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Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

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Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#171

Post by DiscourseFan »

petterroea wrote: post #123
computably wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really surprising, I was under the impression that Scandinavian QOL was also quite high. What are the major contributing factors to the 2x QOL?

- Nice things are within walkable distance living in a major city. In Norway we live mostly in suburbs. Living in the city is unaffordable. Zoning matters. Being able to just walk out of my apartment and do things spontaneously in my own area is a life changer. I can't describe how much the change in mindset from "I'll do a half day trip into town" to "I'll pop two train stops over" did for me - private individuals c…

I've never lived in Japan but I've spent a good deal of time there (probably about 3-4 months total over the course of the last 6-7 years), and I have friends who are Japanese that I have met up with and even traveled with.

I think you'll find that for most of these things, you can get them in New York City. Lots of small local shops, everything is within walking distance or a few stops away on the subway. It is not as safe as most parts of Japan, but its still pretty safe compared to most big cities in the US, and I've seen many people walking around alone at night in Central Park, which is surprisingly quiet and peaceful then.

They'll be a lot of things you'll miss. The Golden Gai is not a tourist hot spot for nothing; that's not to say that New York does not have a million cool local bars you can run into by accident, great food prepared with care by chefs, diverse groups for any interest you could think of, and certainly more than Japan every single possible cuisine from everywhere in the world at high quality.

And while you might miss the Japanese rent, you are not going to miss the Japanese wages. Its true, you have to work in tech or finance to live in Manhattan for the most part, and Brooklyn seems to be filled with trust-fund babies struggling to launch their career in arts (though I've met a few who are doing decently well as video fx artists and UX designers), but if you do manage to secure a decent wage, life will be similar enough, and things will feel affordable, even if they are not by any other standard.

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#172

Post by brador »

fwipsy wrote: post #148
VLM wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

400 yen for a ten pack is more like $2.50 than $5 Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets. The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. Yo…

Maybe they enjoy doing it so the tiny pay doesn't matter too much.

Like uber drivers!

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#173

Post by JimmyBiscuit »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #39
sa-code wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s there to live for otherwise? Can you flesh this idea out more?

There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t. I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social int…

> having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t

Tbh often I see going out and being social as a kind of pre-payment so I can be a shut-in nerd for the other day of the weekend without feeling bad.

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#174

Post by Sol- »

kelipso wrote: post #31
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #21

Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me. Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pa…

This is the kind of detached from humanity viewpoint that I come to hacker news for. Keep it up.

I unironically think so, though. I though this was a great though-provoking comment by OP.

I think it's a totally legitimate thing to ponder and on most internet forums you'd just be ridiculed for it. OP even qualified it by saying they don't have anything against human connection per se.

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#175

Post by petterroea »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #171
petterroea wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Nice things are within walkable distance living in a major city. In Norway we live mostly in suburbs. Living in the city is unaffordable. Zoning matters. Being able to just walk out of my apartment and do things spontaneously in my own area is a life changer. I can't describe how much the change in mindset from "I'll do a half day trip into town" to "I'll pop two train stops over" did for me - private individuals c…

I've never lived in Japan but I've spent a good deal of time there (probably about 3-4 months total over the course of the last 6-7 years), and I have friends who are Japanese that I have met up with and even traveled with. I think you'll find that for most of these things, you can get them in New York City. Lots of small local shops, everything is within walking distance or a few stops away on the subway. It is not…

Yeah, I was considering noting that my description did sound a lot like "guy from the sticks discovers urban life" - many Norwegians already travel to London when they want to have fun. I'm sure other cities have some of these other qualities.

For me as a non-American, America isn't currently an option as a place to live due to safety and unstable political climate, but I have American friends who I use to compare Japan life to life in an urban part of the states. I have never lived in New York nor stepped outside JFK (skyline looked cool though!), so I wouldn't know, but seems like there is some good accessibility of cool places, at least in big financial centers.

I have a friend who _loves_ the US and has been trying to get a job there ever since he graduated, but he has been unsuccessful. He has been screwed over by COVID and the layoffs that followed, basically nobody was interested in sponsoring visas. In many ways we were in a similar situation, trying to escape our home country for something more interesting. I hope he succeeds.

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#176

Post by hto209423432 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #21

Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me. Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pa…

Thanks for the comment.

This sadly is the default zeitgeist within Liberalism as a political philosophy - which is why elites across the world treat humans as cannon fodder. They'd sell them a "dream" and destroy them and communities they're part of in order to create cheap labourers and needy consumers.Once that has passed, they'll throw them under the bus.

Once our overlords get AI/Robots to work for them, we'll quickly see mass-eugenics (positive & negative) programs instituted across the world.

As Dugin et.al note, this is infact the central flaw in modernity - which was moderated occasionally by nationalism, fascism and communism - but ultimately all within the same broad loci.

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#177

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

petterroea wrote: post #123
computably wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really surprising, I was under the impression that Scandinavian QOL was also quite high. What are the major contributing factors to the 2x QOL?

- Nice things are within walkable distance living in a major city. In Norway we live mostly in suburbs. Living in the city is unaffordable. Zoning matters. Being able to just walk out of my apartment and do things spontaneously in my own area is a life changer. I can't describe how much the change in mindset from "I'll do a half day trip into town" to "I'll pop two train stops over" did for me - private individuals c…

That is a genuinely fascinating take because we all hear about how japan is having a population crisis (which it definitely is), and I had always considered Countries like Norway etc. to be one of the top spots if I ever wish to immigrate. (Also this comment is really detailed and genuinely interesting to read!)

I have heard that Japan has a very negative connotation of foreigners (even more so than current form of America) so I am interested to hear your thoughts on that.

I am able to see some similarities with Japan within my own country as well, namely the idea of everything being close. I can't speak about food but being vegetarian, and my country primarily being so too. I actually love our own cultural cuisine. (Anecdotally I watched I think JaidenAnimations where she had issues in japan about some vegan aspects but yeah)

I believe that Japan's Anime/Culture's soft power is really underestimated maybe as it becomes a tourist hub because of that. I am not a big Anime fan but I have watched Animes like Death note, AOT and Yu Yu Hakusho and I was a big fan of Dragon ball growing up :D and many of my friends love anime.

I think that at some point, my conclusion is that Japan and (many South Asian countries) have all some plus/minuses but the quality of life in these countries can be decent if you earn good and have a good work-life balance.

On the other hand, if you don't, then I feel like I have heard too many stories of toxic work culture as well.

Whereas on the sweden/norway side of things, I feel like the subsidies by govt. and other things actually make you feel comfortable being between jobs and imo on average, has nothing like the japanese work culture in the sense that I haven't heard of toxicity in the same sense as japan but I'd love to know your opinion as well. And another reason is that this also makes people more likely to take more risks without worrying too much which might explain why the swedes have the most billionaires per capita.

So my conclusion is that A good job (work-culture) in Japan (South Asia in general?) >= Normalcy in Norway > Toxic job in Japan. Am I right in my assessment or is there more to it that I may have missed?

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#178

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Telaneo wrote: post #112
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, like, what's the point of even being a human instead of a robot?

I'd rather be a robot than a human, so from my perspective, the answer is clearly clearly none. I just don't have the option of turning into a robot.

There are already robots, well I suppose LLM's and average person treats them like utter shit because we can (In a similar way to how the rich might treat average person sometimes* [not all and that's not really my point either] but yea)

My point is that even if you were a robot, if you had feelings. you wouldn't be spared. So are you asking the lack of feelings?

And even if that's the case then, there are people who had gone into accidents who lost their feelings/emotional part of the brain. They sucked at making decisions because I remember reading how the person binge watched shows instead of watching his son's football games, how he couldn't decide what is more important, buying a stapler or filing his taxes (I can be wrong about this one but something similar related to pencils) but my point is that he couldn't make good decisions. He couldn't really compare between two decisions.

Now look at robots, look at LLM's. They can't decide if a car is 50m away then should it be drove or should you walk. They are essentially just a corpus of human data congested into a servant while being nothing more than auto correct on steroids in its true form.

Humanity has its flaws. I absolutely agree. But I think that the reason we have good is also because humanity has flaws. Much of my morality stems from the fact that if I die and I am gonna die someday, that's for sure, then what's my footprint on the world no matter how tiny and questions like these. I suppose every human feels that way.

A robot has no purpose other than being spawned in to create something brittle like yet-another-crud-app.

Perhaps one can argue that humanity is the same seeing the horrors we unleash on each other and tbh we humans have just spawned here and we weren't asked by anyone to exist in our form or not.

But at some point, we do have free-will and freedom no matter how tiny might it seem in algorithms the size of mountains and we can exercise it to bring meaningful change maybe.

I'd rather be human and go watch my children's football game in future rather than be robot. Maybe the surrounding and family and the community as say even hackernews around us give some meaning as we bump into each other.

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#179

Post by leni536 »

cubefox wrote: post #50
rounce wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system. Although the media output for the UK is non-commercial, it does have commercial operations and interactions though and they are mostly centred around the content produced for overseas consumption. As this post is on the .com domain where the international content exists (…

> The BBC is not state funded, it's a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system. If the fee is mandatory, it works similar to a tax, in which case it would be more correct than incorrect to say the BBC is state funded.

It is not mandatory.

Re: Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

#180

Post by 7952 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #21

Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me. Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pa…

I don't think a maximalist solution exists for something like this. And in fact historic trends are doing exactly what you talk about. And the best example is money. It eliminates social resiprocity in favour of a transaction that completes in the moment. And for many people that satisfies a substantial portion of their basic needs. But everything else is then left with just an emotional side as the primary objective. Relationships are based on fulfilling some barely understood emotional need rather than practical benefit. And we feel more and more need to use hacks to try and satisfy that.
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