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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy this explanation. There are plenty of things you can do together that don't cost very much - or anything at all. You can go take a hike. You can go to the park and hang out, or play a board game. You can go to a court and play pickleball. Heck, go to the library! All these things are free and many people do them.

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Or even just...call a friend for a chat. Few people are interested in that these days. A few decades ago, you'd even see media where people were chatting on house phones so much that different people in one house would fight over the phone. "Get off the phone" used to mean "stop talking to your friend on the phone."

Here's an article from 1999[1]:

> Although you may think your parents are unreasonable when they tell you to get off the phone after you've "only" been talking two hours, it doesn't have to turn into a big blow-up.

It honestly feels like a lot of people are trying to find excuses to be anti-social these days.

[1] https://www.ucg.org/watch/beyond-today/virtual-christian-mag...

There's a weird anti-induced demand.

Now that I can talk to anyone for free at any moment, I have no desire to

What would I even talk about? We have little in common

That's another thing. People have less in common with each other than they used to. People consume different media, pursue different specialized careers, and so on.

In conjunction with the fact that people (or bots) you do share interests with are available in a second with the device in your pocket. Such as posting here.

I totally agree, though I'd like to frame OP's argument a little differently in a way that makes more sense I think.

I agree the "shit is just too expensive" is a pretty lame excuse. I think to back when I was a poor ballet dancer around college age, and we always found lots of cheap things to do - a lot of it was like you said, usually just going over to people's houses to hang out, or doing stuff in the city that was cheap or free. Going out to restaurants was a rare treat, and it was almost always a cheap dive place. I had to laugh about the comment about the expense of "8 oz cocktails" - we weren't drinking cocktails, we were drinking 6 packs of Natty Light in someone's studio apartment.

But what I think has changed is that it's so much easier to not be bored with modern tech, even if it makes you lonely. There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc. It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.

So you actually disagree, it’s not the prices, it’s the tech. I agree. The person you responded to claimed it was prices not tech.

No, I responded to someone who said it was not the prices - I believe you are referring to the GP comment.

> It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.

Ding ding ding!

> There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc.

With the one caveat that 'multiplayer gaming' can indeed be a proper socialization experience if you're playing with friends/etc (vs say just YOLOing in something like FPS lobbies etc.)

Or, at bare minimum, it's still more effort than the other options you mention.

In the last few weeks I've tried to be extra mindful about being more 'interactive' with other things in my free time. It's shocking how easy it gets to just fall into a Youtube video rabbit hole. It reinforces how sad I get about my partner's constant scrolling through Facebook.

Heck even now I feel guilty about just doing HN, on the other hand I am still recovering from a good proper bike ride this morning so I guess there's that.

You also can't separate the social media part of this. An expensive cocktail is a cool social media post, Natty light is not.

It is just a much more postmodern world than when I was young. There is a whole level of digital simulation on top of the activity that I never had to think about. The post about the expensive cocktail is the real social activity now.

We may as well be comparing dating on tinder to a rural barn dance in the 1950s. Technology has moved faster than our language as these aren't even the same activities but the words are the same. "Dating", "socializing".

See my second point: financial stress leaves people depressed.

Gas costs money. The car costs money. You can only do the same hike that's an hour away so many times, before you're traveling to go to new places, and hotels cost money at that point. Pickleball courts cost money. The pickleball equipment costs money. People do go to the library, and then they go home and don't interact with other people.

The fact that many young people don't seem to think that "Hey, we'd just go over to someone's apartment/house to hang out and have a meal or drink" as a primary form of entertainment (vs. some "activity") makes me realize how much we have fucked over many young people as a society in general.

I did that as a kid and I loved it, but it made sense when everyone was in bicycling distance.

Then one by one, we got cars and the friend groups shuffled from "Who is in bicycling range" to "Who is in driving range", and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill

> and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill

Does she not have a phone? Calling someone up and saying "hey, let's hang out" and then driving over to hang out was literally how most of suburban social interactions happened in the 90s.

I don't think the issue is that they are naive or lack social skills, I think they just choose against it, and then lie about the motivation for their choice. It's all over this thread: "No time and no money!" But you know it's false. I think they know it's a lie too they just don't want to admit to themselves and others that they like TikTok more than people. Being a lame couch potato is socially acceptable if and only if you connect it to the big class-based social cause. They relished in the COVID lockdowns for similar reasons.

It's not naivete; it's dishonesty.

Then go for a walk in the closest park instead of a hike an hour away.

Play volleyball on the free net at the local park instead of signing up for pickleball and buying great.

The people who want to avoid activities and socialization will always pick the more expensive activities so they can dismiss them. Yet go into the real world and people have no problem finding ways to socialize and have fun without spending much money.

> Play volleyball on the free net at the local park instead of signing up for pickleball and buying great.

Coincidentally, my neighborhood just put up its first volleyball net a week or so back. It was stolen within two days lol

That’s unfortunate. Generally the poles are metal and permanent. It’s common for people to bring their own net when they bring their own ball. A basic net is cheap

Yea or really, people just go to the beach and chill without playing anything

Gas is at worst 6 bucks a gallon, which gets you 30 miles on a bad car. That’s enough for like 5 hikes; if you can’t afford a single dollar split across all your friends for multiple hours of entertainment and exercise then I do concede that you are in a bad spot; but I think most of us are not quite so destitute. (Also, my friends and I do the same hikes all the time.)

Pickleball courts do not cost money, they are freely provided by the state. I go to free pickleball courts every week in SF, and I bike there for free. You can buy 4 paddles for $20 at sports basement and get literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment just on that.

I dunno, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this perspective. Almost everything I do with friends isn’t particularly expensive - if you can’t find cheap things to do you just aren’t even looking.

The library has become a place for drugs addicts and homeless people who use the free computers to look at porn.

It’s no longer a nice or safe place to go.

This is true where I live also. This feral subset of the homeless are ruining every nice public space that we used to have. Libraries, parks, trails. Patience and tolerance is wearing thin; everything that is tried to help them is just abused and shit on (often literally). More and more people are starting to say no, we don't want to tolerate this behavior here, if that's how you want to live then do it somewhere else.

Reading this makes me extremely nihilistic about humanity.

My nihilism is exacerbated by the people who are actively making the problem worse and viciously attacking anyone who criticizes the problem or proposes solutions.

IMO some activists are exploiting homeless people and drug addicts for power and profit.

I think your last sentence is full of shit, and I'm not even saying it's wrong.

What I am saying is that even if "activists" are doing... whatever, I kinda don't give a fuck?

These are people. Human beings. The only shit people seem to give is to get them out of their sight and make them somebody else's problem.

You don't care that people exploit other humans beings for power and profit?

https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-homeless-audit-spendi...

https://invisiblepeople.tv/unveiling-corruption-the-dark-rea...

You are right, the people being exploited are human beings, and rather than working to end the suffering, some people end up prolonging the suffering and creating more of it, because fixing problems ends the flow of funds and power.

You aren't refuting what I am saying, you only seem to justify corruption and incompetence because the apparent intention is noble.

What I'm saying is whatever "activists" are doing or saying is often an excuse for others to continue to ignore the ugly problem. This is not limited to one locality.

What I am interested in is long term support and funding for workable, humane solutions.

These things require bipartisan support at the state and federal level (rooting out many of the causes and aiding homeless prevention), and I'm pretty sure that's fucking toast.

What I am saying is is there is part of the activist movement (at the top) that is either incompetent or corrupt and have no interest in solving problems efficiently and often make them worse, because the incentives are not aligned. Problem solving would cut off revenue and salaries.

You're talking about a tiny group of people, inconsequential in the grand scheme. They are irrelevant distractions.

Shipping people around the country sure as fuck isn't helping.

A side note, but I don't think all homeless are helpable. Some just have some kind of self-destruction about them and are beyond helping, unless they really want to start living differently. I personally know one such guy - a combination of bad upbringing, big ego, a defiant character (that got him fired from every job) has set him on a path that ultimately made his own family kick him out to the streets.

If my fellow Americans hated the rich people that are responsible for all of these homeless individuals half as much as they do said homeless then American wouldn't be half as fucked as it is right now.

The homeless problem is all downstream of shit like the Sacklers pushing opioids and creating millions of addicts for profit. Yet they avoided jail and even can start up new businesses.

Your city sounds depressing. Mine (US) is not like this at all.

The libraries near me are not like this at all.

One library has some homeless people but anyone being disruptive is quickly removed.

We take the kids to the libraries all the time and it’s fine.

There's a lot of this. Seattle's main library was explicitly built with the awareness that libraries are one of the few places homeless people can get out of the weather for a while, and has an entire floor full of public-use computers with a lot of pointers to what little social safety net remains.

The depressing part isn’t that it’s happening, but that it continues to occur despite objections, because the “progressive” activists shame any objects and stop any plans or discourse to rectify the problem.

I think it is quite pointless to blame activists for a deep systematic problem with our culture. It is like an excuse.

The activists should be blamed for causing disruption at the local level for a problem that can only be solved at the federal level.

There isn’t a thing Seattle can do to fix drug addiction/mental health/housing costs (it will remain a high priced local for the foreseeable future). So why should the people of Seattle fall on their sword because the rest of the country won’t get their act together?

In fact, the rest of the country loved that activists in certain cities take on the brunt of the problem, as it lowers their costs.

I think you overestimate the power of activists.

What do you propose locally instead of "falling on the sword"? Unless the city council purposely makes the library a drug den there is no easy cheap solution. Especially since the symptoms are an indication of a malfunctional city in the first place in which I wouldn't trust them with some sort of radical endouver.

Local governments should do what they can, provide clean, secure facilities.

The symptoms are an indication of a malfunctioning federal government. All you can do is keep your house in order.

What city would that be? In the Northeast? Midwest?

Shit is expensive is in context of the option to watch tikitok.

Not that shit is expensive as a be all explanation in and of itself.

It’s a point on the relative ease/benefit of content vs meeting people. And you can even meet people over zoom or a video game now.

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