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Aren’t there many countries which are happily anti social?

In any case - approaching this as if it is damage, will end up putting you in opposition to choices people are making.

You can be incredibly alone in a crowd of people. You can be empty when people are singing your praises.

Meaning - is different simple social interaction. People can find their comfort zone of personal interaction is much smaller than others.

TLDR: Treating it like a problem, results in bad suggestions. Treating it like a choice, suggests that one look at the options available to people.

It may turn out that people aren’t hanging out at bars, but at home. Frankly, why wouldn’t people stay at home, if home is where they have put their time and effort into setting up.

If you want a good place to find solutions, look to boredom and monotony.

Do note - polarization started well before the personal computer showed up in the geological record.

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> Aren’t there many countries which are happily anti social?

Yes: Finland. Purportedly the happiest country on the planet. A bilingual nation who will merrily shut up in two languages simultaneously. Whose complete lack of small-talk is legendary.

Hell is other people.

Ob-disclosure: I'm a Finn.

Quality over quantity, right?

The article thinks the problem is declining quantity, but I'm unconvinced. Americans have always been low on quality, since as far back as slavery and native american genocide.

If anything I think the "meditation" mentioned in the article is a really good sign.

I suspect it might be the smaller quantity in general.

90% of everything is crap. 90% of everything that remains is still crap. With the endless yammering cut out, there is simply a lower volume of garbage competing with your limited bandwidth and attention.

> Americans have always been low on quality

I'm intentionally stripping this out of your provided context, because I don't think aligning the sentiment with atrocities helps. Obviously this is coming from an outside observer's point of view, so take it with a grain of salt - from what I've seen, the American culture is obsessed with self-promotion and hustle. Peoples' ear canals are flooded with demands for attention, and everyone is incentivised to drown out everyone else.

Almost as if the agreed solution to the needle-in-a-haystack problem is "more hay".

Unfortunately, there is evidence that the provided context greatly matters. Here's a quote from the book “The Sum of Us”, by Heather McGhee.

>He was building on global comparative research by Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, which found that “societies that began with relatively extreme inequality tended to generate institutions that were more restrictive in providing access to economic opportunities.” Nunn’s research showed that although of course slave counties had higher inequality during the era of slavery (particularly of land), it wasn’t the degree of inequality that was correlated with poverty today; it was the fact of slavery itself, whether on large plantations or small farms. When I talked to Nathan Nunn, he couldn’t say exactly how the hand of slavery was strangling opportunity generations later. He made it clear, however, that it wasn’t just the Black inhabitants who were faring worse today; it was the white families in the counties, too. When slavery was abolished, Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today. These deficits limit economic mobility for all residents, not just the descendants of enslaved people.

That "public infrastructure" mentioned includes healthcare and welfare, contentious issues in the US even today. Without them, we get inequality, hustle culture, and the US dropping in that list of "Happiest Countries in the World".

I'm not sure which happy, anti-social countries you are referring to.

"It may turn out that people aren’t hanging out at bars, but at home." I understand that entertaining at home has been in decline over the last few decades, and is at or near an all time low. Putnam discusses this in Bowling Alone, and all research I've seen lines up with that.

My belief is that most people agree that the decline of community is a problem (I'll cite the Surgeon General's report, for example). I'm open to reconsidering my position if you have sources for the opposing viewpoint.

I was thinking of Denmark, but as someone pointed out above, Finland.

I went through the surgeon generals report to better understand your point.

Hopefully this brings us closer to congruence:

1) Loneliness and being Alone are different. You can be lonely in a group of people. The Surgeon General captures this where they talk about quality of connection.

2) An underlying issue highlighted in the report, is economics. Resources can set of virtuous cycle, increasing health and time for social connection. Lack of resources decrease this.

If there is a short answer, it’s worth pointing out that causative factors are what solves problems. Forcing people into proximity, for example, wouldn’t alleviate loneliness.

Meaningful interactions, and the ability for people to afford them, is what matters.

I think the primary point is that until the 20th century, most people did not ever have a choice. Communal living was the only primary successful strategy for survival, so we are fairly hardwired for that environment. In that environment occasional solitude was probably a benefit.

It’s like the physical exercise which until the 20th century was just a part of everyone’s life. We sought relief from it whenever possible, but that wasn’t often possible. But in modern life we can go weeks without much physical exertion. And we know the consequences of that.

> polarization started well before the personal computer showed up in the geological record.

What do you mean?

I think "well before the personal computer showed up in the geological record" is a bit of hyperbole, but it is not a new phenomenon:

"We find that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing"

"Partisanship has been attributed to a number of causes, including the stratifying wealth distribution of Americans [2]; boundary redistricting [3]; activist activity at primary elections [4]; changes in Congressional procedural rules [5]; political realignment in the American South [6]; the shift from electing moderate members to electing partisan members [7] movement by existing members towards ideological poles [8]; and an increasing political, pervasive media [9]."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Oh thank god, this is the report I was looking for, and I couldn’t remember what it was. Thank you.

The Reformation is one famous example.

Reformation was itself really about long-standing conflicts between countries/nationalities. Few people really care whether they are saved through faith alone or not, just as East and West weren't really having wars over whether "filioque" belongs in the Nicene Creed.

The Internet does give ordinary people the opportunity to be mean to each other on a daily basis rather than having wars. I'm genuinely not sure that's an improvement, since at least people would think twice before going into combat. The level of desiring to harass each other seems roughly constant.

The reformation broke out in the middle of the hundreds of tiny German microstates that comprised the "Holy Roman Empire". In fact that's the only way it could have broken out; power was diffused among hundreds of princes and the mechanisms of central control weren't strong enough to stop it. That's why it happened when and where it did. Nationalism and politics didn't enter into it for the better part of a century.

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