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The Loneliness Epidemic

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Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#81

Post by JackFr »

heavyirondba wrote: post #61
bilbo0s wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also interesting that nowadays when people lose their jobs, it triggers an almost existential crisis in them. It's kind of sad to watch. I wish people could understand that they are more than their job. It's so ingrained in us though. One of the first things people asks each other is, "What do you do?" It encourages a definition of self that is centered on one's job. If it weren't real life, I'd think I was watc…

I'm pretty certain that existential crisis isn't because of who they'd be without their job, except in status obsessed high-income brackets. For most folks that existential crisis is driven 100% by the realization that they have little in the way of a safety-net, and all it takes is several turns of bad luck to end up in a poverty trap that isn't easy to climb out of. Remember, most Americans make what, 65k or so as…

> For most folks that existential crisis is driven 100% by the realization that they have little in the way of a safety-net, and all it takes is several turns of bad luck to end up in a poverty trap that isn't easy to climb out of.

I think that's more US specific.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#82

Post by logfromblammo »

squish78 wrote: post #30
yters wrote: post #4

The good thing is we can walk next door and meet our neighbor. It is strange this is an epidemic when it is a problem that seems so easy to solve. UPDATE: based on responses to my comment it seems the core problem may be closer to home than we like to admit. CS Lewis' book The Great Divorce details this misanthropy, where hell is a product of the residents' own making because they choose to live on their own because…

I'm amazed at the responses and downvotes to this comment. Is everyone terrified of small talk with their neighbors?

I live in a place where the neighbors are likely to talk about their religion, their football team, their other football team, their kids, their kid's football team, something implicitly racist, something explicitly racist, their job/boss/business (or lack thereof), or their vehicle. I'd only want to hear about two of those things.

I'd prefer to talk about events or ideas, or activities that interest me. It's far easier to join an online discussion already in progress to feel less isolated in South Bumblefart, USA.

I have found that familiarity does sometimes breed contempt, but absence does not always make the heart grow fonder.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#83

Post by PeterisP »

qwsxyh wrote: post #62
koboll wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe something that's just a little more like a college dorm than an apartment building or a suburb -- neighbors in close proximity that you're forced to attend social events with and get to know. I feel like we consistently choose the short-term risk aversion of walling ourselves off from neighbors, blind to the long-term damage it does to our society.

I would legitimately rather kill myself than ever live in a dorm.

That's one way to reduce the housing shortage.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#84

Post by freehunter »

ikeyany wrote: post #78
dexwiz wrote: post #34

The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom. The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a…

> The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. How is this different than what the majority of civilization had to do throughout history? People have always clung to their profession as their identity. Hell, people used to name themselves after their profession. If tha…

Back in the days when people named themselves after their job, there was no difference between career and personal life. You didn’t work 8-5 and then completely disconnect, you worked whenever the job needed done as many hours as it took.

Loneliness only sets in when you have nothing else to do and you’re all alone. If you’re swinging a hammer at a hot forge for 16 hours a day loneliness is a secondary concern.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#85

Post by xamuel »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #63
xamuel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your idea of what's a good person is based on what the world tells you is a good person. I, too, am tempted to think of myself as being inherently good, but if I were born hundreds of years ago, would I really have been so inherently good as to realize how wrong it is to (say) suppress women, when the culture all around me normalized doing so? My temptation is to think "I'm better than that, I wouldn't suppress women…

"Not suppressing women" is a really odd issue to bring into the conversation when Christianity is involved.

Are you suggesting I should do a better job of cherry-picking things? I'm not trying to "trick" people with fake cherry-picked Christianity, we're all smarter than that here. It was an example that what's deemed "good" by the world changes from decade to decade.

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because its foundation was on the rock." (Matthew 7:24-25)

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#86

Post by kashyapc »

I will quote a previous comment on a similar thread[1] I made verbatim here. It is from Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, where he reviews data on loneliness in the US students (among two dozen other graphs in the first twenty chapters).

Pinker implies social critics abuse the words "epidemic" and "crisis" (both words used in the article of this thread).

After reviewing the downwards-sloping graph (plotted from 1978-2011) and more data, Pinker writes:

Modern life, then, has not crushed our minds and bodies, turned us into atomized machines suffering from toxic levels of emptiness and isolation, or set us drifting apart without human contact or emotion. How did this misconception arise? Partly it came out of the social critic's standard formula for sowing panic: Here's an anecdote, therefore it's a trend, therefore it's a crisis. But partly came from genuine changes in how people interact. People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings via digital media. They confide in fewer distant cousins but more in co-workers. They are less likely to have large numbers of friends but also less likely to want a large number of friends. But just because social life looks different today from the way it looked in the 1950s, it does not mean that humans, that quintessentially social species, have become any less social.

I'm not suggesting that everything is hunky-dory, just that we bear in mind the proportions of the problem. Also Pinker may well be off the mark here, as others have pointed out in[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19914075

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#87

Post by toxik »

dexwiz wrote: post #76
mox1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that today in 2019, we spend more time at "work" than at any other time in history? That's just false. Over the 20th century here, work hours have slashed in half. Henry Ford introduced the 5 day work week in 1926, prior to that it was 6. You think the average farmer in the late 1800's worked 40-50 hours? What about the average coal miner, or factory worker?

Physically you are right. Mentally, maybe not. If you are in an information based job like writing or programming, then it’s very easy to carry your job around in your head. I may only program for a few hours a day, but the problems definitely come home with me. It takes a considerable amount of self awareness to both realize this and stop it.

This is definitely true. "Open-world" jobs are par for the course in the Western world, where deciding what you have to do is part of the job, along with predicting, strategizing, and reflecting. It is a lot more cognitively engaging and also heavy. Farming and mining certainly have aspects of this, but a majority of the work was drone work -- exactly the type of work to go first in automatization. What's left is necessarily cognitively difficult work.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#88

Post by efa »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #22
xamuel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. People think of verses like Leviticus 20:13 (homosexuals condemned to death) but forget verses like John 8:7, "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone." Perhaps one of the most relevant teachings of Jesus is from his Discourse on the Church when he says: "For where two or three gather together in My name, there am I with them." (Matthew 18:20)

I've got to be honest here, it's infuriating to see the extremely basic moral/social principles from the Bible held up on some kind of pedestal like they're a unique or difficult to come by idea. As an atheist I try to be a good person because it is something I innately want to do, not because it was a revelation I had in Bible study. The Bible did not invent "being nice to other people"

Judeo-Christian values are the basis of the west's moral code. It's so ingrained you may think it's innate. But it's not hard to impress a different set of values if you preach them from birth. People years ago who believed in racial prejudice were not born bad. They believe what they were taught by society. Some were able to overcome this teaching but for the vast majority they just considered these beliefs as facts. That's why its ridiculous to judge a historic figure based on our current moral code.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#89

Post by badpun »

Tade0 wrote: post #35
badpun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish society was very heavily wounded by 50 years of hardcore socialism combined with the police state (at the hands of the Soviets). The levels of trust people have towards each other are still abysmally low. I wouldn't use Poland as an example, because it is (like other post-Soviet block states) still very much not normal.

I don't know about that. My parents both knew their neighbors very well(which made a lot of sense in times where you'd need a network of people to find some of the more rare goods), while I have no little to no relationship with mine - and I was born just before the previous system collapsed.

I don't deny that people are more lonely now in Poland that they were in socialism. In my opinion, it's the combination of convenience (like you said, people used to need each other for simple things, and now they can just buy everything), alienating electronics entertainment and capitalism, where everyone needs to paddle very hard to get ahead or merely stay afloat. It seemed to me that my parents were happier under socialism than they are now, even though now their material standard of living is greater by like a magnitude.

Regarding trust, I would say there was very little trust in the socialist times as well. You don't need a lot of trust to borrow some salt from a neighbor or even trade a favors (ex. you get me ahead in the queue to buy a car and in exchange I get you access to buying foreign holidays), which is what people mainly were doing in the socialism. You do however need a lot of trust to start a business together. Since in socialism all people were just cogs in the giant socialist machine, they never needed to develop trust towards each other. Now, in capitalism, it's backfiring.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#90

Post by efa »

squish78 wrote: post #30
yters wrote: post #4

The good thing is we can walk next door and meet our neighbor. It is strange this is an epidemic when it is a problem that seems so easy to solve. UPDATE: based on responses to my comment it seems the core problem may be closer to home than we like to admit. CS Lewis' book The Great Divorce details this misanthropy, where hell is a product of the residents' own making because they choose to live on their own because…

I'm amazed at the responses and downvotes to this comment. Is everyone terrified of small talk with their neighbors?

I think saying "so easy to solve" is a gross over-simplification and insensitive.
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