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Comment by admissionsguy | Hacker News Reader

I think the main thing is the lack of on-ramps. Once you have fallen out of the social circulation, there is basically no way of going back. Unless you are able to stay within an extremely narrow range of behaviours (in terms of not being weird, basically speaking expected thinks in expected tone of voice and body language), nobody wants to associate with you. And since about the only way to learn these things is to be around people who already behave in the "right" way, a vicious circle arises.

It has nothing to do with debt, wealth or earnings. Completely independent things. People had it worse at every time in history in almost every place.

It has nothing to do with social media / internet. It just something people tend to fall into when they withdraw, and have no trouble abandoning as soon as the life outside becomes tenable again.

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Social capital follows the same progression as regular capital. If you already have a lot of friends and acquaintances, it's easy to make more. You either get invited to things, or you can organise something and know people will come.

Loneliness is a big problem among recent immigrants. They all struggle to make friends at first, because they have no social capital to build upon. It's hard to break into established circles without being introduced by a member, and few people will show up to a stranger's party unless it's vetted by friends.

There is such a thing as being socially destitute, and the recovery can be quite difficult, especially when you have other things going on in your life.

Great reminder about immigration's social barriers.

Church and work are the lowest friction social spaces that I can think of outside of wealth dimension.

The problem still defaults to getting your foot in the door though. It requires a certain elevation of compassion and information in enough social circles for a single person to overcome cultural devides.

Indeed some of the most social times of my life was when I went to church despite not being Christian. They tend to be very welcoming and friendly in my experience. Sports clubs are great (e.g. badminton) as something less controversial

Sports are pretty good. Frisbee golf is basically free wherever you go.

So about two years ago, we got my sister in law to move into our house, because she was graduating high school and we felt that there was more opportunity in NYC than in small-town-USA, at least for a younger person.

We like having her around, she's very nice, but she's also had trouble finding new friends/social-circles here, and I kind of feel bad for dragging her up here as a result. I've always been someone who is happy enough alone, and I generally find a few coworkers at every job that I become friends with anyway, it's never been too hard for me, but I realize that I'm pretty weird. I feel like I yanked her away from a relatively comfortable and established social circle, brought her to a place where she knows nobody, and then just expected everything to be ok, which makes me feel like a dick.

Doesn't help that I ended up yelling at her boyfriend a week ago, for valid-but-not-worth-yelling-about reasons, and now I think she's afraid to leave her bedroom, so I might have inadvertently given her hikikomori tendencies. I'm an asshole :/

[1] usually the especially geeky people who will listen to me ramble about math.

So, how will you redeem yourself for past behaviours?

Yeah, I have no idea. I did apologize to the relevant people, and it was sincere but I have no idea if they believe me.

ETA: I thought about doing something like buying my sister in law a new iPhone or something, but that of course feels pretty dirty, like I'm just buying forgiveness, and frankly it's kind of selfish on my end, trying to convert someone's sadness into something transactional because transactional things are much easier to deal with.

It's a pretty difficult situation. What said has been said, the damage has been done and there's no going back.

The circumstances also matter, a period of emotional vulnerability. No friends, out of comfort zone. The current result is a breakdown of trust and feeling uncomfortable around each other.

How can one restore trust in such a situation? Would it even be better to say for them to go back to the small town? Being honest about how they seemed better mentally and spiritually there? Truly not an envious position.

Yeah, it doesn't help that I really dislike the boyfriend already [1], so there's only so much I can say while still being honest, and I don't really do apologies unless I feel there's something I should be apologizing for.

I suspect the only thing that I can do is be polite to her and just wait it out.

[1] He didn't do anything actionable, he's just kind of a dumb douchebag.

Presumably she does have the ability to make a decision to move back though? I assume you've broached her options so she knows you're supportive? People need a lot of reassurance that it's ok to change course if something isn't working out.

We've tried to make it clear that she's welcome to move back if she wants, but that she's also welcome to stay here. Obviously we're not holding her hostage, and we'd help her move back (or anywhere else) if that's what she wants.

I think me yelling at her boyfriend made her feel like she was unwelcome to do anything fun here.

NYC is a tough place for a lot of people. When I moved here years ago I was lucky in that I had a lot of friends from college that were also in the city. It could be tough meeting people if you don’t already have that or a third space you enjoy going to.

Maybe find some classes she might be interested in? There’s art stuff at pioneer works, art/computer stuff at school for poetic computation, tons of music/language/cooking lessons, etc. I’ve met lots of good friends in yoga, meditation, or Muay Thai spaces in nyc.

I think you can’t be rough on yourself about bringing her here though. It’s a beautiful place to live if you can get over the beginning difficulty!

Yeah, as I mentioned, I've always been able to find someone I get along with in most jobs that I've had, and so I've managed to find friends, and I've also never had much of a problem being alone for long periods of time. I'm also married so I have a friend that's pretty much always in close proximity. NYC kicked my ass in a lot of ways when I first moved here, but not in the "lack of friends" category. My wife is similar to me in that regard; she's usually able to find one person who she gets along with, and she's also generally ok being alone.

Part of the reason we convinced her to move here was because we thought that she'd have a higher likelihood of going to college if she went to a bigger city (and the CUNY system is excellent and inexpensive). She did go to CUNY for a semester, but for reasons I won't pretend I fully understand, she decided to do online college after that, which she's still doing. I'm not sure how to talk her into some kind of extra IRL classes.

Her only friend here, as far as I can tell, is her boyfriend. Honestly I think most people can get by with just one friend, but he said he's not going to come back to our house ever again because I'm a dick. I don't really blame him for that, and they didn't break up or anything, but I think it's made her feel a lot more isolated I think.

You have a lot of self awareness. Maybe try to fix things with the boyfriend?

I am a little hamstrung by my principles on that. I do feel like the reason I got upset was valid, so I cannot apologize to him for anything pertaining to that.

I can apologize for yelling and I probably will but I don’t know that I can apologize for the content of what I said itself.

> Unless you are able to stay within an extremely narrow range of behaviours (in terms of not being weird, basically speaking expected thinks in expected tone of voice and body language), nobody wants to associate with you.

I'll agree on the lack of on-ramps but this is a pretty limiting view. There's all kinds of people, many who will share some of whatever you think your weirdness is. If you only want to associate with a certain slice of society, it is not so weird that only certain slices of society want to associate with you.

How many of them are both geographically close enough and discoverable enough tho?

You need to live near a population centre to find them, that's true. It's the same reason other minority groups such as homosexuals urbanized so quickly.

I would say it's not just behaviors but isolation causes stress on the body that increases more irrational behaviors and fears.

So that can be crippling when trying to get back to a health state that can handle relationships again. On-ramps to help destress the environment would be helpful too. It's a challenge because we haven't really built many areas where people are welcome to just be, even with 3rd spaces that doesn't those people that are now rewired in their stress state. Some types of maybe community service (clean up, plantings, painting etc) or festivals events might be more helpful here as they can sometimes be lower stress, no required interactions etc. It's a tough thing especially as people have different reasons to isolate though poverty is likely one of the most major ones.

It's 2024. Some of us are isolating because y'all refuse to mask up and we can't risk going anywhere.

I have powered through by wearing a Cleanspace Halo but that precludes a real lot of places I used to go: cafes, cinemas, theatres...

> Some of us are isolating because y'all refuse to mask up and we can't risk going anywhere.

disclaimer: you may have an autoimmune disease in which case your decision is reasonable.

"y'all" is about 95%-99% of humanity right now. That percentage is not going to go down. Are you planning on staying inside for the rest of your life?

The US only has ~50 people / year dying of COVID, largely skewing elderly. There are more than twice that dying due to car accidents, so I assume you're not driving anywhere either?

143 in the week of May 18. 2571 in the week of Jan 13, 2024.

My mistake, I meant per day, and the numbers reflect that. The January was not great, yes, but a few factors: greatly skewing elderly, even less likely in the blue areas OP most likely lives, masks have shown little effect in reducing covid spread, outside is nonexistent, and are they still driving when driving is much more dangerous? People got rightly fearful, but some people will always take things too far and become hypochondriacs, like some people are still by themselves masking in a car? Imo, by the stats, it looks like a tall order to be expecting everyone around them to mask when we estimate the actual effects that would have...

That's only counting deaths. Long covid is much harder to measure, the numbers are significant and daunting. My spouse is so afflicted; she went from being one of the most productive and active people I've ever known, to incapable of doing an hour of work per day.

long covid

Physical and mental health are affected here, agree. Anxiety and depression are just some of them.

The evidence that it has a lot to do with social media is very strong. See Jonathan Haidt’s work on the effects of personal phones and social media on young people’s mental health.

Maybe social media catalyzes the problem but the point is that it’s not the root cause, in the same way that opioids did not in of themselves cause the opioid epidemic.

You need to provide some empirical evidence demonstrating what is the true root cause of the increase in mental health problems then.

Probably the first step is to simply prove that mental health issues are also increasing among populations that don’t use social media.

Haidt reviewed those kind of studies in depth before making his conclusions.

Iron poisoning and lead deficiency. They got it the wrong way round. They incorrectly packed every major cognitive process into the neocortex, instead of assigning them each to the correct part. They got the idea of intelligence the wrong way round: The function of the neocortex is dimensionality reduction - the more powerful it is, the simpler everything is. You can't improve anything that easily. You actually broke it.

I see it in analogy to sugar free sweeteners. There's some evidence that the physical experience of tasting sweetness is an essential phase in triggering the body's mechanisms to deal with large sugar intake. And that triggering that mechanism without providing any material for your body to consume can actually do damage to you as it searches for something to metabolize (this is just an analogy, feel free to prove me wrong).

But just like that, online social interactions trigger some part of our internal mechanisms for reacting to actual community and belonging and healthy debate/conversation, but without the complete "meal" to digest that those things actually provide. Thereby triggering maladaptive behaviors and actually doing damage to the systems that regulate in person socializing.

Probably over complicated but who among us, right?

> The evidence that it has a lot to do with social media is very strong.

Once you ignore finance and lack of housing (and/or overpopulation), then yes.

Japan, the subject of tfa, has low housing costs and falling populations in most prefectures, and a stabilizing population in tokyo.

> tfa

"the fucking article"?

Also: "the featured article", "the fine article", it's a TLA that has largely transcended swearing to become semi common shorthand.

No, Haidt’s analysis includes those factors.

I think this relates alot to what other posters are saying about how it's difficult to break into established social circles without somebody introducing you in. After all, you're more likely to make friends with a room of individuals than a room of cliques.

What social media does is it greatly strengthens preexisting social circles that there is less incentive for someone to be open-minded and make new friends. Take video games for example, I can personally attest people were alot more sociable and open to friend requests a decade ago than today.

One perception on what is causing this would be Discord. In the past, most people playing would be individuals, and group activities would naturally force people to socialize with strangers. The friends you made in one game would not follow you to another. With Discord, nowadays it's more of alot of premade groups of friends playing these games, so there's no reason to socialize in public chat or care about strangers.

Now Discord isn't new, Skype or BBS existed years before, but they were harder to set up, so pre-made groups were less prevalent and the barriers of entry would naturally mean people with more of an open mindset would be using them. Discord in contrast is very easy to get started with, so the more "conservative" elements would take precedence.

I was briefly jobless in a country with a fantastic social security net.

Easily the most stressful and financially unstable moment in my life.

It was only two months, but I genuinely thought I'd never recover my social standing, or confidence ever again

How so, what was your experience? This is pretty diametric to most people's assumptions so I'd be interested in hearing more about how that went down

Possibly due to social stigma. I don’t know that what I’m describing can be attributed to the safety net itself, but many countries with excellent social safety programs also have a low social tolerance for failure. This is not limited to using social benefits - e.g fail in business and you’re a business failure who will struggle to get any financing ever again.

Sounds like people I wouldn't want to associate with then.

From a European perspective who made similar experiences: European countries all tend to be hyper neoliberal nowadays (despite Americans warped perspective) they don't want to offer social safety nets for ideological reasons but have to because of past, long since crushed leftist political movements having forced them into existence, making it very difficult to abandon them now by the ruling neoliberals.

The net effect is the more slowly, erosion of social safety nets and making it as painful and unpleasant as possible to use them (as a matter of policy), as well as mass corporate media propaganda against it's recipients. It's a miserable experience by-design.

> It's a miserable experience by-design.

I believe we aim for a dehumanising experience in New Zealand, although I am mostly unfamiliar with it. Certainly our current government wants to crack down: https://assets.nationbuilder.com/nationalparty/pages/18418/a...

Sorry, i cannot edit on mobile but i just realized maybe i read that wrong. Are you saying that as opposed to countries without safety nets, or instead emphasizing that even with security nets it can still be a very difficult experience?

Very much the latter. I was shuttled from incompatible job (skills and geography) to incompatible job, treated with utter contempt, and had to essentially beg for financial support to pay the rent.

I'm a top 10% earner in the country, paid more than my fair share of social security for many years before that.

It was a jarring experience seeing just how fine the line was between being on the right and wrong side of the system.

I went through something similar here in America very suddenly due to illness. Were it not for family, we would have been homeless.

It’s hard to go from Hero to Zero. Now that you’ve made it, all I can say is “never forget how that experience made you feel” - that way when you vote and you pay your taxes you’ll know why you do it. Ideally so that it’s not even worse for the next guy.

It isn't that you're failing, they are the hikikomoris, who want to be alone, and the very fact that somebody tries to socialoze with them annoys them. It's just the norm in the west, so that it's you who stands out, and suffers alone.

Sounds like social coaching has all the attributes of an untapped business niche. The question is, if there is just a obvious pain, why there is such a shortage of solutions. I think it could be because of the stigma associated with this issue or because people affect by it lack genuine interest in solutions as people are usually happy to pay for all kinds of self-improvements.

Doesn't scale is a huge issue. Lack of evidence that it works is another - and anything remotely evidence based is given by somebody like a psychologist and is very expensive.

Social coaching is just another venue through which scammers do their thing. Eg the Andrew Tate-esque "schools" making men even more dysfunctional in the name of teaching them to be "attractive".

It's very easy to talk about some sort of coaching for these issues, but imo it isn't really that straightforward. The people being suggested to take coaching are often very easily manipulated, and there's also the issue of everyone having a different standard for a healthy level of socialization, and everyone also loves to force their standard onto everyone. Result is that "social coaching" is going to be more like brainwashing/indoctrination in practice.

> Sounds like social coaching has all the attributes of an untapped business niche

The problem is that most of the potential customers are well aware that the field is full of hucksters and certifications are largely meaningless. I'm not about to pay for services I don't believe will pan out.

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