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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Is it a bad thing? People's life choices are their own.

29% seems like a fairly neutral number.

It's a bad thing if we want a cohesive society or if we wish to maximise well-being (both of which are challenged by people increasing their exposure to solitude and loneliness); and your claim about life choices is only partially true - we are all constrained/guided by genetic and environmental factors.

People's life choices are their own, but if many people choose to live alone, that objectively affects housing situation in the society.

if so many people can afford to live alone, perhaps it means that housing situation isn't that bad? in cities like NYC where rents are high, it's very common to have roommates for instance.

> Is it a bad thing? People's life choices are their own.

How much of a choice is it that they made willing? The number has doubled over the last few decades:

* https://www.self.inc/blog/adults-living-alone

* https://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/tag/living-alon...

There are health (and happiness) consequences to not being connected to other people:

* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic

Perhaps the number was artificially low before, and more people actually wanted to live on their own. Loneliness is not the same thing as a one-person household.

I'm not seeing evidence that 15% is the correct number and 29% is automatically bad.

> Is it a bad thing?

Considering there are both housing and loneliness crises going on, and that being lonely or socially isolated leads to an early death and radicalisation, I’d say it’s fair to categorise it as a bad thing, yes.

Sure, not every single one of those people living alone will be lonely, but I think it’s fair to deduce that many people who are lonely and isolated live alone.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/19/health/loneliness-social-isol...

https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/lcdocs/other/21402/Delany%...

I’d wager it also feeds into the fertility crisis. Roommates are a training ground for living with a partner and potentially family. If someone is living with a non-parent for the first time in their late twenties, there may already be habits or intolerances developed that make dating incredibly difficult.

The phrasing in your sources is absolutely horrible and brings back high school vibes of "lonely kids are bad because they are lonely, so they must be bullied to make them normal again". Just great.

It's utterly terrible regarding the issues of housing availability, settling down to start our own families, and elder care. The multi-generation pattern is that the grandparents watch the kids while the middle generation does useful work - the grandparents supervise the kids, while the kids keep the grandparents entertained. Then when the kids get old enough, they help supervise the grandparents.

I think we could naturally fall back into this pattern as housing, elder, and child care continue to get ever more expensive... but for the fact that the baseline suburban house is built with a single common living space, meant for a single family all constantly interacting with each other. You have to get into much more expensive houses with "in-law apartments" and whatnot before you regain the breathing room to have multiple generations living together. And now even houses with that extra space have become economic-grindstone legible due to short term rentals.

If you own shares in e.g. Costco, a long-term sustained trend of shrinking household sizes might give you pause.

I own shares of Costco and am a member and I’m not concerned.

As mentioned elsewhere it isn't actually particularly high for a developed country.

> People's life choices are their own.

How do you know it's by choice?

It triggers conservatives and Christians who believe in the nuclear family and biblical lifestyle. They despise liberty and agency.

Western ideas of liberty and agency came out of 1500 years of Christian. Christians put limits on liberty and agency, but that's very different than despising it.

Even from an atheistic standpoint, current levels of liberty and agency are clearly evolutionarily unfit. The fertility rate of Christians (and other conservative religious people) are at or above replacement level, which means that the unlimited liberty and agency folks are substantially below replacement levels.

This is something people don't seem to understand when it comes to pairing up and forming families. If there is no reliable method to do so and you leave it up to chance, then what's gonna happen? Of course, people will stop forming families at the rate they used to.

In a society where people only have enough children to replace themselves, having people without children means that society will slowly fade away and disappear.

There are a bunch of modern ideologies that don't try to understand or even deny that having children is the most powerful kind of democracy in life. When you are having children, you're essentially saying "I want more people like myself in this world". Under this premise, the western world is saying "I don't want to be here anymore".

Oh please, Christianity is no source of liberty. And as of now, conservative Christians are all about restricting liberty, that is literally their project. Conservative christianity despises liberty, but is all about forcing women into births and relationships they dont want and that harm them.

Bible doesn't ban being single. So your statement is false.

According to bible you can be single or have family, be happy or miserable. The matters is to not commit sins.

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