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I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

wave3.social

41–50 of 728 posts

Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

#41

The lack of deep friendships feel like a 3-fold problem. 1. You can't ever be real, if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something someone somewhere on the largest stage in the world (the public web) that someone will disapprove of, and someone else will raise their own profile by mining your impiety to prove their own concern and moral superiority. 2. Everyone is so mobile and connected online, they…

> You can't ever be real, if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something…

I'm real all the time. What am I missing here?

Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

#45

Sometimes I wish we could have "gentlemen's clubs" of the sort that existed in Victorian Britain (not the US strip club version), third-spaces where one could go to read or converse or play cards with other men or even have a meal or a drink. Having social space that's limited to a set of people one knows, more or less, and that has rules on behavior seems like a civilizing influence that's missing today.

I recommend everyone watch the series Lodge 49. It's free to watch with ads now. Not only is a great show that touches on relationships and loneliness and modern alienation with a touch of magical realism and esoterica and alchemy but it focuses on a fraternal (in name only, women are members) order that your grandfather might have been a member of but have disappeared due to rising individualism, rising rents and di…

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Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

#47

Homepage leaves me asking why this website wasn't a Meetup group for AI-generated stock photos. What's to resonate? I hate to have to be the one to say it, but speaking from my mid-forties, what you are experiencing is called "entering your 30s." If you try to sell "fix loneliness" to a "not committed yet to growing TF up" market you're cooked. Ironically, I'm probably pretty close to who you think you want to hear f…

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Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

#48
post #27

Male loneliness talk aside, why wouldn’t you start a Facebook group to get a gauge for actual interest? I know you mentioned deliberately not using Facebook and Meetup, but spinning up a whole new site just to connect with people seems like a lot of work for something that is largely a solved problem on those platforms. Facebook groups are very popular because so many people are already connected into it. Getting peo…

That would exclude me and others who refuse on principle to use Facebook (or really any social media owned by Meta).

Re: I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

#50
I'd like to offer a contrarian view.

Much of the NYT article can be explained away by the Gell-Mann effect. During most of human history it was hard to maintain multiple strong bonds anyway; long distance communication pre-internet was hard too. There are plenty of modern opportunities for finding friends based on interests: conferences, concerts, sports bars etc. How much of this discussion is a moral panic caused by imprecise notions which by definition cannot be described by hard data?

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