Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

mcc.gse.harvard.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 254 posts

Re: The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

#31

Post by OneTimePetes »

naravara wrote: post #11
JKCalhoun wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can think: turn off the internet. Internet in the morning. Have your coffee, catch up on the news, your social. Then put the internet down for the rest of the day. Go out, ride a bike with a friend, go hike with a friend, go to a coffee shop, library....

Doesn’t this depend on having friends who are off the internet too? In the before times, I’d go to get drinks with friends and often found they were chronically distracted. If there’s a lull in conversation they pull out their phones. I go to the bathroom and come back and they’re swiping through Tinder. I got married before the dating apps got popular so I never went down that particular rabbit hole, but I feel like…

Everyone is at work.

In germany if you take a walk during the daytime your looked upon as a "slacker".

Friends require to be condemned to boredom together.

Relationship require something called perspectives in life. Why produce spawn for a dieing world?

This is what you wanted in the 70s when you demonstrated for a "humanity" capable to hold back from environmental destruction.

Its a species of monks, waiting in their cells to dwindle to zero.

Re: The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

#33

Post by 0des »

We are victims of our own comfort. It's easier to stay home in our filter bubbles unchallenged. People don't know how to socialize these days, it's easier to flick idly through facebook. Awkward conversations with strangers don't happen anymore, because the second a familiar conversation with the bartender ends, everyone reaches into their pockets and retreats back into their digital security blankets. Try having a conversation with someone, and count how many seconds it takes for them to pull out their phone, and instead of correcting them on it, just talk babble and watch as they scroll. There is no intent in the scroll, it is just idle time and a slow drip of stimulus to the frontal lobes.

It also doesn't help that every news broadcast and TV show is somehow furthering agendas that divide us, or polarize topics into idealogical tribal warfare.

Re: The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

#34

Post by disambiguation »

> The report is based on an online survey of approximately 950 Americans in October 2020. Because of certain data limitations, the data should be considered preliminary. More information is available in the report’s methodology section.

- what's the baseline? How many people feel lonely on a good day? How has it changed since then?

- "online survey" is there a selection bias skewed towards those that are more inclined to identify as lonely?

- how does this correlate to how many young adults have a SO / are married?

Re: The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

#35

Post by JohnWhigham »

naravara wrote: post #11
JKCalhoun wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can think: turn off the internet. Internet in the morning. Have your coffee, catch up on the news, your social. Then put the internet down for the rest of the day. Go out, ride a bike with a friend, go hike with a friend, go to a coffee shop, library....

Doesn’t this depend on having friends who are off the internet too? In the before times, I’d go to get drinks with friends and often found they were chronically distracted. If there’s a lull in conversation they pull out their phones. I go to the bathroom and come back and they’re swiping through Tinder. I got married before the dating apps got popular so I never went down that particular rabbit hole, but I feel like…

If there’s a lull in conversation they pull out their phones.

I despise how this behavior has been completely normalized. Especially in the dating sphere. People putting their phones on the table to make sure they never miss notifications is just so fucking disrespectful to the people you're actually with.

Re: The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

#36

Post by phone8675309 »

raverbashing wrote: post #24
naravara wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t this depend on having friends who are off the internet too? In the before times, I’d go to get drinks with friends and often found they were chronically distracted. If there’s a lull in conversation they pull out their phones. I go to the bathroom and come back and they’re swiping through Tinder. I got married before the dating apps got popular so I never went down that particular rabbit hole, but I feel like…

Of course. That's the type of "boomer solution" that a) solves nothing b) only makes sense for those who don't have that problem in the first place It goes the same way of telling "stop being sad" to depressed people or the most meaningless advice of "just be yourself".

Or, perhaps a more charitable reading may be "if you’re not staring at a screen perhaps you’ll meet people while out and form social bonds"?

If you’re very online and you’re lonely being very online then proposing that you change what you’re doing to perhaps get different results is not the same thing as "have you tried not being sad????"

Re: The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

#37

Post by mandmandam »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #10
jbrun wrote: post #4

It's a bit paradoxical. I have a tech company and most staff want to come to the office 1 day a week. Getting them to come is very tough. Many of my staff and friends don't want to have kids, make no effort to find a partner and find all sorts of excuses. Netflix, the internet and these things are part of the problem, but I have no clue what the solution is. There is only one way to not be lonely - be with people who…

All I can think: turn off the internet. Internet in the morning. Have your coffee, catch up on the news, your social. Then put the internet down for the rest of the day. Go out, ride a bike with a friend, go hike with a friend, go to a coffee shop, library....

As apt as those suggestions may be for this crowd, they are neither practical or even polite for a huge proportion of the country.

Re: The pandemic has deepened an epidemic of loneliness

#40

Post by MisterTea »

jbrun wrote: post #4

It's a bit paradoxical. I have a tech company and most staff want to come to the office 1 day a week. Getting them to come is very tough. Many of my staff and friends don't want to have kids, make no effort to find a partner and find all sorts of excuses. Netflix, the internet and these things are part of the problem, but I have no clue what the solution is. There is only one way to not be lonely - be with people who…

> That requires an investment of time and of your emotions - something many people seem unable or unwilling to do.

Unwilling or stolen by tech companies who engineer addiction?

Post reply on HN