The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

Nowadays when everyone's busy trying to make as much money as possible to be able to make rent or survive in ever-increasing inflation, an extra dining table they didn't give away is one they can sell for money. Similarly, borrowing money is harder/less acceptable because everyone else too is under pressure and is less likely to be able to help (or at least it would cause them more hardship).

I see families struggle with things I don’t recall seeing as a kid or teenager. We all had more people around. We were rarely functioning as such independent family units.

And you’re right, my dad was a carpenter himself and he did all kinds of favours for people. Especially elderly people—mostly women—who couldn’t do the work themselves or easily afford to pay someone to. He would offer lower rates, fit things in for free, and show up at their convenience. It was the right thing to do. That isn’t really possible now, though.

Something I urge my kids to understand is that family is great, but it was never meant to be everything. That isn’t to diminish family, but to encourage one to identify and appreciate what’s so valuable and rewarding in friends and community. Humans are so richly social and so poor at functioning in isolation; there’s no sense in pretending otherwise. We really need each other. The more community erodes, so do we each as well.

There used to be local vendors as you describe (what comes to mind is a local shop, an ice cream van, milk man, a fizzy drinks vendor, a butcher/baker), but they've all been replaced by economies of scale (supermarkets and now online).

So now there are no local shops, no weekly vans with their specialist goods. And those half a dozen well known local faces aren't doing their rounds.

A local shop serves as a meeting place where conversations can take place. Even in the 80s in the UK when TV was at its peak, people could have conversations the next day on what they watched last night out of the 4 channels available.

I guess the local social cohesion can be thought of as a necessity when you're going to deal with lots of local people and with recent trends said in the article it's considered optional.

Maybe in India things are different but there it's not like that at all. Ps As you mentioned people asking about your son getting married, one thing I noticed is that the focus on marriage in India is very strong, some of my coworkers in Bangalore who are from smaller villages are pretty much disowned if they don't get married by the age of 23. I know when I was 23 I was just backpacking around the world and enjoying life, not thinking about babies or families. In fact I never did get married and I'm almost 50.

I think that pressure would take its toll too. Young people like to be free and don't want to be tied down. It certainly made some of my coworkers there very stressed with the pressure because they just wanted to go clubbing. One friend's parents didn't even know she had a boyfriend for years. There seems to be a huge disconnect there between generations.

Interesting note: economics would quantify this as a significant productivity increase. You can now get more tasks done per day!

Lesson: economics does not fully capture human values.

"Do you have a telephone number with us?"

"It's going to ask you a question." (About how much tip to add to your bill)

Are there no other ways to make friends via social activities?

I love being in big cities (overseas) because I actually can cultivate this sort of community / friendship with the locals.

I go to the same coffee shops and get to know the folks there, bring them interesting coffee to try, etc.

I will say that this only has worked for me in other countries, not the USA. I think folks here are too burnt out by the lack of safety nets and such, I really don't blame them.

Sometimes there are communities in these spaces - NUMTOTs or small Discord servers. Other times its just marketing foo foo.

I don't think I've ever seen that. What I have seen is non-sponsored people referring to "the [brand] community" or "the [product] community" as a shorthand way of saying they discuss brand or product with other people with that shared interest on a dedicated Discord server or forum. The Sega community, the Final Fantasy community, etc.

Even this has been eroding, the amount of comments made by bots I see across reddit/Twitter has increased exponentially since the 2010s. It only got worse after LLMs.

A couple of them let me install my own apps and use the API, which is disturbing, but most either don't or use the free Slack tier and have maxed out the number of apps that can be installed.

With phones, and before that music, and before that newspapers, it's a social norm. If you are trying to talk to people you feel like the weirdo.

And I get it, cause I don't like making myself vulnerable. I wish I talked to strangers but it's hard to undo a whole childhood of "Don't stare, don't bother them, keep to yourself, everyone loves how quiet you are, you're so mature for your age because you never talk, etc."

No wonder lots of people feel disconnected. They forgot how to connect in even the most conducive settings for it.

I'm more interested in the question of whether technology tethers us home more strongly, instead of venturing outside of our homes.

BUT there are always a few people who are open to talking. I prefer talking to being on the phone when I'm in flight. I get to have a long conversation about 1/4 of flights.

If you read old books like Pilgrim's Progress you see people walking towards the same town together, and they always struck up a conversation. Look at the Canterbury Tales: some really great literature that consists just of fellow travelers having a storytelling contest! We are missing so much humanity in our kosher lives.

I'm talking to people constantly without looking at them. Some are loose ties like this one. But group chats, texts, Discord servers, even Facebook. Tons of 1:1 communication with people I see in person regularly. But also I don't have to see someone in person to have a real conversation. I'm often fully present with real people when on my devices, and I'm perfectly capable of dissociating while politely not touching my phone when I'm in a boring conversation with people standing next to me.

I have seen many (usually younger) people make this mistake. The mistake is thinking that the point of the activity is the activity itself. It isn't. The point is the genuine social engagement.

(Edited to add:)

> I've since learned to say yes more

Years ago, I learned to change my default answer to things from "no" to "yes". It has been a key to my career success. But, more than that, I have lived a more interesting life than most as a result of that.

Making "yes" your default instead of "no" increases the chances that something bad will happen, this is true, but it also increases the chances that something good will happen. Personally, I've found that on the whole, the riskier path is the better path. But I'm quite certain that not everyone will feel the same.

I grew up before the terminally online era, and I'm not sure we ever saw taking turns doing each other's favorite activity as a sacrifice of our individualism. It was just part of what it means to form meaningful social bonds with other people. Heck, most the time we agreed to spend time together before choosing an activity, because that's where our priorities lied.

But these things are very network dependent. Yes we let our kids play in the street and bike around the neighborhood, but it is boring because there are not any other kids to play with, so they don't do it much.

And if you do let your kids play freely, and something happens - they get hurt, they break something, they're being loud, there's the attitude from others of "why aren't you watching your f*ing kid?".

Everyone working all the time sucks for many reasons. It's a trap that people have fallen for and the only ones laughing are the billionaire oligarchs. Women in particular used to work for themselves and their families, building their own assets and their own relationships. Almost like that "founder" status everyone wants. Now they work for the same few men as their partners building wealth for those men and the closest the family has to a home cooked meal is a favourite takeaway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

A book published in 2000 based on an essay from 1995. I remember my sister took a university course on it.

The Internet only replaced social interactions for a tiny group of enthusiasts at that point and "phones" were the size of small briefcases and were novelties in cars at that point (1995).

Declining socialization has been happening for _decades_ and people are overly focused on smartphones as a cause.

Your kid is going to be so alienated from the other kids...

This is possibly a bit extreme, imo. In a world that is ever increasingly digital, responsible exposure is without a doubt necessary; However, it seems that one could also inadvertently foster naiveté and ignorance of our digital reality, which has its own potential pitfalls. The "right" answer is probably somewhere in the middle. As usual.

So let's think about what world we are presenting. Physically you have no autonomy. You require a giant wheelchair to get around (called a car) which you can't drive until you're older. These wheelchairs are higher in the social order than you. You have to give way to them. If you don't they will kill you. They matter more than you.

And in the digital world too: no autonomy. You use a "device". You can't participate in anything without said device. In fact, you basically don't exist without your device. The device is more important than you. Your device does what it does and no more. Someone else controls your device. Your device controls you.

A tiny fraction of children will grow up and ask "does it have to be this was" to a tiny fraction of things. Most will go through their whole adult life without questioning it.

> But, it's considered taboo to express a love of the USA

American flags _everywhere_' Like seriously, I visited both liberal areas (Seattle) and conservative areas (Spokane's surrounds) and y'all patriotic as _fuck_.

> Wars used to be a way to unify a country...

Also because the US is just not threatened by anyone. I'd hope that going back to being the Arsenal of Democracy for Ukraine (and maybe Taiwan or South Korea if things go bad) would've tied the US together, but man I was wrong there.

I don't agree. Every sporting event still plays the national anthem and often has soldiers or military involvement or mentions

I see US flags all the time, all over the place.

There are certain forms of "love" of the USA that are more politically one-sided that may be more taboo if you live in an area where most people are on the other side.

America has had a long history of unequal opportunity. It's kind of founded with unequal opportunity (slavery) and continued to shoot itself in the foot in order to ensure inequality (closing public schools instead of allowing integrated schools is why we have a rise of private schooling to begin with, HOAs existed primarily to ensure the community could enforce that no one could allow a black family to move in by selling their property to blacks). I think of America as a country that is constantly being challenged with the ideals it claims as having against the society it builds which falls short of those ideals. But I don't think this inequality has to do with the recent youth mental health crisis... America has endeavored to be more and more equal by the year.

Nearly every bullet point the article listed for what makes a strong community was basically just a descriptor for cultural homogeneity, which also touches on a rather controversial taboo. This sort of critique of diversity would be considered hate speech by some.

The US _always_ lacked a cohesive cultural identity, it has always been manifold.

Basically the rise of television and movies post-WWII-ish depicted a single culture but it was just excluding everyone except essentially WASPs. This had nothing to do with reality and was just racism. Before the world wars there was even a considerable amount of greater cultural diversity among European immigrants and descendants, German being spoken very widely across the country and quite a bit more of people retaining the culture of their ancestors.

This is why we need to pursue annexation by Mexico, so we can finally be a country with some culture.

Only in some circles.

American here. First-generation immigrant. Came from Germany at age 5.

This misses a crucial part of the problem. It is considered taboo to express a love of the USA in certain social circles. In others, it is considered taboo not to express a love of the USA. The problem is that the two sides have very different ideas of what "loving the USA" means. Among the first group (liberals) the USA is envisioned as an inclusive melting pot where all are welcome. Among the second group, the USA is envisioned as a set of values to which one is required to subscribe in order to be included; to include those who do not subscribe to these values would change the character of the nation to the point where it would not longer be the USA. These values include innocuous things like baseball and hot dogs, to abstract ideals like "freedom", less abstract ideals like capitalism, and quasi-religious ideals like "family values". Lately these have started to morph into religious ideals up to and including the (false) idea that an essential part of the national character is to be a Christian theocracy.

So it's not that expressing a love of the USA is taboo, it's that conservatives have managed to co-opt loving the USA and make it part of their brand. Expressing love for the nation, flying the flag, singing the national anthem, etc. are nowadays seen as expressing tacit support for conservatism in general, and the Republican party and Donald Trump in particular. This is the reason that liberals avoid them.

For me personally, I have always felt that some of the common rituals associated with "loving the USA" were kind of weird. Take the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. I get pledging allegiance to the nation, but to the flag? That has always struck me as bizarre. The flag is just a symbol, a token. Why would anyone pledge allegiance to a flag? But to question this, especially as a minor in a public school, turns out to be unwise.

I always hoped there was a way to avoid US-style bullying. I hadn't considered that it might be yet another consequence of society existing at too big of a scale (ex: behaviors that are accepted or even optimal in a city of 20 million people is wildly different than in a social setting where everyone knows you, your siblings, your friends, your parents, your boss, your coworkers, your pastor, etc.)

Cohorts sound like a good, if imperfect solution, for managing this at school.

Ignoring that it isn't normal elsewhere and wasn't normal here 100 years ago either when children were too busy for that kind of baby court intrigue.

In fact, even in the modern US it's not universal. Both I and my child have gone to school in different areas and in both cases the level of that kind of nonsense was far less in some places than others.

Teenagers aren't naturally alienated. You're alienating them and that's why they're alienated. By 13 a normal child is ready for and craves a lot more responsibility and efficacy than much of modern suburban American provides them, and lacking it leads to trying to direct the energy into other less constructive outlets. Idle hands are the devil's hands.

Looking down on people for focusing on studies and scoring good on tests is such an American thing!

In India, geeks and nerds are celebrated.

https://www.elks.org/who/missionStatement.cfm

"To be accepted as a member, one must [...] believe in God"

There are groups like UU and Sunday Assembly that don't have this requirement.

Social orgs can supplement a healthy community. They can't replace one, however.

A healthy community is one where it is trivial for kids to go on their own to a safe space. A place where they can Kid together, free from interfering adults.

Why do the outliers who do move around become a huge driving factor for the larger population here?

Why does the decline in the driving force bring an apparent increase in the effects?

It's different in a "commuter city" like San Francisco. That means the majority of people don't even live there during the day, and even their job might be temporary. Unfortunately most are there to make money, not friends.

if people select community based on some other criterion, you are more likely to get narrow group think and increasingly extreme opinions/culture that isn't ultimately welcoming or sustainable.

> Many praise the myriad benefits that smartphones and social media are said to bring; online connection can give a person a sense of “community,” we are told. We can find new friends, discover just about any idea imaginable, network, and even date through our phones. We can video chat with hundreds of people simultaneously from far-flung locations. We can pursue learning largely untethered from any physical space. Based on all of this, it would be easy to assume that place doesn’t matter.

> I disagree. Physical place actually matters far more than we realize, especially as our lives become ever more placeless.

Oh, c'mon. The world didn't get scarier, and force us to retreat to the comforts of online interaction. If anything, most of the world is a safer place since the 1990s[1], which curiously coincides with the rise of the internet.

This is a complex topic that researchers can answer better. But personally, I think that the pseudosocial interaction where we can shout our thoughts into the ether without any real risk of consequence compared to meatspace is appealing enough for many people that it covers most of their needs for social activity. It's also the ideal safe haven for the hypersensitive newer generations.

I think the pendulum will swing back at some point, and we'll start rejecting online activities. But then again, we'll also continue to merge with technology, so all of this could be the tipping point, and we have to accept it as the new normal.

In any case, what is certain is that Big Tech needs to be heavily regulated, just as other Big industries were before it. The psychological manipulation and social experiments need to stop, and we need to better understand the effects all this groundbreaking technology has on our wellbeing and society as a whole. It's not like the future of our civilization depends on it, or anything...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop

> But Alexander wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs.

Which era of our history might best reflect "normal" human life?

There are many types of activities which, while not criminalized yet, are “anti-social” in certain environments and can cost you your job.

US birth rates started dropping off not a generation later.

I’m not saying removing religion did not contribute to the decline (e.g. parents forcing their children to go to church), and we definitely screwed up when it comes to replacing that freed time with something more social. But actively asserting ideas and beliefs that don’t hold ground in the modern days to the children isn’t something I can support.

Few months ago I found a recurring event where a small group of strangers discuss deep topics from a deck of cards with questions, which are often very personal. This was probably the most impactful, I've met some new friends there.

Generally though, it's a funnel. Sometimes you find somebody, sometimes not, I just try to make a lot of opportunities.

What worked is volunteering in charitable activities, organizing programmes and camps, deliberately choosing some people and making time to see them regularly. That's about all.

I agree it's related. But that it's glaringly obviously the cause? I'd need to hear more.

Loss of third places, TV, necessity to move around for studies then jobs (and moving your kids along if / when you got them), increased cost of living, … are all massive contributing factors.

I spent part of the summer in Spain, and you'd see teenagers hanging out in the park, or at the beach huddled together while looking at their own tiny computers.

If someone has little positive face to face interaction with people outside their immediate family, I don't see how you could argue that's not a lack of community.

:)

https://www.ic.org/directory/community-types/

The moment something like that grows or scales to a tipping where real estate funds take interest then it will naturally enshitify as most things in society that have been monetized by large scale investors.

I agree with everything you said but with the risk of gate keeping I worry that the only way co-living projects will work is by having a bunch of stubborn fun people starting it off and keeping it at a non-industrial scale.

Any other gathering / community has to deal with these real world problems before they can attract people.

In my college years, there were clubs or fraternities, and they could use classrooms or student unions as low cost resources to gather in person and foster community. I think that's a barrier as an adult.

In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school.

In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).

Growing up we used to have these kid/youth centres that were run by local Catholic organizations. We used to hang out there after school. Ostensibly the point was that there'd be 30 minutes of catechism doctrine, but we didn't really care about that. To us it was just a the place where everyone would be. I miss that so much. A place where you can just go and meet people your age, without any reason to be that and without having to pay an entrance fee.

Now as a grown up we have community centers, which are run, not by the Church, but by sort of hippie-lefty people. But it's not really the same atmosphere, because you go there, and it's just one demographic of people. It's not quite the same.

There's also pubs and climbing gyms which people often use as low effort places where one can mingle, but again, it's not quite the same. I don't like drinking multiple times a week and I really don't like climbing.

There are some options, of course, but they're limited and often of poor quality, at least locally. Libraries are trying to adapt to fill this gap, and maker spaces spring up but most don't have funding to be good - or if they do, that funding brings things that ruin the spirit. Once you're looking for a place as an Adult, especially without kids, the number of relevant events and things to do drops quickly too - so these same children aren't going to find better options as they grow older.

However for non-religious people there is really no third place to meet. Additionally, the truth is that outside of religious communities, people are not having children and thus it creates a further sense of isolation and loneliness. The best one can do is perhaps join meetup groups for hobbies but most of those cost money and may not be welcoming to everyone.

I would also say that this can be a cultural phenomenon, for example in my home country (Iran) people are always meeting and socializing, at 10PM streets are bursting with activities and it's very easy to find people to connect with. In the west, unfortunately it's much harder and society is more focused on the individual rather than the collective so to approach a stranger in the street feels like a risk as they might consider your actions rude, disruptive or invading their personal space.

Basically it's too expensive to make spaces available for below market rate due to the direct cost of rents (a middle or upper-middle class person could drop $1000/month on a passion project, but not so easily $5k/month) and there's a very high opportunity cost to forgoing revenue/profit, because you can find buyers willing to buy you out for 3-25x incremental profit. That opportunity cost makes it tempting for any community space to instead chase profit. But it also makes non-residential property more expensive because you're bidding against companies that are able to convert incremental $1000/mo profit to $50k-100k in realized value, even if you aren't intending to do that.

Rents themselves are very competitive not just from low supply but also because technology has made the rental market very "efficient"/liquid - it's easy to market a property and accurately price it, so sweetheart deals/underpriced leases are difficult to find. Plus rental properties themselves have been very well financialized as well - increases in incremental revenue/profit of commercial real estate can be recognized as many-times-more increases in equity by lenders, which can be accessed by loaning against the equity. So sweetheart deals are more costly to lessors than before.

It didn't need to be this. Richer kids might have been into swimming and water polo. I got into volleyball later and ad hoc sand courts were all over the place. Most of the parks near me also had tennis courts and I played tennis quite a bit. Even the more counter culture kids who weren't into team sports often did some combo of skating, surfing, and snowboarding and bonded over that.

Some of this is obviously mediated by where you happen to live. Southern California has a lot of open spaces, beaches and mountains, and the weather is pretty temperate all year. As much as Hacker News laments suburbs, the sprawl also means there are a lot of parks because there is so much space.

I've gravitated more toward individual athletic pursuits in middle age, so I'm not really involved in sporting communities any more. Seemingly, though, all this cheap, free to the consumer infrastructure in the form of concrete courts with nets still must exist, no? Nobody ever expected parks to turn a profit. They were just a thing cities and counties were expected to provide out of tax revenue and they're a minuscule portion of that compared to expenditure on schooling and law enforcement at the municipal level. There can't be any economically good reason to put them on the chopping block.

After years trying to see people weekly and failing miserably, this is best hack I have found. Caveat emptor, takes discipline and patience from everyone but it's great to see loved ones daily, fully engaged in a project.

It helps that I can afford to have hobby businesses.

In general, people seem to do a lot less unstructured leisure activity and social interaction. Quantitative goals are imposed by social expectations, gamified ad-funded software, or economic anxiety.

Be sure to like and subscribe.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6763725-capitalist-reali...

> Adorno was born a German Jew at the end of the nineteenth century; he saw Hitler come to power via popular vote; and, in 1941, he was forced to flee Germany for the United States. Once there, however, he observed conditions of isolation and aloofness that made him worry: post-war American culture looked, to his eye, too much like pre-war Germany. The post-war “baby boom” had resulted in the growth of the American suburbs, sprawling sections of land developed for first-place functionality (private residence) and located within commuting distance to second-place nuclei (cities, office buildings, places of work). Adorno watched Americans shuttle back and forth in their cars between work and home, and he critiqued what he saw as ever-deepening habits consistent with conditions of social alienation. “He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest,” Adorno argues in his 1951 work Minima Moralia. In other words, Adorno says, isolation begets feelings of superiority, but not solely because the isolated individual lacks opportunities for comparison; rather, isolation begets superiority because the isolated individual has no audience but himself, no one to receive (and, perhaps, critique) his image of himself, to test whether or not it is even accurate.

--Sheila Liming, "Hanging Out" (2023)

For many that’s now the unattainable dream: a community with values that sit still long enough to even aim at upholding them, a robust partnership early enough in life to start a family the biological way, children who can look forward to the same.

On the surface there is a culture war around this, and it’s true that the old model had serious problems with admitting other lifestyles. That needed fixing, but not by obliterating the model that works for most people with overwhelming precedent.

The real culprit as always is the “monetization” of everything, a baton that has now firmly been passed from finance people to Silicon Valley people.

The #1 post on Y-Combinator’s news site is in some sense the central locus in the observable universe for this.

Yes, corporations and governments aren't great parents. But then neither are parents, if they allow corporations and government free reign over developing minds.

I shit you not my wife and I wanted to visit a park the other day and realized the parks dept now has paid parking stalls. The PARK. An outdoor space, supposedly paid for by my tax dollars, that because of it's distance from me is not feasible to walk to (and because the streets here are fucking terrifying) now charges me to park my vehicle there, so I can get some nature. Just un-fucking-believably apple pie in the window sill, burgers and fries, fireworks on the fourth American.

I am so goddamn tired of every interaction I can have requiring money. I just want somewhere to go that's nice to be that doesn't demand my fucking credit card.

There are many different definitions of 'left' and 'right'. One perspective that can be useful is to think in terms of 'collective' and 'individualistic'. On this axis, neoliberalism is firmly to the right (not in the centre as is often portrayed). Communities are collective by definition and neoliberalism is inherently anti-community.

When I was younger I was always confused by the incessant political drive to 'privatise' everything despite the obvious bad outcomes. On the whole, the cost of services didn't go down, they didn't improve, and they didn't become more efficient. The opposite would happen, despite the promises to the contrary.

My eureka moment was when I realised that it really was simply about ideology. The essential aim was not to improve anything. It was to ensure all activity was turned into a 'market transaction' so as to provide those with capital more opportunities to invest. From that point of view, the push for privatisation makes perfect sense.

We have been fooled into selling our communities for profit (as if that's the only way to improve our lot).

We've doubled down on marketplaces to mediate interactions because they are rational systems. Rational systems like marketplaces, elections, and bureaucracies are the sine qua non of liberalism, which both ends of the political spectrum advocate for in their own ways. The right typically advocates more for marketplaces and corporations (i.e. market-based bureaucracies) and the left typically advocates for more government managemeant (election based bureaucracies).

Rational systems are in constrast to local cultures based on tradition, biology, and shared history. Its why there is so much homogenization in farming, music, clothing, architecture, etc.

The upside is that rational systems allow for scale, propserity, and individual liberty on an unprecedented level. On the downside, rational systems are fundamentally dehumanizing.

We mediate everything through marketplaces because we've don't have any place for non-rational organizing principles (locality, biology, shared history, etc)

That doesn't make sense. Kids in previous generations had to grow up with things like the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation, which had greatly faded into the background until very recently. Also (at least in the 80s) destruction of the environment was a an issue kids were made very aware of. At least when it comes to this teen mental health crisis, the 70s and 80s are often understood to have been far better.

I think pointing to climate change as a cause of the teen mental health crisis is a good illustration of how issue activists can twist and distort perceptions.

Friends, relationships, drama — they are kids.

The result is a pervasive societal siege mentality with everybody retreating into their homes. The Starbucks data on where "third places" are thriving or dying aligns very well with this model.

The answer is as obvious as it is unwelcome, which is it slow down a bit and give people and families time to adapt to their strange new neighbors and neighborhoods.

Society and social system are not working ideally, in fact is far from acceptable levels if you ask me. But the solution is not ostracism disguised as virtual interaction.