I made a website for lonely people, and got >100 people to log their locations
lonelyworld.info
lonelyworld.info
That is all. I am no messiah claiming to have a panacea for loneliness, but just a human being offering help to other human beings.
Hopefully I can go further than making people feel good momentarily. I will think and work endlessly for that end.
Again, I know it does not work for everyone, but sometimes throwing yourself in the deep, away from your own comfortable home situation, works wonders.
When I travel solo, I become much more introverted. I think that being in your own head has a stickiness to it, so if you're in it for a while, it's hard to snap out of it. You can also be quite weary after a day on the road.
You might also find solo travel difficult when you're around other people. I love solo travel when I'm in nature, but Friday nights in cities can be dreadful.
Still, you will meet people. You don't have to be extroverted, just open to talk. If you're not curious, other people will be. They'll throw you the ball. You just have to throw it back. Bless these people.
However, the stereotypically cold Germans were actually highly receptive of a random stranger talking with them. I was invited to changed destinations a few times to hang out in random cities, and started a couple friendships.
Of course those were also people taking advantage of the 9 euro ticket, so there's a lot of selection bias here. :)
I also think that if you're avoidance strategy is withdrawing from social life, changing your location and not staying in all day is the key ingredient. You can't get your needs met at home.
This is what helped me, when I was in that position.
I think the struggle for a lot of adults is not in the interaction or in the start but in the maintaining relationships.
This is easy in school and university because of the free time and co-location, the challenge is to do it when we all go our separate ways.
In that sense I do feel like I lack the skills and the mental CRM system to keep walking those friendship footpaths before all the weeds and time make these footpaths slowly vanish.
So what I'm saying is: not sure it's a skill problem (it might be if we're talking about staying connected to what you need) but a societal problem
From Wikipedia:
"The hedgehog's dilemma, or sometimes the porcupine dilemma, is a metaphor about the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs seek to move close to one another to share heat during cold weather. They must remain apart, however, as they cannot avoid hurting one another with their sharp spines. Though they all share the intention of a close reciprocal relationship, this may not occur, for reasons they cannot avoid.
Arthur Schopenhauer conceived this metaphor to describe what he considers to be the state of the individual in relation to others in society. The hedgehog's dilemma suggests that despite goodwill, human intimacy cannot occur without substantial mutual harm, and what results is cautious behavior and weak relationships. With the hedgehog's dilemma, one is recommended to use moderation in affairs with others both because of self-interest, as well as out of consideration for others. The hedgehog's dilemma is used to explain self-imposed isolation."
The more intimate you are with someone, the more you're also aware of their pain and hardships. Intimate relationships involve conflicts and require compromises you would be able to avoid or not get into in a more distant relationship. They involve vulnerability and trust.
The vulnerability and trust and the deep emotional meaning that intimate relationships have can make those conflicts all the more painful. Sometimes the compromises required or the shared pains can amount to damage.
Of course that's not the only side of intimate relationships, as the metaphor also says. I'm not sure I'd agree with the interpretation that we (or most people) should be wary or moderate with closeness to other people. But I do get the idea that it's not without a significant cost that wouldn't be there when keeping a greater distance.
Where each of us falls on the spectrum between the joys and pains (or even damage) of close relationships probably depends both on personality and our experiences.
Appreciating this is a short summary, I think it would be good to show why the hedgehog analogy is a good one. Reading this I inferred that this was just a given, that because we have this analogy of hedgehogs it must therefore be true for humans. It would be good to know why.
I thought, why is it that in this today and age with ultimate connectivity, there is not a reasonable way to make new friends? I agree physical location plays a huge role because you feel the most connection when you are in person with someone. But with remote learning and working on the rise, this loneliness situation will only get more pervasive.
I think there is a better digital medium/channel/mode of interaction/environment that can abstract as much of the genuine human connection from real-life interaction as possible, and the current social media landscape is severely lacking at it.
I am building Lonely World to learn as much about the loneliness 'market' if you will, and validate my hypotheses for the better digital social platform. I am happy so far that people have cheered me on my mission.
But it also makes me question whether my long-term relationship (8 years) has been a good fit for me and the thing I really always wanted.
If you move to a new place without any contacts, and you don't speak the local language, and the locals are not famous for their warmth, you struggle.
The problem is that there is no step by step solution that works for everyone. We all have different ways to put ourselves out there.
Another example of converse: I was happy in high school (that mission school in palau), but moving to the university in TN absolutely stiffled me for those five or so years. I guess another way to phrase my point is "place does matter," and don't discount external factors for being the reason you are lonely. We in America often attribute a lot to internal factors such as attitude, outlook, mindset, etc. And, yes, internal factors are important. However, life really is a balance of external and internal factors, you need to optimize both to the extent you can. I feel like self-help talks and media emphasize internal focus because that is (supposedly) the thing you do have control over. That said, if you can get a "ticket out of town," even to just visit a new place, don't discount what it could do for your internal issues like loneliness.
It can absolutely help some people, but for others it can make them feel like they're more alone than they've ever been, because while their anxieties and social struggles still exist, they no longer have any support structure of a family or friends from home around them.
Studies show that it can lead to or increase the risk of increased obesity, substance use disorder, risk of depression, cardiovascular disease, risk of high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
It is also something people feel great shame over.
I remember when i started my loneliness group on Facebook. I then posted it existence in a large group for immigrants.
One admin messaged me to say how pathetic and dumb it was and recommended shutting down the group right away.
"Just go out and meet people. it is not hard"
He was an extreme extravert who spent most of his time networking with new people he meets or perhaps he knows. He cannot imagine the it being a problem.
Yes probably :) But also an asshole, if you allow me to be polite.
Extraversion is not an excuse to not having the bare minimum of empathy.
https://thatskywish.netlify.app if you wanted to give it a try. It follows the same principle that allows people to leave message for a friend anonymously.
Wish that we have more website like this.
I recently open sourced the star animation at https://github.com/adityapurwa/starflies if you want to take a look.
I believe where this is done by other services they account for the density of population in a geographic area. (IIRC there was an article posted here a few years ago)
In my case a 3m radius would mean I’m one of 4 households, for example.
something like this: https://citiesnear.com/me
The good thing is that the prior experience of lesser-known and more-famous online communities/media outlets has given the next entrant in this space plenty of accumulated wisdom to capitalize on.
Paywalls are part of the solution but they can't be the only one because there's always the tradeoff there between making the cost high enough to weed out the majority of bots and fly-by-night spammers, but also low enough that it's not a significant barrier to entry for community growth.
And maybe a 'did this person show you their penis?' feedback toggle for good measure.
You can start with some basic Code of Conduct that let's say Github, Reddit or Twitter uses - no need to reinvent the wheel. Then you can modify it as time goes to suit what's working or not for your community.
If you have a good model for iterative improvement that puts the user in the loop somehow, it'll be reflected in your engagement stats.
Wonder if you could ask them before the round ends, "y'all wanna play another?"
If the site had a secret sauce, it would be the ability for the users to connect with each other in a meaningful way. Maybe sending each other affirmations of some sort? Sort of like the Sarahah website (https://sarahah.top/). I hope you can crack that code to build something people really engage with.
Definitely, there is a need to actually TALK to people, not just shouting into the void. I think there are plenty of forums/text messaging apps out there. I am trying to solve with voice, but a bit nuanced from Clubhouse, Discord, or Twitter spaces. Hope to add the feature soon here!
https://slate.com/culture/2004/07/the-perplexing-success-of-...
Complaining to strangers who might actually listen, instead of seeking the guilty thrill of public catharsis... Something I am definitely taking note on
https://web.archive.org/web/20120207131807/http://grouphug.u...
The problem with all these sites for using them to meet people imo is that they're too open. If you spent the time to get to know everyone you want to meet it would probably be fine but at that point you'd have spent hours upon hours forming virtual friendship, which to me defeats the purpose of casual meetups.
I'd love a site that lets you set strict and sophisticated filters. Maybe with the option to quiz users and sort out those who can't give interesting answers to certain questions. Not sure why no one's attempted to make that yet, the obvious advantage of the digital world is that we can go through large numbers of individuals, filter the noise and match exactly the ones that are suitable for each other based on shared interests. Yet the best we got is swiping left or right based on someone's photoshopped profile picture?
> Being able to prescreen is less friction than spending time meeting uninteresting people.
This is probably true for some individuals (e.g. those with social anxiety, or those who work 16 hours a day or something), but certainly not all. Even uninteresting people are often moderately entertaining for a short while, which is much more than I can say for taking an online quiz.
Additionally, there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem regarding the reputation of the group itself. If I can be pretty sure ahead of time that being admitted to the group will be worth it, then I will probably suck it up and take the quiz. This pretty much requires someone who is already a member convincing me. Otherwise it might well turn out to be a ghost town, or full of holier-than-thou nerds, or just not a fit for whatever other reason. I wouldn't want to go through a prescreening process just to find that out -- easier and more fun to just stick with meeting randos.
Looks great, would like to give it a whirl. But under "Share with the World", I can't get the button to become enabled with something other than "Loading...". Turned off the pi-hole in case there was a DNS query getting blocked, no joy. Safari 16.2, macOS Ventura 13.1.
YC startup school videos had a concept called 'hair-on-fire' problem. There are many lonely people in the world whose 'hair-on-fire' problem is loneliness, and they are willing to try things to make it go away.
I think my app managed to tap into their needs, and I am honestly more glad that they have found it somewhat useful than that they shared me their locations for my app.
I posted this on Reddit forums for lonely folks (there were 4~5) and got 1000's of engagements there, out of which about 20 people logged their locations per day. It trickled to 0 after about a week. At that point I had ~150 logs.
I learned a ton from that experiment, namely: 1. People do like this stuff, 2. Website needs to have better UI/UX and be faster because they reported not being able to view the site due to server overload (was using free Streamlit hosted webapp), and 3. people's attention span is short. I am getting awesome engagement now after having posted on this forum, but I am at the same time ready for it to tank down just a week later. It is kind of like releasing a movie: it can have a huge box office weekend, but it will not sustain that because it is the same content and not too many people watch the same movie over and over again. The only way to avoid that is to offer new features that people can actually interact with, I think, so the iteration never stops.
The whole story so far has been genuine, including all the datapoints on the website, messages, and the fact that I relate to the lonely souls out there since I have personally been through one during my PhD. I think the authenticity resonated with the people and led them to interact with what I have built.
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/special/hikikomori/pages/article...
Like the concept.
I will need to add features to: make toggle more user friendly; and have option to make the map jump around or not.
Thank you for feedback!
But a nice idea :)
a sense of isolation feeling "out of tune" with people around us having no one to turn to"
Do "we"? I don't. Thats kind of a condescending accusation to make on the landing page of a website!
This is a nice visual framework, can I ask what it is?
You don't need a token to use this map, as long as you keep the usage to a reasonable limit (I think it says 1,000,000 tiles per month)
You can always setup your own tile server. It's not that hard and can be cheap (if you don't count your time). I recommend, checking https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler
I want to approximate it to 3 mile accuracy (diagonal of a box, so in one dimension, would be sqrt(3^2 /2) = 2.12 mile in lat or long). 3 mile, in geographical coordinate would be equivalent to : 3 mile / 3960 mile (Earth radius) * 180 deg / pi rad = 0.0434 degree. I divide each dimension by 0.0434, and round it to a whole number (essentially, mod 0.0434). Then, I multiply that number by 0.0434 and save that as the location.
This means that a user's location can lie anywhere inside a box with 3 mile diagonal length at that geolocation.
If you see inconsistency in my logic, please let me know.
Given N points within M meters or so, which is roughly what you get for multiple measurements of "home" with an error on the measurement, I think you could have a reasonable stab at deriving the location from an estimate of the error on the geolocation plus which circles they fell into. All in same circle makes near centre more likely than near edge.
edit: daily check in, so all the above needs is a tendency to check in from roughly the same location each day.
This information isn't personally identifiable by itself. Even combined with your original HN comment, the information leakage cross section and associated risk is minutely small.
I understand the concern about your privacy, but in practical terms what outcome are you afraid of in this instance?
Getting less lonely inherently requires some degree of trust in and vulnerability to other human beings.
It's tragically sad when privacy fears prevent someone from living a colorful, stimulating, and deeply fulfilling life.
In case you're open to unsolicited advice: Develop the skill of Discernment. When the "privacy threat" part of your brain activates, take a moment to analyze the degree of the threat and intentionally choose your response accordingly.
Maybe i dont have an issue with it because I'm an introvert?
And it definitely got way worse during/after pandemic. I would suggest you check out some Reddit forums if you are curious to know the other half of the population. r/ForeverAlone, r/lonely, r/loneliness, r/alone, r/LonersEmpire
while I may not win in the office for being and introvert it sounds like i win outside the office :-P
But I do have bouts of longing for connection with other humans sometimes. It can be difficult to reconcile. Even if I make plans to go out and make friends or meet an existing one during one of these slumps, by the time the planned day rolls around I usually have to force myself to actually do it. Once I force myself out there I have fun, but it takes so much effort to actually do it and not stay in my own little world reading or coding or whatever.
I think I've come to terms with the fact that even though I really love being alone, I do need to put in an effort to make more meaningful connections over the long term.
As an off-the-scale introvert and socially anxious person, I’ll just say that loneliness and introversion aren’t incompatible because the degree to which you are depleted or energized by the presence of others is not a binary variable. Rare is the person who needs no human interaction.
But as others have alluded to, loneliness may be a catch-all for many emotional states and mental health conditions. A sense of self-alienation can be read-out as loneliness and even the most committed introvert can experience that.
i do recommend adding an option for people to change the scope of their location, such as limiting to just state/region, country or continent for privacy reasons.
this is a really cool idea