get a hobby.
The Loneliness Epidemic
31–40 of 337 posts
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#32Ants don't meet at the bar at the end of the day to chill with each other. It isn't necessary. And their society isn't unraveling. The more connected the human ant hill gets the more we will behave like ants. Disconnected because we don't need to be as connected. Connected because that is the only way to survive. Those that can't handle the change...wont. This is a process of societal metamorphosis whose tracks have…
I don't disagree with you that there are meaningful analogies between humans and animals. But we are much closer evolutionarily to dogs, and dogs definitely need to wrestle in the den at the end of the day. I don't believe there are panaceas for societal evolution to be found in synthetic technological networks. Though I'll be interested to see where neuralink has gotten in 20 years.
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#33It 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…
>it was always about the values and the bond it created between each member of that religion. Sometimes people formed bonds they shouldn't have and then the religion starts a crusade or two
Are you saying that the modern loneliness epidemic has been deliberately created to prevent this?
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#34The 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 minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.
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. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.
No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else.
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in a highly conservative and (according to statistics) religious society (Poland) and my observation is that it's not correlated. People who sought company in church were often disappointed, because most of the others who went there had lives of their own and weren't that invested in the whole thing. Hell, the loneliest people I know are consistently religious.
Polish society was very heavily wounded by 50 years of hardcore socialism combined with the police state (at the hands of the Soviets). The levels of trust people have towards each other are still abysmally low. I wouldn't use Poland as an example, because it is (like other post-Soviet block states) still very much not normal.
I don't know about that. My parents both knew their neighbors very well(which made a lot of sense in times where you'd need a network of people to find some of the more rare goods), while I have no little to no relationship with mine - and I was born just before the previous system collapsed.
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#36It 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…
Religion was created as a tool to control people and explain natural disasters. It's no coincidence early hierarchies were headed by whatever the priest class was in that particular society, even going back to the first civilizations.
Modern religions (not even all) may be about the bond between practitioners, but that's only because we can explain weather patterns, and the governments of most states don't rely on things like the "mandate of heaven" to function.
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#37At 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.
In many ways universal basic housing makes more sense than universal basic income.
Of course the devil is in the details, how do you avoid it becoming a ghetto. Probably not by putting it in its own neighbourhood.
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. People think of verses like Leviticus 20:13 (homosexuals condemned to death) but forget verses like John 8:7, "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone." Perhaps one of the most relevant teachings of Jesus is from his Discourse on the Church when he says: "For where two or three gather together in My name, there am I with them." (Matthew 18:20)
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", but statistically speaking, almost no-one actually was better-than-that! Trying to be a good person without the guidance of the Holy Spirit is futile. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23)
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#39The good thing is we can walk next door and meet our neighbor. It is strange this is an epidemic when it is a problem that seems so easy to solve. UPDATE: based on responses to my comment it seems the core problem may be closer to home than we like to admit. CS Lewis' book The Great Divorce details this misanthropy, where hell is a product of the residents' own making because they choose to live on their own because…
People occasionally ring my doorbell. I always pretend to not be at home. Clearly, there's a flaw in your solution.
How sad.
Re: The Loneliness Epidemic
#40> "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. And at a time when emotional seclusion is increasingly being seen as a crisis in countries around the Western world, perhaps this is what has made English people uniquely sensitive to loneliness as a major health concern."
This is evidently written from the perspective of an englishman, but I find the contrast with the American South (where I was born and raised) evident: here, it is very common to strike up a pleasant conversation with strangers. If you are left in each other's company for a few minutes, it's almost rude not to. I find that there's something of a cultural difference which might help here, as you can get a little bit of socialization from unexpected places. I regularly chat with the doorman at my office, and know he has another job as a music promoter. He also figured out a particularly clever way to game Spotify. Same with lots of other random people.
I'm not positioning this as a perfect solution, but as one more change which might help. Half of me wonders if this is because the South was always so spread-out that we took company where we could get it. But I certainly am not qualified to trace the roots of cultural stuff like this. Anyway, just something to think on.