Comment by hjgjhyuhy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hjgjhyuhy | Hacker News Reader

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I agree. In our modern societies we have more means of communication than ever, yet we’re also more lonely than ever before. Urbanization has also disrupted people’s social lives very much. Raising children is hard when your parents live far away and all your friends are too busy to help, even with state-funded childcare.

Different generations used to live together and help each other. Underpaid nurses and nannies are just a shallow replacement to that.

Then of course there’s the insane pace of change and increasing competition. Only guaranteed sources of income are either very hard to get into, or pay peanuts with bad working conditions. AI might make even some of those disappear, rendering years of education worthless. Life is much more complex than before. There are lots of options, but no obvious answers to which actually make sense. I’m lucky enough to have access to free education and decent social security, but still I feel like my life is way more uncertain than it was for my parents. They just had to get an education and could then work until retirement with same employer, buy a house and just settle down. Without job security pretty much everything else becomes difficult.

>In our modern societies we have more means of communication than ever, yet we’re also more lonely than ever before.

I really wonder if most people are just worthlessly incompetent at forms of communication other than face-to-face interactions.

The narrative is that the covid lockdowns made people more socially isolated, and to some extent I don't disagree, but the narrative goes on to paint an image of "noone to see or talk to, lonely, might die, help" which in this day and age is simply not (or at least shouldn't be) possible.

A video call is literally only a Skype or a Discord away. Talking to someone is literally just a phone call away. Fucking social media swamps you in the presence of others.

I admit that it probably helped that I hate dealing with humans in the flesh anyway, but I felt no lessening in my ability to socialize because my communications and interactions by and large weren't disrupted.

The "we are more disconnected the more connected we become" narrative can go die on a rusty spork.

> I really wonder if most people are just worthlessly incompetent at forms of communication other than face-to-face interactions.

I think a large number of people are worthlessly incompetent at communicating effectively period. Face-to-face is what most humans are good at, so if you are bad at that, you will usually be even worse at other forms

As someone who was homeschooled, loves being fully remote, and has worked as such for several years (and pined for it long before) I don’t think we can yet equate video chats with real conversation.

Conversation isn’t a data transfer. It’s a joint function of two people. Anything other than the real thing is messing with that function in weird ways.

> A video call is literally only a Skype or a Discord away. Talking to someone is literally just a phone call away.

Literally zero of my Discord contacts would ever respond to a video call let alone a voice call let alone an invite to a common voice chat. Nobody uses Skype anymore. I don’t know what age group you’re in, but it sure sounds like the “happy go lucky, internet has only ever been socially profitable for me” 35-50 yo range.

> Fucking social media swamps you in the presence of others.

Fucking social media swamps you in the “impression” you are in the presence of others while leaving you in a tiny little jail cell where you can’t interact with any of the pretty pictures hurrying across the barred window of your cell.

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