The loneliest people (and places) in America | Hacker News Reader

The loneliest people (and places) in America

washingtonpost.com

57 pointswallflower57 comments

> No matter how much time you think young men devote to video games, you’re probably underestimating it. Two decades ago, high-school- and college-age males (ages 15 to 24) spent about a quarter of an hour a day alone playing games. Now, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.4 hours a day.

Wat? I'd have expected it to be a lot more.

I'm sure there are quite a few who spend over eight hours a day playing games...

There are also quite a few who never/rarely play games. Averages do things like that all the time. Which of course opens the question of is that an important factor?

Yeah, but a more useful analysis would be to look for a median instead of mean, or clean the dataset to remove outliers to say something like, of those who play video game, the average/median is... this would also lead itself to the next step of analysis about if it's an important factor like you mention by categorizing them into players vs non-players.

Or modes. Since the data is likely multi-modal.

At this point, you can just show the entire histogram.

True. My main point is that almost everytime I read something about "average" hours spent playing games or whatever, it turns out to be a hack job. Like why use average if you have a bunch of zeros in it? What does that average actually tell us? Usually nothing useful. Metrics like what percentage of teens/men/etc play games now vs 10 years ago, or of the people who play at all, how many hours do they play now vs 10 years ago, etc would be so much more useful than what they gave because the increase in average hours played might only be due to fewer zeros being in the dataset.

Sometimes the data is a seep and clean-ish bell curve and average works well despite a lot of 0s and high scores.

Still way below average time spend watching tv then. Pretty surprising.

TV audience statistics are related to a lucrative branch of advertising. The higher the numbers, the higher that busyness is signifiant.

I’d be very curious to know how do they calculate “TV watching" statistics. Gaming is quite easier as you just count active playing time (=some input in the last ~5 sec) and there way less incentives to inflate the numbers.

> Still way below average time spend watching tv then. Pretty surprising.

Not to me. While games have replay and collaborative play fynamics, there just is a much higher volume of great TV and, as social beings, people get to be part of the zeitgeist.

Definitely not people staring blankly at low quality drivel alone for hours

1.4 hrs/day lol.

Same survey probably concluded that young men watch porn once a month.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like much if you grew up in the 80s and remember the concerns about how the average household watched 4+ hours of TV a day. I consider my time spent playing games to be time wasted, but at least it's not entirely vegetative.

That's the thing with averages. MMO/online gamers sink more time, but even among gamers they are not the largest demo. 2 decades ago, there was even less of that.

I might have averaged 1-1.5h when I was younger, and now it's 30 min. Almost always single-player (made exceptions for FromSoftware games).

One thing jumped out: many of the states with high rates of "always" lonely, also have high rates of "never" lonely. Many of these states are in the Sun Belt. The article ties those always rates to poverty, these are also states that have had a high in-migration in recent years.

Could this contradiction instead be that many of those who report being always lonely are those who have moved recently to the states, and who don't have the connection (often familial) that those who have been around longer, or who have stayed back in the "less lonely" states, have?

I live in Louisiana, one of those states. We have the lowest in-migration and low immigration.

Probably the more likely explanation is that the general individual has slowly withdrawn from society due to the internet.

With how toxic many online communities are, I wonder what that says about how the real world must have treated them.

Fairly often, a person gets radicalized on the internet and then treats real world people around badly. Online toxic communities produce toxic people, but frequently those people were not mistreated all that much in the first place.

I've also met multiple people I'd never want to interact IRL but that are actually ok/nice people out of the internet. Being behind a keyboard definitely seems to bring the worst out of some people.

But choosing to spend time in those online communities in the first place might be an indicator that they're seeking community that they haven't been able to find, or were left out of in fhe real world.

Might be, might be not. You really can not say that. Sometimes, online is simply cooler the exact same way new friends are sometimes cooler. It is more fun, because it is new and exciting. Sometimes, online (or new political group) hooks you in with fake threats that gives you feeling of purpose that has nothing to do with your actual environment being bad.

Plus these groups are addictive by way of being bubbles - where your real life friends might tell you that "hey that is rude" or just wont appreciate you being derogative to others, like minded online individuals will embrace that part of you. And as you become more radical, IRL people will avoid you to avoid your toxicity while you will feel good in the similarly toxic environment.

I can say it just as much as you can say that the internet is the cause of the radicalization. Note the qualifier "might".

Florida doesn't fit though. They have a lot of in migration yet low lonelyness rates.

Likely because people either move with a purpose (getting retired and living in a retiree community) or are moving to a specific community (an immigrant community, like myself), so there is plenty of other people just like you around.

The community I live is easily 30% Brazilian, my oldest kid pre-school class is 90% kids born to Portuguese speaking households, even the kids that don't speak Portuguese pick a word or two and join in our events.

I think the kids definitely change the equation, it is much easier to find other people in the same life period as you due to the kids being around the same age and being together anyway. Not sure how it would be if we didn't have kids but then again if we didn't have kids we would have stayed in PHL or moved to NJ/NY, we wouldn't come to Florida.

If it was strongly influenced by southern states having transplants, I feel like NC would be much lonelier, but we actually did pretty good. That surprises me, because culturally and economically, our closest peer is Georgia, and they didn't do as well. The biggest difference between us and Georgia is that the a huge portion of Georgia's population is centered around Atlanta, while NC has two major metros (Charlotte / The Triangle) and lots of mid-sized cities spread all over. Would be interesting to see this data on a per-county or per-metro level.

Maybe I misread some of the article, but seems like younger people just "suck" at being alone? IE, older people are less likely to feel lonely when they're physically alone? I wonder if that's because older people are more likely to have a solo hobby - reading a book, knitting, whatever - and younger people are more likely to "doom scroll" online?

It's a bit weird. They didn't find any loneliness among the gender divide, but it also did note that Gaming among males has drastically increased. But on top of that, Gaming seems to be average in terms of satisfaction but still highly rated as "the worst use of your time".

It may suggest some internal polarization. There's a lot of young people who can more or less get by being a pseudo hermit between gaming, remote work, and necessities. But the ones who can't suffer greatly on a mental level. I wonder if breaking down games by genre or format would reveal anything?

Regardless, it did also say the primary factors overall have to do with economic, social, and community strength. It's no real secret by now thst Gen Z has had all the structures of yester-decade pulled up from under them. Job market is stonewalled for graduates, third places are dead or near-dead for community building, and social media further ruined a lot of incentive to meet locals in a physical setting.

Being someone from gen z, it feels like there's no opportunity for anything. Not just jobs or economic opportunity, but social ones as well. I graduated high school and started college in the wake of covid so I feel extremely developmentally behind. I do some volunteer stuff in my area but I don't actually "know" or enjoy time with them outside of our volunteer work because they aren't my age or in my stage of life. I don't even play games anymore because the pressure of "making it" makes me feel worse than before playing a game.

Your comment caught my attention as I’ve noticed GenZ comments on social media making a major point about stage of life and age. Curious to know why your friends need to be your age and in the same stage of life? I’ve always had friends that are older by 15 years, and now also younger by 15 years. So Millennials to Boomers and we connect on interests, hobbies, sports teams, hikes, walks, climbing, games, favourite beverages (beer, cocktails). My 2 cents: Over the years, friends of different ages have been essential for connections, opportunities, referrals for services, housing, advice and learning from other people’s experiences (aka the easy way).

Education was a major casualty of the pandemic that gets ignored, of course students have routinely been screwed throughout history because they don't have a voice. That said every generation gets screwed by the real world at some point. For millenials it was the 2008 financial crisis. My sister graduated college that year and the labor market was just brutal. As unceremonious an initiation as it gets. As for opportunities, the world is changing. The America that boomers built is dying, meanwhile tech and social media corrupts everything else. I wish I had advice for young people, but I'm at a loss as well and can only rant. My only hopeful prediction is that in the future we'll see a cultural rejection of the abundance and noise we have created and return to sincerity, intimacy, and a rediscovery of the great things of our past.

Gaming is frequently social activity. People play games with their real life friends, schoolmates, colleagues and friends. And they chat while playing in a similar way they would chat over a beer. You can not just assume that "playing video game" equals being alone.

Young people who still go to school, including college, are in a company of peers massive amount of their time.

Depends on the game and habits. An MMO is very different from a singe player platformer. Which are both different from a casual mobile game with some async competitive modes (words with friends).

As for school, keep in mind the rage of Gen Z these days goes from high school to nearly 30 years old (many people cutoff at 1997-2010). The midpoint of this generation is just starting to get out of school these days and "enter" the workforce. To a rude awakening that nothing is in fact working.

I do not nit understand what any of that has to do with transition to work. Simply, in real life, I have observed a lot of socializing mixed with gaming. Both boys and girls, altrought boys somewhat more and both adults and kids altrought kids a lot more.

The way boys used to go out and play soccer or basketball where they mixed socialization and sports they do the same with games.

So consequently on can not just see them play games more and assume they are lonely more.

The article mentions young people being disproportionately more lonely it's merely an observation of what the age group we consider tebcurrent "young people" are.

>So consequently on can not just see them play games more and assume they are lonely more.

Well that was an interesting part. Boys are spending more time playing games . Bit boys didn't report feeling more lonely than girls.

Did we all agree to completely forget that the Great Recession happened and that the job market is right right now?

USA had low unemployment rates.

If by "we", you mean a few dozen billionaires, then yes. Yes we did.

But also, no government really wants to admit it's a recession until they can no longer deny that even their fake numbers (GDP, "unemployment") are falling.

I game and I consider it a waste of time. But it is a decent way to not think, or distract your brain by thinking about what's happening in the game. It's an escape from the misery of life, even if it's only temporary.

Whether or not it’s a waste of time depends on other factors IMHO. For example if it’s the evening and I’m too mentally exhausted for anything that takes brain power, it doesn’t feel like as much of a waste because I wasn’t going to be doing anything “worthy” of the time anyway.

Well my Job is in games so I can't really answer here unbiased. I definitely game less as I job seek but I consider most of my gaming to still be passive research in a way. Like any other craft you simply approach, critique, and sympathize with games in a different way if you spent years professionally developing them.

Younger people who feel alone are missing out on life experiences. Older people who are alone now may have already had those and no longer need them.

It's a bit puzzling to me that they acknowledge statements like

> Looking at people who identify as LGBTQ, the data at first suggested that they tend to be lonelier. But it’s largely because self-identified LGBTQ folks tend to be younger.

But then do not follow up with an analysis adjusted for this - wouldn't that be fairly straightforward?

That sentence is the follow up analysis. The effect disappears if you adjust for age.

https://archive.ph/j0IOL

> Across the data, nothing we tested relates more strongly to loneliness than a lack of social support. When you ask who’s “always” lonely, more than half of the people who say they never get social support raise their hands.

A lack of a sense of community makes people feel lonely. Wish this had been the first sentence instead of the last.

Yes, but it begs the question if you just leave it at that, no?

Sure, the article can support the premise to prove the point out, I just wouldn't have read the rest of it. Waste of time.

The headline reminded me of this piece from Alvin Chang that I really enjoyed:

https://pudding.cool/2023/09/invisible-epidemic/

This is the first useful case of scroll hijacking that I’ve ever seen. Very intuitive and innovative.

These are survey questions. It seems to reveal most about cultural differences between what different groups feel like they are allowed to feel.

It would be difficult to control for this but it’s just naive to think these numbers should be interpreted in the straight forward manner presented.

It’s obvious that men and older people would likely report less loneliness as a cultural instinct, on average, for example. This is distinct from actual loneliness, though, which would be higher in both groups. At least if you think suicide rates are correlated.

It’s an important topic but this is unfortunately just going to muddy the waters.

It is derived from the Census Household Pulse Survey which is designed, administered, and analyzed by the most sophisticated survey designers out there. They've had decades to create and refine approaches that deal with this problem.

I trust their interpretation over "throwaway13337" statements about what they find "obvious."

#gell-mann effect

The color shading on those maps seems deceptive to me. It suggests a starker contrast than what the numbers tell.

The scale of each map is independent, and differs by an order of magnitude from the "lonely" top row to the "not lonely" bottom row.

A charitable view would be that they consider each category independent.

Another charitable view would be that they're focused on showing trends, not "absolute value of loneliness", and that you can view the order of maps Always-Usually-Rarely-Never to be an additional dimension. This would have better fit a linear layout, but as they note in the caption, a fifth map "wouldn't fit"; they are constrained by article layout.

If you think the WP is simply trying to push the premise of the article, that there is a "Loneliness Epidemic", then you may enjoy the book `How to Lie with Maps` by Monmonier:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo274005...

You can be alone in a sea of people.

It's not about quantity, it's about quality and depth.

However it would be ideal to feel content with superficial interactions but it's almost always not sufficient.

See https://archive.ph/ZByHo

Interesting and much different then stereotypes thrown around would have you believe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com