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

The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

city-journal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

981–990 of 1001 posts

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#981

Post by kenneth »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #924
kenneth wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another idea: be an expat. Move to a foreign country that speaks a different language and take language classes. First, it'll be a big valuable change, and it'll provide plenty of adventure, and expats are quick to make new friends given the shared isolation. I would recommend China or Taiwan.

Roatan, Honduras. With daily cruise ships in port, there's a steady influx of English speakers. Its cheap to live there, too.

Oooooh, thanks for sharing that. I've never heard of Roatan. Heard Honduras is pretty sketchy, but an island like that must be totally different and I'm now adding it on my list of places to visit. It'll help with my travel goals (have to visit another 40 or so countries in 2 years!)

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#982

Post by mensetmanusman »

kadendogthing wrote: post #477
irrational wrote: post #374

Is it just the family, or is it also community institutions? I'm thinking specifically about the decline in church attendance. Regardless of your beliefs, church congregations (not mega-churches, but small congregations of at most a few hundred) provided a built-in community that could provide support, companionship, activities, etc. So far I haven't seen anything that really replicates all those communities had to o…

>I'm thinking specifically about the decline in church attendance. This is an often repeated point but I don't see how it has any credence. Most people who attend churches may talk with each other for just a few hours -- and personally I've found most churches don't really foster a socially-healthy atmosphere. And that's fine, that's not the goals of churches, never has been and most likely never will be. Churches if…

Lots of sociological data disputing this...

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#983

Post by Fjolsvith »

kenneth wrote: post #981
Fjolsvith wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roatan, Honduras. With daily cruise ships in port, there's a steady influx of English speakers. Its cheap to live there, too.

Oooooh, thanks for sharing that. I've never heard of Roatan. Heard Honduras is pretty sketchy, but an island like that must be totally different and I'm now adding it on my list of places to visit. It'll help with my travel goals (have to visit another 40 or so countries in 2 years!)

You can go direct via cruise ship out of Houston.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#984

Post by tuesdayrain »

cferr wrote: post #972
rock_hard wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started something similar about 12 years ago...inspired by the movie “Yes man” I started saying yes to every opportunity that I came across. Wanna have lunch together? Yes! Wanna go out with us tonight? Yes! Wanna help me move? Yes! It really got me out of my shell and made me realize that the reason I was alone is because I was an asshole. People had been trying to include me all my life, but I had always declined…

"Wanna help me move?" is my favorite. Nothing like getting a free workout with a friend or family. You might even get a dinner out of it too.

> "Wanna help me move?" is my favorite. Nothing like getting a free workout with a friend or family. You might even get a dinner out of it too.

Oh cool, nothing like giving up an entire day for the possibility of a permanent back injury or accidentally damaging someone's furniture all because they're too cheap to drop a few hundred dollars on some professional movers.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#985

Post by smsm42 »

avtar wrote: post #772
smsm42 wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because for some people talking to strangers is hard. Literally - like for some people carrying a 50 lbs bag might be hard, so can be talking to a stranger. Can I take this 50 lbs bag and walk with you for a mile or two because you think it'd be fun for you? Yes, I can. Do I want to? Maybe, if you're my friend or I feel like working out or just in the mood. Or maybe not, because I don't feel like doing this work now.…

Reading this felt like you've been observing me at the gym and documenting my behaviour. I've been trying to establish an exercise habit and at some point I'd like to become comfortable again talking to strangers. It used to be a skill that I practiced unknowingly when I was young and could talk to anyone. Now there are days when I'm done working out and it takes all the effort just to make eye contact with someone a…

Don't get me wrong - many introverts can talk to strangers just fine if they need it (just as I can lift 50 lbs if I need it), it's just something they don't particularly enjoy doing. It's work. If it needs to be done, it will be done, but if it can be avoided - it will be avoided. I am not sure one needs some training to change that - if I don't enjoy doing something, why waste time on doing it if I could instead do something I already enjoy doing?

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#987

Post by shearskill »

flahgd wrote: post #494
baxtr wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if that’s true. Both my female cousins fit the description above, except they’re in their late 30s by now and still aren’t able to find partners for life. Sometimes I think maybe that’s the way it’s always been and that’s why there were forced marriages, which you might not have liked but in the end they made you happy through the family you’d usually had around you as you grow older. Don’t know

Well of course, a woman's sexual value plummets after her mid 30s (also known as "hitting the wall"). However, 25 is still young and a 25 year old girl has an almost unlimited amount of options if she tries online dating.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#988

Post by gdy »

Joukahainen wrote: post #481
Robotbeat wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extremely negative-sum way of viewing the world. Some individual humans (and even communities) can and have had a net-positive impact on the environment. For instance, did the parents of Greta Thunberg have a net-negative impact on the world by choosing to bring her into it? When people implicitly say that bringing children in the world is necessarily a net-negative on climate, they're implying that their l…

It is not realistic to expect that children will live without carbon emissions when it is clear that billions and billions of people don´t do that. We have too many people on the planet. Carbon emissions is only one of the many huge environmental problems we have. Creating new consumers to the planet is clearly the most devastating act for the environment what individual people can do.

Do you think you qualify for receiving the Darwin Award?

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#989

Post by chrismeller »

bargl wrote: post #733
chrismeller wrote: post #65

The number of people I know who advocate that “blood is thicker than water” and then spend most of our outings at a bar complaining about one or another of those blood relatives... For years I’ve felt like I’m supposed to report in to my family (my mother in particular) because otherwise I’m assumed dead. It was never reasonable, I was always safe and happy (and not engaged in anything crazy like CIA wetwork, just tr…

I actually had a similar(ish) situation to yours. I read a book called "boundaries" and that's made my relationships with my family much better. This all came about when I was getting married. This was about 10 years ago now. Fast forward to wife + kids and I did something I never thought I'd do. I moved home to be close to family again. I'm still fully self reliant but my kids get to grow up near gma and gpa which i…

I suppose my problem is that I’ve tried to set limitations. The people I’m setting them upon don’t agree.

So that leaves us at a crossroads. I either grit my teeth and continue to put up with what I see as unacceptable behavior, or I enforce the ultimatum and refuse to engage.

This is hardly the first time I have ever had this kind of argument with any of the people involved. It goes, as many family arguments tend to, along a predictable and repeatable pattern: argument, agreement, repetition.

Eventually I had to realize that this has happened dozens of times and if I don’t change any variables we will just continue to repeat the cycle for the rest of my life.

All of that said, I don’t have kids. I don’t really want them, but I assume at some point it’ll happen. I do realize that having grandma and grandpa there is valuable. You’ve got a free babysitter and the family roots. If it came down to compromising my ultimatum and not having that connection... I would absolutely, 100%, without any question, tell my mother to F off again.

The whole thing ends up being exactly what you said - sometimes family are a blessing and built in friends, but sometimes they aren’t and you find other friends to fill in that gap.

I just can’t stand it when people say that family is all that matters.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#990

Post by dang »

paganel wrote: post #644

> Especially now that Uber has a STFU option I never understood why people are so against talking to the people that give them a ride. I once was in a very rough spot in my life and talking with taxi-drivers almost daily about the most trivial stuff (weather, politics, traffic) used to give me a very healthy reprieve from the black thoughts I used to have.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117510.
Post reply on HN