As far as I can tell not only is the US a high trust society in general (I can open a business anywhere, I can buy a home anywhere, I can generally expect someone to be kind to me), it's also safe despite it's gun ownership. The anti-gunners always seem to ignore cultural differences in countries. For example, comparing Sweden or Finland to the US. These are still culturally homogeneous. The US is a veritable melting pot of 10,000 different cultures. This has a dramatic effect that people avoid talking about because it is politically incorrect. In this sense the US can be viewed as a lower-tier of high trust due to the lack of cultural homogeneity. Though I would still argue on fundamentals the US itself is very high trust, albeit somewhat awkward and very self-deprecating.
I think your issue trying to resolve high trust is stemming from the media portrayal of the US. As someone who spends every waking moment here, and many moments outside of metros, I just don't see what horrors the media reports. If it does exist, it's somewhere else (and I honestly can't be bothered to worry about it).
That isn't exactly my understanding, at least over the last couple years - didn't 2020 bring a sharp rise in homicides (along with gun ownership)? Perhaps I'm just a bit sensitive since I tend to hear gunshots at night every so often and a police officer just gunned a man down in his car for nothing more than eating a burger in my neighborhood just a few weeks ago. Last I heard he was still on life support.
But overall I have to say that my experience of living in the US just feels like being trapped in a box with lurking predators everywhere. Everywhere you go, there's some scam or hidden fee (which doesn't really feel that different from a bribe now that I think about it) that someone is just waiting to spring on you. God forbid if you need some kind of healthcare - no one can tell you what anything will cost, but they will bill you something, probably a lot. I get that that might not meet the definition of low trust, but it doesn't feel like high trust either.
I think you have the causality backward here
> America is very high trust...
We're as polarized as ever, virtually no one approves of our leadership, and everyone thinks corporations or "the media" or "the deep state" or some faceless billionaire is behind the scenes pulling the strings.
So no, there's no trust in this country. You've confused trust with apathy and defeat.
> proceeds to distrust the numbers
thanks.
And I m not sure about declining trust either (despite what people say). people are much less likely to solve interpersonal differences face-to-face rather than through a public impersonal institution , it's just that institutions change , now we have large private-sector agents running our lives , and too many of them are in the tech sector
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...
This is the definition of trust unless I am missing something. Trusting your family or clan is social trust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...
"the ability of various peoples to organize effectively for commercial purposes without relying on blood ties or government intervention"
I live in the US but grew up in a society closer to low trust. Lots of pros and cons to both, but I think one thing you are overlooking is that there are things a family/clan provide that are not replaceable by institutions or other things.
No institution will provide the same moral support when a loved one passes away that family/clan does. No institution will blindly stand up for you, no questions asked. There are downsides to these types of societies, but there is a lot of value to these types of bonds/relationships. Less about trust, more about care. You are never emotionally isolated (even if you really want to be). You're always interconnected.
which i think is good - blindly standing up for someone, and unfettered loyalty, is not a sign of a good, rational democracy.
Families do that, but even then, only to an extend. Your position should be defensible by a fair institution, but only if your position is _actually_ something defensible as agreed to by society at large.
It doesn't seem like people like how things are going all that much
I would have imagined that the entire discussion would have been about that. I'm originally from a small town where it's almost entirely a '3rd space' - even the homes.
Sitting with my grandmother for lunch, literally random people would walk in to 'say hi' - or not really 'hi' but rather to talk/pass on something 'really important' such as the cousin of the shop keeper who passed on, and that's his family at the funeral parlour - because of course you ought to know. etc..
There is a great intellectual in personal freedom in being able to leave the community, at the same time, civil society has not created a replacement; frankly it's obvious and sad.
Perhaps even more perverse are generations of people who have never known what was, and have no frame of reference for it.
Our leaders don't give it a thought and many would be leaders who might otherwise speak for traditional communities either lack the communication skills, are caught up in other bad ideas, or are pushed aside as relics in favour of some ideological meme.
I think this is a first order cultural issue, like healthcare and social assistance. I'm not sure we have even the language to address it, as usually the most academic individuals want to talk about the most progressive ideas and 'change' of some kind. Perhaps there is hope, in that often we just find a 'new way' to describe some otherwise traditional concept. 'Organic gardens' being a good example of that; in my hometown, many people have 'organic gardens' - because they've just always had 'gardens', and really never did use a chemicals, ergo, they were hip before it was hip. Perhaps the term '3rd Space' can substitute in a similar manner to describe what we've understood since the dawn of time in social terms, i.e. 'the community'.
It's a bit of a sensitive social issue which relates to 'someone at home', obviously almost always the mother. I have no doubt whatsoever that women having the chance to work, contribute etc. is very material progress, at the same time, I have no doubt that 'homemakers' add tremendous value. The former we measure in terms of productivity, GDP etc. the later, again, it's 'externalized' from our data and language, and kind of 'shamed' a bit in some circles so we just don't talk about it.
In 2022 I kind of just assume the world is fairly gender-less in most respects so I'm always shocked to see this kind of data which shows substantial numbers of women (relative to men) preferring to stay at home. It's still about 50% [1]. I've seen other, more nuanced data that puts it a bit more subtly: men mostly prefer to work full time (but definitely not all), women substantially prefer to work part time with almost equal cohorts wanting full time work vs. stay at home full time. I think the 'part time' concept rings interesting, because it may feel aspirational or 'best of both worlds' for at least some people (men included) who kind of want to spend time with young children, but not be 'locked in the home'.
And finally, we are living a lot longer and so ratio of families with children is smaller, which affects the numbers.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer...
It is almost as if humans have gender/sex related predispositions and are not a tabula rasa for the society to scribe on, as the far left would like to claim..
I would suggest the Blueprint by Robert Plomin, a fascinating read.
Given that women’s participation in the labor force in the US passed 50% in the 1970s (well within living memory!), this is pretty optimistic :)
However, did that disappear because of the technology, or because I became an adult?
From my perspective the spaces are numerous. It is people wanting to use them that is absent. Everywhere you go the question from those running them is the same: How can we attract more people here?
The problem may actually be that we have too many third space areas, which has spread them all too thin. Nobody wants to go to a third space to sit alone.
Notably a lot of restaurants/cafes used to be '3rd spaces' - but they've often been replaced with corporatized chains. Starbucks, funny enough effectively 'brands' their cafes as '3rd spaces' with the comfy chairs etc. but they are in reality, not really 3rd spaces. Just the 'feeling and appearance' of it.
In my local suburban Starbucks there are little 'cheerful sticky notes' ostensibly written by community members, alas, they are not. They are mostly the same handwriting; the little bits of 'cheer' were handed down to the manager from corporate HQ, to be 'passed off as' community notes, so as to substitute for the sentiment of the local folks, who obviously can't be trusted to be 'on brand'. I find that a deeply cynical form of 'marketing'.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. Those groups are all trying to figure out how to attract people. Such groups are found all over the place, with a small group of people desperately trying to make something of them, but are all struggling to establish a community.
The outcome I see over and over again is that the dedicated few end up taking the club/organization/group on as a job and plan one or two events each year that brings out the larger community. And it works for one night only, but then people go back to living their lives and the dedicated few get back to work to make it happen again next year.
The problem is that these people don't really want a job. The hard work is just the only avenue they see to support their dream of building the community they want to exist in. But it's a struggle because there is so much competition for one's time.
I posit that there are too many third spaces that have spread too thin and as they become thin it becomes less likely that anyone else wants to become a member of their community. Nobody wants to sit alone. If the bowling club, ladies auxiliary, church, etc. came together there would be a better chance of a community starting to build, but that would mean letting go of competing interests and in a world that has become accustomed to never ending choice that is a hard pill to swallow.
Maybe that's what people say. Their actions show other preferences though - most people choose to mindlessly either channel-surf their TV or scroll their phones in free time. Unfortunately, human brain is inherently lazy and will usually go for the easiest option, especially when one is tired (e.g. in the evening after work). I don't see community spaces ever coming back to become a thing again.
We're talking about third spaces. People will definitely sit alone in their first space quite happily. They will not sit alone at the bowling alley or at church, however. These communities require a sufficient population of members to be compelling.
> I don't see community spaces ever coming back to become a thing again.
Or perhaps the once-a-year events I spoke of earlier are simply the evolution of third spaces? The people absolutely come out to them, and there are many throughout the year so an individual is never short of a community event to involve themselves in. In that sense the community spaces have never gone away. You no longer find the specificity like "I'm in a bowling club. That's what I do." it is more like "I am going to the bowing event this week, the church event next week, the ladies auxiliary the next night..."
My point was - if there was indeed a need to create such spaces, they'd be there in spades. But, reality is, people are just happy to sit alone in their houses now, so the community spaces don't get created. It was already observed in villages in Poland in the 1970s. Before that time, people were meeting each other in the evenings, as there was nothing better to do. After roughly 1970, most people got TV, and in the evenings streets became empty and you could see a TV glow through each house's window. Now, with Internet and social media, it's even worse.
My father is getting up there in terms of age, and hangs out with his buddies every single day after 'work time' (most of them don't work). They go to each others garage, hang out, have a beer, watch you tube, talk about nothing.
If your buds were all within walking distance you might find yourself in the same position, as I gather would most people.
Go to a country where modern culture has not taken over and you see the same.
I guess because they are all far removed from the needs of younger generations. The church for obvious reasons, greasy diner because people want healthy food options. Bowling still seems kind of popular but mostly with families.
We need new community spaces that match the needs of new generations. I'm not sure I have the answer for what they are, but maybe a place that does good food and has areas for hosting whatever events and workshops people want to put on? Or maker/hacker/art spaces?
Besides that, we need to reorganize our society so that people have some free time and financial security while working a reasonable number of hours, even for entry level and low skill jobs.
If everyone is stressing about their financials and has no spare money/time to enjoy life, find friends, and pursue hobbies, then I'm afraid we live in a kind of low-level dystopia and no amount of "3rd spaces" will fix that.
That's probably the need right there. The younger generations are off spending their time carting their kids around from sports league to dance class to who knows what. They don't have time for anything else. In the age of "my kids must do everything to outcompete the other kids", that becomes one's life.
You see a short window between leaving college (which brings its own community) and starting a family where the young ones join these communities, but it is indeed short lived once family starts to overwhelm them.
Those children activities do provide a community of sorts for the parents, but it's also a little more insular as unless you have kids that are involved you're not really welcome into those communities and likely would feel out of place even if you were welcomed not having what everyone else is bonding over.
One other thing I'd also point to is network effects. If lots of people are all finding it easier to be online all the time rather than be social, then for any given person, that results in a reduced number of potential friends.
[0] I would actually put some blame on social media for being a poor substitute for socialization, but just good enough that it makes people less likely to dig themselves out of being isolated. But blaming the internet in general, including things like blogs makes as little sense as blaming books.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
Even when I didn't know others in the building. My central location is right next to the main public transport hub which made it super easy for my existing friends to get in, and not worry about how they are getting home after drinking because its a 5 minute walk to the train station.
It often crosses my mind, I fully love the experiences I've had and the friends I made abroad but if I could do it over, I sometimes think, knowing what I know, I'd not choose to do it again. Sure, I'd give up those experiences and those friends but I'd have different experiences and different friends. My sister, who stayed put, clearly, by nearly anyone's definition, has had a full life of friends and family and achievements etc..., and she has none of the tradeoffs have having left loved ones behind and having to choose between them.
If anything the lack of social trust has made people more attached to their families and less willing to make a move. At least that's one explanation of the known mobility data.
In that way, I see the collapse of institutional trust as a good thing. Not because I'm an anarchist or iconoclast, but because systems built upon illusions are less stable than systems built upon truths.
We are in the process of a shift from an unstable equilibrium to a stable equilibrium. That shift is shaking a lot of people loose from society's safety nets, but ultimately will lead to a better place. It had to be done.
That's the view from the cockpit. My view from the ground also suggests it's not catastrophic. I'm an early digital native. Twenty-five years after access to the internet, I now have a spouse whom I met online and two children. I work remotely and spend most of my waking time online. I have no friends outside family, which could be better but it's not catastrophic as shown by my ability to create a family and carve out some life for myself. I've adapted.
Maybe I am just an optimist. Really the status quo ante was untenable and we must move forward and make the best of what we have.
For those who speak English or want to learn it is a great opportunity to reach across national identities, but , at the same time, I don't really foresee the other communities disappearing.
And if anything most of it is extremely US centric. I think you're in a bubble inside of a bubble and are completely oblivious to most of what's outside of these bubbles, and that's a feature of internet as we built it, a personalised content distributor that mostly show you what you want to be shown
The collapse of old systems isn't creating a new more global and encompassing system, it's creating very highly individualistic groups/tribes mentality, as, if not more, fragmented than before
> I work remotely and spend most of my waking time online. I have no friends outside family
If this is the future you're trying to sell us... how bleak
Two questions:
1. What are the sources of information that convinced you that your authorities were always lying double-dealers?
2. What prevents you, living in a democracy, from using your freedom of political speech to convey the above to others and convince them to vote for authorities who are not always lying or for laws that punish lying? (Since you are not an anarchist, you must assume non-lying authorities are possible)
1. The fallout from the Iraq War. As to why Vietnam or Watergate did not do the same, well I wasn't alive then and children are credulous.
2. It's not about choosing the right authority. It's about first, creating a trusting culture backed by truths so the trust is well-placed, and second, about designing institutions that are fail-safe given what I now know about the nature of power and the people it attracts.
Yes, the problem with power is that even in many democracies it seems too easily convertible to money and attracts greedy people.
I suspect such greed is a psychological pathology, but in addition to treating it the system could somehow make power inconvenient and unprofitable to attract "irrational" people who are crazy in the right way to want to actually make things better rather than turn a profit. This does probably sound quite un-American and I don't know how it could be implemented.
I am somewhat hazy on the politics of the Iraq war but I'll look it up.
Now how do we vote in such a way as to make sure we elect non-liars? Being a liar is not always visible, but maybe we can determine it by looking at whether the candidate lied while holding previous offices, and whether or not they get caught in any lies while on the campaign trail. We may also be able to make some judgment of a person's honesty based on how they make arguments, i.e. how they use statistics, and how often they omit relevant information that would look bad for them.
So suppose that everyone could perfectly identify who was a liar and who was honest. Would the electorate then vote only for honest politicians? Nope. A voter finds other things valuable in a politician besides just honesty, for example agreement on policy issues, or allocating tax money in a way that benefits the voter. Even if the candidate for party A is found out to be a no-good stinking liar, that still might not be enough to induce a party A voter to vote for the party B candidate instead. After all, party B is terrible. And there can be no party C that adopts the policy stances of party A but is staffed by honest politicians. Because of vote splitting in first-past-the-post electoral systems, two parties tend to dominate with outsiders having no chance of getting elected, even if the electorate prefers the outsiders. This is why we'd ideally want to use a more sane electoral system like score voting.
> and true information doesn't necessarily spread faster than false information
It definitely doesn't. I believe there're studies that shown it to be demonstrably the case. What spreads well is a story, and a story is always a subjective and selective interpretation of facts, and as any good journalist will tell you two different interpretations of the same factual info can prompt two diametrically opposing opinions (even if they never technically lie, they can intentionally or not omit/deemphasize parts of the story, choose what to report and so on).
be careful with that one. if you dig far enough there may not be enough truths upon which to build something cohesive. if you believe the individual in a secular society already creates illusions for themselves in order to get by (e.g. purpose/meaning), maybe similar illusions are necessary for even the smallest of social systems.
Maybe rephrase as "systems built upon unnecessary illusions" is better.
Finding forbidden love across religious or ethnic lines is a triumph of the truth of our shared humanity over the illusion of group differences. Finding meaning in the face of heat death, well that's an illusion we all have to play along with.
I think it's far easier to strip away illusions that suck than it is to build a worldview from scratch. Thankfully the former seems to be our modus operandi so most people never have to try the second option.
achieving coherence across these illusions is what authority does. this authority creates a new illusion — the rule of law — to enforce coherence across individual variations along these illusions of rights/etc. some structure (courts, penal system, representative democracy, …) appear as apparatus to better define/protect the base illusions.
but which of these illusions are “necessary”? can a society flourish without believing in property? can it flourish if it doesn’t believe that humans are exceptional when it comes to the issue of rights? can it flourish if it doesn’t believe rule of law is the way to define these illusions?
these illusions are necessary to today’s state-based societies. some of them were considered unnecessary as recently as when the West was being settled, and many are outright contradictory to tribal or nomadic lifestyles of the past.
if societies built upon fewer “unnecessary illusions” are to be better, more stable, then where does that put us? initially it seems at odds with historical developments, though the illusions i highlighted probably exaggerate that.
I strongly disagree with that. The most stable societies historically have been built around a religious center, which is by definition not an objective rational truth. We are yet to see a very large group of people co-exist in an environment based on truths. So far we are witnessing quite the opposite: truth itself has acquired a new definition ("alternative facts", "my truth", etc).
Edit: for people who downvote this comment. Do you have an example of a stable society based on truths? Other than a speculation that this time humanity will succeed, and people will finally value truth over comfort.
I think also any team of programmers would qualify - at the end of the day, you can empirically verifiy claims.
On a broader level, you could argue that since modern society is basically built on the laws of physics - our bureacracy and infrastructure is only possible because Maxwell's Equations are "true" in the sense that they accurately predict things about reality [0] - we are living in a system built on truth, and when we communicate on Hacker News, that is only possible because of all those before us who have sought out and shared true things about the universe.
[0] - you can probably use a definition of "truth" different than "accurately models reality", but it's the one I use, and I think most people will accept it as good enough.
We’re not including people who are different anymore than we did in the past. We’re just “accepting” them with words and not actions.
I see this behavior a lot in my social circles and communities I’m involved in. A lot of preaching of acceptance and awareness while not including them in anything at all.
It’s all idpol.
We don't invite Sarah to the Christmas party because she's Jewish and that goes against her beliefs and we don't want to offend her (regardless of how strict of an adherent she is), we aren't inviting Suzie either because almost everybody has kids, and she's deep down the /r/childfree rabbit hole (which is a perfectly fine worldview to have), etc.
Most everyone I know just sits on their phones, computers, or TVs a good portion of the day. All boredom is banished, all gaps are filled. The threshold for participation and collaboration is higher, because why risk boredom when you have guaranteed-minimum-satisfaction available.
It's like opening up to so many possibilities, even to creativity, as you can start imagining the all possible threads that create those amazing stop-inducing plots. Thank you!
I see this a lot too, but I disagree with the conclusion. I think more people are bored today than have been before. (How many of you browse Netflix or YouTube, jumping platforms, thinking "there's nothing to watch") But we need to recognize that engagement does not mean a lack of boredom but rather addiction. As the article points out, people are substantially more risk adverse now.
While that may be good for things like less people doing heavy drinking and such, our lives are inherently risky. If you talk to people about why they have a hard time making friends you'll find that this risk adverse nature often pops up (not the only cause, but one of many). Same with dating. Any type of relationship is inherently risky. You WILL get hurt by some of them too, but that is the price to pay for the high rewards of successful relationships (which can form online).
So I am in agreement that there is a "why risk it" aspect of people, but not about boredom. I believe we are self isolating because that's what animals do, especially depressed ones. If our lives are comfortable enough there is little incentive to take any risks. So it sounds weird, but I think a major part of the issue is that our lives have become so well off that there is fewer incentives to push ourselves out of our comfort zones[0]. But we are human too and able to find challenges for ourselves and create discomfort when there is none. This is a double edged sword that is difficult to wield, but I think it is important that we learn it. It is how we better ourselves: putting ourselves in uncomfortable positions[1].
[0] I do think this also plays a role in the (global) rise in authoritarianism, but that is too much for this comment.
[1] Even doing things like learning to code, ride a bike, or learn an instrument requires putting ourselves in uncomfortable positions. Specifically because you're never good at something when you first start. But the challenge is supposed to make us stronger.
We’re all tip toeing around something. The statistics are suggesting that we have no friends, no relationships, no jobs, no kids, no marriage, and so on, which kind of defines a meaningless life.
If in the back of your mind you sort of know that, then the other statistics kick in, uptick in depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
Is the solution to fix the risk aspect, the boredom aspect, or should we stop telling people their life sucks which they indulge in via their self pity, or, is there at least one society on earth right now that’s not like this that we can look to?
Some part of me is starting to believe the answer is far simpler:
Everyone, snap the fuck out of it. Your life sucks, but it also doesn’t. We’re all going to be fine.
This is kinda what I was getting at before. The things that make us uniquely human are our abilities to override our natural tendencies. I figure that's what you're suggesting with this line.
To dig further into what I've said before about people being comfortable and existential concerns, I think part of the problem here is that it is harder to determine how to take action. The gap is quite large from where we are to where we need to be. In every day complications it is easy to break down a need into several tasks with clear goals. Whereas existential and abstract problems seem insurmountable and difficult to break down because of their complexities (a thing humans aren't particularly well equipped to handle through natural means). So it is easier to just lay flat. But I think part of what makes us human is being able to light that internal fire yourself, though it is not anywhere near as simple as it sounds.
With more basic needs met I think it's fine folks may spend more time in arbitrary leisure. Even if it means less time doing meat space activities or producing fewer children.
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Usually, when we challenge ourselves, we extrapolate from, and build previously understood models/variables or slight variations thereof in order to expand our knowledge. From this we form an expanded model that takes us even farther before. That is how we form calculated risks. These are our known unknowns. This is the kind of scenario that is conducive to challenging oneself should the potential rewards outway the potential losses.
However, there are situations where you have no ability to craft a reasonable risk model, due to ignorance or, whether one is aware of it or not, faulty information. These experiential black boxes are built on hidden or heavily abstracted variables that aren't replicable or controllable. However well-defined the goal, the actual payoff is elusive. The costs/losses can't be known until after fact if at all, by which point one may have already suffered them. One can only assess the range of opportunity costs concerning the undertaking of the decision or not. Dating and/or marriage in general — but especially in the last decade or so — fall into this category.
> You WILL get hurt by some of them too, but that is the price to pay for the high rewards of successful relationships (which can form online).
Perseverance may be a necessary condition to find a high quality relationship, but isn't a sufficient one [1]. There's a point where such a pursuit becomes self-defeating masochism. Losses don't automatically stop at 0 and we don't get our time back. "Why risk it" is a necessary question to ask, because if you can't answer it, then it isn't wise to undertake a process that can make one more poorer in time, money, self-satisfaction, and health than when one first started.
[1] That's to say nothing of whether such a relationship will continue to be a high quality one after obtaining it.
Your phone, like your tv is actually mostly quite boring and needs a bunch of flashy gimmicks to keep you watching, a la Letterman's "tonight's top 10" launch animations to try and hold your interest over how they didn't have the content for 3 jokes in a week let alone 50.
Quick edit to something different with colour and movement!
And they were right then, too. I despise the television.
Are we not all friends here on HN? Or am I so depraved and desperate? Have I socially died and don’t even know it, friends?
We’re all friends right? Right? What the fuck is going on.
Being able to talk to people who are willing to spend time talking back is a basis for friendship, at least in my book.
Friendship doesn’t always have to be so serious.
On HN, the topic is given (the article we comment on), and it is usually not personal. If it happens to be personal, it is most likely not the personal topic I would like to discuss now.
Also, if any of us died today, most likely no one else on HN would ever notice. That too is not exactly what I imagine as "friendship".
And for me, a friend is family I get to choose for myself. Anyone else is, at best, a friendly acquaintance.
I expect there are many other definitions out there as well.
In short, only you can answer that question.
Fun and interesting is enough for me, we don’t need to be best friends. We can be some semblance of friends. Or is that asking for too much as well?
Anyways, I agree with you. The drop in friendships can’t be fucking tracked because everyone has their own idea of what it means.
Exactly. And all this is before we even get to differences in languages and cultures. In the old country, word friend has very different connotations when compared to US equivalent. There it is basically reserved for the highest level of US version of the word. In US the world covers a whole range of social affinities.
<< Interesting how varied (imho, high) our standards are for another human being.
This is why being a kid has its benefits. You have X? We are best friends now. As you get older, possession of item X is a very sucky proxy for a good relationship.
That said, you f'ing matter and you deserve to be friends with people. You can do it too. Just get out, talk to people in the real world, whatever just do something different from what you are doing now.
I'm rooting for you man.
Maybe I'm looking at this through rose-tinted glasses, but I see that feeling as decreasing here on HN.
@dang - any input here? Hows moderation been in 2016 vs now?
I remember hearing some futurist a decade or so ago say how indistinguishable real-life and online life will be eventually. At the time I couldn’t believe it but your comment synthesizes it in a way.
I would be considerably more lonely, less inspired and knowledgeable without this community. That’s friendship to me.
But I do find that you can have real friends online, and it's not all that much harder or less common than having real friends in person. And the cameraderie we might have with a lot of people over HN isn't that far removed from real friendship.
My standards for friend are pretty low these days - anyone who can have an interesting, respectful conversation without becoming hateful or condescending over a difference in opinions is an awfully good candidate.
Would you listen to me ranting about evil nimbyists preventing any form of urban development and thus blocking economic growth?
Would you call me asking me to help you with an unexpected problem?
Can I stop by your place just to hang out a bit, without any particular reason?
Would you pick me up from an airport tomorrow if I ask you to?
Will I come to you if I have a wild business idea? Or will you come to me to brag about your recent promotion?
No, we are not friends. We don't even know each other. You need to spend some time with a person for at least couple of hours a day for about half a year to become friends.
I’ll read your posts on HN and upvote you, how’s that, and thoughtfully reply.
We probably don't know your name, so I don't even know it counts as an acquaintance, unless you're famous externally and have linked that to your HN username, or have used it as your name. And even then we know it in the same way as a roll call in a crowded lecture room or business meeting, and not as the individual.
I think classic online forums did provide scope for building up social connections, but I think the Reddit-inspired social news sites, including HN, simply do not.
With that safety net, someone has to first accept a level of risk they don't currently need to, and they also have to meet that same risk barrier for someone else. So people are unwittingly trading more two sided, genuine social interactions, for shallow, one sided interactions.
My answer to that one is yes for most people on this site. :)
The only place this would happen for me is work. But that's no longer possible because all my coworkers at my new job are WFH.
It happened in school and college, after that it's only ever happened at work that I spend "a couple of hours a day for about half a year" with anyone.
Even if joined some kind of club, that would be either a couple of hours a month or at best, a couple of hours a week, not a couple of hours a day.
Traveling brings people closer (that could be arranged through meetups), doing intense social work (also possible through meetups)...
That's not even an acquaintance in my book. Friendship requires a little bit more back-and-forth. Good friends have some trust associated with them. Apologies to all the HN'ers: you're better than redditors but you're still internet strangers. Plenty of people on the internet are not ones you'd want to be friends with.
I go to the pub with other people and enjoy their company, but many of them don’t find interesting the kinds of things discussed on HN. At times, that makes me feel lonely in a crowd, Which is why I also come to HN.
Yes we are friends, but if I did not also have the pub friends I would feel lonely.
Your notion of friendship is slightly odd... But. That brings me to:
Why isn't there more of a concerted attempt at local HN meetups?
Ask HN, Show HN, how about Meetup HN: (some city)
1. Lower trust society, probably made worse by increased political division.
2. Loss of social skills. People are more testy and angry or on a hair-trigger. You look at photos from 70+ years ago and people seemed friendlier , more approachable, and more gregarious. Same for online, in which people have gotten angrier and more intolerant with each election cycle. Campus guest speakers have been shouted-down when trying to give talks, such as Charles Murray. This suggests poor social skills.
3. Individual preferences. Perhaps people are choosing to withdrawal or be alone, because it's more enjoyable. Maybe the internet, smart phones, Netflix, and social media are more enjoyable than social outings. There are more ways then ever for people to do things together, such as group events which are posted and scheduled online, yet people are voluntarily choosing to be alone.
Previously, you could put up with someone who had a few quirks or was a little obnoxious because, hey, that’s part of life and there are only so many people you can interact with in a day, and some of them suck. But now, I can find the other 10 people who like whatever band I’m into, or weird sport, or whatever, and I can spend a bunch of time with them. I no longer have the patience to hear about your stupid hobby, or your horrible politics. I can just walk away, go to my computer and hang out with other like-minded people. Just like here on Hacker News!
Now we spend smaller blocks of time together, a lot of conversation is online where you can selectively present yourself favorably, social media is a selection of your best moments curated to be shared. We don’t spend time with people, so no one knows us and that creates a constant pressure to be “the image” you’ve presented. This is a recipe for anxiety, depression and having no resilience to the daily ups and downs of life.
Much like physical exercise, social interactions are a biological necessity. People aren't just choosing to be lonely.
No it is not. There is no reason to believe that screen time is displacing social time. It could well be displacing reading novels or watching TV.
I do a lot of socialising. I make an effort. I see other people around me doing the same thing.
Here I am at a screen. I cannot remember the last novel I read from start to finish.
Also, I'd really like to see this trend in a broader context. How much did these kinds of indicators dip during, say, the great depression?
The matrix is real. Not that we are living in a computer (thats just stupid), but that we are being reduced to particiption in algorithm, mere conduits of information.
That malaise, hard to pinpoint but ongoing since 150 years, is the driver of the social recession
My generation in my country feared nuclear war and economic collapse (15% inflation when I was growing up). Each demographic has its own impeding doom: climate change fear is new, but I don’t think there is more fear than the past. I think people in the US from my generation had communism to worry about, and communists probably worried about the US. The big change is social media and mass media driving more fear - hard to measure the difference though - does our capacity for fear remain constant regardless of input?
Edit: and when I think of the fear in the lives of my friends, their personal situation is far more critical than any distant fear of global warming. Their kids, their job, their marriage, their parents, their friends, their status. I am interested in the demographic differences because that give good hints as to cause and effect.
George Hotz, are we living in a simulation (6 minutes)
the narrative of destruction isn’t universal, but the binary divide between those who share it and those who do not almost maps to progressive v conservative groupings for those who accept the labeling.
Such is progress when you zoom out to the century scale.
Anyways its arrogant to say that when "the old ways" were only replaced in like the last 15-20ish years and people got on along well-enough before that without diseases of despair.
IMHO the only reason "the old ways" went away wasn't because the new way is better, but rather we humans have rather lazy, addictive personalities and so its easier and simpler to utilize the new tech-based ways even when in the long run we are much worse off for it. I don't even know how you can say the old ways were worse though, when its only been 15-20 years and society has changed so much. The old ways were around for a very long time.
I think they are clearly better, at least in principle. Extending civil respect to LGBTs, for example, is one of the outcomes of moving away from how things were in the past. We are in general finishing the project of the individualistic society, and any institution that is holding that back (religion, traditional gender roles, etc.) is losing ground.
I don't have solutions, I am just noting that we have some loose ends to follow up to make sure we can still have comfortable communities of very different individuals.
also “smart” phones. how can we expect to do anything else while our eyes are glued to the little screens we carry everywhere?
the trust angle is presented too broadly. the article opened with how many close friends the individual has. i trust my close friends with my life. i trust my neighbors enough to leave my door unlocked at night. i trust the larger neighborhood to go on midnight walks with headphones, eat/drink at a new place knowing i won’t get sick, etc. these forms of trust are what allows for IRL friendships to form. trust in gov institutions, or any large-scale system is only relevant to IRL friendships to the same degree that connecting with someone across the country over the net is relevant.
> The healthier alternative involves rethinking internet infrastructure on pro-social ends: platforms owned by the people using them with community prerogatives in mind.
while i do believe this to be better for the individual, socially, i don’t expect this would halt the political trends. my digital life is 90% on independently-operated services like Matrix, Mastodon, git forges and good ol’ personal blogs. the more personal/supportive social norms in these areas don’t magically lead to an environment which is pro-the-status-quo politically. almost the opposite: many of the community-operated online groups doing something they feel meaningful want to bring that same meaning to the IRL, but run into massive difficulties that they attribute to the political status quo. the Nixos convention just held in France apparently handed out a “smash the state” sticker in their swag bag. naïvely pushing for stronger/community-operated online groups may just exacerbate the clash between the online social order and offline political order in the short term. not that i’m for or against that here: merely put forth as an observation.
The author essentially cites a bunch of unrelated (albeit interesting) statistics, talks (sighs) about "broader cultural shifts", and then on top of all of this drops this little pseudo solution at the end. A pseudo problem followed by a pseudo solution, go figure
There are too many of these bloggers (and opinion columnists) sitting around in armchairs, recycling the same gibberish they read in the Atlantic and waving their hands in the air with respect to "broader cultural shifts"
The second one of these bloggers starts "broader cultural shift"ing is the second I put their blog in the hosts file
The author cites a statistic about when students start driving, start drinking alcohol, etc. Then the author cites a statistic about "declining trust in institutions". It's easy to put a bunch of statistics like this together and imply that they indicate a lack of socialization (a common cause) or something like that, but all they really show us is a changing culture that the author (and many others) are bothered about
It's a pseudo problem (in my view) because it outlines several different (supposedly related) sub problems and then tries to tie them together as a single problem with some implicit common cause
And we're on the verge of a AR/VR breakthrough, probably making the screen time issue even worse.
One slightly off-topic comment I have, however, is:
When the author talks about delayed adulthood and mentions that the percentage of 12th graders that tried alcohol declined, how is that possibly a trait of adulthood?
If anything, I'd say that not consuming alcohol demonstrates a more conscious choice that could be associated with adulthood. Also, one must consider the impact of hangovers only increases, thus increasing the correlation (I guess) between adulthood and the avoidance of alcohol.
Let me also speculate that living between countries especially takes a toll on social life due to the time invested in commuting.
Maybe the definition of individualism should evolve a little.
As far as I can tell, it's easier than ever before to make a close friend, for those willing. I suspect that peoples bandwidth of acceptance is narrowing with the popularization of the internet. They imagine friendship to be something other than a close bond. They've idealized it, so of course reality never matches up.
the party has repeatedly insisted socialism will triumph 'eventually' without much allusion to anything but historic tendency, however i wonder if US capitalisms hyper-individualism in the throughs of social recession may be the elusive driving force that fulfills the parties prophetic declaration. that, as many more find themselves shut out and alone the notion of collaborative public forum itself could prove enticing enough to walk back some of the most egregious excesses of neoliberalism in the 21st century
I'd rather jump off a bridge tbh
Is this what life is always like in declining empires? Will it just get worse every year until we have a few wars and genocides until there's enough destruction to start rebuilding?
I suppose this is the logic we get from kids raised by algorithms.
We are now living in the globalised world when most people don't share Christian values. It means, trusting anyone at all apart from (with caution) closest immediate family members (and even that only because they are on your will), is simply a mistake.