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Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

pewresearch.org

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Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#31

Post by notus »

This resonates a lot with my experience and reminds me of a short book I read by Sebastian Junger called Tribe. His focus is more on the tribal aspect of military life and that the disassociation with a close knit group or a tribe is part of what leads to PTSD as there are quite a few people who have been in the military who have PTSD despite not ever being in combat. He claims that in smaller tribal communities mental illness is less common and that in times of extreme hardship or disaster people report decrease in symptoms of mental illness as they become more valued by their community as a helper during the hardship.

I interact with people normally at work, but outside of work I'm usually alone and it is hard to ignore the negative effects of it on my mental health. If I'm around people after work I generally feel more positive and have less anxiety, but left alone for too long and my anxiety will start to take over. I really miss my younger years where I had close groups of friends and we hung out all the time.

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#32

Post by ixtli »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #27
ixtli wrote: post #17

As an anecdote, I've lived the majority of my life in America (born and raised middle class on the east coast in a wealthy area) and if I was tasked with writing an account of my time here it would be focused around one thing: alienation. American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that…

I agree entirely with this. I can only speak for myself and my wife (mid 30s), but we are making active efforts to combat this in our family and social circle. Our house is large enough to take in parents (parents still have hangups about how "they should be able to take care of themselves and live by themselves"; we'll be waiting if and when they change their mind), extended family, and friends, we host family dinne…

There might not even be anything you can do if its systemic! Honestly as I get older (im 32) i find how fucking lucky i was to have been brought up in a really really strong family (half is italian, half is european jewish.) Its amazing the degree to which this has helped me be a normal person with good coping mechanisms.

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#33

Post by andreilys »

ixtli wrote: post #17

As an anecdote, I've lived the majority of my life in America (born and raised middle class on the east coast in a wealthy area) and if I was tasked with writing an account of my time here it would be focused around one thing: alienation. American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that…

To live alone one must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher. - Nietzsche

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#34

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

ryanmercer wrote: post #13

I'm 34 and once you add in the weekends I am and talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day. At Gym1 I talk to my lifting coach but most of the time I'm in my head focused on training, after that at Gym2 I'm just trying to do my accessory work and conditioning and don't talk to anyone other than "hey" bac…

I have found that truly open office plans act as significant discouragers of social contact at the office. Everyone except for the truly oblivious are hyper-aware of how any pleasant extraneous conversations they have are being heard by every single other person in the room. With a small team maybe that's not so bad if everyone has good chemistry, but not so with a large team.

When everyone has their own office or cube space, people aren't nearly as averse to friendly conversations because there is a sense of moderate privacy there. Additionally, you feel comfortable having social interactions in shared spaces, because you know you have the 'safety' of your private or semi-private cube to return to.

My last nightmare of a job was open office with ~100 employees. Even the kitchen was part of the open office, right in the middle, so even during lunch there really was no space where people felt comfortable having any sort of non-work-focused social interaction. I would go weeks without any friendly interactions at all despite being surrounded by people. It got to the point where I would walk out of the office building after 8+ hours onto the busy streets of downtown, and feel alienated/isolated/detached from all of the other people walking around. I was really getting concerned about it because I hadn't made the connection. I mentioned it to my therapist, and she asked me to describe my standard workday, and when I did she said "It's no wonder you feel like this at the end of the day, your working environment sounds like a nightmare."

Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#35

Post by YeahSureWhyNot »

That's not a bad thing, people she embrace loneliness and learn to be able to enjoy it. What's the point of speaking about it like it's some kind of a problem with the person. If someone wants company then they can go socialize with whoever is available, otherwise maybe they don't wanna socialize with what's available and prefer to just chill on their own.

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#37

Post by stirfrykitty »

I may be in the minority, but the older I get the more I want to be alone. I love my wife and kids, but there is almost too much pressure anymore to do this, do that. There are too many hands on my time. I recharge only when alone. I cannot do it with the TV on, kids in the background, etc. It's one of the reasons I like hunting. Just me and the great outdoors. I really like getting up at 0430 and being in the deer blind by 0600, watching the night drain from the firmament and knowing I'm alone for several miles in any direction save animals. It's a great feeling. It's also why I tend to favor holidays in remote places with few to no tourists. My wife also likes this approach.

Editing to say that schools are now offering summer sports, which I hate, because it means less time in the evenings to relax after work. American culture is too busy. Too many games, too many expectations of parents to commit to this and that. Too many schools begging for money when I already pay taxes. It goes on and on...

Some people need lots of social engagement; I don't. I don't like parties. I do like two or three couples over for a BBQ and beer. It's intimate enough, but controllable enough that there are not competing voices in the background.

At work, I'm fortunate to be able to keep the lights out in my office, draw the blinds and stream my psytrance while working. My colleague I office with likes the same things, so it's a win-win for us. People think we're weird that we like it dark, but I've never worked in an IT office where the lights were preferred. I think this may be an IT thing. I also dearly miss when IT was in the data center and not accessible to the general office staff.

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#38

Post by jackcosgrove »

Many Americans own a lot of idle property. There is a problem now where baby boomers want to age in place in their suburban homes, which locks younger people out of those properties. However these suburban homes have huge yards by global standards, that could easily support the construction of grandparent/in-law structures. It seems like one solution is for the suburban elderly to, maybe with their children's assistance, build an outlying house in the back yard and downsize to there, and let their children occupy the main house for raising grandchildren.

Multi-generational housing is a good solution to this problem of elder isolation and general social isolation, and the friction associated with that can be eased given the amount of land many suburban properties contain.

I have always thought that the turn towards the nuclear family caused many of the social problems that began to appear in the 1960s. I think we should return to more extended family living situations.

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#39

Post by lotsofpulp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #27
ixtli wrote: post #17

As an anecdote, I've lived the majority of my life in America (born and raised middle class on the east coast in a wealthy area) and if I was tasked with writing an account of my time here it would be focused around one thing: alienation. American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that…

I agree entirely with this. I can only speak for myself and my wife (mid 30s), but we are making active efforts to combat this in our family and social circle. Our house is large enough to take in parents (parents still have hangups about how "they should be able to take care of themselves and live by themselves"; we'll be waiting if and when they change their mind), extended family, and friends, we host family dinne…

In my family and extended family, we keep parents with the kids as they age so that they’re never alone. Free babysitting too. Requires quite a bit of compromise though, but being able to afford a larger well insulated home helps.

Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average

#40

Post by howard941 »

snarf21 wrote: post #14
nickthegreek wrote: post #3

My father passed away around 11 years back and it wasn't til several years later that it really hit me that my mom was basically all alone for large portions of her day out on the a country property. I now call her and chat for about 20 minutes a day on my commute home. I know that it has made a huge difference in her life and I feel more connected to her than ever before. I highly recommend that others take some tim…

This is also why a lot of spouses pass soon after the other. They lose hope and the reason to get out of bed each morning. I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.

In a perfect world we'd do this and the companions would be well-paid - better paid than they were for the automated jobs in that this new gig can't and shouldn't be automated.

In our actual world the funds saved would find their way to the caregivers but when does that ever happen? Some intermediary will be there capturing most of the value, as is the nature of 21st century America. Companions are rarely off the books highly paid no bennies, much more likely off the books underpaid undocumented immigrants or minimum wage workers hardly able to house and feed themselves much less compassionately care for their wards.

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