Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
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Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#2"If I told you, 'I went into my backyard, I made this pill. It's amazing. It's free. If you take it, it'll actually improve your health, make you feel better, improve your performance at work, improve your grades, boost your immunity,' you'd be like, 'Sign me up. I'll take that tomorrow.'" It turns out that's what social connection is. Just a little connection can go a long way in keeping us healthy.
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#3[flagged]
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#4[flagged]
Hear me out: shorter work week (4 day week), work life balance, and living where there is more density and public transit to reduce social friction. Humans are social creatures, they must have time and opportunity to be social.
We've done the line go up thing, and it isn't working out great. Maybe we could try something else?
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#5[flagged]
Hear me out: shorter work week (4 day week), work life balance, and living where there is more density and public transit to reduce social friction. Humans are social creatures, they must have time and opportunity to be social. We've done the line go up thing, and it isn't working out great. Maybe we could try something else?
Theoretically yes.
Practically almost all people got highly manipulated into having no hobby's or interests in their free time. They will find no use for a 4 day week not will they see any advantages.
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#6[flagged]
Hear me out: shorter work week (4 day week), work life balance, and living where there is more density and public transit to reduce social friction. Humans are social creatures, they must have time and opportunity to be social. We've done the line go up thing, and it isn't working out great. Maybe we could try something else?
Definitely should be a balance between individualism and collectivism. Covid drove us all the way to one extreme, and now some people seem to crave the opposite.
But it is also interesting to see that there seems to be a wide spectrum in office cultures post Covid. Some jobs still feel like they are in the thick of it, while others are back to 5 days (or even more if you work for one of Elon's companies)
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hear me out: shorter work week (4 day week), work life balance, and living where there is more density and public transit to reduce social friction. Humans are social creatures, they must have time and opportunity to be social. We've done the line go up thing, and it isn't working out great. Maybe we could try something else?
Theoretically yes. Practically almost all people got highly manipulated into having no hobby's or interests in their free time. They will find no use for a 4 day week not will they see any advantages.
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of options." The data on 4 Day Week trials has been positive in almost all cases [1], across many countries, same with remote work. We should try it if we care, I just don't think we care at a system level.
Like rapidly declining fertility rates, there is enough will to complain, no will to change anything (imho, based on observations and the data). Maybe things need to get worse before they get better, I think we're just arguing over how bad the situation will need to get before change is made (structural demographics, socioeconomics, etc).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39992783 (citations)
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#8"If I told you, 'I went into my backyard, I made this pill. It's amazing. It's free. If you take it, it'll actually improve your health, make you feel better, improve your performance at work, improve your grades, boost your immunity,' you'd be like, 'Sign me up. I'll take that tomorrow.'" It turns out that's what social connection is. Just a little connection can go a long way in keeping us healthy.
[flagged]
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hear me out: shorter work week (4 day week), work life balance, and living where there is more density and public transit to reduce social friction. Humans are social creatures, they must have time and opportunity to be social. We've done the line go up thing, and it isn't working out great. Maybe we could try something else?
Definitely should be a balance between individualism and collectivism. Covid drove us all the way to one extreme, and now some people seem to crave the opposite. But it is also interesting to see that there seems to be a wide spectrum in office cultures post Covid. Some jobs still feel like they are in the thick of it, while others are back to 5 days (or even more if you work for one of Elon's companies)
https://www.cato.org/commentary/remote-work-here-stay-mostly...
https://www.theguardian.com/money/article/2024/jul/12/workin...
https://www.hrotoday.com/news/only-5-of-employees-prefer-wor...
https://www.population.fyi/p/singapores-fertility-crisis-cou...
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/11/27/are-remote-workers-mor...
The whole remote vs in office in somewhat a tired argument, so lets move a level up to power structures: old folks in power, both government and corporate. ~2M people in the US 55+ die every year, ~5k per day. ~4M people turn 18. ~4.1M Boomers are retiring per year, ~11k per day. This demographic transition is the opportunity to move the zeitgeist around social interaction to improve outcomes for the human at scale (imho). Like bankruptcy, change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden.
Work must get done, but re-evaluating what work looks like in the service of the human (because why are we even living if it is just to work) should be a priority if loneliness is killing us (and more time at work is not the solution imho). It's just a job, you are just a replaceable cog, most people just need a check, and coworkers are not your friends (in most cases). Collectivism is coming together as a community, not for a meaningless job and org.
(n=1, I structured my life so I can take only remote jobs, so I can be close geographically to the people who matter to me, enrich my life, and I want to spend time with, but this does not scale [or rather, we should figure out how to make it scale: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html])
Re: Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
#10[flagged]