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The Loneliness Epidemic

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Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#111

Post by trentnix »

mises wrote: post #43
defterGoose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you see that this is an extremely dogmatic view? If society has seemingly agreed that society needs government, part of society needs to actually administer that government.

> Can you see that this is an extremely dogmatic view? Snuck premise much? I doubt he'd agree that it's dogmatic, nor would I. Governments are certainly needed for certain things, but politicians tend to come up with problems to solve, or try to solve problems which they are not equipped to solve. They aren't really supposed to create a social order so much as a legal one, anyway. Even if the could, I'd see that as d…

It’s really pretty simple. Politicians have one tool: the hammer that is your tax dollars. So everything they see looks like a nail.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#113

Post by Circuits »

For me it is a rather paradoxical situation. On the one hand I am a very lonely person and on the other hand I like being alone. When I am alone I tend towards depression and crave social interaction but not all social interaction works. For instance, if I spend a day with my family it is usually great for about 2 or 3 hours and then all I can think about is getting home so I can be by myself again.

For me it is not enough to just be with people. For instance, when I was in HS I would never have characterized myself as a lonely person. I believe that is because those relationships, long forgotten, had serious depth. I also had more confidence when I was younger making my intimate life easier to progress.

However, now a days I have neither and I have lost the confidence to strike up the band. I honestly find it hard to even look a women in the eyes much less ask her for her name and tell her mine. Tbh, even if I was going to force myself to make a new friend I wouldn't know where to start.

Luckily for me I have pretty damn thick skin and have learned to deal with my loneliness, depression and anxiety. That being said, at 32, I find myself feeling as though dying young and alone is a probability. However, I take heart in knowing that it could be worse, for many people are simply dying of starvation and so, on the whole, I am a pretty lucky guy.

If loneliness is a problem that someone else can solve I just don't see how. From my perspective, this is a problem that, like a snowball rolling down a hill, builds up over time and eventually takes on a life of its own.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#114

Post by freehunter »

kinos wrote: post #110
freehunter wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back when people had up to 6 months of time off a year?[1] [1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

If modern people had half the year they could consider free time, no one would be lonely.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#115

Post by rayiner »

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 average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.

The median person lives just 18 miles away from their mom. 57% of Americans have never lived outside their home state. A third have never lived outside their hometown.

The more I read about it, I’m convinced “loneliness” is an upper middle class problem.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#116

Post by vectorEQ »

A lot of people who feel lonely, are hardly ever alone. imagine how shitty and uninterested we really are to eachother and ourselves... if we can be together and feel alone at the same time. Stop neglecting yourself, and that will make you stop neglecting others.

My tips: Actively take time for yourself. to get to know yourself and become more aware of yourself. Even if you do not suffer from such symptoms yet, it will be one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself in whatever position or situation you find yourself.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#117

Post by dwg465 »

defterGoose wrote: post #41
radcon wrote: post #17

At the risk of sounding like a crazy hippy, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that some kind of subsistence-based neighborhoods would be a great option for dealing with this problem. Not only would it provide some relief from the feeling of being shackled to bullshit jobs for life if you don't want to starve to death, it would also help foster much stronger communities.

Some friends of mine from college and I, while considering our impending matriculation into the housing and job market of LA, conceived of the idea of 'failure house'; a place where we could all live when we failed at life. We still talk about it ten years on, and it has evolved into the idea of 'failure commune'. One of these friends became a lawyer and bought a house in Orange County recently. Traitor.

I just graduated college and am having similar thoughts (but think Bay Area instead of LA). It seems like a great idea but I know of few examples besides full-on communes. Do you know of any examples of living communities or living styles that fall somewhere between living on your own and living on a commune?

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#118

Post by dsfyu404ed »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #12
rofo1 wrote: post #3

It only makes sense for this epidemic to take place in the society we've developed. We are tearing apart the fabric and the bond that kept everyone feeling as a part of community; namely, religion. Religion was never designed for people to fear the man upstairs; it was always about the values and the bond it created between each member of that religion. Individualism and decadence are being more or less encouraged, o…

"Since in 2019, you can't say: religion, race, nationality and nation without being labeled one way or another." I think this implies this has not always been the case, which I don't think is true, at least in my country in USA. People came to America partially to avoid religious persecution. And of course, slaves were also brought to America and a whole field of pseudoscience was created to explore how black people…

>think this implies this has not always been the case,

This was the case at least through most of the 20th century. Even in the 50s and 60s when "white flight" was cleaning out the predominantly ethnic urban neighborhoods those people were moving to suburbs where they had a lot in common with most of the people there and the people left in the city had a lot in common with each other.

>People came to America partially to avoid religious persecution

It's worth noting that a lot of those groups were being persecuted for being too hard-line and once in the new world they formed their own little groups and kicked out or hanged anyone who didn't agree perfectly with them. While I think we'd all be better off had certain ships sank, members of fundamentalist cults tend to get to know each other, especially when they're trying to not starve and not get scalped by the natives they started a war with.

>And of course, slaves were also brought to America and a whole field of pseudoscience was created to explore how black people deserved their enslavement.

Shared adversity is arguably the best way to bring people together. Now, before anyone misrepresents me as saying slaves anywhere at any time had it good, I'm not. I'm just saying that chronic loneliness was not a problem they had.

To conclude, having stuff in common brings people together and because of the way society tended to work in the past race, religion, nationality, nation, and other things we pretend don't matter today were strong indicators as to how much you had in common with someone and commonality tends to lead to meaningful interaction and/or friendship which solves loneliness.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#119

Post by slothtrop »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #44
slothtrop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monotheism was popularized to transcend kinship, in order to raise large armies. Prior, people were fragmented into close-knit tribes up from 100-200 people. They had their own lore and beliefs. Loneliness was not the issue they had, and not what monotheism addressed. In order to wage warfare and conquer a region with large numbers, you have to convince others to fight for you. This was difficult. It led to the agric…

> Monotheism was popularized to transcend kinship, in order to raise large armies. When you say that, what are you thinking of? Rome wasn't monotheistic, before it Judaism wasn't really a military powerhouse, and Christianity only really came of power due to it's growing popularity in the Roman Empire. I can't think of an example of an ancient monotheistic empire, and post-classical it's really only Islam and Christi…

I'm jumping ahead on the timeline, yes. Early Roman Empire had a polytheistic religions in common. It expanded its power after monotheism.

Obviously it's possible to have a large, shared polytheistic religion. We still have those today. The religion being a common denominator is more in the spirit of the point I was trying to make. Using a single God as a means to unite people was more palpable to some leaders. Muhammad understood this. The Arabs hadn't scriptures, nor institutions, and he saw the unifying power of Judaism and Christianity. When you have pagans worshiping separate sets of gods, it's less effective to try to politicize "all these are valid", "some of these are valid" and have them follow along.

From the wikipedia entry on religion in ancient Rome - "Even the most skeptical among Rome's intellectual elite such as Cicero, who was an augur, saw religion as a source of social order. As the Roman Empire expanded, migrants to the capital brought their local cults, many of which became popular among Italians. Christianity was in the end the most successful of these, and in 380 became the official state religion. "

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#120

Post by dkarl »

You can see the problem here: A national culture that promotes polite restraint, and which actively fends off and forestalls the forming of relationships between strangers, is one that might as well be inviting loneliness on its population.

Let's not forget there are two hazards here. Loneliness is one; the other is the suffocating tyranny of constantly attending to others' ideas and feelings, because attending to your own would be unacceptably disruptive of precious social connectedness. In "A Room of One's Own" Virginia Woolf diagnosed the injustice of a society that reserves the privilege of aloneness to men, and particularly upper class men, while denying it to women (who are supposed to be "selfless") and to a lesser extent the lower classes (who are supposed to be too mindless and animalistic to make anything of solitude.)

Being reluctant to intrude on another's social space is a good thing. It should be joined with skill at inviting others in, and a readiness to respond to that invitation. Let's not shit on people who have solved one half of the problem as if they were inferior to people who have only solved the other half.

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