Suburbs are structurally lonely (your own castle with as little reliance on others as possible), and only ‘work’ when paired with other sources of community. Those sources are disappearing for a variety of reasons but the transfer from physical -> digital, communal [1] -> personalized, eating out -> eating in [2], public space -> private space, friend time —> media time all add up. We also don’t have strong culture around co-habitation within let alone across families, and a bunch of other culture things that keep us isolated physically and cognitively.
Look at schools and retirement communities for examples of how to design community that keeps us present and with others, then compare to what most experience.
There’s a space between the immediate self/family and the super broad impersonal gov’t and/or hired services (that pave your roads, deliver your food, etc) that is severely under-developed in our modern context. Local interdependency and pooled resources isn’t a thing. My read from talking to several peers in 30s is an openness to explore alternative community structures (eg like a kibbutz) to bring this close community back. I get the sense from many that there’s just something missing and we’re all starting to rediscover the ways communities in the past organized themselves to fill this important place in our lives.
[1] communal being other-oriented or at least aware of others needs versus having our needs ever more optimized and personalized. This causes mindset shift.
[2] there are stats showing rapid increase in delivery over dining in past 10yrs, I believe it’s now majority takeout/delivery these days
Interesting that the my image is the exact opposite.
Downtown no one talks to each other. They live in fancy apartment buildings and go out to their events.
In the Suburbs, neighbors have BBQs, block parties. I knew all the people around the house when I lived in the suburbs. The Garys next door with their bull dog and their daughter Diane living in a detached apartment above the garage. The Alberas with a farm in their backyard. The Kumbs with their kids Gary and Janice and a pool. The Ryans who mister Ryan would always ask me to rub his back and his daughters Kim and Nannet were both my babysitter at one point or another. The Caldwells with their 5 kids Brian, John, Wendy and 2 too small for me to have played with. The Bargayos with Leah and Laura. I can name at least 7 more families.
Since that time living in apartments in cities I've never made friends with a single neighbor.
For most of my life that's been the stereotype. There are plenty of movies about people knowing each other in an ET/Spielberg movie style suburban neighborhood vs the cold hearted city.
My European perspective. I wouldn't blame it on suburbs in particular. I would blame most if not all forms of city living. Most people live in flats where nobody wants to have anything to do with their neighbor and there is no communality. People move in and move out, nobody cares. The less you have to hear of your neighbor, the better. FWIW I would rather have a 'burb castle than a flat where I have to smell and listen to idiots drink, smoke, fight and blast music. And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.
Now farms and other isolated & rural towns are a different deal. There you're no longer mass of people. You actually get to know the community around you, and people don't come & go nearly as much.
I lived on a kibbutz after college. It has its own set of problems. The closer you live to people, the more politics enters the picture. The less money there is to go around, the more that politics revolves around the relatively financially trivial. You can't force people to like each other just because they live in close proximity.
The problem isn't finding people with shared interests and values, it's in building real-world (not Internet-based) communities around them.
Blaming it on community planning might be pointing to the symptom rather than the problem. I’d hazard that the real problem is intolerance born from individualism. In the American context we have a society such that people both clutch and invent their own rights while insisting that all others respect and maintaining them. This would be fine if tolerance actually existed and the relationship were bidirectional. The relationship has proven to be unidirectional in a lot of cases which has led to the polarity that we are experiencing. Abstracting further, I’d say that these situations could largely be reduced to groups of people misunderstanding the significance of difference between tolerance and affirmation.
Last words: yes it is simplistic and reductionist to boil it down like this. I’m comfortable with staging the problem like this because we aren’t considering an ultra specific case here that requires precision.
My armchair opinion is that the middle ground / something missing is characterized by a few things that used to be somewhat fulfilled by the workplace:
1. Tribal feel: 100-200 individuals not your immediate family.
2. Pursuit of some shared goal. When we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, this was probably as simple as shared survival.
3. Forced interaction and cooperation. If you can flee at the first sign of annoyance, you're never required to develop deeper bonds with the people from #1 if they are even remotely irritating to you and can just opt out of getting to know them.
Work probably fulfilled a lot of these requirements when people stayed at one place for decades. Even if people came and went, there was some stable group of people that you were stuck with in pursuit of a common goal. I suspect this held even in the face of industrialization and the formation of massive corporations. Now, though, people move around so much that the workplace feels extremely impermanent and fleeting. In some ways I think that may be a good thing. The "community" you get from work has probably always been false. But I believe it did serve a psychological need, and as that's degraded I think you're seeing a lot of unhappiness result.
I've recently been looking for a house cleaner and decorator as I have a hard time keeping up due to working
busy hours at my job (and I really hate cleaning & decorating).
I was chatting with a friend of mine who needs a web application for something he volunteers for. We came up with the bright idea that he would clean my place then do the interior design. At the same time he's working on that, I work on his app.
We sort of organically discovered a business contract and so far it has been working great. He enjoys cleaning and design and I like programming and both of us either hate or can't do the other. In addition, it gets us both off our asses as we're generally working on these things at times that we would normally be watching TV or doing other useless things. So far it feels win-win-win and it gets to the heart of what you were talking about - how to fill in that community between hired help and your close family. The alternative was that both of us spent our own money for these services and probably end up not as happy with what we got.
I think it's a factor, but not a major one. Look at Tokyo, for example, which is probably very close to an ideal urban living arrangement in terms of density/comfort. Yet Japan also has a huge problem with "loneliness epidemic", from hikikomori to kodokushi.
I think the biggest factor is what grandpa Marx identified hundred and fifty years ago: human alienation is an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself.
There's tons of literature on this, e.g. see links below, but many people seem to be afraid to even read the arguments, let alone engage.
The need for and convenience of cars. Public transport promotes community, but cars isolate - in particular children. I daren't let my daughter ride down the lane on her bike, so she's trapped.
I don’t see how the rise of digital media and independence somehow lead to disassembled communities.
A lot of people argue that the internet takes us away from human connection but I disagree. If anything it brings people closer by allowing individuals to join communities that they could never have assembled with their reach in the physical world.
Furthermore if an individual prefers to be on their device over talking to people near them, it’s probably because they wouldn’t talk to those people to begin with. Or that they feel so comfortable in the community they’ve already built that they don’t care to expand (a problem that exists with or without technology).
There is a skill to running a friend group which regularly does activities together. It isn't a particularly deep or study-intensive skill, but there are things to learn about how to communicate about logistics and activity-preferences. Once you learn that and are able to practice it, having friends becomes much easier.
It does however also depend on meeting people who also have a reasonable level of logistical and calendar-management skill. Not everyone has this skill and not everyone prioritizes exercising it. If you have contacts who cannot unambiguously agree to meet you at a particular time at a particular pizza restaurant, you have to be willing to search out different contacts who do have sufficient skill, caring, and resources.
The non-PC argument here is that diversity directly opposed to community, and I think there's some truth to it. If everyone in an area has lived there for their entire lives, it doesn't really matter if it's apartment buildings, a small high-density European-style town, or suburbs. If the rate of migration in/out is low enough, newcomers assimilate, assuming the society is welcoming and they interact.
There are lots of places where immigration (both within the US and internationally) is very high, and where people often only intend to live for a while for work, so there's not much in the way of community, and people don't make much of an investment in building institutions (beyond their immediate household and workplace).
It's ok in technology or other well-connected professions (because I probably care more about my interactions online and at conferences with the ~200 or so security people from around the world that I closely follow, vs. anyone from my home town or where I've ever physically lived), but for anyone else, it probably sucks a lot. The only culture I've ever seen which seems to deal with that level of constant migration in anything approaching a functional way is the military, and there it's due to an overarching identity, lots of highly artificial forms of identity (the "unit", rivalries, etc.), and lots of traditions and institutions actively encouraged.
Internal migration in the U.S. has fallen consistently since the 1980s; more people today live closer to where they were born than they did in previous decades. And in most places in the U.S. -- certainly, the places captured by this loneliness survey -- the number of brand-new migrants is tiny relative to that population of people who were born there.
If you want to have a reasonable discussion about these things, don't front-load your argument with labeling people who disagree with you in such broad, and frankly wrong, strokes.
> There are lots of places where immigration (both within the US and internationally) is very high, and where people often only intend to live for a while for work
What you're describing doesn't really fit with the broader concept of immigration, which has more of a long-duration/permanent settlement aspect to it. But, I can certainly imagine that any place which is just a temporary destination for people would have a hard time becoming a real community.
If this is true, I’d expect loneliness to be higher in diverse urban centers and lower in rural areas. Is this the case? Anecdotally I’ve notice the opposite... that diverse urban areas are less lonely and isolating.
While I do agree with your thought that transient communities are more lonely because they have no true community. I disagree in that I think diversity has powerful mechanisms that breeds unique experiences, which is arguably the universal joy of life.
The thesis from Sebastian Junger’s book Tribes esplains it best: when a community has a common stressor, that strengthens the social cohesion. An incredible point made was that Israel has the lowest sucide rate of all the third world countries, and guess what he attributes it to? Mandatory draft. The common stressor that every single countryman can empathasize with each other about is war. While it sounds depressing it serves as an example, do we as a nation, state, city or even neighborhood have a common stressor with each other? Antecdotally I find it challenging to think of something like that for my community.
It's interesting that Junger points to a mandatory draft as an example. Two counterpoints to that would be South Korea and Lithuania, which also have mandatory drafts and high rates of suicide per capita.
>An incredible point made was that Israel has the lowest suicide rate of all the third world countries, and guess what he attributes it to? Mandatory draft. The common stressor that every single countryman can empathasize with each other about is war.
The second part would explain bigger empathy/cohesion (the have a common stressor), not less suicide.
I'd say it's rather that the draft can make you see often BS personal problems people tend blow out of all proportion for what they are (in other words, it "hardens" you). If you have to be accountable to a sergeant, wake up every morning at 6', do drills, have to learn to work and live with others whether they fit your echo bubble or not, etc, for a year or two, you get a taste of more stuff that awaits in the real/working word than you'd get starting from being overprotected and spoiled by your parents all your life.
> ...do we as a nation, state, city or even neighborhood have a common stressor with each other?
I think "common stressor" might be too broad a term. We certainly do have a common stressor: make more money (leaving aside Banks' adage "Money is a sign of poverty"). Except we've evolved narratives around money that tend towards zero sum outlooks, and that doesn't bind us together, so that isn't the kind of common stressor you are describing.
The factor that appears to set apart the kind of common stressor you describe is an empathic quality experiencing the stressor together imbues upon the group. This is why external stressors are so quickly seized upon by politicians of all stripes (not just formal politicians, but also managers). Why the group cannot bond over overcoming common human frailties and insecurities ("will I be liked" type insecurities), is an open challenge.
I live in SF and it has plenty to do. But last night despite aching to get out of the house I couldn’t.
I don’t have a ton of friends out here and the ones I have are frequently busy with their own projects/life
The typical offered advice is join meetups to meet new people, but a search of meetups going on last night were only for events where you drink heavily (a weekly beer pong tournament for backpackers, that I’ve been to twice only to find it’s a huge rip off and nobody shows up) or for niche groups I don’t fall into (LGBTQA+, Elderly, meetups for specific racial groups)
Every now and then I’ll go out anyway, just go to a bar and see what happens, and maybe 30% of the time I’ll meet cool people, but those relationships never blossom. I’ll text them after and then later in the week to hang that next weekend, and lo and behold they’re busy
I do clubs/exercise classes during the week, but so far, those haven’t blossomed into outside of club/class relationships. Every now and then I’ll ask if it feels right.
My roommates are cool and my age, but much more of the “finance bro” type. I don’t mind that so every now and then I’ll suggest we grab a beer or watch basketball (they’re really into the Warriors) but they usually pass. I think they can tell I’m not quite like them.
In terms of dating, dating in SF is kind of a crap shoot, What with there being something like 2 guys for every girl out here (thank you tech), but when I do get a match on tinder and go on a date it usually goes well, then we’ll go on a few more then I inevitably end up ghosted, or call it off if it’s not working from the other end
Loneliness exists inspite of our efforts not because of it.
I’ve been in this city for over a year now, and despite all of the effort, my friend group hasn’t grown
So, drinking can be problematic, but I highly recommend Karaoke, and ... moderate drinking.
You may cringe at the idea, but it’s worked for me in the past and can be a way to enjoy drinks with complete strangers with whom you have nothing else in common and often without planning ahead.
When I had no friend group, I created a small one around Karaoke night - with complete strangers. I imagine the same might work for other things like pool.
FWIW, it took me a year and a half to establish a friendgroup in SF, and I didn't find it by meetsups or recreation, just by pure happenchance of finding someone who WILL reply to your texts, and welcome you into their friendgroup. I also find friendgroups in SF to be fairly surface level, OR vibrant/intense but short-lived.
That said, roommates are also a great way to expand your friend circle, though not all roommates are looking for that, and sometimes it takes a few different pairings to finally "click," with your roommates.
I think drop-in sports/intramurual leagues are good for this, though I could be wrong. Join a kickball league or something maybe :)
I'm curious to see if there are any statistics on loneliness and race. I often see the black people in my city sitting on porches and benches in the evening and chatting with each other; it seems like a very nice community and something I wish I could have been a part of growing up. Same thing with the Latino community: in my mom's country, people still practice an open door policy among friends, still gather around the TV and scream at the sports players for hours. There is no white community so to speak: people today would probably say that's racist. But I think a lot of white people remember the "it takes a village" days, the days before we decided to demonize anyone that let their kids out of their sight, when television was just becoming affordable.
I’ve lived in the US my entire life, and I’ve come to feel like American society is one big competition to be more well-off than everyone else. Does anyone else feel this way?
I think this is why I have difficulty making friends.
I think it is the type of people in your circles. Social elite, east coast, etc is where I hear that sentiment.
I grew up poor. The only one-upsmanship I recall was in story telling or joking.
Now as a well off adult, my social circle is much smaller, and since I just moved, it is about zero, but I've not seen this competition from my cohorts at work.
Humans have always had a preoccupation with their status. In capitalistic you do this largely through the accumulation and display of material wealth. This is pathological. If you look a poor or pre-capitalist societies, the only way people can accumulate status is by being useful, and by being a good guy.
I do actually feel pretty well settled with some sense of community where I live (Montreal), but one thing I've noticed while applying to jobs is how many jobs are super aggressive about relocating me to NYC or the bay area. They almost don't listen to me when I say I'm not leaving Montreal, like I need some sort of excuse to want to actually stay where I currently am.
The atomisation of society goes back a long way, however, I believe that the era of atomised society we now know was ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher.
What changed then was stranger danger. With schemes such as 'Neighbourhood Watch' (in the UK) people saw strangers as potential threats, just there wanting to break in, steal the VHS player and sell it for heroin. Strangers were not welcomed as visitors, that was not the default.
Much else happened then to destroy community and make it so everyone was out for themselves. In the UK we also had the privatisation of social housing and the privatisation of public transport. The car became king and the poor could end up being those terrifying homeless types that nobody likes to see but take for granted nowadays.
In generations before Thatcher/Reagan there was TV and that apparently destroyed community. True we might not have been going down to the church hall to have a dance or to play board games, however, at least with TV families watched programmes together in the front room. Plus with only a few channels you could talk about TV with people in ways you can't today. There was still a national conversation, even if it was about what David Attenborough had brought to the small screen the night before.
Community is the enemy of consumerism, if people are sat in a public space enjoying company then they are not in their cars going to shops and buying commodity entertainment. But consumerism has kind of died too, people do not shop like they used to as any mall can testify to.
Despite everything that is wrong people are innately wanting to have friends and be part of a community. This will never go away, even if those needs are currently met by proxies in social media and opioids. Although Thatcher grade leaders may want everyone divided and living in an atomised society, human nature will win in the end. Long live the revolution.
It's easy to point out that this is caused by 'the internet' or 'modern technology' replacing the need for human interaction. We feel less alone but are more selective about our friends, live in smaller echo chambers.
In meatspace there's this thing where you want people to like you if you meet them, possibly enforced by the fact that someone might punch you if you rile them up. On the internet we select our own groups and then with group dynamics we try to be the 'cool kid' which results in maybe racist in-jokes or maybe in radicalization.
I really have no idea how to even begin solving this and if this has to be solved at all. It seems everyone's stance is hardening and we're drawing starker 'us vs them' lines or just aren't interested in others' plights as we can just select the small subset of people that fit with our current mindset.
Over the past few months, I have made great progress on developing habits to fight my depression. I wake up very early, hike, work on my side projects, and go to communal hacker spaces sometimes.
However, I and many others still feel very lonely, it's like we all live in seperate bubbles and can't connect deeply. I have no idea what causes this divide. Have humans always felt like this?
I find it strange that I have friends, but I'm always feel alone. I live in a huge city, work has good people that are genuine friends outside of work, but I always feel alone. Everyone talks about meetups and conferences, but I find them to be extremely superficial interactions.
I also only ever see people outside work for social purposes about once a month or two. I've tried going out more, but nothing really ever happens.
There is a good reason why people are escaping small towns. If you are even a little bit outside of the mold, such as being into reading instead of cars as a guy, you will be ostracized by a huge part of the community. And may God have mercy on you if you are into the really weird stuff, such as liking programming, tinkering with electronics or anime.
My impression is that many people sneer at the things that are necessary for building relationships or consider them lazy/stupid/etc. Things like doing or not doing thing just because others like it. Things like going home to familly instead of staying late. Coordinating with friends to help each other - you are supposed to be individual. Or just socializing without networking or other practical gain.
You are supposed to work 70 hours a week and change job every two years and be aggressive in pursuing own goals. It makes for a good economy, but also for loneliness as there is no space for trust and relationships building.
I’m highly skeptical. There’s only one piece of data cited in the article. In that data, the only mention of a possible trend is this
> shows that loneliness is worse in each successive generation.
Basically if you read the linked to report, the data show older people are less lonely than younger people right now. That’s not the same as showing loneliness increasing over time. There are many plausible reasons for younger people to be lonelier... it’s just as likely younger groups are always lonely and lose loneliness as they age.
The rest of the article talks about partisanship, which is a different issue entirely. Indeed as we sort ourselves into ideologically similar communities I might expect loneliness to decrease.
Social institutions started falling down once TV appeared and was demanding of attention. You had to be around at 8pm on Tuesday to see your show.
Now with phones we have even bigger attention sinks.
End of the day, the rise of cheap entertainment and the long decline of mainline religious organizations, erosion of ethnic organizations, etc have led to a lot of social problems. There was an article a few weeks ago suggesting that even romantic relationships are having problems as people have trouble with social contact and apps have made sex on demand a thing.
>Couldn’t it be that younger people are always lonelier than older generations?
The article doesn't merely say that "younger people are lonelier than older generations", but that successive generations are lonelier than those previously...
I think that we long for genuinely human interaction. The absence of that makes us lonely. But tech-mediated interactions reduce the amount of human interaction. (Having this conversation on HN isn't the same as us having the same conversation at a bar, even if we say the same things.) We get more interaction via tech (across the world, not just in the same room), but much of the human touch gets lost.
But I think the problem is bigger than that. Our philosophy has dehumanized us. It's basically a question of who we think we are.
As a society, we no longer believe in God. We believe in the physical universe - in matter and the laws of physics. That means that all we can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. That's all we can be, because there is nothing else.
In particular, we can't have any free will or any ability to make a real choice. Matter that obeys the laws of physics doesn't choose anything - it just obeys the laws of physics. We're just machines made of atoms obeying the laws of quantm electrodynamics, which make up biochemicals obeying the laws of biochemistry, which make up neurons obeying the laws of neurology - and nothing more.
We can't love in the real sense of the word - choosing what's best for the one we love - because we can't choose anything. Even the lesser flavors of love are just a matter of biochemicals and neurons just doing their thing.
There's no real beauty in any objective sense - there's just certain things happen to hit our neurons in a certain way.
For that matter, there's no truth, either, and not just in the postmodern sense. If our brains were built by evolution, they were built to give a good enough answer fast enough. They were not built to find actual truth, even were such a thing to exist.
So in this view, free will, love, beauty, and truth - everything we thought of as making us human - are dead. We're just machines, just like the computers on our desks. As more and more people believe this (and start to act like it), it becomes more and more rare to be treated in a genuinely human way. The result is that we are lonely.
You might really enjoy the short book "The Abolition of Man" by CS Lewis. It's not a fantasy or apologetics book like he's known for, doesn't presume any christian or theistic view point, but it describes a very similar phenomenon to your observations, what he calls "men without chests".
I will say that there are actually places (in the US at least) where what you describe is not the societal norm at all. But there's tradeoffs with everything. Super visible religiousity and expectations of constant amiability and politeness do have some downsides. It is less lonely though.
It's interesting to me that among the HN readership, the majority of the conversation here is either "This is true because it matches my experience." or "I had a different experience and therefore this is false."
Cities and suburbs (and rural places too, for that matter) all fall on a spectrum, and probably a bell curve. People do too. I think too many of us expect happiness to come from the place we're in magically, as if it takes no effort to find it. You still have to work to connect with people no matter where you live, However, this doesn't invalidate the contribution that certain build environments make to loneliness.
Personally I don't think it's the work/life balance that is different from 60 and 70 years ago the reason of loneliness.
I think it's the combination of the world getting smaller, via technology, and the rise of individualism the increased standard of living gives us.
From one hand, the too small world frightens us, it makes us want to shell ourselves from the big nasty world.
On the other hand, we think we are special and the others around us not worthy of us.
Greece has the exact same problem (which was made worse by the recent crisis), perhaps in different numbers, since family ties are strong here and people don't usually relocate to find work, but it's still a problem.
[+] [-] npunt|7 years ago|reply
Look at schools and retirement communities for examples of how to design community that keeps us present and with others, then compare to what most experience.
There’s a space between the immediate self/family and the super broad impersonal gov’t and/or hired services (that pave your roads, deliver your food, etc) that is severely under-developed in our modern context. Local interdependency and pooled resources isn’t a thing. My read from talking to several peers in 30s is an openness to explore alternative community structures (eg like a kibbutz) to bring this close community back. I get the sense from many that there’s just something missing and we’re all starting to rediscover the ways communities in the past organized themselves to fill this important place in our lives.
[1] communal being other-oriented or at least aware of others needs versus having our needs ever more optimized and personalized. This causes mindset shift.
[2] there are stats showing rapid increase in delivery over dining in past 10yrs, I believe it’s now majority takeout/delivery these days
[+] [-] tokyodude|7 years ago|reply
Downtown no one talks to each other. They live in fancy apartment buildings and go out to their events.
In the Suburbs, neighbors have BBQs, block parties. I knew all the people around the house when I lived in the suburbs. The Garys next door with their bull dog and their daughter Diane living in a detached apartment above the garage. The Alberas with a farm in their backyard. The Kumbs with their kids Gary and Janice and a pool. The Ryans who mister Ryan would always ask me to rub his back and his daughters Kim and Nannet were both my babysitter at one point or another. The Caldwells with their 5 kids Brian, John, Wendy and 2 too small for me to have played with. The Bargayos with Leah and Laura. I can name at least 7 more families.
Since that time living in apartments in cities I've never made friends with a single neighbor.
For most of my life that's been the stereotype. There are plenty of movies about people knowing each other in an ET/Spielberg movie style suburban neighborhood vs the cold hearted city.
[+] [-] clarry|7 years ago|reply
My European perspective. I wouldn't blame it on suburbs in particular. I would blame most if not all forms of city living. Most people live in flats where nobody wants to have anything to do with their neighbor and there is no communality. People move in and move out, nobody cares. The less you have to hear of your neighbor, the better. FWIW I would rather have a 'burb castle than a flat where I have to smell and listen to idiots drink, smoke, fight and blast music. And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats.
Now farms and other isolated & rural towns are a different deal. There you're no longer mass of people. You actually get to know the community around you, and people don't come & go nearly as much.
[+] [-] solatic|7 years ago|reply
The problem isn't finding people with shared interests and values, it's in building real-world (not Internet-based) communities around them.
[+] [-] haloux|7 years ago|reply
Last words: yes it is simplistic and reductionist to boil it down like this. I’m comfortable with staging the problem like this because we aren’t considering an ultra specific case here that requires precision.
[+] [-] ellius|7 years ago|reply
1. Tribal feel: 100-200 individuals not your immediate family.
2. Pursuit of some shared goal. When we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, this was probably as simple as shared survival.
3. Forced interaction and cooperation. If you can flee at the first sign of annoyance, you're never required to develop deeper bonds with the people from #1 if they are even remotely irritating to you and can just opt out of getting to know them.
Work probably fulfilled a lot of these requirements when people stayed at one place for decades. Even if people came and went, there was some stable group of people that you were stuck with in pursuit of a common goal. I suspect this held even in the face of industrialization and the formation of massive corporations. Now, though, people move around so much that the workplace feels extremely impermanent and fleeting. In some ways I think that may be a good thing. The "community" you get from work has probably always been false. But I believe it did serve a psychological need, and as that's degraded I think you're seeing a lot of unhappiness result.
[+] [-] liberte82|7 years ago|reply
I was chatting with a friend of mine who needs a web application for something he volunteers for. We came up with the bright idea that he would clean my place then do the interior design. At the same time he's working on that, I work on his app.
We sort of organically discovered a business contract and so far it has been working great. He enjoys cleaning and design and I like programming and both of us either hate or can't do the other. In addition, it gets us both off our asses as we're generally working on these things at times that we would normally be watching TV or doing other useless things. So far it feels win-win-win and it gets to the heart of what you were talking about - how to fill in that community between hired help and your close family. The alternative was that both of us spent our own money for these services and probably end up not as happy with what we got.
[+] [-] baursak|7 years ago|reply
I think it's a factor, but not a major one. Look at Tokyo, for example, which is probably very close to an ideal urban living arrangement in terms of density/comfort. Yet Japan also has a huge problem with "loneliness epidemic", from hikikomori to kodokushi.
I think the biggest factor is what grandpa Marx identified hundred and fifty years ago: human alienation is an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself.
There's tons of literature on this, e.g. see links below, but many people seem to be afraid to even read the arguments, let alone engage.
https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php
https://isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|7 years ago|reply
In rural communities everyone knows everyone. People talk to each other. People help each other.
This is especially true in Seattle. The Seattle Freeze is very real.
[+] [-] sgt101|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derangedHorse|7 years ago|reply
A lot of people argue that the internet takes us away from human connection but I disagree. If anything it brings people closer by allowing individuals to join communities that they could never have assembled with their reach in the physical world.
Furthermore if an individual prefers to be on their device over talking to people near them, it’s probably because they wouldn’t talk to those people to begin with. Or that they feel so comfortable in the community they’ve already built that they don’t care to expand (a problem that exists with or without technology).
[+] [-] afarrell|7 years ago|reply
It does however also depend on meeting people who also have a reasonable level of logistical and calendar-management skill. Not everyone has this skill and not everyone prioritizes exercising it. If you have contacts who cannot unambiguously agree to meet you at a particular time at a particular pizza restaurant, you have to be willing to search out different contacts who do have sufficient skill, caring, and resources.
[+] [-] rdl|7 years ago|reply
There are lots of places where immigration (both within the US and internationally) is very high, and where people often only intend to live for a while for work, so there's not much in the way of community, and people don't make much of an investment in building institutions (beyond their immediate household and workplace).
It's ok in technology or other well-connected professions (because I probably care more about my interactions online and at conferences with the ~200 or so security people from around the world that I closely follow, vs. anyone from my home town or where I've ever physically lived), but for anyone else, it probably sucks a lot. The only culture I've ever seen which seems to deal with that level of constant migration in anything approaching a functional way is the military, and there it's due to an overarching identity, lots of highly artificial forms of identity (the "unit", rivalries, etc.), and lots of traditions and institutions actively encouraged.
[+] [-] robinsloan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgh|7 years ago|reply
If you want to have a reasonable discussion about these things, don't front-load your argument with labeling people who disagree with you in such broad, and frankly wrong, strokes.
[+] [-] carbocation|7 years ago|reply
What you're describing doesn't really fit with the broader concept of immigration, which has more of a long-duration/permanent settlement aspect to it. But, I can certainly imagine that any place which is just a temporary destination for people would have a hard time becoming a real community.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beefin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beefin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidlee1435|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
The second part would explain bigger empathy/cohesion (the have a common stressor), not less suicide.
I'd say it's rather that the draft can make you see often BS personal problems people tend blow out of all proportion for what they are (in other words, it "hardens" you). If you have to be accountable to a sergeant, wake up every morning at 6', do drills, have to learn to work and live with others whether they fit your echo bubble or not, etc, for a year or two, you get a taste of more stuff that awaits in the real/working word than you'd get starting from being overprotected and spoiled by your parents all your life.
[+] [-] yourapostasy|7 years ago|reply
I think "common stressor" might be too broad a term. We certainly do have a common stressor: make more money (leaving aside Banks' adage "Money is a sign of poverty"). Except we've evolved narratives around money that tend towards zero sum outlooks, and that doesn't bind us together, so that isn't the kind of common stressor you are describing.
The factor that appears to set apart the kind of common stressor you describe is an empathic quality experiencing the stressor together imbues upon the group. This is why external stressors are so quickly seized upon by politicians of all stripes (not just formal politicians, but also managers). Why the group cannot bond over overcoming common human frailties and insecurities ("will I be liked" type insecurities), is an open challenge.
[+] [-] baursak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RoutinePlayer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgb223|7 years ago|reply
I live in SF and it has plenty to do. But last night despite aching to get out of the house I couldn’t.
I don’t have a ton of friends out here and the ones I have are frequently busy with their own projects/life
The typical offered advice is join meetups to meet new people, but a search of meetups going on last night were only for events where you drink heavily (a weekly beer pong tournament for backpackers, that I’ve been to twice only to find it’s a huge rip off and nobody shows up) or for niche groups I don’t fall into (LGBTQA+, Elderly, meetups for specific racial groups)
Every now and then I’ll go out anyway, just go to a bar and see what happens, and maybe 30% of the time I’ll meet cool people, but those relationships never blossom. I’ll text them after and then later in the week to hang that next weekend, and lo and behold they’re busy
I do clubs/exercise classes during the week, but so far, those haven’t blossomed into outside of club/class relationships. Every now and then I’ll ask if it feels right.
My roommates are cool and my age, but much more of the “finance bro” type. I don’t mind that so every now and then I’ll suggest we grab a beer or watch basketball (they’re really into the Warriors) but they usually pass. I think they can tell I’m not quite like them.
In terms of dating, dating in SF is kind of a crap shoot, What with there being something like 2 guys for every girl out here (thank you tech), but when I do get a match on tinder and go on a date it usually goes well, then we’ll go on a few more then I inevitably end up ghosted, or call it off if it’s not working from the other end
Loneliness exists inspite of our efforts not because of it.
I’ve been in this city for over a year now, and despite all of the effort, my friend group hasn’t grown
[+] [-] drvdevd|7 years ago|reply
You may cringe at the idea, but it’s worked for me in the past and can be a way to enjoy drinks with complete strangers with whom you have nothing else in common and often without planning ahead.
When I had no friend group, I created a small one around Karaoke night - with complete strangers. I imagine the same might work for other things like pool.
[+] [-] MAGZine|7 years ago|reply
That said, roommates are also a great way to expand your friend circle, though not all roommates are looking for that, and sometimes it takes a few different pairings to finally "click," with your roommates.
I think drop-in sports/intramurual leagues are good for this, though I could be wrong. Join a kickball league or something maybe :)
[+] [-] Invictus0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] booleandilemma|7 years ago|reply
I think this is why I have difficulty making friends.
[+] [-] sethammons|7 years ago|reply
I grew up poor. The only one-upsmanship I recall was in story telling or joking.
Now as a well off adult, my social circle is much smaller, and since I just moved, it is about zero, but I've not seen this competition from my cohorts at work.
[+] [-] hasbot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fricken|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonahrd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howard941|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|7 years ago|reply
What changed then was stranger danger. With schemes such as 'Neighbourhood Watch' (in the UK) people saw strangers as potential threats, just there wanting to break in, steal the VHS player and sell it for heroin. Strangers were not welcomed as visitors, that was not the default.
Much else happened then to destroy community and make it so everyone was out for themselves. In the UK we also had the privatisation of social housing and the privatisation of public transport. The car became king and the poor could end up being those terrifying homeless types that nobody likes to see but take for granted nowadays.
In generations before Thatcher/Reagan there was TV and that apparently destroyed community. True we might not have been going down to the church hall to have a dance or to play board games, however, at least with TV families watched programmes together in the front room. Plus with only a few channels you could talk about TV with people in ways you can't today. There was still a national conversation, even if it was about what David Attenborough had brought to the small screen the night before.
Community is the enemy of consumerism, if people are sat in a public space enjoying company then they are not in their cars going to shops and buying commodity entertainment. But consumerism has kind of died too, people do not shop like they used to as any mall can testify to.
Despite everything that is wrong people are innately wanting to have friends and be part of a community. This will never go away, even if those needs are currently met by proxies in social media and opioids. Although Thatcher grade leaders may want everyone divided and living in an atomised society, human nature will win in the end. Long live the revolution.
[+] [-] mymythisisthis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supakeen|7 years ago|reply
In meatspace there's this thing where you want people to like you if you meet them, possibly enforced by the fact that someone might punch you if you rile them up. On the internet we select our own groups and then with group dynamics we try to be the 'cool kid' which results in maybe racist in-jokes or maybe in radicalization.
I really have no idea how to even begin solving this and if this has to be solved at all. It seems everyone's stance is hardening and we're drawing starker 'us vs them' lines or just aren't interested in others' plights as we can just select the small subset of people that fit with our current mindset.
[+] [-] androidgirl|7 years ago|reply
Over the past few months, I have made great progress on developing habits to fight my depression. I wake up very early, hike, work on my side projects, and go to communal hacker spaces sometimes.
However, I and many others still feel very lonely, it's like we all live in seperate bubbles and can't connect deeply. I have no idea what causes this divide. Have humans always felt like this?
[+] [-] tekla|7 years ago|reply
I also only ever see people outside work for social purposes about once a month or two. I've tried going out more, but nothing really ever happens.
I don't get being social/
[+] [-] bragh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|7 years ago|reply
You are supposed to work 70 hours a week and change job every two years and be aggressive in pursuing own goals. It makes for a good economy, but also for loneliness as there is no space for trust and relationships building.
[+] [-] h0p3|7 years ago|reply
https://philosopher.life/#Find%20The%20Others:%5B%5BFind%20T...
[+] [-] softwaredoug|7 years ago|reply
> shows that loneliness is worse in each successive generation.
Basically if you read the linked to report, the data show older people are less lonely than younger people right now. That’s not the same as showing loneliness increasing over time. There are many plausible reasons for younger people to be lonelier... it’s just as likely younger groups are always lonely and lose loneliness as they age.
The rest of the article talks about partisanship, which is a different issue entirely. Indeed as we sort ourselves into ideologically similar communities I might expect loneliness to decrease.
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
Now with phones we have even bigger attention sinks.
End of the day, the rise of cheap entertainment and the long decline of mainline religious organizations, erosion of ethnic organizations, etc have led to a lot of social problems. There was an article a few weeks ago suggesting that even romantic relationships are having problems as people have trouble with social contact and apps have made sex on demand a thing.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
The article doesn't merely say that "younger people are lonelier than older generations", but that successive generations are lonelier than those previously...
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|7 years ago|reply
But I think the problem is bigger than that. Our philosophy has dehumanized us. It's basically a question of who we think we are.
As a society, we no longer believe in God. We believe in the physical universe - in matter and the laws of physics. That means that all we can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. That's all we can be, because there is nothing else.
In particular, we can't have any free will or any ability to make a real choice. Matter that obeys the laws of physics doesn't choose anything - it just obeys the laws of physics. We're just machines made of atoms obeying the laws of quantm electrodynamics, which make up biochemicals obeying the laws of biochemistry, which make up neurons obeying the laws of neurology - and nothing more.
We can't love in the real sense of the word - choosing what's best for the one we love - because we can't choose anything. Even the lesser flavors of love are just a matter of biochemicals and neurons just doing their thing.
There's no real beauty in any objective sense - there's just certain things happen to hit our neurons in a certain way.
For that matter, there's no truth, either, and not just in the postmodern sense. If our brains were built by evolution, they were built to give a good enough answer fast enough. They were not built to find actual truth, even were such a thing to exist.
So in this view, free will, love, beauty, and truth - everything we thought of as making us human - are dead. We're just machines, just like the computers on our desks. As more and more people believe this (and start to act like it), it becomes more and more rare to be treated in a genuinely human way. The result is that we are lonely.
[+] [-] sudosteph|7 years ago|reply
I will say that there are actually places (in the US at least) where what you describe is not the societal norm at all. But there's tradeoffs with everything. Super visible religiousity and expectations of constant amiability and politeness do have some downsides. It is less lonely though.
[+] [-] filesystemdude|7 years ago|reply
Cities and suburbs (and rural places too, for that matter) all fall on a spectrum, and probably a bell curve. People do too. I think too many of us expect happiness to come from the place we're in magically, as if it takes no effort to find it. You still have to work to connect with people no matter where you live, However, this doesn't invalidate the contribution that certain build environments make to loneliness.
[+] [-] axilmar|7 years ago|reply
I think it's the combination of the world getting smaller, via technology, and the rise of individualism the increased standard of living gives us.
From one hand, the too small world frightens us, it makes us want to shell ourselves from the big nasty world.
On the other hand, we think we are special and the others around us not worthy of us.
Greece has the exact same problem (which was made worse by the recent crisis), perhaps in different numbers, since family ties are strong here and people don't usually relocate to find work, but it's still a problem.