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Comment by sulcate | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to be transparent: I'm interested in a structural analysis as to why there's a crisis of loneliness.

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?

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It's the modern stuff we have.

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.

That but I would also add:

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!

Yeah, I strongly agree. These factors you mention are probably bigger than than the ones in my post, haha.

This. Somebody I read noted that streets in Polish villages started becoming empty in the evenings in the same period of time when the windows of houses there began to glow with the light of the TV screens. TV is just easy companionship and entertainment (even if ultimately unsatisfying), and we're a huge sucker for easy.

Why is loneliness more common? Look at the work week. Everyone is working long hours, doesn't get time off, or is too broke to spend it doing social stuff in America or other countries. Lots of fear increases this too, with people working too much social skills go down and mental health issues become an issue. And lack of interactions with others increases fear in general.

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.

But people worked a lot more in the past. The 5 day work week is a relatively recent invention. The 8 day work hour is also relatively recent. Why are we having a crisis of loneliness now and not when 18 hour workdays 7 days a week was the norm in a factory somewhere?

I think it mostly boils down to how trivial it is to entertain yourself these days with a smartphone.

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.

Agree.

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.

Smartphones are just the final nail to the coffin. Before smartphones, TV had already killed a of people's sociability (and radio did a lot of damage before TV as well). The book "Bowling Alone" was written well before the era of smartphones.

The 5 day workweek and 8-hour workday weren't won that long after unvarying (same job every day, same amount every day, no seasonal variation) optimized cog-in-a-machine industrial wage labor started to not just exist, but be common.

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.

> Lots of fear increases this too, with people working too much social skills go down and mental health issues become an issue. And lack of interactions with others increases fear in general.

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"

Marketing.

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?

Additionally:

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.

TL;DR: I was stuck in a local optimum where the screen provided so much relative value, and leaving the screen required so much relative energy and vulnerability, that I’d opt for screen time.

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.

The commodification of social spaces? If you can’t spend time in places without paying (in the cost of coffee, beer, gym fees, etc ) then that excludes big chunks of people, or they alert ration their social times to some extent

I'm gonna trot this one out again: I read somewhere that people reflexively choose convenience over happiness, and I don't have a source for that but I find that it explains nearly everything about modern life. Sitting at home watching Netflix fails to fulfill all kinds of basic needs, but it's _easy_. Similar patterns are everywhere; our lives are so filled up with the path to least resistance, there's very little room for intentional effort to do things that are actually fulfilling.

The current economic system - capitalism - and the philosophy and behavior patterns that it enforces on people. I saw how the system changes a society first hand when the free market ideology took over the society I grew up. People started to compete with each other, everybody was pushed to make more money, a 'good' career, the youth were pushed to study hard for getting good jobs to acquire such good careers, even as the society started to prioritize monetary/wealth gain before everything else. Social relations, from friends to relatives get loosened as everybody was immersed in his or her own survival and self gain. Worst impacted were the youth, who were pushed to drop social concerns and work harder to secure their future. It caught the youth in their early teenage years by them being pushed to prioritize studying and success over any social relation.

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.

You hit the nail right on the head

> It should be noted that, empirically, all other economic systems that have been tried are even worse than capitalism as far as people's perceptions of their existence.

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...

You prefer Holodomor?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

It should be noted that, empirically, all other economic systems that have been tried are even worse than capitalism as far as people's perceptions of their existence.

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."

> It should be noted that, empirically, all other economic systems that have been tried are even worse than capitalism as far as people’s perceptions of their existence.

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.

> 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.

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.

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