8 ms·

Interesting. No one has yet mentioned today's lack of community. We don't share a sense of place any more, we move around from job to job, families spread arou

Interesting. No one has yet mentioned today's lack of community. We don't share a sense of place any more, we move around from job to job, families spread around the country or globe. We rarely share an emotional connection and sense of place with our neighbours that our grandparents would have known. We haven't even kept the sense of virtual community that the BBS's had - social networks amplify dissent and engagement, not friendship and connection. That's before you get to the amount of divorce and people living alone, with less and less free time or money outside of work. I'm not the least bit surprised loneliness is becoming a global epidemic.

hliyan 9y ago
Agreed. Perhaps this is not exactly what you meant, but I do feel that shared spaces are shrinking and private spaces are expanding. I found this particular quote from The Atlantic quite telling: "The United States is in some ways becoming a medieval society, in which people live and work in the modern equivalent of castles--gated communities, apartment buildings with doormen, and office buildings with guards--and try to shield themselves while traveling between them. They do this by riding in sport-utility vehicles, which look armored, and by trying to appear as intimidating as possible to potential attackers." - Keith Bradsher https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/suvs-and-trust/547076/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/suvs-and...
- jchrisa 9y ago
  Sell your car and start biking year round. You won't be lonely for long.
  - Omnus 9y ago
    What on Earth could you possibly mean by that? You'll magically make deep, abiding, social ties by riding a bicycle?
    - jpindar 9y ago
      Well, it works for motorcycles. Sometimes I think I should get back into riding just for that reason.
  - enervate 9y ago
    Is this just dark humor or are cyclists just gregarious?
    - kodis 9y ago
      Not the OP, but I suspect that it's less about bikers and cyclists in particular and more a matter of coming into contact with other people who share an interest. Taking up golf or tennis would likely have the same effect.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I'm not against this idea, but an inattentive 23 year old driver who failed to yield killed a bicyclist crossing an interstate on ramp (in the crosswalk) down the street from my house last week, so there is risk involved. Riding bicycles alone isn't going to help; its going to take decades of urban planning to fix the last 60 years of mistakes.
  - heedlessly3 9y ago
    this guy clearly lives in the city. Some people live in the suburbs where cars are needed to commute to work
    - adamjc 9y ago
      For a given definition of 'suburb'. My commute is 10 miles each way, not a problem.
    - irrational 9y ago
      Well, I live in the suburbs and ride my bike to and from work. Though my work is just 2 miles from my house. However, the vast majority of time I see nobody (other than people in cars) while riding my bike, so I'm not exactly sure what OP means by bike riding being a way to not be lonely.
  - 13of40 9y ago
    Biking and walking to work are a couple of the loneliest activities I've tried.
    - scruple 9y ago
      I like to play "Will anyone smile and say, 'Hello!' back to me today?" whenever I'm out walking/cycling/running. The answer is more often than not, "Nope, no takers today."
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    Just to give an alternate take on the comment from how others are replying: Maybe look at it as joining a community, not specifically being about cycling. Being a cyclist gives you something in common with someone else that you can talk about it and, when doing it, it's rather visible. A running club, writing group, etc. can be similar.
  - btrettel 9y ago
    Depends on what you mean by lonely, I think. I'm a transportation cyclist, but I don't think being a cyclist has measurably increased the number of friends I have. It did give me something in common with quite a few of my friends, but I didn't meet any of them through cycling. For a while I tried joining a cycling club, but I found that I didn't have much in common with racing cyclists. Being a cyclist did however does apparently increase the number of people who seem willing to harm me, unfortunately. That's not loneliness, but it's not good either.
- tdeck 9y ago
  Did most people live and work in castles in the medieval era?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
NiklasMort 9y ago
this!
jij290sdj 9y ago
We seem convinced that pushing people to go out in the world, settle into family life, and such is what we should be shooting for. But a lot of this comes from traditional values/plant boundaries for acceptable social patterns. Perhaps we really need more alone time and less forced "sell yourself to survive." Human societies seem to be full of stretches of coming together, then short, traumatic periods of divisiveness, that end with new norms. We seem to be in something like that now. There's literally no where else to go. We'll still tacitly be around one another. I can't help but think though, that our culture is pushing "socialize at X level" because of the modern wins: it enforces adherence to popular meme. It's like religion and missionary work; socialize a lot, get in someone's face with your ideas, always be peddling it. What if it's not a literal loneliness we need, but ideological? To reclaim our imaginations. Power up an ability to imagine and think for ourselves, that's yanked away by Slack dings, and hitting next quarters metrics. We over socialized. Is it a dramatic pullback and loss of shared community? Hardly. That may be what you feel, but outside your feelings, I don't see it. Honestly, I'm all about not having to be in people's faces or here them as much as I do.
arximboldi 9y ago
I agree. However, in spite of my collectivist tendencies, I have to admit myself that it is too easy to romanticise communities from the past. They could be vicious holes with no room for scape, as the rural book trilogy from García Lorca or movies like the White Ribbon illustrate...
DenisM 9y ago
FWIW, my gym instructor proposed that the gym could be the new church - a place for people to come together. I don't feel it works out (he he), but it might be an interesting place to start thinking. I posted this list of suggestions earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16425522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16425522
- mancerayder 9y ago
  I work out at a gym, and my workout takes about 1h15 to 1.5 hours, and then I have a shower and a commute. But if you have time to socialize during a workout, you either have a lot of free time or you're doing it all wrong.
  - remar 9y ago
    I've never really understood how people seem to socialize between work sets. I've tried and it just completely kills my focus and momentum between sets. I've noticed the people at my gym who seem to talk the most are the ones who don't really come to train, but to just casually exercise. They don't seem to be following a particular program, or even know what they're doing when it comes to performing certain lifts etc.
    - mancerayder 9y ago
      At my gym, a big chain in my city, there's the word Club constantly used, and it does attract certain types who just like to meet people or chat up people. I can understand maybe being a small group doing circuits, but for strength training there's no time in between sets to have a conversation. I set a timer of between 2 and 3 minutes if I'm not supersetting, I'm not the best conversationalist during that interval.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
tischler 9y ago
.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  The liberation of women has basically caused a diffusion of responsibility of communal tasks...Yeah, so maybe it was actually a bad idea. Well, heck, you could say the same thing for Capitalism, which has also benefited billions materially. Liberation is bound to cause social disruption. The problem isn't the liberation. It's how society needs to (re)organize itself around change. It's ossification in how society views itself, which may exist in the older, traditional part, as well as in newer conceptions. The problem is ideological rigidity, which can be found in both the religious right and the secular left. You shouldn't be rigid when it's time to adjust.
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    I think this is right. The problem is people being forced or coerced to do things that don't actually make them happy. An ideological rigidity about expectations. But this tribalism is what makes human beings human. We're not going to get rid of that anytime soon, at least not without fundamentally changing the nature of the human animal. The best we can do is tell people "Prefer doing things that make you happy" and hope they don't commit their lives, careers, families, etc. to things that don't make them happy. And make "happiness discovery" much easier by changing the way we educate our young. Perhaps also it would help to give people an easy way out of things they don't enjoy doing? Kinda hard if those "things" are marriages or children, so I'm not sure how feasible it is.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      this tribalism is what makes human beings human. It's perfectly reasonable to construct a tribalism which aids in discovering the truth. Science itself is an example. The best we can do is tell people "Prefer doing things that make you happy" and hope they don't commit their lives, careers, families, etc. to things that don't make them happy. One of the best things we can do, is to have many non-exceptional role models, on which younger generations can make incremental improvements. What's needed isn't a whole-cloth re-imagining of the entire social reality. We need a kind of progressive traditionalism, where people can try and evolve towards a better society without dropping complex cultural systems which create value and human well-being. Perhaps also it would help to give people an easy way out of things they don't enjoy doing? Kinda hard if those "things" are marriages or children, so I'm not sure how feasible it is. I think it's far better to make people aware of the "price" up front, so such deep commitments are made by people who are ready.
stcredzero 9y ago
No one has yet mentioned today's lack of community...We rarely share an emotional connection and sense of place with our neighbours that our grandparents would have known. A big part of this is the degree to which people in their 20's and 30's are willing to unperson someone in public spaces -- even in person -- just for the suspicion of holding to the wrong ideological viewpoint, or even just for being from the "wrong tribe." It's so common to encounter some sort of unfounded imputation of hidden unsavory motivations. This sort of thing manifested itself in the 80's as a bigoted/snap judgement questioning of one's religious affiliation or sexual orientation. It was back in the 80's and 90's when I started to develop my information-flow technique for evaluating people: I would watch how they would evaluate me, and gauge what information they used to jump to which conclusions. Bigots often jump to wildly inaccurate conclusions quickly on scant information. Bigots often impute under-the surface motivations without justifiable evidence. I've seen such jumping/imputation in rural South Carolina and from people in poor white neighborhoods in Ohio. What's surprising to me, is the remarkable frequency with which I've seen essentially the same jumping/imputation in the Bay Area. If you want community, start by exercising the Principle of Charity. Allow for a Loyal Opposition. The vast majority of people have well-meaning (as well as self serving) reasons for their positions. If you want community, let people speak and listen to them. If you want to destroy community, then silence people and impute dark motives.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I came out of academic circles in California in my young adulthood, and I see the snap judgements you refer to quite often in myself. I think I was on a track where I valued learning and inference above everything, and that gave me a kind of a weird cognitive bias. Things I could rationalize that weren’t obvious got ++points in my head. The result being I overtrained towards using “scant” information, to use your nomenclature, and undertrained more abundant information sources that were more easily apprehended. Kind of a masochistic information bias. It did open my mind to some (very real) things that few people notice. Which is useful. But it also closed me off to some quite useful but more mundane realities. I probably share a lot with conspiracy theorists in that way. It’s been hard reorienting myself out of that. In some ways I’ve overcompensated now and become more gullible.
b0rsuk 9y ago
My pet peeve: matchmaking in games vs dedicated servers. Yes, dedicated servers had problems, and required some technical know-how to run as well as decent hardware. But they were mini communities. And some people actually enjoy matches with some level of imbalance. Mopping up a few players, getting smashed when you stumble upon a great one. There were some to watch out for. Long story short these days I play single player games and board games. As a bonus, a well thought out board game stays relevant forever. It never has its servers disabled or becomes incompatible with new system.
quanticle 9y ago
>We don't share a sense of place any more, we move around from job to job, families spread around the country or globe. That's not true. US labor mobility is the lowest it's been for generations. Our parents' and grandparents' generations had far more people that moved for work. In fact, there's a strong case to be made that a lot of social problems result from people not having the opportunity to move to areas of greater economic opportunity, whether it's because they're caring for elderly parents, or because housing is too expensive in those areas, or credentialism and increased licensing requirements have made it impractical for them to move across state lines. Whatever the cause, a wide range of economists and social scientists believe that more mobility, not less will help solve many of the pressing social issues that we face. https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-mobility https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-... http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-lack-of-labor-mobility-in-the-u-s-is-a-problem-and-how-we-can-fix-it/ http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-l... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/upshot/its-not-the-inequality-its-the-immobility.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/upshot/its-not-the-inequa...
bluntfang 9y ago
There's the concept of a 3rd place[1]. Traditionally a male-centric idea, but as the gender equality gap decreases they will be more and more important for everyone. Basically, there are 2 standard places that adults spend most of their time: Work and Home. The 3rd place is a community space like a barber shop, and allows people to participate in their community, meet people, share ideas, ect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

hliyan 9y ago

Agreed. Perhaps this is not exactly what you meant, but I do feel that shared spaces are shrinking and private spaces are expanding. I found this particular quote from The Atlantic quite telling: "The United States is in some ways becoming a medieval society, in which people live and work in the modern equivalent of castles--gated communities, apartment buildings with doormen, and office buildings with guards--and try to shield themselves while traveling between them. They do this by riding in sport-utility vehicles, which look armored, and by trying to appear as intimidating as possible to potential attackers." - Keith Bradsher https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/suvs-and-trust/547076/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/suvs-and...

jchrisa 9y ago
Sell your car and start biking year round. You won't be lonely for long.
- Omnus 9y ago
  What on Earth could you possibly mean by that? You'll magically make deep, abiding, social ties by riding a bicycle?
  - jpindar 9y ago
    Well, it works for motorcycles. Sometimes I think I should get back into riding just for that reason.
- enervate 9y ago
  Is this just dark humor or are cyclists just gregarious?
  - kodis 9y ago
    Not the OP, but I suspect that it's less about bikers and cyclists in particular and more a matter of coming into contact with other people who share an interest. Taking up golf or tennis would likely have the same effect.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  I'm not against this idea, but an inattentive 23 year old driver who failed to yield killed a bicyclist crossing an interstate on ramp (in the crosswalk) down the street from my house last week, so there is risk involved. Riding bicycles alone isn't going to help; its going to take decades of urban planning to fix the last 60 years of mistakes.
- heedlessly3 9y ago
  this guy clearly lives in the city. Some people live in the suburbs where cars are needed to commute to work
  - adamjc 9y ago
    For a given definition of 'suburb'. My commute is 10 miles each way, not a problem.
  - irrational 9y ago
    Well, I live in the suburbs and ride my bike to and from work. Though my work is just 2 miles from my house. However, the vast majority of time I see nobody (other than people in cars) while riding my bike, so I'm not exactly sure what OP means by bike riding being a way to not be lonely.
- 13of40 9y ago
  Biking and walking to work are a couple of the loneliest activities I've tried.
  - scruple 9y ago
    I like to play "Will anyone smile and say, 'Hello!' back to me today?" whenever I'm out walking/cycling/running. The answer is more often than not, "Nope, no takers today."
- JBlue42 9y ago
  Just to give an alternate take on the comment from how others are replying: Maybe look at it as joining a community, not specifically being about cycling. Being a cyclist gives you something in common with someone else that you can talk about it and, when doing it, it's rather visible. A running club, writing group, etc. can be similar.
- btrettel 9y ago
  Depends on what you mean by lonely, I think. I'm a transportation cyclist, but I don't think being a cyclist has measurably increased the number of friends I have. It did give me something in common with quite a few of my friends, but I didn't meet any of them through cycling. For a while I tried joining a cycling club, but I found that I didn't have much in common with racing cyclists. Being a cyclist did however does apparently increase the number of people who seem willing to harm me, unfortunately. That's not loneliness, but it's not good either.
tdeck 9y ago
Did most people live and work in castles in the medieval era?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

NiklasMort 9y ago

this!

jij290sdj 9y ago

We seem convinced that pushing people to go out in the world, settle into family life, and such is what we should be shooting for. But a lot of this comes from traditional values/plant boundaries for acceptable social patterns. Perhaps we really need more alone time and less forced "sell yourself to survive." Human societies seem to be full of stretches of coming together, then short, traumatic periods of divisiveness, that end with new norms. We seem to be in something like that now. There's literally no where else to go. We'll still tacitly be around one another. I can't help but think though, that our culture is pushing "socialize at X level" because of the modern wins: it enforces adherence to popular meme. It's like religion and missionary work; socialize a lot, get in someone's face with your ideas, always be peddling it. What if it's not a literal loneliness we need, but ideological? To reclaim our imaginations. Power up an ability to imagine and think for ourselves, that's yanked away by Slack dings, and hitting next quarters metrics. We over socialized. Is it a dramatic pullback and loss of shared community? Hardly. That may be what you feel, but outside your feelings, I don't see it. Honestly, I'm all about not having to be in people's faces or here them as much as I do.

arximboldi 9y ago

I agree. However, in spite of my collectivist tendencies, I have to admit myself that it is too easy to romanticise communities from the past. They could be vicious holes with no room for scape, as the rural book trilogy from García Lorca or movies like the White Ribbon illustrate...

DenisM 9y ago

FWIW, my gym instructor proposed that the gym could be the new church - a place for people to come together. I don't feel it works out (he he), but it might be an interesting place to start thinking. I posted this list of suggestions earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16425522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16425522

mancerayder 9y ago
I work out at a gym, and my workout takes about 1h15 to 1.5 hours, and then I have a shower and a commute. But if you have time to socialize during a workout, you either have a lot of free time or you're doing it all wrong.
- remar 9y ago
  I've never really understood how people seem to socialize between work sets. I've tried and it just completely kills my focus and momentum between sets. I've noticed the people at my gym who seem to talk the most are the ones who don't really come to train, but to just casually exercise. They don't seem to be following a particular program, or even know what they're doing when it comes to performing certain lifts etc.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    At my gym, a big chain in my city, there's the word Club constantly used, and it does attract certain types who just like to meet people or chat up people. I can understand maybe being a small group doing circuits, but for strength training there's no time in between sets to have a conversation. I set a timer of between 2 and 3 minutes if I'm not supersetting, I'm not the best conversationalist during that interval.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

tischler 9y ago

stcredzero 9y ago
The liberation of women has basically caused a diffusion of responsibility of communal tasks...Yeah, so maybe it was actually a bad idea. Well, heck, you could say the same thing for Capitalism, which has also benefited billions materially. Liberation is bound to cause social disruption. The problem isn't the liberation. It's how society needs to (re)organize itself around change. It's ossification in how society views itself, which may exist in the older, traditional part, as well as in newer conceptions. The problem is ideological rigidity, which can be found in both the religious right and the secular left. You shouldn't be rigid when it's time to adjust.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  I think this is right. The problem is people being forced or coerced to do things that don't actually make them happy. An ideological rigidity about expectations. But this tribalism is what makes human beings human. We're not going to get rid of that anytime soon, at least not without fundamentally changing the nature of the human animal. The best we can do is tell people "Prefer doing things that make you happy" and hope they don't commit their lives, careers, families, etc. to things that don't make them happy. And make "happiness discovery" much easier by changing the way we educate our young. Perhaps also it would help to give people an easy way out of things they don't enjoy doing? Kinda hard if those "things" are marriages or children, so I'm not sure how feasible it is.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    this tribalism is what makes human beings human. It's perfectly reasonable to construct a tribalism which aids in discovering the truth. Science itself is an example. The best we can do is tell people "Prefer doing things that make you happy" and hope they don't commit their lives, careers, families, etc. to things that don't make them happy. One of the best things we can do, is to have many non-exceptional role models, on which younger generations can make incremental improvements. What's needed isn't a whole-cloth re-imagining of the entire social reality. We need a kind of progressive traditionalism, where people can try and evolve towards a better society without dropping complex cultural systems which create value and human well-being. Perhaps also it would help to give people an easy way out of things they don't enjoy doing? Kinda hard if those "things" are marriages or children, so I'm not sure how feasible it is. I think it's far better to make people aware of the "price" up front, so such deep commitments are made by people who are ready.

stcredzero 9y ago

No one has yet mentioned today's lack of community...We rarely share an emotional connection and sense of place with our neighbours that our grandparents would have known. A big part of this is the degree to which people in their 20's and 30's are willing to unperson someone in public spaces -- even in person -- just for the suspicion of holding to the wrong ideological viewpoint, or even just for being from the "wrong tribe." It's so common to encounter some sort of unfounded imputation of hidden unsavory motivations. This sort of thing manifested itself in the 80's as a bigoted/snap judgement questioning of one's religious affiliation or sexual orientation. It was back in the 80's and 90's when I started to develop my information-flow technique for evaluating people: I would watch how they would evaluate me, and gauge what information they used to jump to which conclusions. Bigots often jump to wildly inaccurate conclusions quickly on scant information. Bigots often impute under-the surface motivations without justifiable evidence. I've seen such jumping/imputation in rural South Carolina and from people in poor white neighborhoods in Ohio. What's surprising to me, is the remarkable frequency with which I've seen essentially the same jumping/imputation in the Bay Area. If you want community, start by exercising the Principle of Charity. Allow for a Loyal Opposition. The vast majority of people have well-meaning (as well as self serving) reasons for their positions. If you want community, let people speak and listen to them. If you want to destroy community, then silence people and impute dark motives.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
I came out of academic circles in California in my young adulthood, and I see the snap judgements you refer to quite often in myself. I think I was on a track where I valued learning and inference above everything, and that gave me a kind of a weird cognitive bias. Things I could rationalize that weren’t obvious got ++points in my head. The result being I overtrained towards using “scant” information, to use your nomenclature, and undertrained more abundant information sources that were more easily apprehended. Kind of a masochistic information bias. It did open my mind to some (very real) things that few people notice. Which is useful. But it also closed me off to some quite useful but more mundane realities. I probably share a lot with conspiracy theorists in that way. It’s been hard reorienting myself out of that. In some ways I’ve overcompensated now and become more gullible.

b0rsuk 9y ago

My pet peeve: matchmaking in games vs dedicated servers. Yes, dedicated servers had problems, and required some technical know-how to run as well as decent hardware. But they were mini communities. And some people actually enjoy matches with some level of imbalance. Mopping up a few players, getting smashed when you stumble upon a great one. There were some to watch out for. Long story short these days I play single player games and board games. As a bonus, a well thought out board game stays relevant forever. It never has its servers disabled or becomes incompatible with new system.

quanticle 9y ago

>We don't share a sense of place any more, we move around from job to job, families spread around the country or globe. That's not true. US labor mobility is the lowest it's been for generations. Our parents' and grandparents' generations had far more people that moved for work. In fact, there's a strong case to be made that a lot of social problems result from people not having the opportunity to move to areas of greater economic opportunity, whether it's because they're caring for elderly parents, or because housing is too expensive in those areas, or credentialism and increased licensing requirements have made it impractical for them to move across state lines. Whatever the cause, a wide range of economists and social scientists believe that more mobility, not less will help solve many of the pressing social issues that we face. https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-mobility https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-... http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-lack-of-labor-mobility-in-the-u-s-is-a-problem-and-how-we-can-fix-it/ http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-l... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/upshot/its-not-the-inequality-its-the-immobility.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/upshot/its-not-the-inequa...

bluntfang 9y ago

There's the concept of a 3rd place[1]. Traditionally a male-centric idea, but as the gender equality gap decreases they will be more and more important for everyone. Basically, there are 2 standard places that adults spend most of their time: Work and Home. The 3rd place is a community space like a barber shop, and allows people to participate in their community, meet people, share ideas, ect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place