The case for hanging out
slate.com
slate.com
To me, it seems to be a death by a thousand cuts. Just a few challenges that come to mind:
- The housing crisis has made it very difficult to live close to your friends and just pop in throughout the week.
- Organized religion is in decline and nothing has yet taken its place as a "third place" for a community to congregate.
- Needlessly intense working conditions and / or working remotely has taken away the "second place", where you would typically "hang out" with your co-workers.
- Many people today choose not to have children, starkly dividing adults into mutually exclusive schedules and social personas.
- Many people move frequently throughout their young-adult and early-adult years, fragmenting their social lives and preventing mature friendships from forming.
- There is a significant cultural gap between older and younger generations, creating social friction within the nuclear family unit and across generational boundaries.
- The digital age has moved the location of many common past-times from a public "third place" to your private bedroom.
- etc, etc, etc
So many people I know are doing stuff, like joining a pickup soccer league, rock climbing, board gaming, video gaming, gardening, surfing, knitting, hacking, making, etc. All of these interests come with their own new circle of friends you meet, who I then meet through knowing you when you invite your soccer team to your birthday party. People will keep up these things even when they have kids.
My parents generation never seemed to do any of this. They were contented with basically not socializing or engaging much beyond what they already knew, never taking personal trips or even eating out even though they can afford it, just staying busy with the house making tasks for themselves, since there is really no limit of potential repairs or projects to do around a house if you don't limit yourself (e.g. you don't need to polish the floors that many times a year). In my generation it seems like everyone has something they are really into that isn't work or their immediate family. You see this starting to shift how these suburban towns you grew up in look like, too. Main street suburbia is no longer dead antique shops. There's now an arthouse cinema, axe throwing, duck pin bowling, and a brewery.
Not all zoomers. I pretty much confine myself to work, lurking online, occasional periods of HN commenting, drinking, and the occasional walk or hike. Just biding my time and collecting my tech TC. When I get into late 20s and am rich, then I'll think about doing those things.
> Main street suburbia is no longer dead antique shops. There's now an arthouse cinema, axe throwing, duck pin bowling, and a brewery.
I always hear junior tech workers and interns saying how much they do these rock climbing/top golf/etc. type of activities. I always assumed they were signaling. Maybe it's great and more people should try axe throwing.
This is pretty unhealthy honestly. As I got out of my early 20s my worldview on a lot of this sort of "hole up and just grind, rest later" has changed a lot. Who knows what your late 20s will be like? I've seen them end up going all sorts of ways for different people. Maybe you will end up with some expensive medical condition, maybe you will just be older and not have the body you had in the early 20s. Some of your friends and loved ones will have died by then, you might even die, who knows? Live today for today, because there's no guarantee for a tomorrow. If this lifestyle makes you happy then by all means do what makes you happy, since avoiding stress is very important to a healthy long life, but don't ever defer enjoyment or happiness to some later time you assume will happen.
I still vaguely remember this discussion from Walden from when I read it 10 years ago:
> "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
> The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,” and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate himself for his day’s solitude...
> ... He wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues;” but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.
> Consider the girls in a factory,—never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.
There is more than one way to live, and it's not a sickness not to eagerly participate in social axe throwing et. al. I think it's great that some people like it. But I don't think not doing it is missing too much. Life is long.
They are a generation who collectively "lost" a year because of zoom home schooling and so they all seem to make a point to have other outside activities to connect with their friends on. I know most of us had that too, but for some reason it seems more important to them than it did even for me.
> - The digital age has moved the location of many common past-times from a public "third place" to your private bedroom.
Rent a co-working space with your friends!
Before cellphones, I had to go hang out at the coffee shop if I wanted to catch my friends in person so we could all go do something.
Before the internet, I had to go to the coffee shop and read event flyers off of the community board if I wanted to find out what was happening around town.
The coffee shop became a hub of social activity in and of itself partly out of necessity, and it was awesome. I had probably a hundred friends back then and they were all just people who hung out at the coffee shop.
Nowadays everyone can just veg out in their pod until their friends call them on-demand. The result is missing out on all the opportunities to make friends by accident.
Before Covid, I was finally starting to get my social life together, I had a group of people I could hang out relatively regularly, close enough to my age. We would go out on the weekends, have a few drinks, talk, maybe go dancing or something.
Post pandemic everything is drastically different. Suddenly, no one can organize. If someone tries to get a group together, everyone flakes last minute. Certain people don’t like each other anymore, and in general people feel more antagonistic, myself included at times.
I used to go out by myself a lot too. It used to be fun. I could go out and by the end of the night I would meet cool people, have some interesting conversations, maybe fuck around and hop bars all night Now, no one talks to me, people seem less… amicable and going out by myself now means “sit and drink for hours because it’s still better than sitting around at home doing basically nothing”.
Hanging out hasn’t really been fun since Covid.
I am very happy working on my own things, discussing things on the internet, hanging out with spouse, etc. I am also happy to participate in things that revolve around getting something productive done, or communicating asynchronously in a way that allows consensual focus - when people can send me a message that I can respond to whenever I want, and vice versa.
To me, it seems like society is just slowly starting to adapt to communicating in the way that I like to communicate. Selfishly, it's great. I have tried and failed to understand how it's a bad thing, but I have trouble doing so.
On a similar note, I've noticed that a lot of my friends are more willing to hang out post-pandemic as they all feel like we lost too much time being stuck at home.
That is to say, most of our time as humans has been spent sitting around with other people telling stories and sharing our feelings and thoughts. Full stop.
The fact that loneliness is so pervasive is a symptom of the larger social crisis that will certainly be our ruin.
Simply hanging out with strangers, being vulnerable, giving and receiving emotional and physical care in platonic ways with no social expectations, is one of the key things we need to do to get humanity onto a safe trajectory.
[1] Chan, E.K.F., et al. (2019) Human origins in a southern African Paleo-wetland and first migrations. Nature 575, 185–189
[2]Sahlins, Marshall (2009). Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age. Pacific Ecologist. 18: 3–8
We replaced that with spending most of our time listening to made-up narratives by massive media companies who share portfolios with financial scammers and military contractors.
This is the path in my view:
1. Mutual cooperatives become the dominant form of labor organization over corporations (definitely possible)
And
2. Mutual Aid Communities become the dominant form of social organization over Churches and Families (harder but I think still possible)
Not just for the dead, but for the shocking loss of this or that imagined future.
And this process is going to be weird, and we'll hardly recognize ourselves, but of course nothing fundamental will have changed.
I was inspired by my Dad; he and his poker buddies (mostly other dads in the neighborhood) have been playing together for over a decade. They take trips to cities like Vegas every couple of years for milestones like 50th birthdays, and occasionally meet up on lazy sundays at sports bars. I started my own poker group with my friends after my dad brought me to one of his games.
A few tips for your first game:
- make sure at least one person has the rules down pat
- play with a small amount of money at stake (I do a $20 buy in). Without money on the line it's way to easy for people to lose interest and play recklessly, derailing the game
- start the game late if you're worried about the group not gelling together. Starting late (I'd recommend 9 pm, YMMV) makes it feel more intimate, lessens the pressure to sustain a good time for hours, and reduces the suffering if the game flops
- if the game is a success reach out within a couple of days to schedule the next one
- you only need about two friends to put together a poker game. If they each bring a buddy then you've got a 5 person gameIf poker is completely off the table then board games are a great alternative. Make sure to pick a game that forces players to regularly interact with each other. I would recommend Wits and Wagers or the classic Settlers of Catan. If you're looking for a more serious strategy game (and if your group can tolerate the emotional highs and lows) I would strongly recommend Diplomacy.
Pen and paper RPGs like D&D can be great fun too, but they're harder to get started with and require the same group of people to play every time. If someone can't make it to a session the entire group can't play, and it's hard to bring in new people. But if you can get a game established with a good group it's amazing. I'm still friends with the people I played with in high school.
Here’s my secret: I host a night about once every two months and I bake soft pretzel bites with varying dipping sauces. People know I’m going to bake pretzels and this familiarity is comforting, but they also come to see what sauces I’m gonna have. I try to make them exotic at times
Huge difference between playing for $10 vs nothing. In a free game people tend to be much more reckless.
But $10 is not remotely like playing blackjack in a casino
To make this actionable: Invite only people where you suspect they're comfortable with uncertainty and don't want to optimize the s** out of every weak hand.
What struck me reading this is that our cultural obsession with productivity has bled over into our private lives—socializing has to be a calendar item in order for it to fit in, and if it's going to be a calendar item it should have a specific purpose. This is sad. We've lost something important: spontaneous, purposeless social interaction.
In the UK there are countless nooks, crannies, parks etc to just kill time with people.
Even the pub is an institution expressly for this purpose. You go in, buy a pint when you want and are left alone to your friends/business. None of this “What can I get you? How is everything tasting? Anything else?” hyper-commodification of simply being somewhere just for the sake of it.
Are there any “coffee pubs”? I personally enjoy an occasional beer but I don’t know if I’d want to repeatedly invite folks to hang out for hours in a place that largely serves alcohol drinks in mixed male/female company. Seems like it could become a headache in the US.
One other issue in the US is that any third space becomes a long term hangout of all the local homeless, which causes people not to want to go there. Several local Starbucks have this problem and I stopped going there. It pushed me to drive 15 minutes to find one I can hang out without being distracted by people with obvious mental illness who need treatment.
Yes. Our local Starbucks, at the Redwood City CA train station, removed all their furniture and closed their bathrooms. Now it's a big empty room with a bleak counter, where people sometimes come in and buy something.
Try La Tartine just around the corner, which has plentiful seating, decent prices, and closes pretty late.
Agora in Houston is a Greek-owned coffee shop that operates as a coffee shop day and night but also offers alcohol at night, and sometimes has belly dancers and such. It's pretty unique - I don't think I've ever found anywhere else like it (in the US anyway).
The US has bars and parks and coffee shops too. Plenty of places to just go and be
Maybe I haven't been going to exciting places...
And as for taking my order before reading the menu, depends how fast you can decypher the translation of whatever app you use :) (assuming a non-Japanese speaker)
The 40 hour work week needs to go. Now.
ETA and don't forget so many restaurants and pubs either closed down completely, cut opening times or hiked prices thanks to inflation and exploding rents over the last years. It's not just the pandemic that fucked things up.
Even without insane hours and ordinary 40 hours, the problem is: out of 24 hours, you lose 9 hours to sleep (8 hours + 0.5/0.5 to fall asleep and wake up), 3 hours for eating (including making the food and cleaning up), 8 hours to work, 1 hour to commute... that leaves you with just three hours a day of theoretically "free" time, of which you'll set aside at least an hour to decompress from work, one hour to interacting with your spouse - and now you're left with one hour a day of actually "free" time.
No way to fit hobbies or even any meaningful social activity in there and any unplanned events (e.g. a traffic jam, something comes up at work so you need to stay a bit late) completely throw everything off.
I don’t want to give the wrong vibe: I love said phone call or in-person hours.
The activity, even if it’s a meal or a walk, make it infinitely better and something that can happen on a more regular basis with less-close friends. Golf gets a lot of flak for being a game that men play because they’re too toxically masculine to ask their friends to just hang out. My perspective: there’s something to be said for people being too boring to just hang out with as often as you would be willing to play golf with them.
This might be an extrovert/introvert divide. Extroverts being driven to have more casual friends where you need an activity to avoid awkwardness while introverts limit their friends to those with whom just existing is entertaining enough. The club attendance would be for extroverts here.
I would tend instead to think that it’s a transition in civilization where we just have more fun things to do and don’t need to sit around “talking shit” as the article mentions. Roman gladiator events were a big deal and everyone attended, now you pick what sporting events you want to watch from home. Why would I sit around doing nothing when I can find people and make relationships while simultaneously having fun doing something I enjoy? Your comment portrays them as mutually exclusive and they aren’t.
Even as an adult I still hang out with my college buddies at least once a week, to do absolutely nothing, sometimes we'd go to bars, often just chat. My parents also do it with their limited circle of friends. Same with my sister and her group of friends, sometimes they include me too.
I don't know where I stand on the extrovert/introvert continuum but boring clubs are definitely 10x more boring than just hanging out for me. And interesting ones aren't exactly for "just hanging out".
It’s about the next tier of friends/acquaintances. Just hanging out with the next tier, for me, sucks. I have SO many things I would rather be doing than hashing out surface level conversations with anyone outside the network of 6 friends (who include my parents in my case). At the same time, social interaction of any kind is nice. If I can combine the things I like with “people” I will.
Your comment strikes me as you being fortunate to have a group of close college friends around, and your parents/sister similarly being fortunate to have groups of people who mutually like each other enough to have fun hanging out.
It’s also very relative. Before I developed the hobbies and interest that took me away from kicking it with roommates etc., kicking it was better than nothing. I say “sucks” in this relative sense. I just have stuff I really like doing now.
I also have plenty of hobbies, I have a band, soccer weekly with some folks, I also have a garden, I play video games with another buddy...
My point I guess is that some people have a higher tolerance for hanging out with others, even unknown folks. I find that almost everyone has interesting stories to tell if you let them, and I enjoy hearing. I have my share of funny anecdotes too. I thought that's down to the introvert/extrovert spectrum but from your post it seems to be something else.
Our definition of hanging out is different. I’m going with “killing time” in a sense of hours at a time, which you definitely don’t do at work. Similarly, I doubt you often kill hours at a time with random people you don’t know or your neighbors. And your dad/sister’s people are different too if your dad/sister are there.
Folks like me aren’t sociopathic lol. I like a good casual conversation with a neighbor when you happen to be getting the mail at the same time. I had a great conversation today with a stranger about Apple watches.
It’s sitting in the garage with your roommates (and whoever else) for 6 hours on a Saturday smoking cigarettes talking shit that I’m highlighting as boring. (And the article is praising.) It’s not “lost” as the article states, I just have better things to do. And that used to be every Saturday for me (pandemic aside).
My team has weekly happy-hours which are obviously after hours (I honestly thought every team did it!), my landlady often invites us tenants a monthly dinner that goes into the night, I attend random Meetups and just stay for several hours chatting, I participate in our co-working space "parties" and stay until late with people I never seen. Heck, yesterday I went to a restaurant with my (recent) language class and we stayed until 2AM.
Of course you can claim "this is not really hanging out, this is other stuff". I hate cigarettes and don't have a garage, but I guess drinking and random location is equivalent, as long as we chat for hours, so why not?
But I definitely do not consider "chatting while picking up the mail" as hanging out. Not even in the same ballpark.
In Germany we have a thing called "Men's day" where we get a cart of beer and go to the middle of the forest just to do nothing at all for a whole day. Now THIS is what I call hanging out. I wonder if the culture is where the disconnect is coming from.
EDIT: Although honestly pretty much every other country I lived in my life had a similar culture and... it was the rule as far as I could tell.
EDIT 2: I also don't think you're a sociopath! Far from it! I just think you're someone who doesn't enjoy long aimless chats with unknown people.
The ceremony or whatever is an excuse to get together, and most people might not really care about the beliefs portion, but it provides a backdrop to hang out as a community.
Even in the case of something that also serves a practical purpose, such as working out, the fitness purpose exists in symbiosis with the socializing purpose. Sometimes the reason I get a workout is that I want to hang out with my friend, and sometimes the reason I spend time with my friend is because I wanted to work out.
Having another reason to hang out also helps friendships endure through times where you don't have much to say to each other.
Either way, I wish there were more public places for random people to meet other than commercial establishments.
A tad strong, no? It seems like there is this whole niche or genre of sociologists and commentators who go around catastrophizing things, looking for anything that is wrong or as reason for society failing.
I don't know why anyone comes to either my meetup or the ones I go to, but they are 100% not people I want to hang out and drink with. Mostly middle-aged Asian and Indian men who are polite, quiet, socially distant, usually with no particular enthusiasm for the topic of the meetup. I don't know why they're there or why they're so numerous, but they're definitely not there to socialize and have fun.
Masons, Rotary, Lions, Elks, Knights of Columbus.
Optimists, Eagles, Moose, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis.
Sons of Norway, Daughters of America, Active 20-30...
I joined a social club when I moved way out to work remote. The members are a bit older. They have good stories and great advice, and they're experiencing a resurgence of membership applications from people just like me. There are plenty of clubs that focus on friendship and community service that are waiting on your application!
A question I see asked _all the time_ is "How do you even make friends, now?" People have been asking that for a long time -- one answer is definitely to try out a social club near you.
Now, I'm sure they don't check. They probably don't pray, they won't quiz me about what church I go to. I could lie.
But I don't want to. I don't want to have to.
The exception is the Rotary Society. The average Rotarian is male, white, and 58 years old.
I was actively involved in Rotary in the 90s/00s via a Rotaract Club (for 18-30yos), and even then, there were many women, many non-white members, and plenty of people under 50 in the Rotary clubs I visited.
If some clubs/areas are still dominated by white, older males, it is mostly due to the difficulty in attracting any new members into volunteer organisations these days (mostly as it's unfashionable and people have other things to do), not due to any exclusionist policies.
Also if anybody is reading this and interested in radio - take the test! It's cheap and you can cram the material in a day.
I don't want to go to the geriatric clubs who lament about how woke things are, either.
Just leave your bullshit at home, please.
If you consider small online communities as a sort of club, you can make a few friends there.
Otherwise Meetup.com was a good place to find groups of people. Dog owners and parents tend to find their peers at the park. There are WhatsApp and Facebook groups for just about anything else, but many of them spread through word of mouth.
If not the Scouts, then any voluntary org with a cause at its centre is great for forming connections.
One solution to that would be for younger people to join.
EDIT: Also, always make an effort to talk to the new people that join your events, because other people in the group will tend to mostly talk with those they feel comfortable with. It makes new folks feel welcome and they’ll want to come back :)
Otherwise I'll just sit at home working remote on solo projects all day, so responding to a call or two a day gets me (running) out of the house, and after the call we usually sit around the station and shoot the breeze for a while which is fun. When I get bored of that, I walk back home and get back to work. Sure it's hard work, but that really helps balance the tedium of just pushing tiny plastic buttons for 12+ hours a day.
Do you notice a trend in the membership of your named organizations, mainly that they seem filled with old conservative men?
Re: "daughters of the america"
"Council of the Daughters of America, a patriotic fraternity, which seeks to aid in preserving and perpetuating the Public School system; to instill a spirit of patriotism into the youth of our land; to place our flag over every schoolhouse; to promote the reading of the Holy Bible therein; and to protest against the immigration of paupers, criminals, and the enemies of our social order"
Ugh, yeah, my queer self is not really looking for that kind of engagement and I doubt they're looking for me.
It has to be noted that there is absolutely an increasing poverty of community life and hyper individualization. It's kind of incentivized in currently existing systems.
But I joined a group workout gym with a local owner and a good community, it’s helped a lot with isolation.
I’m in the process of joining a BNI and, being surrounded by people motivated enough to run their own small business, it’s helping a lot.
I’m going to be meeting up with some folks who run a local hackerspace and do a weekly “coffee and code” - that seems promising and I’m hopeful it’ll help a lot.
All of these have something in common:
* A local business owner decided to start a BNI chapter and get a group of like minded individuals together to talk about business and share referrals
* An employee at a gym was disappointed in how gyms operate and wanted to do better, so started a space to bring people together around their interests.
* A smallish group of local hackers got together to create a shared space where they can geek out together
If you look at that list of social groups and say “I only see spaces for old conservative men” and “there is a poverty of community life” - maybe start a space or group for people like you? Or find people who are already doing that. Unless someone creates that space and brings people in it’s not going to exist.
Having the spaces OP listed isn’t mutually exclusive with the existence of any other social group.
Perhaps you could join the local Democratic party? Participate in the process and help candidates campaign!
Or if that is not for you, you could volunteer as a poll worker. While not strictly a club, it is generally the same people very time and the goal is very noble.
Some gyms are great for meeting people. I would say independent bookstores as well!
Good luck!
Humans are wired for sociality and interdependence. Our brains pretty much literally wither away, in ways, without meaningful social stimulus.
Given this, I can't immediately simply lay the blame at the feet of individuals as to why people seem increasingly lonely and thirsty for meaningful connection. So what might be some other causes for this type of isolation that seems increasingly common?
People prefer binge watching a 10 episode Netflix show on a weekend rather than hanging out. Or playing video games. Or Youtube. I know some streamers and some people spend 5 hours a day watching them play video games on Twitch. Others spend 2, 3 hours an evening on TikTok or Instagram. Or are on Twitter all day, that's their hang. Or Reddit and 4chan. Or Hacker News!
Even older generations are spending an awful amount time on messaging apps. My father isn't much into that but he's all day on news websites looking for whatever important thing. I know some Guitar web-forums where the average age is between 50 and 60 and they complain all day about kids these days and they Polyphia guitars.
Back when TV was king I remember only going out when the boring stuff started. Whenever I hear the Full House theme song I get the urge to go hang out with my friends. I was really really lucky there was enough boring stuff.
I also remember a teacher jokingly answering why he had 10 or so siblings to a classmate when we were in our teens: "well my parent's didn't have TV".
I remember going to random shops with friends as a teenager to play guitars we couldn't afford, think of video games we wanted to buy, or which anime figures were cool. If we were kicked out, we would go hang in a park, or at the front of a specific building that had cool looking stairs we could sit. Can I even do this today? I can still do the other stuff, but as an adult it seems that this is only possible with my significant other. Whenever I visit, there's no groups of friends in those hobby shops anymore, it's only couples or solo people.
Everything was a social activity back then. Today you gotta call people before you go to their houses because they're incredibly busy with Netflix or some video game.
We need more boredom. Not you and me, but society.
We feel that it is taboo to approach others, rather than try and start a conversation and seem weird we all stare at our phones.
We are also hesitant to try something new, when we were young we had parents who would push us but now when we are independent we no longer have that push.
The thread started gave a list of social clubs, the reply is that all of them are old white men who would not be accepting. Perhaps they had visited each club and experienced rejection but the Eagles and the Odd Fellows don't strike me as particularly conservative organizations. Neither do the Optimists, Kiwanis and Active 20-30.
In order to meet people, you must step out of your comfort zone!
Now if you are lucky enough to be well off enough not to have that issue then the second thing is tech replaces people in a lot of areas - food, entertainment, health, ways we connect with others etc. If you had to rely on others more I bet most people would be less lonely in general. Isolation becomes easier the more tech you have available - be it cars or computers it can easily isolate you if you don't purposely avoid isolation. Now tech can bring people together, I'm in a long distance relationship and tech makes it very easy nowadays but it's still not the same, as in person face to face experiences.
But I also think people will always face loneliness in every generation, it just might go by other names.
Incidentally, a ton of early cinema (1900-1930, say) is very concerned about the dehumanizing effects of industrial (and office!) work, and the anti-social lost-in-the-crowd effects of cities (usually contrasted with rural or small town living) which nonetheless draw the masses with promises of money and glamor. Those seem to have been their major anxieties, in this realm of thinking.
I was just on a weekend beach trip with friends and, at the end of the day, we considered playing some card games, but frankly we all wanted to just chill on our phones in bed for the last hour of the day, and we chuckled that we would have opted for the card games back in the days without smartphones.
It’s hard for going out and socializing to compete with solitary smartphone time. And it’s easy to avoid ever doing the former, especially once you need it the most.
This is chilling to hear. Sometimes I really hate the industry I work on. We're really destroying mankind, and it's not in the ways most people predicted. Even Huxley's Brave New World looks optimistic compared to what we're doing.
I think fear is an important thing to bring in here, because it's easier than ever to go down a path of "only the specific subculture on this subreddit/discord/whatever understands and accepts you, if you go to the Elks lodge the elderly crypto-nazis will literally murder you. Best to stay inside and post more about how scary those other people probably are"
If you recognize my user name at all then you've heard me bang this drum a few times before, but marketing is among the top reasons Everything Sucks in modern society.
Your attention is constantly being assaulted by people who want to sell you something. In order to sell you something, they have to convince you that you need it, but chances are you don't need it, so they exploit your insecurities.
You're not manly enough, buy our pickup truck.
You're not pretty enough, buy our makeup.
You're not working hard enough, buy our productivity enhancement programme.
You're not healthy enough, buy our fad diet.
You're entitled to money because of a minor screw up, join our class action.
Everything sucks because of that other political party, vote for us instead.
We're encouraged to treat each other as competitors and seek the material above all, because that makes it easier for companies to sell us shit.
We're encouraged to be entitled, because that makes us get angry when we don't get things, like the stuff they're trying to sell us.
Carl's Junior: Fuck you, I'm eating.
The side effect is we isolate ourselves, but that's just fine by them because they are selling us the junk we try to fill the hole in our lives with anyway.
The message fucks us up on a personal level, and that radiates out to the sociological level. It forces us to be defensive with the systems we put in place to keep people connected (email, phone calls, the web, search results, etc.) because they will exploit any opportunity to hijack your attention. Is it any wonder we're wary of connecting with people too?
We don't email with friends because our inboxes are overflowing with marketing so we don't use it to communicate anymore.
We don't answer phone calls because most of the time it's just marketing calls (or scams)
And so on.
I can only share my experience, can’t do a structural analysis.
For me, it was screens. Not anything in particular about the screen being bad in and of itself, but that the screen was so easy and efficient.
I can do my work better on a screen. I can create more value on a screen. I can have a meeting more efficiently on a screen. I can communicate more efficiently on a screen. I can entertain myself more efficiently on a screen.
Going out requires effort. I have to “get ready.” I have to go somewhere. I might not know people so I have to be vulnerable to cross a threshold of familiarity. I have to either be comfortable with myself and how others see me or I have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. These things pretty much aren’t a problem for me on a screen.
So my default is to wake up, go to a screen to work (I WFH because it’s more efficient), get done with work and find entertainment on another screen. Go to bed and start over again. I just bounced from screen to screen.
Being social. Taking care of my body. Taking care of my mind. These all require effort above that baseline.
It took me a long time to realize and appreciate that I was stuck in a local optimum and being inefficient in the short term was necessary to break out of it.
So, in such a society, you enter a rat race very early in your life by starting to study hard for qualifying for a good college, and it chains forward from there on while destroying any social connections that you might have built. You already move to another city when going to college. Then the college itself quite short, merely 4 years, without enough time to create and solidify bonds. That is if the students can even find enough time to socialize in between the classes. Whatever bond was forged gets immediately broken by people moving to different cities, regions or even countries after graduation, to maximize their income and career chances.
By this point the person is already hampered in the social department. Not only he or she was not able to socialize with his or her peers and the system already forced him to isolation and alienation from the peers to compete, but also because his peers have been brought up and educated with the same competitive mentality, the human social traits that our species have developed are already hampered or repressed. The peers are competition, not people to cooperate, collaborate, less, live together to support each other. The co-workers or acquaintances frequently leaving their jobs for a better opportunity somewhere does not help - you know that even if you hit it off with some person you met in your job or locale, that person can move away tomorrow in a flash. Which makes you further wary of creating any social bond that can be broken by next week.
When the entire society is taken over by this mentality that enforces its behavior patterns, there is no escape - everybody is in a fight for survival or bettering his or her circumstances. Its a societal level alienation of people from each other and from what makes us humans a social species.
Students did the same in the Soviet Union. Graduation exams sorted not just who got which universities (if any at all) but which subjects they would spend their time in. Competition didn't disappear behind the iron curtain.
> The co-workers or acquaintances frequently leaving their jobs for a better opportunity somewhere does not help - you know that even if you hit it off with some person you met in your job or locale, that person can move away tomorrow in a flash. Which makes you further wary of creating any social bond that can be broken by next week.
In the Soviet Union, you never knew when your friends and family would "disappear" either. Many Soviet citizens lived in a state of fear that they'd be next. That also makes you wary about who you associate with.
Capitalist countries have border guards to keep foreigners from coming in illegally. Socialist countries have border guards to keep their own people from escaping.
Capitalism does not enforce behavior patterns. You are free to opt out and be poor and not compete with others, if you want. You can be homeless, or subsist on minimum wage, or go on welfare benefits, and many do.
Compare this to socialist economic systems, where opting out is illegal and classifies you as a social parasite. "Being unemployed" is a felony that gets you ten years in a forced labor camp. "Complaining about how it is unfair that you are not allowed opt out" is also illegal, and also gets you a stint in the labor camp. That's "enforced behavior patterns."
The modern mixed economy, which has displaced the system for which the name “capitalism” was coined during the early to middle 20th century in virtually every place that it existed at the time the term “capitalism” was coined for the dominant economic system of the industrialized portion of the West in the mid-19th century, has, empirically, not been worse than capitalism as far as people’s perceptions.
If you compare only precapitalist systems and Leninism and its derivatives, you’d be right.
> Compare this to socialist economic systems, where opting out is illegal and classifies you as a social parasite.
The modern mixed economy is the closest (though not a very close) thing to a socialist economy system that has been tried on any large scale basis (its even the closest thing – though again not a very close thing – to a Marxist system, despite Leninists trying to claim the name.)
Vanguardist elite authoritarian state capitalist command economies are not socialist, and not (despite the aspirational claims originally made for them) empirically an effective way of bypassing the need Marx identified to go through a period of private capitalist development on the way to a socialist system.
That's patently false. Socialist implementations like the USSR's lifted people from mud huts and being barefood to apartments and space age within the same generation. The only reason that it ran out of steam was because the US, who controlled 75% of world's resources at the time, started an all encompassing economic warfare and arms race to starve it of GDP by forcing it to allocate all to defense. Which is not something hypothetical or anything interpreted by historians - we have the Kennedy administration' internal memos and planning that envisaged this plan and implemented it. If ANYone did even a fraction of that to the US, the US would initiate a nuclear war as can be seen from the various examples during the Cold War. That the Soviets were way too less aggressive and they let themselves to be starved out of GDP has been a fortune for the human civilization for averting nuclear war.
> Socialist countries have border guards to keep their own people from escaping.
That's also a flat out lie that the system propagates to protect itself: Castro opened the doors of Cuba and told anyone who didnt want to stay to f... off in mid 1980. Yet the Cubans are there, except from a few who still think that the Muriel boatlift law is still in effect and they will be getting tens of thousands of dollars in US taxpayer money if they step into US soil from a boat. Otherwise they could just fly in. All the immigration from Cuba has been a few hundred thousand people, most of them people who had a good time during Batista and their relatives. Thanks to US taxpayer money, of course.
You could also leave the USSR at any time by paying back the free education and other services that the state, therefore the society, has given you for free. Which is not even an option in the US, for example - if you are born poor you just stay poor instead of someone giving you anything free.
> Capitalism does not enforce behavior patterns. You are free to opt out and be poor and not compete with others, if you want. You can be homeless, or subsist on minimum wage, or go on welfare benefits, and many do.
First, welfare benefits dont exist in capitalism. They are part of social democracy, first advocated by the socialists in the First Socialist International. So that's not the argument you want.
Second, all that you said do sound like enforcing of behavior. "You dont have to participate - you can just starve". Sounds utterly sociopathic.
> "Being unemployed" is a felony that gets you ten years in a forced labor camp.
There is no such thing anywhere. Don't make up falsities for argument. Doing the same in any country during wartime gets you the same kind of repercussion, including the 'democratic' ones who have all those written in as 'emergency laws'. If any rando like you ever knew what the 'emergency laws' in the most democratic countries involve, you would swiftly lose all the farcical illusions that you had about 'democracy'. Unfortunately such knowledge requires either special interest, or doing service in any NATO country's military or paramilitary tasked with enforcement of such laws. So that the masses like you can remain in blissful ignorance about the legal system that they live in...
...
So basically capitalism is the best system solely because people like you believe in a lot of falsities and lies. Which is of course the only way to sustain a system that kills people when they cant pay for healthcare etc...
People are different.
The point being, the offered easy solutions aren't undeserving of critique and we can discuss real reasons people might not be joining these dying institutions. There was an issue in framing and I discussed it.
A la the other conmments around not wanting to hang exclusively with senior citizens, or ham radio not offering the kind of bustling community one might want. Perhaps there's are reasons said organizations are struggling and a reason why people might feel the choice to find meaningful community isn't always easy, when it's disincentivised in society.
I'm hoping that we don't necessarily lump all of these into one category, because social clubs are really very diverse, and I think they're very much worth trying out for those looking for social engagement.
Yeah, some of these clubs have musty old ideals, some are conservative or strictly religious. Then, there are other clubs out there -- perhaps not as wide in size or scale, but still looking for members -- that have ideals that might be more modern, less conservative, secular, etc.
I think a lot of people these days are strictly thinking of grandpa when they hear about these social clubs, or group organizations, so they immediately write them off. But there are good organizations out there, and it might be worth a second look.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/society
You are society when you bring people together. You are isolated when you stay away.
I mean this literally: start a society that shares common values with yourself but is broad enough to include the values of others so you’re not standing on an island alone.
I might be wrong here, but generally when I’ve felt alone and tried to start a society for people like me, other existing societies that overlap shake out of the woodwork and I realize there was a rich network of people to join up with.
For what it's worth, I've definitely noticed an uptick in respect for religion in our type of crowd, often but not always channeling Jordan Peterson's ideas.
I think after losing the last culture war, religion has had to do some real soul searching and is beginning to adapt to the new, hyper-scientific world.
Clubs that do revolve around members’ politics and identity, honestly aren’t all that much fun.
The bigger obstacle to joining the "Daughters of America" might be that Wikipedia calls it "almost nonexistent" due to dwindling membership. [1] Lol.
I succeeded. It was all with the help of Meetup, just hanging out at bars with groups lead me to talking to more and more people, and usually afterwards, I'd talk to people outside of Meetups at different bars.
This led to gaining friends, and we'd just hit each other up to "hang out". It was the best year of my life due to this "hanging out" so I 100% relate to this whole article.
There is no guarantee that you'll make a friend there, but the odds are much higher than watching TV at home.
Most Meetup groups are zombie groups with thousands of members and no events.
The Meetup engagement algorithm drives people to keep joining groups and keep RSVPing to events, but very little to encourage repeat attendance or to prune zombie groups and events from your calendar. As a consequence, most groups have tons of inactive "members," and most events have tons of fake "attendees."
Even though I'm a "member" in over 100 groups, my Meetup calendar is mostly full of corporate Zoom events that are basically ads.
A sports bar or English style pub would work, but I’d rather without encouraging everyone to continuously consume alcohol.
10-20 friends used to show up at this one lake easily off one group text. We’d spend hours talking, sitting on an old wood dock drinking beers and skipping stones we picked up from the loose gravel along the shore, and yelling to hear our echoes spread through the mountains. One time we hung up a rope on a thick tree branch and went swinging off the hill and flinging ourselves into the water. As the sun would begin to set we’d lite a small bon fire on the shore and sit around it staring into the flames philosophizing, occasionally some guys and girls might wander off into the woods to make out, smoke some weed or do who knows what. And when it got very late, we’d drive out to whatever burger joint was still open and sit on the curbs in parking lots eating greasy food. Always 10 or 20 people deep, just hanging out. Just another random day in our lives, oblivious to the dark shadow slowly crawling across our world.
if it's a group with a common interest, you can rent a room in a dance studio or something similar, set up tables/chairs there, and have a hobby night
- public library usually has rooms of various sizes plus you have the added amenities
- local high school gym/auditorium can be rented
- if you live in a house, your yard. if you live in an apartment, your rooftop
- parking lot
among others
I just know from experience, more often than not, I walk away from a hangout feeling worse than before.
Things like walking groups are great, but more often than not hangouts seem to be based around an activity that is as unhealthy as possible (staying up late, drinking, smoking, eating shit food) and the social interaction is pretty surface level.