Is there a loneliness epidemic? Or is this viewing history through rose colored glasses? Is the shift from how society used to work to how society has come to work real or just a grammatically correct statement? Statistics are biased by those who compute them. Have we asked everyone or inferred and p-hacked up data points? The single salary family is largely a myth. A relatively small percentage of the population eve…
Unlike the supposedly golden 1950s, a lot of people today were adults before and after the 2010s and would say similar things comparing the two.
People need to purposefully and intentionally do things. Sitting home on an app, watching TV is easy. There is no fear or rejection, there is no work to get out of the house, there is no risk. But there is also no reward. My thoughts on this are you need to have multiple roots into your community. This is something that you go to often and talk to people, become a regular, say hi. Think back to how your parents or gr…
> Attend every week. In my experience, this is the key. “90% of life is showing up.” If you are around the same people every week, for whatever reason, with even a minimal amount of openness and friendliness, you will get community.
I'm open and friendly to everyone I meet but get treated like a weirdo and ostracized (I am also a weirdo).
You don't only have to be "open and friendly", you have to say the correct things in the correct way in the correct order in order for people to accept you.
You have to be the one who creates things to do. Really, that’s it. You want to play D&D together, you host and DM. You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing. You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with. Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little…
Agree but the flaking culture is too normalized right now, at least in the west. Nothing is more demotivating than majority of people just not coming and doing it in such a non-chalant manner. It's really not fun to put all that work and people don't take the invitation seriously to the point where they jusut ghost the event.
This annoys me: at least say you're not going to make it. I don't expect you always to be free or even want to attend, but how hard is it to say 'Thanks but I can't come.'?
It's the phones dude. It's literally just the phones. Get rid of the phones and you fix it.
Old geezer take: If you're referring to smart phones - social engagement in the US was already headed down 5 decades before those were invented. I blame TV.
Indeed, TV enabled millions of people to laugh at the same joke simultaneously, each sitting alone on their own sofa.
Maybe our built environment shouldn't consist solely of isolated houses in isolated gated communities where we drive our kids and sit in isolated cars in the school dropoff/pickup lines.
Dense cities have the same problem or worse. There are even college towns with apartments where nobody talks to each other.
You have to be the one who creates things to do. Really, that’s it. You want to play D&D together, you host and DM. You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing. You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with. Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little…
>Accept that most people flake This is a thing that's always surprised me when I've been in the US. How common it is to enthusiastically arrange to do some activity together, get a meal, play a game, have a drink, whatever, and then for people to just call it off at the last minute. It seems much more socially acceptable to do so than either the UK (where I live) or France (where I have lived and still visit regularl…
I think your comment about social acceptance in the UK is slightly off. It's person dependent. I would say my experience aligns closer with the 50% mark. It's a massive variant from person to person. I have friends that will turn up to anything, rain or shine, sickness or in health. Equally, I know people that would flake on a wedding because they stubbed their toe or the latest season of [insert meaningless reality show] came out.
You have to be the one who creates things to do. Really, that’s it. You want to play D&D together, you host and DM. You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing. You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with. Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little…
Sure, but this only works as advice for people who you can talk to, such as me. I'm not trying to solve my loneliness, my own personal goal is to find ways to reach out to people who sit alone all day, and are dying from loneliness, and the only way to reach them is to catch them as they walk on the way to the grocery store, and hold up a sign that they can read. The question in my mind is, what next? So far, I've on…
You can reach people you otherwise might not have by inviting your neighbours around for coffee and cake one weekend morning? Even if you have nothing in common it starts building a community of people who live in proximity to one another.
You have to be the one who creates things to do. Really, that’s it. You want to play D&D together, you host and DM. You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing. You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with. Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little…
That is excellent advice. How do we amplify this advice to more areas?
I practice that by being intentional about my work: I think about all the opportunities I have to meet people and how I can give back to them. I call that slow multicast.
I have a startup in my incubator that I call .find . I am a looking for a founder. I love how you explained it simply, clearly. I would love to have you in my "combat loneliness" team
My ingredients:
- walk the walk
- Multicast
- Seed
- Tie to your bucket lists as growth engine (virtuous cycle)
I would love to further the combat, please reach out to me Joseph de Castelnau on IG and X.
> So they sit on social media all day when they're not at work or school. How can we solve this? The naive solution is to place blame on the people who are influenced by the most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans. Kinda like how the plastic producers will push recycling, knowing they can shift blame for the pollution away from their production of the pollution, because people love blaming.…
Shouldn't we rather just regulate social media instead of forcefully de-anonymizing online communication and restricting access to online community?