911–920 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking something away by force is not the way to encourage someone to do something else. This is carrot or stick mentality. The city added benches and chairs in all the parks to improve the quality of our third spaces, as an example of social infrastructure.
Social infrastructure is great! However, if you have a crack epidemic adding some benches isn't going to change anything.
I've been a remote engineer for about 10 years now, just over 50, enjoy programming but most of my friends have dropped off or gone crazy (trumpers) in recent years, and I never got married. I recently took a local wheel throwing (pottery class), which was daunting at first, among a class of almost all females, younger, etc, but im 6 months in and literally just interacting with humans is one of the best parts of my…
You can have political/religious conversations with people who disagree but often it feels like walking in a mine field.
We are training a culture of passive consumers who don’t create. People are attracted to activity and action. The next generation is inundated with creation through their phone. They don’t see the space to create. They sit at home alone wondering why they are alone. The reality is because they are consumers not creators. You must produce.
Controversial example: in Breath of the Wild, your weapons break really fast. But, they only break while fighting enemies and looting places, so you almost always end up with more/higher-powered weapons. It's the game's way of always giving you new weapons that have different quirky properties to keep combat interesting. But players don't like that friction and uncertainty: it's probably the most hated on aspect of the game. Players want to keep their same weapons the whole time, and miss out on the constant variety.
I think that in the same way, we've optimized the fun out of life. We collectively tend to avoid uncertainty and friction. We let yelp/google maps reviews tell us what restaurants are good. We watch movies at home instead of trekking all the way to the movie theater. Get food delivered and even dropped off at the door so we literally don't even have to speak to another human at all. We've been optimizing the fun out of life, and we didn't realize it until it was bad enough to be called a "loneliness epidemic"!!
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…
Anything but a purely positive or enthusiastic response is not allowed in US culture.
I've been a remote engineer for about 10 years now, just over 50, enjoy programming but most of my friends have dropped off or gone crazy (trumpers) in recent years, and I never got married. I recently took a local wheel throwing (pottery class), which was daunting at first, among a class of almost all females, younger, etc, but im 6 months in and literally just interacting with humans is one of the best parts of my…
The inability of your friends to have non-political conversations can be a big part of isolation. I follow the “no politics, no religion” rule when I go out and it’s served me well. You can have political/religious conversations with people who disagree but often it feels like walking in a mine field.
This is an element of cancel culture, or a culture which indoctrinates to tattle/report one another.
> 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.…
Also, the naive view is to place all the blame for a broad cultural shift on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/TikTok and pretend people can't choose to limit their use. Someone pretending there can only be a single factor to blame for a problem is usually a biased person with a bone to pick. The rhetoric supports your cause, but the US is not going to ban social media for adults any time soon and telling people they're helpless until the government bans social media is unhelpful at best.
This is something that I care deeply about and have put a lot of thought into. I can only speak to what I think needs to be done in America. Public transportation. Removing or heavily rolling back zoning laws. Government investment in child care. Nature takes the path of least resistance. If we want people to actually meet people and have the energy to make meaningful connections, the government has to set up the inf…
You dont need public transportation if you have a strong community proximal to you.
You dont need government childcare if You have teenagers (inexpensive babysitters) or family members to do it.
Nature takes the path of least resistance. I would suggestion this is reductionistic. People take the past of high certainty and higher rewards (albeit favoring the former)
If people _knew_ they would have a good time if they showed up at an event, they likely would do it.
I don't have a full answer, but a couple thoughts: 1. Volunteer. Somewhere, anywhere, for a good cause, for a selfish cause. Somebody will be happy to see you. 2. Stop trolling ourselves. As far as I can tell, all of the mass social media is trending sharply towards being a 100% troll mill. The things people say on social media do not reflect genuine beliefs of any significant percentage of the population, but if we…
> The things people say on social media do not reflect genuine beliefs of any significant percentage of the population The social media trolls are running the government. This can't be a serious take in 2026.
1. Almost every policy of the current US administration is deeply unpopular.
2. The vast majority of social media users do not comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
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…
I've repeated this a couple times. Yeah, usually I have to do the bulk of the inviting and organizing. And yeah, it's uncomfortable being the "leader". But I know everyone enjoyed the time together. Those that didn't just never came and that's fine too.
You really can just do things!
> 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.…
But making children (and adults, because how else can you tell without checking) give their biometrics to companies (and by extension the highest bidder (palantir, paramilitaries, and police)) that helped create and then exacerbated this crisis is like asking the drug dealer association to help folks quit by giving them new exotic chemicals heretofore undiscovered.
You 'win' the war on pollution by making companies actually pay for their externalities, repeat offenders cease to exist, their assets seized, and their executives are jailed, rather than just 'paying fines' for the thousand of corpses they leave in their wake.
Likewise, if social media companies produce informational or social 'pollution' so defined, we can do likewise and insist they defray the cost of the damage. If they are no longer profitable when the cost is not paid by society, then they'll have to learn to innovate again.