Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

This comment will get buried in the sea of individual responses here since I am too late. But for the dumpster divers, here is my contribution!

1. People have obscenely high standards for social interaction. If this person is not an outlier (in a good way) with their behaviors, it's just not going to happen. Most people have a very low tolerance for new people in their life. This has always existed to some degree but people today much prefer to listen to endless content from their favorite streamers, comedians, etc. and form parasocial relationships.

2. The environment for interacting with people has much higher stakes. Think about all the people who get recorded and posted on TikTok every single day. These are people doing it where you can see it - not just the Meta glasses people who remove the recording light. You can act like being a weirdo has no consequences but everyone has this extremely powerful device that can broadcast whatever you do to billions of people immediately - and you can suffer real consequences from this. Every crashout you have in any kind of crowd will be posted for eternity so that the world can see.

3. There is less and less benefit to having social networks/friends. Your friends aren't going to help you get a job, buy you a house, or meet your spouse. Meeting a spouse through friends is increasingly rare as online dating is dominating. As much as everyone complains, it is the major way people meet their spouse in major cities. People assume this is because friend networks are getting smaller but it's not due to that. It's because standards for interaction within friend groups has changed and standards for partners has changed. Unless you are prolific top 1% social maximizer, you are not going to run into anywhere near enough eligible people in your social network to meet your maximized match. We expect to completely maximize and find the best possible fit for our spouse now. Compromise of any kind is considered worse than dying alone. Cost of housing has exploded, jobs have become very hard to keep/find, and this turns everything into a transaction. Living with friends and kicking them out when they can't make rent is a tough but very real situation. People are more transactional because the economy dictates its necessities. Your family is the only thing that will bail you out - your friends can't overlook you skipping $2000/month in rent for 6 months.

There is more but anyway - loneliness epidemic is not going to get solved. It will continue to get worse until some kind of revolution which would require a complete reworking of our entire economy. I would accept this as the new normal and try to figure out how you can optimize your own individual experience in spite of all these things that are working against you. It is not worth trying to fight it on a systemic scale because there are simply too many components and the core cause is one our entire economy is based around. (A good investment is inherently counter to affordability)

Predominantly, rejecting all priors and aggressively maintaining an open mind, reading a lot as a child, intentionally deferring the formation of concrete opinions about things until I was on my own and able to guide my own hand.

This was necessary because I was raised by two major conservatives, in rural, conservative areas, surrounded by racists and sexists, my computer use and reading materials were surveilled and restricted, I was only allowed to listen to approved Christian music, I couldn't really even choose my own clothes, shoes or hairstyles. My belongings were regularly searched and my school administrators and teachers were always looped into the surveillance circle, alerting my grandparents and school administrators and punishing me if I so much as drew a stick figure holding nunchaku or dared journal about my experiences.

There was a very aggressive and invasive attempt to brainwash me and the only thing I could think to do was wait until I was on my own, and learn everything from scratch. This began at 16, when I became homeless after refusing to enter Confirmation as a Catholic (I am atheist). My grandparents kicked me out and stole/broke most of my things. My mom was too busy doing drugs and not working to support me.

I read a lot of philosophy and studied various topics. This has helped immensely with forming a foundation for my morality, sense of ethics and motivation. I still battle with a lot of internal demons stemming from my childhood and disorders including ADHD, and I can get extremely depressed, and I've burned out a couple times, but I just devote myself to my work and studies and get by. My brother, on the other hand, turned into a domestic abuser, which tracks considering his large role in the violence I experienced growing up.

It's clear to me that intentionality was the defining factor in escaping most of the traumatic cycles present in my family tree, including drug addiction, violence and crime (as an example, my mom is currently in prison for abusing a mentally-handicapped quadriplegic)

You're completely missing the point. The problem is people aren't collectively incentivized to do so. Individually someone can decide "oh wow, I'm lonely, I should get out more", but collectively there's nothing incentivizing everyone to do it, or even notice it's an issue. If there were, we wouldn't be in this situation.

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"How do we solve the obesity problem?" "Well people should just work out."

Obviously, that would solve it, but they're distinctly not doing that, which is why we're talking about a broader solution to actually get people to work out.

A friend of mine has this problem with their D&D campaigns. He makes huge efforts and there’s always one or two people who flake or don’t have the same commitment level. He’s gotten quite angry and sad about it.

He is trying something different now, to make a hybrid campaign where there’s a lot of one-shots in a broader story arc. It’s structured like missions in an ongoing struggle.

Maybe if you want to do board games, we need more games that scale up and down easily. I’m not a board game person, IDK.

people act as if this is an individualist problem, but that ignores all the facts

the first place to think about serious change is city planning since the invention of cars & then suburbs

we used to be forced to live next to each other, walk and see each other

it turns our car based city planning doesn’t work on any level if you look at cities which didn’t go all in