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Comment by Zealotux | Hacker News Reader

I live in Barcelona, and during last year’s blackout I wandered through the city. As I passed by the Baix Guinardó gardens, I came across something that felt like a "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" brought to life: the park was full of families socialising the old way, children running everywhere, the whole place buzzing with chatter and energy.

Later that day, walking home through darkened streets, I noticed small groups, maybe a dozen people at a time, gathered around certain spots. For some reason, a few closed shops still seemed to have working free Wi-Fi (backup generators, maybe), and people clustered there, drawn in like mosquitoes to light. Their faces glowed in the dark, lit only by their screens, and they stood in near-total silence. It’s hard to describe the feeling, it was surreal. You had to be there.

I’m no Luddite, but I went to sleep that night wondering how on earth we get ourselves out of this.

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Have you ever seen those videos filming London streets in the 1970s? They are absolutely packed with groups of two or three people, not going places, but just standing there, chatting, as if they have nowhere else to be. It is something most of us have never experienced in any form and the change has happened over long enough timescales that we are used to our streets of strangers just going about their lives, the external world just a physical inconvenience to traverse as quickly as possible, not the real world where one just exists.

My perspective is very simple: our homes are simply a lot more comfortable than they used to be.

We have better heating/air conditioning, endless television/video games/entertainment, large refrigerators, lower density, etc and so on.

Back then, home covered a narrower set of needs - so the default option was to spend time elsewhere, even if it was just to escape the noise/heat/smells/smoke of home for a minute.

> our homes are simply a lot more comfortable than they used to be.

Yes. And public spaces are significantly less comfortable (and more expensive) than they used to be

I think a lot of it comes back to cars: many people traded longer commutes for suburban houses, which has advantages but comes at the cost of not having much to do without driving somewhere and less free time around other people. This is especially bad for parents when they don’t feel comfortable letting their kids walk / bike around the neighborhood since that means more time spent playing chauffeur.

London in the 70s (which GP was talking about) already had long commutes (large suburbs and lots of commuter towns) and most households had cars. Roads are much safer and public transport is good so kids can get around by themselves.

One big difference is that more women work: stay at home mums used to strengthen communities - doing voluntary work, organising things. Now that is mostly done by retired people so the pool is smaller and fewer households have someone directly involved. Another way to look at it is that the working hours for a similar household has increased greatly so the household as a whole has less time to contribute to the community.

Another factor is that people move around more. Again, very noticeable in London where a lot of people have moved out because of high house prices. People do not near people they grew up with.

I think an undersung and underquantified factor here is how much less time people have. For reasons psychological and socioeconomic, across class lines, it seems we all have a mental calendar and todo list in our heads now, a tyrant that will always point out that aimless chatter is not appropriate, lest we fall even further behind.

I have plenty of such scenes in my city still, but these people are usually either pensioners, or local unemployed drunks who have an entire day to fill. People with jobs don't hang outside, unless they're with their kids.

Were streets the real 3rd places?

I always wondered how commoners (?) could afford to go to a pub every day to socialize, or if it was cheap, how the pubs could survive with a bunch of people who were just hanging out day after day.

Wages were much lower. As were property prices. Legislative demands were also simpler.

Laws are only simpler in hindsight

In the past 3 years I got married and got a kid. Both mine and my wifes social situation went 180, and now we are one of those couples you saw in the park. The kids and kid problems become new shared interest, you meet bunch of people, with similar shared experience, and you end up connecting on other fronts as well. eg - I m in high rise, parking next to an interesting winter beater every day for 2 years, and now I know the guy because our wifes meet on the playground. Turns out he also likes 3d printers and CNCs and has many ideas :)

But even before this, through wife and her hobbies (dance, pottery etc) I had chance to meet many people and their partners and through them their friends etc. Then it becomes a choice whether you will get up and go see others or pick your screen.

You are very fortunate. When I took a career break to become daddy-day-care for our child I went to "Parents & Toddlers" groups and found them unwelcoming and suspicious.

Going back to work was a relief, because I was able to actually talk to adults without feeling that they were judging my reasons for being there.

That is pretty nasty of them and horribly sexist.

However, you were not daddy day care, you were being a parent. if you were a woman would you call it mummy-day-care?

On top of that, is looking after your child a substitute for day care rather than vice-versa?

I m 6'4", bearded, and as my wife says, with "constant bitter brooding face" - most people in every day life are unwelcoming and suspicious towards me xd, and while having very cute daughter for sure helps immensely, just interacting with kiddos the right way ultimately lowers peoples guard, and even if kiddos are not around, you have to win over the trust & respect. To some it comes easy, others have to work for it, but it does get better, and you build the social circle. Don't get left out over initial resistance! Bring your kiddo and bring extra snacks

Your story reminds me of working pre-pandemic, and going on an afternoon walk with a coworker. He was into pokemon go and he wanted to attend an event (raid?) before we walked. I followed him down the street where he stood at a certain deserted spot and waited. All of a sudden, people just started appearing, some from cars, some coming from between the bushes, some walking down the street.

the raid started, they all silently stared at their phones, and at some point they all looked up, looked around and walked away.

all mostly in complete silence.

who knew this was a precursor to more of the same, maybe throughout society.

IMO Pokémon go was the trendy app that actually bucked the trend of social media isolation, I talked to so many randoms that summer

I recently read that the Pokémon franchise is more profitable than Star Wars.

I was astounded as I know very little about it.

Not only that, Pokemon is the most profitable franchise of all time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...

>but I went to sleep that night wondering how on earth we get ourselves out of this.

I'm sure HN will suggest another layer of technology will fix all of this.

Technology and/or regulation

OpenClaw in the park

Parks as a service

An app that simulates being in a park around other humans.

This is an interesting post (and also a very well written one!). It touches on something that does slightly irk me about the wider friendship/loneliness conversation that it feels we've been having for a decades now.

Its the "we" in "how on earth we get ourselves out of this." The bluntness of the "we" conflates it into a bigger problem than it is. If you walk past many parks & gardens across cities you'll find that same picture of families socialising in the old way without a blackout, but also people glued to their phones too.

People who are intentional of having classic socialising are still doing it, people who choose not to either through their own intention or, i suspect and hope, in a very ambient non-intentional way are the ones who may need to get out of it. Yes there are more of the latter now than before but the former groups are still a huge part of society. And if they can do it even with the same distractions and phones and access to social media etc. why can't others?

Yup, I'm a Spaniard and had a similar feeling. I'm pretty sure that, if the government had proposed an intentional weekly blackout, there would have been a large majority in favor.

I'm currently trying to reduce internet usage by a simple rule: no feeds (try to avoid places where I could even see them).

It's extremely difficult.

YouTube receives you with a feed, every social network as well, even the online version of a newspaper is arguably a feed. It's usually not possible to use a service without having one in frequent sight. Even my weather app tries its best to offer a feed of weather related news, the photo gallery app shows one of memories....

What last years blackout in Barcelona???

Barcelona has an extremely well oiled social scene.

Look up "2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout", the whole of Spain and Portugal had no electricity for a whole day.

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