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Comment by afr0ck | Hacker News Reader

It breaks my heart to see Western people living such lives. I love the West for so many reasons, but the social construction is a complete broken mess. Family and community is completely destroyed. People live and work only for themselves. The amount of loneliness and isolation is just mind blowing and unbearable. IMO, it's a selfish lifestyle. People who manage to make great success (due to a combination of lack, intelligence, hard work and sometimes just beauty) can live very good lives but the rest are doomed to live miserable, lonely lives and no gives a shit about them until they die. Very sad. I wish you happiness and fulfillment (whatever they are for you).

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What are you contrasting the "West" with? As a person who lived most of his life in an Asian country with a very strong familial and social construct, I can say that there were no shortage of lonely, broken people there - we as a society just did a better job of hiding it. Perhaps the sense of failure and isolation may have slightly different causes, but that is not to say that Western society is somehow uniquely broken.

I would never say it's uniquely broken. Loneliness and isolation probably exist in every corner of the world. The thing is that the West gets almost everything done right IMHO. It's an amazing place to be. However, the connection and social part of it is not going anywhere. Families are one of the best constructs to build life-long fullfilling relationships, but everyone is giving up on them now. People are not getting married and are not having children, and if they do, it likely ends up in a divorce. As OP said, it's all hookup culture now. How many people will end up single and lonely after a certain age? Lots and lots and lots ... It's a serious epedimic.

I have to agree with the sibling commentator - the freedom to choose the level of engagement with family and society in the West is what drives many of us from the East to leave our homes. I also do not think the Eastern way is a good default for most people. It clearly works for lots of people, but it also comes at a great price for a lot of people. There are aspects of any traditional culture that can be stifling, especially if you don't happen to be at the top of your specific privilege pyramid. Rigid social hierarchy, lack of upward mobility, and discrimination are also deeply ingrained within traditional strong social constructs. Yes, the sense of belonging to the family & society is strong, but it's only a positive if your family values you - which isn't always a given. Yes, the Western social construct as it exists now is prone to certain weaknesses, but I don't think we can make value judgements on which is objectively better for most people. I have siblings who are very happy to remain in your homeland, and I have siblings who left - both would likely be unhappy if circumstances were reversed.

The divorce rates are in long term decline.

As someone who moved from SE Asia awhile ago, agree 100%:

  - Parents can't wait to kick their kids out once they're college age
  - A societal sense of embarressment if you're *still* living with your parents
  - No night-time social options to speak of unless you want to drink/party (everything closes early - no midnight cafes or the like)
  - Macho and bully culture all the way through high school leading to polar extremes in kids' social circles
  - Everything has been financialized. There is no community to help out with _anything_. You have to pay for _everything_
  - Suburbia abound, both kids and parents can't walk anywhere – kids are trapped in their homes and parents become defacto Uber drivers
  - There's this weird sense of "keeping boundaries", making it hard to make friends with your neighbors etc
  - Domestic help (eg live-in maids) are very expensive relative to cost-of-living and relative to some Asian countries, and kindof culturally taboo – parents are expected to parent completely on their own

Some (not all) of these strike me as not applying to all of the West, but being very American.

Eh, I don't think family ties are "completely destroyed" in the West, we're just not as into our family as some "Eastern" cultures (I'm thinking of India in particular) can be.

Remember, a lot of the "West" (at least my exposure to it, the USA) is a conglomeration of other cultures; we have many Eastern cultures here as well!

Many of my friends have large families that they're much more entangled with than I'd opt into with my own family.

I could not live with my mother again, though I love her very much. I imagine many Indian men would love to have that option, all else being equal, though realistically they simply don't.

The freedom to choose is nice, but a great many of us "Westerners" choose to stay close to our families. That's what freedom is; the ability to opt into culture, rather than be forced into it.

I am from North Africa, from a socio-economic background that's somehow the middle ground between the West and the East. I do agree with the concept of freedom of choice. I always thought about it in such terms. In the West, you have total freedom in whether to keep close to family or not, but it comes with the risk of isolation and loneliness. On the other hand, in the East, lonliness and isolation is pretty much gauranteed to never happen and there is always a large social network to fallback to when life gets hard, for emotional and material support. However, you need to first be loyal to the community and never leave them or disappoint them to be granted such a privelege, which contradicts the freedom of choice. IMHO, the West is better if you manage to succeed and build you own fullfilling social network, but if you fail, you're doomed to love a miserable lonely life. The East is a good default option for most people but it holds back people a bit.

> IMHO, the West is better if you manage to succeed and build you own fullfilling social network, but if you fail, you're doomed to love a miserable lonely life. The East is a good default option for most people but it holds back people a bit.

Very well put. But I also posit that it’s getting harder and harder to build a fulfilling social network in the west

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