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Comment by zupatol | Hacker News Reader

> At one point, the psychologists thought of designing a mobile app, a sort of electronic nagging mother, to help people break bad social habits. (You’d check an item off the list, say, if you remembered to talk to anyone that day—a store clerk or a librarian.) But they didn’t get funding for the software, so now they’re focusing on a simpler and more low-tech fix.

This mobile app sounds like something that would be really easy to write.

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There are a lot of apps that could be used this way. I think http://lift.do might work well for this. And I know of people using our own http://beeminder.com for things like this.

This is helpful.

This will only help so much - it'll soon become a chore/annoyance, as it would become more of "checking the box" than actually "connecting with people".

This is a problem that can't solved by tech, mobile app etc (tech can only help a bit). I'm not sure simply "talking with store clerk" will help loneliness. If that is the case, talking to our bosses and other colleagues (who really don't care too much about anyone other than themselves - in many cases) should help, but we know it doesn't.

Also, we don't need a mobile app for this - just setting up a reminder on the calendar we use, should be more than enough.

As one grows older, making friends (and genuine connections) becomes more and more difficult. That is a problem worth solving.

I don't know that you can so easily dismiss other people as not being able to help. I have kept a journal for a while of my mood correlated with how many people I talk to. Granted n=1 and totally lacking rigor, the results for me indicate very easily that even simply asking "how are you" to the person who makes my lunch has a large impact.

I have made some quite close friends of the people who I interact with daily -- coworkers, baristas, cashiers etc. In my experience the depth of intimacy available to you depends on how much you're willing to risk. If you reveal yourself first, other people feel more comfortable following your lead.

What you wrote about how relations with others can be expected to be shallow is, IMO, what the article talks about when the researcher says that you have to suspend the beliefs and assumptions you make when approaching other people.

I'm not dismissing other people. I'm simply trying to say that talking to other people, just for the "sake of talking" doesn't help much. 10 minutes with people who we love and care about (and vice versa) is not the same as 10 minutes with a random person. That is why people feel lonely at parties, even though they are surrounded by dozens and dozens of people. Of course, it might very well happen that that 10 mins with a random person might turn into a life long friendship - which would be awesome. Perhaps it is worth trying it a few times (like Jim Carey from the move "Yes man") and see where it takes.

All I am trying to say is - talking to a person just to tick a box on an app, won't help (either of the parties). Being genuinely interested will. And this is not a problem that can be solved by tech. If anything, tech makes it easier to disconnect, rather than connect. It is much easier to spend 6 hours watching 3 movies on netflix on a sunday, back to back, than going out and actually talking to someone.

The key thing about connecting with another person, of being intimate, is being present.

When you "talk to a store clerk", you are talking to the role of a store clerk. The uniform. The representative of a corporate transaction machine. When you use an app and "check the box", generally, people do that as mindlessly as possible.

Technology does not solve this. An individual person's mindfulness extends this.

This leads to a lot of interesting insights. For example, there is a relationship between being "intimate" and "naked", and not necessarily in the physical sense.

We all have inner selves that we protect by layers of masks, rationalizations, and buffers. This is the vulnerable part of ourselves. And to connect with someone else is to bare that open.

Who really wants to open themselves up like that? That's quite a leap of courage and faith. It is also the supreme act of generosity and compassion.

So. You want to solve this? That's great! First solve it for yourself: be fully present. Learn to be mindful. Get in touch with the wounded part of yourself, and in doing so, learn to extend compassion to others around you.

What an app like that needs is /significance/ - it needs to be thought of as a big thing, and not just another annoying little app. Get some names behind it, some studies, something to give it a broader significance. Hell, maybe even make the application by prescription. That way you're not just being annoyed by another app, you're checking in on a prescribed therapy like replacing a band-aid on a wound.

Some of us should probably reach out to them. It does sound like a fairly straight forward app. Might even be a good hackathon project or fun size project which doesn't necessarily need to have monetary rewards.

Then reach out.

This is not solvable with technology.

Even easier, they could probably just provide a list of items to enter in an existing todo/calendar app.

I'm a fan of HabitRPG[1], been using it since the very first public version. It allows you set both positive and negative habits which you then track daily. Mobile app is coming soon, I hear.

[1] http://habitrpg.com

Isn't this exactly what Lift does?

I think Glenda can do recurring todo lists.

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