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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

If, instead of scrolling HN, you talked to me, both our lives would improve.

Human contact, even with strangers, has a profound impact on health, mental state and quality of life. This has been researched and proven over and over. We are simply wired to function in social groups. Our current state of individualism is rather exceptional, and a cause for many issues with (mental) health.

So, yes, you scrolling HN has an effect on my health, because the reverse is unfortunately true too: loneliness (and isolation etc) have a negative effect on humans

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> If, instead of scrolling HN, you talked to me, both our lives would improve.

I'm wholly in sympathy with the idea that public life would be better if we spent less of it on our phone, but counting every good deed left undone as a harm done is a very dangerous road to go down.

Fair point.

I wasn't seeing it as a "good deed left undone" but as a normalized state that has been unbalanced by phones and individualism. That the norm is a place where humans talk, collaborate, and have deep connections in small social groups. The way humans have lived for millions of years.

I guess looking at it from a more practical perspective of individualism being the norm from which we should break through good deeds, is a far more effective and realistic way. Thanks.

I wouldn't chat with strangers sitting on a bench with or without a phone. I say this as someone who often walks in parks without taking out my phones. If there's a claim that my not talking is affecting other people's health, I'll counter claim that such a burden of socializing is a kind of peer pressure, and it is negatively affecting my mental health.

> We are simply wired to function in social groups.

A stranger on the bench is not my social groups. I have my friends and circles to whom I talk, and that's good enough for me. Talking with utter strangers on random occasion is stressful to me; I'm quite certain that I'm not wired to do it.

"If, instead of scrolling HN, you talked to me, both our lives would improve."

You haven't talked to me :D

Yeah, it takes two people to talk and if I'm on my phone and someone starts talking to me, I'm more than willing to put it down and talk.

> If, instead of scrolling HN, you talked to me, both our lives would improve.

Citation needed. The cohort that wants to talk to random strangers in my experience 1) significantly overvalue their opinions 2) seem unbothered by any behavior or body language saying "please leave me alone" and 3) are not nearly as interesting as they think.

Just because I'm outdoors doesn't mean I signed up to be bothered by randos.

> If, instead of scrolling HN, you talked to me, both our lives would improve.

It might be just my big city upbringing but the random people chatting me up in public almost always want something from me I would rather not give them. Most of them want my literal money. Either by scamming me or by just begging. Those who don’t usually want to tell me about their faith and try to get me converted.

Not saying it is all interactions. Have a few positive ones too, but the wast majority is not.

The reason I am very skeptical about talking with strangers is evidence based and has nothing to do with phones. In fact it predates smartphones by decades.

The idea that baning phone usage is going to make people less lonely is in itself preposterous. If you see me on my phone in public most likely i’m talking with one of my friends. If you are feeling so lonely that you want to force me to interact with you instead of them, then maybe you are the one who has a problem? Like join a club, invite people over for some board games or volunteer.

I believe this is most likely a big city mindset (for good reason).

After living in London a few years and returning back home, I realised how defensive and wary I'd become of stranger interaction.

In London people might be trying to pickpocket you or sell you something, but in smaller towns I've found most of the time people are genuinely being friendly or asking for directions etc

I've almost always lived in big cities myself and had many pleasant conversations. But I'm pretty good at profiling.

It might come as shocking, but it used to be the case that one could meet new people in the street, because the probability of positive human contact dwarfed the scammers or beggars you describe.

Couples that met on a bus commute was a trope with a basis in reality; nowadays everyone's isolated, headphones on, eyes glued on a phone. The first reaction to human contact in public spaces is one of distrust and defence.

> The idea that baning phone usage is going to make people less lonely is in itself preposterous.

It's not magic; it's a signal, a public statement.

> It might come as shocking, but it used to be the case that one could meet new people in the street, because the probability of positive human contact dwarfed the scammers or beggars you describe.

That sounds good. I was in my early twenties when smartphones went from a curiosity you heard about on the TV to a reality in many hands. Scammers and beggars masively outweighted positive random contacts even before. Phones and headphones did not cause this where I have grown up.

One of the most famous experiments that prove exactly this were done in the NY subways. (In the eighties) on mobile, so don't have a link to the paper at hand.

I grew up in a small suburban area where a lot of my learned behaviors came from being a mall rat. Since that was the major place I socialized (in the arcades), you quickly learned how to try and signal you're not willing to talk or engage with people. Mainly because malls had a ton of smaller stalls staffed with sales people who would immediately try to pull you aside if you even gave them a side glance and try to sell you a phone plan or other things.

As an introvert the last thing I want is random people deciding that me trying to enjoy some peace on a park bench is license to try to "improve" my life by talking to me. Almost every stranger who has thought they were "improving" my life by talking to me, has either had no impact, or actively made it worse.

Plus, it's such a culturally dependent thing, Americans are known for always engaging in little bits of random conversation and pleasantries with total strangers, but other cultures can see it as either cheap and shallow or weird and creepy, and of course if someone sees it as either of those, it isn't going to help their loneliness.

> If, instead of scrolling HN, you talked to me, both our lives would improve.

Talking to random strangers in public is generally very awkward and unpleasant for me and I don't see how subjecting myself to that would improve my life in the general case.

Me too. But science tells it's the reverse. Obv. statistics, so it doesn't apply to your personal situation.

Yet, I, introvert++ have had the best moments when travelling, talked to random strangers or exchanged beers, music and stories when stuck in transport. This still comes out as net positive for me in all the decades of having awkward conversations, unwanted attention or just social interaction. I won't give up those hundred of situations that made me uncomfortable for the few that truly changed my life.

The last thing my introverted-ass wants to experience is someone assuming that they're making my life better by randomly chatting with me on the street.

I spend all day at work talking with people, being in meetings and having said human contact. Outside of work I prefer to control that contact, hence why I walk around in public with big obvious headphones on.

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