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Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

economist.com

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Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#191

Post by closeparen »

bbrian wrote: post #121

The real culprit, IMO, is the automobile. By allowing people travel further, the frequency your life overlaps with other individuals' decreases exponentially. Relationships with strangers are much easier to start with familiarity. I'd like cities to be planned foremost with walkability in mind.

It takes a lot less work to meet up with friends when everything is a 20 minute drive vs. when everything is a 2 hour walk to bus to once-per-2.5-hours train to bus to walk. In the Bay Area, seeing friends who don’t live in my neighborhood is a special occasion. In car-oriented Midwestern sprawl, it was almost every week. Being in cars together, trading rides, etc. also created a pleasant, low-pressure space for conversation. The audience of one’s fellow train/bus passengers changes that dynamic a lot. I don’t think it’s as drastic a difference as you say. There are tradeoffs all around.

Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#192

Post by bbrian »

Buldak wrote: post #162
bbrian wrote: post #121

The real culprit, IMO, is the automobile. By allowing people travel further, the frequency your life overlaps with other individuals' decreases exponentially. Relationships with strangers are much easier to start with familiarity. I'd like cities to be planned foremost with walkability in mind.

I would have thought that we've lived in a car-centric culture for generations now, though. How would cars explain why loneliness and isolation have risen just recently?

The report doesn't say loneliness is rising recently. It says technology use is rising and then measures individuals' loneliness, following up with a survey on technology use and a self reported ~"Do you think technology is contributing to loneliness?".

I think for a large part the Internet is replacing television. Is there a suggestion that those spending over two hours/day online (correlating more in the report with loneliness) are being affected by the medium or content or they're just using PC rather than TV?

I'd wager that car use is also up significantly too. Better roads, better cars, more two-car families (28% of US households have more cars than people), kids not walking to school...

[] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/09/americans-spend-average-176...

Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#193

Post by logicfiction »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #176
hutzlibu wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add games to the list of counterexamples. Still works today. Even though I never made friends online (as I was not so into it) I know friends who did.

Does it still work? I don't play online games any more, but my impression is they mostly moved from guild and group style like MMOs, where you got to know people and probably chatted on Teamspeak as well. Now they seem to be mostly random individual match-ups either for pvp or for a dungeon. That seems like it would take away many of the possibilities.

The element that you might not be aware of is Discord. Primarily a chat and voice communication app but its divided up into individual servers run by community members for free where each is like a Slack server if you are familiar with that software.

I'm not in the child age group, but I've made friends this way as a 31 year old.

Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#194

Post by lists »

kakarot wrote: post #164
taurath wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with moderate/severe social anxiety, the idea of not having it seems just crazy to me.

How much of your anxiety boils down to just not feeling confident about the appropriate actions to take or words to say in social situations? That's something that can be remedied for anyone with a little focused education.

>How much of your anxiety boils down to just not feeling confident about the appropriate actions to take or words to say in social situations?

You're enabling your own prescription by making the problem easier, viz. reducing the problem of anxiety to "not feeling confident about the appropriate actions to take", which, I might add, is also a redundant claim since its taking an effect of anxiety and elevating it to the cause.

Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#195

Post by sridca »

whitepoplar wrote: post #138

Moving to NYC saved my life. I was depressed, lonely, insecure, and starving socially. When I got here, I discovered a city of people who were earnest, open to meeting others, and happy to welcome me into their lives. What makes this city so great for people like me is that it forces you to both strive for better and not take yourself so seriously (because no one fucking cares). It's a city full of selfish, caring, h…

Could you provide some specific examples?

Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#196

Post by JoshMnem »

vilmosi wrote: post #186
JoshMnem wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar worries about AI. Example: I never let computer programs reply for me by clicking pre-written responses to emails or messages. The designers of those products are making the mistake that the less you have to think about things the better, but I think that you have to use your brain or you will lose it. Even those simple routine tasks (like talking to a bank teller for three minutes) provide essential c…

I don't know, they used to say the same thing about writting.

Socrates was right in some ways, but there are differences. Writing has caused damage to memory abilities (I work in a related field), but it has large benefits for cultural knowledge. Offloading our thinking about email responses or decisions about what we do with our time into AI doesn't have any real benefits for society. Having computers do your routine thinking for you is like refined sugar for the brain -- it can be attractive and addictive, but I think it's a bad idea in most cases.

Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#197

Post by agumonkey »

andai wrote: post #190
agumonkey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wonder how much of recent 'tech' is due to not very articulated desire to do away with the burden of these social interactions. Something I did want to before[1] but maybe it would be better (and maybe we'll see it this way later) to just revamp the current structure and way we exchange to each other. To make a bold myopic summary, internet is kinda breaking us apart.

I used to always use the automatic check out at the supermarket, because I used to dread being forced to interact with a stranger (who often doesn't even want to be there, or interact with me!) I recently began doing a job that requires me to smile at and greet strangers all day long, and I found myself doing this automatically off the job as well. So now I find myself having pleasant interactions with supermarket st…

We agree on both the fact that society is aiming toward that (for various reasons), and that less fulfilling jobs don't .. fulfill the employees (cashier jobs).

For the habit of social interactions, I have an anecdote:

I rarely go out, I was invited to a friend 30th birthday, went there quite nervous, wasn't happy most of the time, bored etc etc. The next day I felt in a much improved mood. I believe that even when slightly negative, being surrounded with people, the random thoughts of everybody, etc has a very profound effect on your brain that reset or refill something that you can't when you're alone, even if you're doing 80% of things you like and enjoy uninterrupted.

For time freed, at least you're using it for friend time :)

Re: Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

#199

Post by mathgenius »

ronnier wrote: post #106

My opinion is that likely mostly impacts men. I see men struggling to find women to date (and the opposite for women, too many men to pick from). The internet and apps have made the dating market very difficult for men in general. Women literally have 100's or 1000's of choices at any given time while men will struggle to have a single option. There are just more men now than ever it seems, and it's really exaggerate…

Try social dancing: salsa, argentine tango, swing.
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