Tiredness of life: the growing phenomenon in western society | Hacker News Reader

Tiredness of life: the growing phenomenon in western society

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71 pointsmathgenius26 comments

Regarding socialization, suburbs are anti-social. There is almost no chance for spontaneous interactions with strangers.

Even small countryside towns are more social b/c there is a main street where people hang out on the street.

If you have to get in a car to "do something", your chances of spontaneous interactions go down exponentially.

I washed my bicycle outside last week and some 70-80 year old started up a conversation with me. Other times, going to the laundromat, some 80 year old lady chatted with me. But if I had to get in a car to get coffee or ride my bike, these kind of interactions would not happen. I want to live in a city when I get old and die on my feet.

I agree with your point about car oriented suburbs, but I’m also not convinced living in cities is necessarily social particularly in America.

I lived without a car for 5+ years and I didn’t find it led to spontaneous interactions. I think there’s other cultural and socioeconomic factors at play here.

I live car-free in a dense Canadian urban center and it doesn't lend itself to social interactions with strangers, indeed. Going outside means being assaulted with loud, dangerous car traffic and an absence of places where strangers can, for lack of a better word, "loiter".

If we want to facilitate impromptu social connections we need our streets to be pleasant and and safe from cars so that people want to stay around. Trees, benches, playgrounds, flowers and fountains. This is nothing new, it is how towns have been built for centuries until we sacrificed them in the name of cars and of economic output.

Might depend on your stage of life, or what you make of your environment. I live in a relatively suburban area and constantly have spontaneous interactions at swim meets, local bars/breweries, baseball games, coffee shops, community events, parks, playgrounds, etc. There are plenty of hang out spots to meet new people.

I also play in some adult sports leagues with active older people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. Also know lots of grandparents so regularly interact across generations. I’ve lived in large cities as well as small towns, and don’t feel like I’m missing much. Spending time at a laundromat sounds awful to be honest.

I expressed a similar observation on here about how I’d witnessed a change in people putting up higher fences and becoming more insular in their lives, and it seemed some people thought I was talking about how things changed as all people got older, it never clicked that I was talking about generational change. I now realise that millennials can’t even fathom what social life even was before the internet.

> There is almost no chance for spontaneous interactions with strangers."

My family lived in a suburb of an east coast US town. The "town" was about 30k residents in just under 5 square miles. It had a well-developed downtown, but driving was still the norm. In the five years I lived there, I ran into an acquaintance (neighbor, parents of our child's friends, etc) while "out and about" about 1-2 times.

When we moved to the city, running into someone we knew was a daily occurrence. Even after school was out for the summer, we went close to 40 consecutive days of running into a classmate. Most hilariously, I was on the subway with a coworker and explained out I ran into more people I knew in the city than in the suburbs. As we exited the subway, the father of my son's best friend rode past on a bicycle and stopped to chat for a bit.

While these weren't strangers, I felt more like I was part of a community in the city than everywhere else.

‘Socrates: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the “threshold of old age”: Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?’

https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/arch/greeks/PlatoRepublic.h...

In 2,500 hundred years we have advanced much in technology. In philosophy, perhaps, none at all.

In a way I feel this comes down to the difficulty of putting philosophical thoughts into words, and the difficulty of understanding those words.

For mathematical or in general scientific facts, I can build clear frameworks and descriptive languages, in which I can express my thoughts clearly. If I read someone else's, I can usually understand parts and even use them without understanding the whole thing (i.e. I can use a formula without being able to derive it).

In philosophy, any thought can be understood in a multitude of ways, especially depending on the way I come up with the thought. This means I can explain something as well as I want, the other person maybe can't ever understand it without walking the same path I took. Or the person can misunderstand me, without either of us ever noticing.

But, as much as formalization might help with these aspects, it would also lose much of the romantic and experiential aspects of philosophy, which would fundamentally change it.

decided to end it at 71 by drinking poison instead of escaping

The happiest older adults I know have one particular thing in common, at least it seems to me. They have been in a constant state of “re-launching” their entire lives. They have always been up for learning something new, trying something new, starting something new.

I’m not sure where they got the impetus to live that way. If you follow the default path of society, you are launched out a cannon at 18 or so and see how far you fly until you hit the ground in middle age and skid a short distance further. But then that’s it. One big launch you land where you land.

The major diseases of aging (heart disease, cancer, neurodegeneration) won’t last forever. The more they become treatable, the more years people will live in good health. We need to have find ways to give people more opportunities to relaunch.

> The major diseases of aging (heart disease, cancer, neurodegeneration) won’t last forever. The more they become treatable

It’s worth pointing out that working to prevent them years in advance is still very effective.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably part of the modern world, and are likely participating in the unhealthy habits of the modern world like the rest of us. The time to start changing them is now.

Unhealthy habits like…?

Too much processed food, sedentary lifestyle, too much alcohol consumption (not limited to the modern world but still not good).

Metabolic disorder used to be vanishingly uncommon and now it’s everywhere.

Modern life has nowhere near enough of "sitting around the campfire". Particularly with mixed ages.

The closest analogue I can think of in the UK is the old blokes down the pub at all hours of the day. Unhealthy in many ways, but at least they have a regular crowd and each other.

No idea if that happens elsewhere.

Exactly. Third places or social Schelling points. Society needs many more places where people can just show up and "shoot the shit" with people they know and casually make new acquaintances. In the US, I only know of skate parks, university dorm communal areas, and a rare type of local bar, but I'm sure there's similar in things like tennis courts or chess in the park.

I have seen this in the US at rural cafe's or diners. When my wife was waitressing, she'd call them the "coffee-drinkers". Every morning there'd be a group of semi-regulars that filtered in to drink coffee and swap lies with each other for a couple hours before going about their day.

I feel like one unspoken Western principle is that youth is the most desirable thing. You see this in the countless TV shows/movies set in high schools or colleges, the age distribution of influencers, etc. And I feel that our culture is not yet sophisticated enough to conceive as age as something different than "the opposite of youth" - i.e. ugly, dreadful, etc.

Maybe part of it is that when the world didn't change much, the oldest become the wisest. They survived it all. They've seen more and understand the dangers and pitfalls.

Now the world changes so fast that its not as true. A lot of the skills you learn become obsolete as you age. You have to keep learning at the same rate as the young because you can't rely on your 'back catalog' of info staying relevant. This means there's not an automatic connection between age and competence/wisdom.

You can add to it that many of the young people now rely on youtube and shorts for wisdom and learning, instead of having to talk to an older person.

While I don't think this necessarily has to be looked at thru a "sad" lense, what came to mind to me was the social isolation part of the equation.

It's kind of tragic that we (if I may speak on behalf of the USA) find ourselves living these [self-?]segregated lives. I love old people! There's so much to learn, so many stories. I love kids, too, because there's so much to [un/re?]learn about experiencing the world without decades of conditioning modulating perception and imagination. Yet the trail I circle every day intersects with none of theirs.

Many screeds about the decline of institutions like the Church or the Masons, Elks, intergenerational households — you name it - but I doubt we're going to do a 180 on that. So we have to imagine new possibilities.

I'm partial to at least two "culprits": highly car-centric culture (even in dense cities that are otherwise highly walkable), and the school system tradition of splitting student cohorts on an age basis.

There will be no silver bullet. We also can't (and shouldn't) lop off the tribal roots that influenced so much of our "wiring" as individuals of a highly cooperative species.

I would love to hear more ideas about what we could do to make everyone feel (be!) less isolated. Zoom/FaceTime doesn't cut it. There's no reason why an octogenarian ought to feel like their life is pointless because they're out of the workforce [per the article]. There's every chance for a meeting-of-minds between, say, a curious 8 year-old and a patient 88 year-old that would have an unknowably large impact on an unknowably far future.

Lots to think about.

An innovative library or park would set up connection opportunities, I think, unless being a homeless respite center makes this unwise.

So many consequences of not having enough shelter for everyone.

Most senior centers are happy to accept volunteers.

It being mothers' day, we were just talking about this today. My grandmother was quite active into her 90s (she was delivering Meals on Wheels to "the old dears" into her late 80s).

The problem is she outlived all her friends and her siblings; her youngest friend, whi did survive her was "older" in her ways. My nanna eventually moved into a retirement home and really hated it. She just didn't like being around "old people".

Yet though two of her three kids and all of their children (and thus most of her her great grandchildren) lived close by, she told me it just wasn't the same. "you young people have other things on your minds, and you should". Eventually, as she statred to lose her marbles she decided that was enough at 96.

Also I heard from my mother (a physician, late 80s now) that a huge problem with those who remain in their homes is loneliness: it's simply harder to get out and see your friends, and for them to do the same. People don't drop by unannounced because it's too hard.

Now these examples are from the west (Australia). But I remember my Indian great grandmother complaining that she was useless, and she was aging in the normal Indian cultural fashion. So it feels a bit premature for the article to consider this a western phenomenon. The traditional Indian (and I assume from what I hear, Chinese) model of the in laws, particularly the MIL, moving seems like it simply shifts the burden around.

Part of this is caused by the spate of long term illnesses that turn your final decades a slow descent into death, e.g. heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and dementia.

But the good news is that your chances of suffering from any of them goes down drastically if you take good care of yourself.

The point isn’t to live forever, but if you do stay healthy you’re far more likely to have a few good decades in retirement and die quickly.

My friend Roni Bennett blogged about “what it’s really like to get old” for nearly two decades with a large readership.

https://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/archives.html

She passed away in 2020.

>Molly was 88 years old and in good health. She had outlived two husbands, her siblings, most of her friends and her only son.

At 88? What you'd expect, partying and looking forward to the future?

The real interesting story would be about why there is a whole lot tirednes of life in western society at 20 and 30 - and the related depression, loneliness, withdrawal to one's house, and so on (the "doomer" demographic).

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