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How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

nytimes.com

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Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#171

Post by resg4mp »

softwaredoug wrote: post #112
Spooky23 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social institutions started falling down once TV appeared and was demanding of attention. You had to be around at 8pm on Tuesday to see your show. Now with phones we have even bigger attention sinks. End of the day, the rise of cheap entertainment and the long decline of mainline religious organizations, erosion of ethnic organizations, etc have led to a lot of social problems. There was an article a few weeks ago su…

In a grant-funded and eyeball driven world, science and media have perverse incentives to cherry-pick data to show trends that don't really exist. You live long enough, you get skeptical of 'sky is falling' narratives...

Have you read "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam? It's a tad outdated, but describing the same trends of growing loneliness and isolation. And sure enough, the author concluded that television was a factor (though not the primary factor.)

The book makes its case through data. Lots of clear charts and a great appendix at the end. The author spends a lot of time discussing his methodology and potential problems with it.

I tend to be skeptical, like you are, of "sky is falling" research coming from academia. Especially when the conclusion is that TV is bad for us (Sounds like my nagging parents trying to get me to play in the back yard!). But after reading this book, I'm stumped. I can't say the author is cherry picking the data. Surely there are limitations to the research, and the book is upfront about them. No, there is definitely something going on. The research makes that clear. And electronic media is likely a part of the explanation.

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#173

Post by Regardsyjc »

androidgirl wrote: post #84

Is there anything we can do to stop being lonely? Over the past few months, I have made great progress on developing habits to fight my depression. I wake up very early, hike, work on my side projects, and go to communal hacker spaces sometimes. However, I and many others still feel very lonely, it's like we all live in seperate bubbles and can't connect deeply. I have no idea what causes this divide. Have humans alw…

That's amazing! I think people might have misconceptions over how many deep relationships you're supposed to have. I used to feel lonely that I didn't know enough people who had similar interests or passions as me.

Something that helped me the most was learning how to love myself and I'm still learning. I used to hate being alone in my own company. I would have a lot of anxiety.

Someone told me to do the things you love and you'll meet people along the way. This has worked wonders for me. The most important thing for me was learning how to be vulnerable, open, and to trust people again.

After that it was figuring out what I actually wanted with my life. It helped me realize that I didn't want relationships with people who brought me down and it helped me figure out who I did want to have relationships with.

I don't think it takes that many relationships to feel fulfilled. But I do feel that as we get older, we have less room for relationships in our lives, and culture tries to tell us otherwise when it's simply not true.

I feel like I've gotten to the point where I can't have any more deep relationships, any additional responsibilities to the ones that I already have. I think deep relationships, the ones that fulfill you, come with responsibilities, and thus you can only have a limited number of them.

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#174

Post by clarry »

tekla wrote: post #95

I find it strange that I have friends, but I'm always feel alone. I live in a huge city, work has good people that are genuine friends outside of work, but I always feel alone. Everyone talks about meetups and conferences, but I find them to be extremely superficial interactions. I also only ever see people outside work for social purposes about once a month or two. I've tried going out more, but nothing really ever…

> Everyone talks about meetups and conferences, but I find them to be extremely superficial interactions.

Even here people mention finding meetups in a city. I'm with you here.. I used to visit conventions and such as well as had other random meetups with people who have similar hobbies and interests and even though I had a decent time, I always felt out of place and like an outsider. So these interactions never felt particularly meaningful, and there was no deeper connection going on. Often these events just left me more depressed than I was before going.

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#175

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

clarry wrote: post #28
npunt wrote: post #17

Suburbs are structurally lonely (your own castle with as little reliance on others as possible), and only ‘work’ when paired with other sources of community. Those sources are disappearing for a variety of reasons but the transfer from physical -> digital, communal [1] -> personalized, eating out -> eating in [2], public space -> private space, friend time —> media time all add up. We also don’t have strong culture a…

> Suburbs are structurally lonely My European perspective. I wouldn't blame it on suburbs in particular. I would blame most if not all forms of city living. Most people live in flats where nobody wants to have anything to do with their neighbor and there is no communality. People move in and move out, nobody cares. The less you have to hear of your neighbor, the better. FWIW I would rather have a 'burb castle than a…

I dunno about that, having grown up in a rural area I can distinctly remember newcomers to the area (especially if from abroad) never being accepted unless they had young kids going to the local school (who would be accepted by the other kids much faster). There was one couple who tried extensively for years going to and organising events but never became anything more than "the dutch couple"

You also get a lot of weirdness where everyone knows a bit too much about everyone else. ...and, yeah, there's a really strong push towards conformity. If you're at all unusual it's pretty isolating. Some people will help you if you're in trouble but you'll never make anything resembling friendships.

If you grow up in the community, your direct family are pretty accepted within it, and there are other people within your age range, it's highly unlikely to be a lonely experience. in my case we had two neighbours that got married around the same time as my parents but neither could conceive, which both resulted in no other kids in the area at all and a kind of strained awkwardness between them and my parents

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#176

Post by remarkEon »

tokyodude wrote: post #93
npunt wrote: post #17

Suburbs are structurally lonely (your own castle with as little reliance on others as possible), and only ‘work’ when paired with other sources of community. Those sources are disappearing for a variety of reasons but the transfer from physical -> digital, communal [1] -> personalized, eating out -> eating in [2], public space -> private space, friend time —> media time all add up. We also don’t have strong culture a…

Interesting that the my image is the exact opposite. Downtown no one talks to each other. They live in fancy apartment buildings and go out to their events. In the Suburbs, neighbors have BBQs, block parties. I knew all the people around the house when I lived in the suburbs. The Garys next door with their bull dog and their daughter Diane living in a detached apartment above the garage. The Alberas with a farm in th…

My experience is exactly the same. I've lived in several urban centers now as an adult, and I'm planning on moving to the suburbs or exurbs once I can afford to buy a house. Honestly the only people I've met in the city are the folks from Church, but all the ones with kids are moving out too. Cities feel super atomized to me right now, where folks really have little in common beyond shared misery in high housing costs.

Obviously this is just my experience.

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#177

Post by Fricken »

tokyodude wrote: post #93
npunt wrote: post #17

Suburbs are structurally lonely (your own castle with as little reliance on others as possible), and only ‘work’ when paired with other sources of community. Those sources are disappearing for a variety of reasons but the transfer from physical -> digital, communal [1] -> personalized, eating out -> eating in [2], public space -> private space, friend time —> media time all add up. We also don’t have strong culture a…

Interesting that the my image is the exact opposite. Downtown no one talks to each other. They live in fancy apartment buildings and go out to their events. In the Suburbs, neighbors have BBQs, block parties. I knew all the people around the house when I lived in the suburbs. The Garys next door with their bull dog and their daughter Diane living in a detached apartment above the garage. The Alberas with a farm in th…

I work in a family farm a few weeks a year and if you head into town to pick up some things you gotta budget time for making chitchat with people, and it was the same deal when living in a built up walkable urban neighbourhood in Montreal, and in Vancouver, you see and interact with the same people every day.

Now I live in a neighbourhood with many immigrants from Africa, and they're super tight knit, in terms of their involvement in the community they put anything else I've seen to shame, excepting maybe when I was staying in a small villages in Indonesia and Mexico back in my surfing days.

But, like many, I grew up in a generic cookie cutter suburb and it was pretty dismal as far as community involvement and interaction goes. People get in their cars and drive away.

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#178

Post by Fricken »

solatic wrote: post #29
npunt wrote: post #17

Suburbs are structurally lonely (your own castle with as little reliance on others as possible), and only ‘work’ when paired with other sources of community. Those sources are disappearing for a variety of reasons but the transfer from physical -> digital, communal [1] -> personalized, eating out -> eating in [2], public space -> private space, friend time —> media time all add up. We also don’t have strong culture a…

I lived on a kibbutz after college. It has its own set of problems. The closer you live to people, the more politics enters the picture. The less money there is to go around, the more that politics revolves around the relatively financially trivial. You can't force people to like each other just because they live in close proximity. The problem isn't finding people with shared interests and values, it's in building r…

People living interdependently in close proximity to one another is characteristic of most people throughout human history. It has never been perfect, but when you throw it out, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#179

Post by black-tea »

Baeocystin wrote: post #152
black-tea wrote: post #111

It's possible that what we're witnessing is behavioural sink[0]. It's been observed in other mammals that overcrowding leads to social degradation and eventual total failure of the population. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

I used to live in Montana, on the outskirts of a small town. There were few enough people around that it was trivially easy to take 10 minutes getting even further out of town and find yourself at a trailhead that hadn't been used in months. My point is that if you did wind up seeing someone else, it made you happy in a way that just doesn't happen when you live in a more densely-populated area. And this coming from…

Yep. I often go for walks alone in the countryside and I'll often stop and have a short conversation with every person I see (which may only be one or two). I wouldn't even do that at the large company I used to work, let alone in a city.

Re: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

#180

Post by sudosteph »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #165

I think that we long for genuinely human interaction. The absence of that makes us lonely. But tech-mediated interactions reduce the amount of human interaction. (Having this conversation on HN isn't the same as us having the same conversation at a bar, even if we say the same things.) We get more interaction via tech (across the world, not just in the same room), but much of the human touch gets lost. But I think th…

You might really enjoy the short book "The Abolition of Man" by CS Lewis. It's not a fantasy or apologetics book like he's known for, doesn't presume any christian or theistic view point, but it describes a very similar phenomenon to your observations, what he calls "men without chests".

I will say that there are actually places (in the US at least) where what you describe is not the societal norm at all. But there's tradeoffs with everything. Super visible religiousity and expectations of constant amiability and politeness do have some downsides. It is less lonely though.

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