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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

Humanity's revealed preferences are really, really strong here.

As basically every country on Earth gets richer, two things happen in survey results.

One is that as people get richer they spend more time apart. Household sizes get smaller, the number of social interactions per week goes down, etc.

You'll also see that as countries get richer people say that they report feeling less lonely. Loneliness is less of an issue for the rich countries who live more apart. The correlation between this and GDP is comical. As you get to poorer countries, like clockwork, people report being lonelier in surveys.

The evidence suggests that as people get more choice they decide to see people less and they also feel happier for it and less lonely. So I don't think there's a problem here.

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I think the problem is that self-reported scores of loneliness go down, but a lot of the data suggests that our increasing solitude and isolation isn’t good for us, whether we feel lonely or not.

Good article on this a few days ago that I’ve been thinking about a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812533

Do you have data for this? This contradicts common sense and every datapoint I’ve seen so far that isolation is a rapidly rising issue.

Face validity. Someone may have pulled together numbers for this in a study, but this area is a new facet of interpersonal behavior at a macro-economic level, so there won't be much published on the subject yet.

Here are some good high quality surveys:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5547349/

https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone

But frankly I wasn't kidding when I said every quality survey shows this.

If you have ever seen an article suggesting that loneliness is higher in the West or in capitalist economies or whatever, you have been 100% misled. That is essentially just a made up narrative that plays well in articles

Those surveys are both about how elderly people in the Nordic countries report being less lonely than those in Mediterranean countries. They discuss things like whether extended families live together, but don’t really touch on people’s social lives more broadly. I’m not sure that you can draw a sweeping generalization from this that wealthier countries prefer less socialization.

Just keep looking up high quality surveys on different loneliness related topics until you are convinced. There are a lot of different ways to ask it. They all point in the same direction.

What exactly am I supposed to be convinced of? That people who have choices about how to spend their time 1) choose to be mostly alone and 2) are happier because of it? This is a pretty strong causative claim that would require a lot of evidence and considerable expertise in interpreting that evidence, neither of which I have.

Even the surveys you sent already suggest that people who live with spouses are much less lonely, which seems to be the opposite of your claim.

Frankly, your claim sounds so insane to me (someone who has a lot of choice in how I spend my time, enjoys the company of others often, and is not lonely) that I think it would require extraordinary evidence to convince me.

Just copy and paste my original post into ai and have it explain what I mean and what the evidence suggests. It will say it is true the correlation is massive like cm2012 says but he is being too sure with his reasoning. You can evaluate from there.

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