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The Loneliness Epidemic

melmagazine.com

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Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#171

Post by Dumblydorr »

dwg465 wrote: post #117
defterGoose wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Check out co-ops. There was one near Uchicago, my friend lived there with 20 others, mostly not students. They had group dinners every night, cooked by housemates, and always had someone around to chat with. We used to hang there playing games and partying. The vibe was pretty hippie but if you dont mind that, I'd recommend it. The rent was equivalent to sharing a 3 or 4 bedroom but you got a lot more shared amenities and dinners to boot.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#172

Post by oposa »

LordFast wrote: post #133
rayiner wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ab…

Interesting. Anecdotally, this checks out. All of my middle/lower-middle class friends from high school have long been married and raising families, almost in all cases raising them with their extended families. Most of my professional tech friends are barely getting started in their late 30s, and everyone who's started had basically put their career into a slower gear first. I made a similar choice a couple of years…

By definition you wouldn't know many lonely people. The chronically lonely ones are going to be the people who didn't end up getting married when they "should" have, couldn't make it into a proper career or fell out of one at some point. Most upper middle class people won't be lonely since if you can afford a career you can afford a social life or you might even be forced into one. But of course uncertainty and insecurity can make one feel lonely, so I guess that would count. Still that isn't going to be your epidemic. That is going to be those left behind.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#173

Post by em-bee »

ghostcluster wrote: post #112

There was a story here a few months ago that seems pertinent. > A Solution for Loneliness: Get out and volunteer, research suggests https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971294

at one point a friend of mine was lamenting how all these volunteer activities kept her from having a social life, to which i responded that these activities were my social life, and i would not have it any other way. it's all a matter of perspective.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#175

Post by em-bee »

xamuel wrote: post #38
Fauntleroy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

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…

while you could not have changed the social order, you could have treated women with more respect than was the norm, especially your own wife. allowed your daughters to learn what they were interested in instead of forcing them into their assigned roles. these exceptions existed, and you could have been one of them.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#177

Post by turk73 »

freehunter wrote: post #84
ikeyany wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Back when people dropped dead around age 50...

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#179

Post by imesh »

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.

My old college roommates and I are purchasing a 4 acre lot. A few of us are ready to put down houses now. I feel like this kind of thing is becoming more common? I know we weren't the first people with this idea. Land and housing is so expensive that we can't all individually own homes, but if we pool money on land this becomes possible. And doesn't everyone want their friends to be their neighbors? We have to develop alternative strategies to make it through the future.

Re: The Loneliness Epidemic

#180

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

slothtrop wrote: post #119
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Muham…

> Early Roman Empire had a polytheistic religions in common. It expanded its power after monotheism.

No, it didn’t “expand its power after monotheism”. The Roman Empire didn’t even begin its official flirtation with Christianity until well into the 4th century CE. However, most historians consider the Roman Empire to have been in its waning days then, as it never fully recovered from all the shocks of the 3rd century. The full extent of Rome’s power happened under paganism and well before Christianity was anything more than a small, persecuted sect.

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