22 ms·

The Social Recession: By the Numbers

248 points by antonomon 4y ago

antonomon 4y ago
Less friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.
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1270018080 4y ago
As someone who likes looking at charts, I hate being in the "middle" of the story on the social recession. In addition to everything listed in the article, we also have ever increasing partisanship, declines in education, climate destruction etc. Instead of everything getting .5% worse every year, it would be nice to see something dramatically change, good or bad. Some shift that actually changes things just to get this current failing society out of the way. Is this what life is always like in declining empires? Will it just get worse every year until we have a few wars and genocides until there's enough destruction to start rebuilding?
- willnonya 4y ago
  Which empire are you imagining is in decline?
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- antonomon 4y ago
  It feels like things are a bit primed for something like that, in a way. Although it could easily not and just continue indefinitely if the public is pacified completely. Still, I think if this drip drip drip of a decline continues, then I think we might start seeing some weird fascination with war as an “outlet." A lot of fine de siecle 20th century writers talked about this same thing with regards to mass industrial society, as if they wanted WWI. When Wittgenstein was sent to the front, his response was basically, “I really needed that,” as if it was some kind of cleanse. People are built for narratives, they derive meaning from them, and a drift cannot persist indefinitely. Amid the collapse of traditional meta-narratives that once gave meaning, there are today many competing ones, none of which are truly for the now. It feels like we need a new way to live otherwise we will exhaust ourselves.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I'd recommend The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd DeMause [1] if you aren't already aware of it. The actual child abuse part is not apropos the technological aspects, but there's a deep (one of the most direct and powerfully written) account of perennial sacrificial cleansing rituals and the societal death-drive (Thanatos).
    - antonomon 4y ago
      Wow, great suggestion. I will check it.
      - parthianshotgun 4y ago
        I'd really look into the validity of the book, a cursory google search reveals that's it's basically a load of shit. Also the book is narrated by Stefan Molyneux, which, I wouldn't say is a 'happy accident' when it comes to Molyneux oeuvre
        antonomon 4y ago
        Lol wtf? Jesus christ, nevermind then.
        nonrandomstring 4y ago
        Someone you don't like read a book. Therefore the book is rubbish. I suppose this is the logic we get from kids raised by algorithms.
        parthianshotgun 4y ago
        My perspective is velenced by my own biases, just like yours. My function here was just to provide a countering force to your force, and let the OP atleast be presented with the opportunity to be skeptical (mirroring the discourse around this topic, no doubt). It's worth pointing out that psychohistory is not a serious field, and largely considered a pseudoscience.
seydor 4y ago
The US must not be a low-trust society. You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can't trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan). The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple. Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today's technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as 'problems' and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Every single highly individualistic society seems to be in population decline (more so if you factor out immigrants from “anti-progressive” Muslim or Catholic countries). Individualism seems to be a self-limiting feature of society: it’s unpleasant to raise children in highly individualistic societies, which makes such societies inherently transitory.[1] Is societal self-obsolescence how you define “progress?” How successful can your society really be if your people don’t seem to want to raise kids in it and perpetuate it? If you have to import people from collectivist societies just to take care of your elderly? [1] The inverse is not true—many collectivist societies are also facing population walls—but for quite different reasons.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Birth rates dropped to below replacement rate in the 70s near universally among developed countries, far before many of them became increasingly more individualistic. American culture and attitude seeping into most of those countries kicked into overdrive the 21st century, but birthrates were already low by then.
errantmind 4y ago
The more time people spend passively consuming entertainment, the less time they spend doing everything else, including socializing. Most everyone I know just sits on their phones, computers, or TVs a good portion of the day. All boredom is banished, all gaps are filled. The threshold for participation and collaboration is higher, because why risk boredom when you have guaranteed-minimum-satisfaction available.
- juunpp 4y ago
  The best part isn't even "sitting on their phones", but walking on their phones past other humans.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Every time I'm stuck behind someone who inexplicably stopped in the middle of a walkway to answer their phone, I just imagine to myself that it's a book and think of how engrossing the plot must be for them to pull it out and read it at the worst possible time, and at least I'm a little more amused than annoyed.
    - juunpp 4y ago
      Lucky you. I get the equivalent of road rage... but on the sidewalk.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        Well, now you know my trick for dealing with it, maybe you can try it or work on one of your own ;)
    - henriquemaia 4y ago
      Thank you for sharing such a beautiful strategy to make what is now a common occurrence into something so meaningful. It's like opening up to so many possibilities, even to creativity, as you can start imagining the all possible threads that create those amazing stop-inducing plots. Thank you!
cowpig 4y ago
I wonder how much of this can be explained by social media? Feels like a feeling of impending doom with climate change could also be a factor. Also, I'd really like to see this trend in a broader context. How much did these kinds of indicators dip during, say, the great depression?
- trgn 4y ago
  Very little. This has been an ongoing process, it's called modernity. It's the evaporation of reality due to mass media and commoditization. It's a reductive process that turns actual people into widgets, the adaptation of man to machine. Human relations, since these cannot be quantitied, are transmuted into transactions that can be measured, quantitied, monetized. Affection, intimacy, loyalty thus become replqced by countable things like swipes, nft drops, car infotainment packages, yoga cruise experiences, ... The matrix is real. Not that we are living in a computer (thats just stupid), but that we are being reduced to particiption in algorithm, mere conduits of information. That malaise, hard to pinpoint but ongoing since 150 years, is the driver of the social recession
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    I genuinely fail to see how social media does not fit perfectly into the description of mass media commoditization in modernity.
    - trgn 4y ago
      For sure, it fits into it, apologies if I gave the impression it didn't.
- robocat 4y ago
  > Feels like a feeling of impending doom with climate change could also be a factor. My generation in my country feared nuclear war and economic collapse (15% inflation when I was growing up). Each demographic has its own impeding doom: climate change fear is new, but I don’t think there is more fear than the past. I think people in the US from my generation had communism to worry about, and communists probably worried about the US. The big change is social media and mass media driving more fear - hard to measure the difference though - does our capacity for fear remain constant regardless of input? Edit: and when I think of the fear in the lives of my friends, their personal situation is far more critical than any distant fear of global warming. Their kids, their job, their marriage, their parents, their friends, their status. I am interested in the demographic differences because that give good hints as to cause and effect.
tchock23 4y ago
I wonder how much of the lack of close friends is due to people moving more frequently. After college most of my close friends did a stint in various cities making it very difficult to maintain a relationship with them. I’d be curious to see a graph of reported close friendships against mobility.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Along with low density car based transport. Used to live in the suburbs a few years ago and had very few social interactions because there was way too much friction. Easier to just play video games or watch TV. Now I live in a high rise and have a few friends in the same building. Social events are spontaneous, I'll get a message like "Hey we are having a party now, come down to level 5" so I end up spending a lot of time with friends and building social groups.
  - c1ccccc1 4y ago
    I like this explanation and the one in the parent comment quite a bit. Rather than a grand thesis about internet / social media [0] / polarization that one's likely to see in a think-piece, it's the little things about how we've chosen to structure our society. These things that seem like trivial inconveniences [1], like just making some new friends when yours have moved away, or if you live the suburbs just taking that 20 minute drive whenever you want to see someone, end up having a disproportionate impact on our behaviour. After all, we evolved in an environment where one was pretty much automatically embedded in a community, with very little effort required to socialize other than following the social norms of the tribe. One other thing I'd also point to is network effects. If lots of people are all finding it easier to be online all the time rather than be social, then for any given person, that results in a reduced number of potential friends. [0] I would actually put some blame on social media for being a poor substitute for socialization, but just good enough that it makes people less likely to dig themselves out of being isolated. But blaming the internet in general, including things like blogs makes as little sense as blaming books. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
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readthenotes1 4y ago
I tried her this but it must be infected with some virus because an overlay popped up that made it so I couldn't read anything past the first paragraph!
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rafaelero 4y ago
I find this subject fascinating. We young people have been detaching from the old ways of living without really building a new narrative. I still think it's cringe how some subsections of society want to revive the traditional life ™. I mean, there's a reason we went away from that, so that ends up being very patronizing and unhelpful.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > We young people have been detaching from the old ways of living without really building a new narrative. George Hotz, are we living in a simulation (6 minutes) https://youtu.be/_SpptYg_0Rs https://youtu.be/_SpptYg_0Rs
- soared 4y ago
  That’s a common viewpoint of current times v older times on many topics. But it’s not like the 70s people were consciously building a narrative of free love, that’s just how the culture was at the time. Largely the narrative was not assessed and applied until after the fact. We have just as much of a narrative know, we just lack the ability to look at it independently and define it.
  - rafaelero 4y ago
    I don't know. Competition (be it to accomplish the best career, the best body, the best public persona) seems to be at an all time high. That suggests that we don't have any narrative that binds us and promote some type of cooperation. I could be wrong, but I don't think previous generations dealt with this level of individualism.
    - trashface 4y ago
      Late 40s guy here, I agree competition (for everything) seems much more intense now at all age levels. Wasn't like this when I was younger. As a person who prefers co-operation, I'm not liking it, and since that is my strength, it feels like I'm less able to excel in this environment.
  - 4y ago
debacle 4y ago
Look at the reddit front page and tell me it isn't enabling much of these behaviors.
- seydor 4y ago
  Look at russia and see a society that is trying to disable those behaviors
- mistermann 4y ago
  I thinks it's fascinating how it evades significant study, attention, and curiosity.
- cr4nberry 4y ago
  > Look at the reddit front page I'd rather jump off a bridge tbh
jesuscript 4y ago
Here’s a wild question: Are we not all friends here on HN? Or am I so depraved and desperate? Have I socially died and don’t even know it, friends? We’re all friends right? Right? What the fuck is going on.
- dgfitz 4y ago
  I don’t consider anyone on HN a friend if that means anything.
  - jesuscript 4y ago
    Maybe that’s the intangible the linked post is not addressing. What does friendship even mean to the people they tracked? Being able to talk to people who are willing to spend time talking back is a basis for friendship, at least in my book. Friendship doesn’t always have to be so serious.
    - Viliam1234 4y ago
      For me, a friend is a person I can discuss personal topics with. On HN, the topic is given (the article we comment on), and it is usually not personal. If it happens to be personal, it is most likely not the personal topic I would like to discuss now. Also, if any of us died today, most likely no one else on HN would ever notice. That too is not exactly what I imagine as "friendship".
      - nobody9999 4y ago
        >For me, a friend is a person I can discuss personal topics with. And for me, a friend is family I get to choose for myself. Anyone else is, at best, a friendly acquaintance. I expect there are many other definitions out there as well.
  - conductr 4y ago
    Me either but I can see how it serves the purpose of a friend and for some people it could support increased isolation
paulpauper 4y ago
I think there are some key factors: 1. Lower trust society, probably made worse by increased political division. 2. Loss of social skills. People are more testy and angry or on a hair-trigger. You look at photos from 70+ years ago and people seemed friendlier , more approachable, and more gregarious. Same for online, in which people have gotten angrier and more intolerant with each election cycle. Campus guest speakers have been shouted-down when trying to give talks, such as Charles Murray. This suggests poor social skills. 3. Individual preferences. Perhaps people are choosing to withdrawal or be alone, because it's more enjoyable. Maybe the internet, smart phones, Netflix, and social media are more enjoyable than social outings. There are more ways then ever for people to do things together, such as group events which are posted and scheduled online, yet people are voluntarily choosing to be alone.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  I think your #2 is spot on, and your #3 is the cause. Tech is being used as a replacement for so many aspects of our lives now: social networking, online dating, shopping, even asking for information ("just google it"), all reducing in-person interactions and replacing what were once very involved processes.
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    I have to wonder if it’s sort of like ads. Previously, if you wanted any entertainment, you probably had to put up with ads of some sort. On TV, there were commercial breaks. In the newspaper, there were print ads, etc. Then the internet and streaming and ad blocking came along. I never liked ads, but I would begrudgingly put up with them before. (I’d mute them, not look at them, fast forward, etc. But it was impossible to get away from them.) Now I have zero tolerance for them because I have tons of media without them. Previously, you could put up with someone who had a few quirks or was a little obnoxious because, hey, that’s part of life and there are only so many people you can interact with in a day, and some of them suck. But now, I can find the other 10 people who like whatever band I’m into, or weird sport, or whatever, and I can spend a bunch of time with them. I no longer have the patience to hear about your stupid hobby, or your horrible politics. I can just walk away, go to my computer and hang out with other like-minded people. Just like here on Hacker News!
cr4nberry 4y ago
> The healthier alternative involves rethinking internet infrastructure on pro-social ends: platforms owned by the people using them with community prerogatives in mind. The author essentially cites a bunch of unrelated (albeit interesting) statistics, talks (sighs) about "broader cultural shifts", and then on top of all of this drops this little pseudo solution at the end. A pseudo problem followed by a pseudo solution, go figure There are too many of these bloggers (and opinion columnists) sitting around in armchairs, recycling the same gibberish they read in the Atlantic and waving their hands in the air with respect to "broader cultural shifts" The second one of these bloggers starts "broader cultural shift"ing is the second I put their blog in the hosts file
- antonomon 4y ago
  Why is it a psuedo problem? I deal with its effects every day. Your excessive aggression seems to be symptomatic of the anti-social, terminally online.
- hexatin 4y ago
  I agree that the blogger doesn’t give anything close to a thoughtful or meaningful solution, but I don’t agree that it’s a pseudo-problem. Anecdotally, from every person I have spoken to around my age and above my age, it seems that something is causing socialization to not work as effectively as it did in my parents’ generation, and the data appears to support this phenomenon. It may be poorly characterized, in that the blogger may be incorrect about what’s driving it or how it manifests, but I feel like it is inarguable that something is happening, and whatever we’re currently doing to deal with it is not working.
  - cr4nberry 4y ago
    I agree with you that the solution offered was woefully inadequate. What I meant by pseudo problem wasn't necessarily the problem itself, but the framing of it. The author cites a statistic about when students start driving, start drinking alcohol, etc. Then the author cites a statistic about "declining trust in institutions". It's easy to put a bunch of statistics like this together and imply that they indicate a lack of socialization (a common cause) or something like that, but all they really show us is a changing culture that the author (and many others) are bothered about It's a pseudo problem (in my view) because it outlines several different (supposedly related) sub problems and then tries to tie them together as a single problem with some implicit common cause
jackcosgrove 4y ago
I see the collapse of authority as mostly a product of more information at our fingertips. The authorities were always lying double-dealers; we just had less of a clue of the extent of it. In that way, I see the collapse of institutional trust as a good thing. Not because I'm an anarchist or iconoclast, but because systems built upon illusions are less stable than systems built upon truths. We are in the process of a shift from an unstable equilibrium to a stable equilibrium. That shift is shaking a lot of people loose from society's safety nets, but ultimately will lead to a better place. It had to be done.
- pmichaud 4y ago
  What signs do you see that we’re headed toward a new, stable equilibrium, instead of just catastrophically destabilizing?
  - jackcosgrove 4y ago
    The emergence of a shared global culture, especially online, and especially spoken in one language, is momentous historically. After thousands of years of separation by geography, which produced cultural differentiation and foreignness, we are now starting to come together with one culture and one language. This is a stable equilibrium because it's global rather than local. That's the view from the cockpit. My view from the ground also suggests it's not catastrophic. I'm an early digital native. Twenty-five years after access to the internet, I now have a spouse whom I met online and two children. I work remotely and spend most of my waking time online. I have no friends outside family, which could be better but it's not catastrophic as shown by my ability to create a family and carve out some life for myself. I've adapted. Maybe I am just an optimist. Really the status quo ante was untenable and we must move forward and make the best of what we have.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      There is no shared global culture forming online. It’s deeply fractured multicultures that have very little in common with each other. You assume everyone is in your bubble but everyone has their own bubble and the cultures are in direct opposition.
tjr225 4y ago
We all got to see what life would be life if we put our entire existence on the internet. What we built does not make the world a better place.
ilaksh 4y ago
Its not just the internet. The economy also plays a role.
worik 4y ago
"Putnam’s trends can be assessed more contemporaneously through a simple metric: screen time, a proxy for time spent not doing community activities in person." No it is not. There is no reason to believe that screen time is displacing social time. It could well be displacing reading novels or watching TV. I do a lot of socialising. I make an effort. I see other people around me doing the same thing. Here I am at a screen. I cannot remember the last novel I read from start to finish.
analyte123 4y ago
I don't know how you can look at a graph of how many teenagers work, drive, and go out that suddenly declines after 2008 and not mention the major economic recession at the time. While I agree that there are technological changes and purely social changes that have happened, I think there's more to the economic causes of this issue that aren't usually examined by this type of commentator.
- bradlys 4y ago
  Cause capitalism can never be at fault. We must continue to grind and support our overlords. The reasons for societal collapse could never be attributed to capital - for capital is what will save us all and lead us all to nirvana. Capital is holy!
martin_drapeau 4y ago
What do we make of online communities (i.e. gamers), sports & recreation (parents sit down with other parents to chat), startups who's cluture is team/family like (easily replaces religion), etc... Maybe the definition of individualism should evolve a little.
gernb 4y ago
WFH is only going to make this worse. A top place people spend long amounts of time with others is work. Work is in top 2 places people make new romantic partners, marriage partners, and friends. There's nothing on the horizon to replace it as a socializing force. Even if you WFH those ~8 hours a day, 40 days of week of sitting alone can't be made up for by socializing outside of that time, something you could already do before WFH. I'm not saying you should therefore be forced to go to the office. Rather I'm just pointing out WFH will arguably make this worse, maybe not for your specific situation, but in aggregate across the population, if WFH is the new normal then we'll need to social institutions to fix the lack of socialization opportunities that are being discarded.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  Great point. Personally I think this is a good thing -- I've never seen work as a great place to socialize, so I felt "left out" of that aspect of work life in the past. Now with WFH, maybe we'll see alternatives pop up more and more.
- cirgue 4y ago
  > WFH is only going to make this worse. My social life has improved massively since WFH became the norm. I eat lunch with my neighbors most days, I work from friends places/they work at mine on the reg, and it is way easier to have the energy to go out for dinner/drinks/other activities after work. I went to Chicago for a week last month to hang out with my friend and his wife and no one had to take any vacation days to make it happen. Everyone's situation is different, but I have a tough time imagining that WFH is going to lead to a reduction in socialization on balance if people are now able to control their schedules more easily.
  - rabuse 4y ago
    Mind if I ask what location this is where your neighbors are so "neighborly"?
    - edmcnulty101 4y ago
nimbius 4y ago
it may be a little obtuse but i find a rather interesting parallel between this social recession and the open ended presupposition of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the context of leninist revolutionary theory. the party has repeatedly insisted socialism will triumph 'eventually' without much allusion to anything but historic tendency, however i wonder if US capitalisms hyper-individualism in the throughs of social recession may be the elusive driving force that fulfills the parties prophetic declaration. that, as many more find themselves shut out and alone the notion of collaborative public forum itself could prove enticing enough to walk back some of the most egregious excesses of neoliberalism in the 21st century
colinsane 4y ago
> Skepticism toward the state has evolved into more generalized distrust toward society at large, amplified by the internet. the trust angle is presented too broadly. the article opened with how many close friends the individual has. i trust my close friends with my life. i trust my neighbors enough to leave my door unlocked at night. i trust the larger neighborhood to go on midnight walks with headphones, eat/drink at a new place knowing i won’t get sick, etc. these forms of trust are what allows for IRL friendships to form. trust in gov institutions, or any large-scale system is only relevant to IRL friendships to the same degree that connecting with someone across the country over the net is relevant. > The healthier alternative involves rethinking internet infrastructure on pro-social ends: platforms owned by the people using them with community prerogatives in mind. while i do believe this to be better for the individual, socially, i don’t expect this would halt the political trends. my digital life is 90% on independently-operated services like Matrix, Mastodon, git forges and good ol’ personal blogs. the more personal/supportive social norms in these areas don’t magically lead to an environment which is pro-the-status-quo politically. almost the opposite: many of the community-operated online groups doing something they feel meaningful want to bring that same meaning to the IRL, but run into massive difficulties that they attribute to the political status quo. the Nixos convention just held in France apparently handed out a “smash the state” sticker in their swag bag. naïvely pushing for stronger/community-operated online groups may just exacerbate the clash between the online social order and offline political order in the short term. not that i’m for or against that here: merely put forth as an observation.
steve76 4y ago
moneycantbuy 4y ago
it’s the economy. increasing wealth inequality correlates with the bleak charts presented in the article. the more squeezed we are financially, the less time we have for each other and building community. also “smart” phones. how can we expect to do anything else while our eyes are glued to the little screens we carry everywhere?
markvdb 4y ago
Are cross-cultural and/or cross-national couples also part of this trend? I imagine there to be a growing number of cross-cultural couples with rising mobility. Hooking into traditional social life with one partner less aware of those traditions is less trivial. Let me also speculate that living between countries especially takes a toll on social life due to the time invested in commuting.
lucasfcosta 4y ago
This piece is brilliant. One slightly off-topic comment I have, however, is: When the author talks about delayed adulthood and mentions that the percentage of 12th graders that tried alcohol declined, how is that possibly a trait of adulthood? If anything, I'd say that not consuming alcohol demonstrates a more conscious choice that could be associated with adulthood. Also, one must consider the impact of hangovers only increases, thus increasing the correlation (I guess) between adulthood and the avoidance of alcohol.
- dvsfish 4y ago
  "Tried" is probably the keyword here. Everything you said is correct, but having alcohol is something that adults, not children, typically do. Whether or not more mature adults move to alcohol avoidance is a different thing. I think it definitely indicates a change in socialisation at the very least, and while labelling it an adult trait may be incorrect depending on who you ask, it is still relevant.
unrealp 4y ago
- I help people in a mental health support group, (not a counseller, just informal). I see people aged below 25 going to therapists for advice that used to be given by friends in earlier era, some of the advice I saw was really common sense stuff. Indirectly it might be supportive of the statement that friendships are declining. - I wonder how much of increase in youngsters' mental health issues numbers is due to better reporting of data and better awareness of mental health issues in young people. - Friendships among young people are less confrontational and more supportive now. People want to say nice things even if they see oddities; people want to be politically correct. Previous generation used to get more honest feedback. For example, if someone doesnt want to socialize, now friends label the person as introvert and encourage acceptance of introversion vs previously friends used to encourage being social. I see the positive of 'acceptance of whatever you are' mindset, at the same time I think 'motivating to do something different' has reduced. I see positive/negative of both approaches.
- bradlys 4y ago
  It’s acceptance of people as they are but then ostracizing them from the community. We’re not including people who are different anymore than we did in the past. We’re just “accepting” them with words and not actions. I see this behavior a lot in my social circles and communities I’m involved in. A lot of preaching of acceptance and awareness while not including them in anything at all. It’s all idpol.
  - viridian 4y ago
    It's a strange form of biological essentialism where someone is considered perfectly as they are, and not in need of any changes, but also that person must be rejected from the group based on certain characteristics. We don't invite Sarah to the Christmas party because she's Jewish and that goes against her beliefs and we don't want to offend her (regardless of how strict of an adherent she is), we aren't inviting Suzie either because almost everybody has kids, and she's deep down the /r/childfree rabbit hole (which is a perfectly fine worldview to have), etc.
jasmer 4y ago
We have such an absence of '3rd space' areas, otherwise called 'community spaces' that literally the language seems to be missing, and we can nary fathom it into the analysis! I would have imagined that the entire discussion would have been about that. I'm originally from a small town where it's almost entirely a '3rd space' - even the homes. Sitting with my grandmother for lunch, literally random people would walk in to 'say hi' - or not really 'hi' but rather to talk/pass on something 'really important' such as the cousin of the shop keeper who passed on, and that's his family at the funeral parlour - because of course you ought to know. etc.. There is a great intellectual in personal freedom in being able to leave the community, at the same time, civil society has not created a replacement; frankly it's obvious and sad. Perhaps even more perverse are generations of people who have never known what was, and have no frame of reference for it. Our leaders don't give it a thought and many would be leaders who might otherwise speak for traditional communities either lack the communication skills, are caught up in other bad ideas, or are pushed aside as relics in favour of some ideological meme. I think this is a first order cultural issue, like healthcare and social assistance. I'm not sure we have even the language to address it, as usually the most academic individuals want to talk about the most progressive ideas and 'change' of some kind. Perhaps there is hope, in that often we just find a 'new way' to describe some otherwise traditional concept. 'Organic gardens' being a good example of that; in my hometown, many people have 'organic gardens' - because they've just always had 'gardens', and really never did use a chemicals, ergo, they were hip before it was hip. Perhaps the term '3rd Space' can substitute in a similar manner to describe what we've understood since the dawn of time in social terms, i.e. 'the community'.
- firstSpeaker 4y ago
  When I was a 10 or something we used to gather together and watch tv with neighbours kids, we used to borrow things from our neighbours! My mother and other kids mothers used to sit and have tea and chitchat and spend time together. It was to the point that we could go to our friends house anytime and maybe even sit and have lunch with them (no invitation or preparation was needed). Comparing that with today small town that I live it feels more like people are living in in isolation cells rather than a community.
anovikov 4y ago
As an outsider, i see trust in the U.S. and the West in general as a problem. If anything, you need a lot less trust. You are taken for a ride by foreigners - from private citizens to governments with everything in between - all too often. It only works because you are way, way too trusting to people you shouldn't trust. We are now living in the globalised world when most people don't share Christian values. It means, trusting anyone at all apart from (with caution) closest immediate family members (and even that only because they are on your will), is simply a mistake.
mavu 4y ago
If there was a graph, I bet my hat that you could see the impact of Facebook (introduction of algorithm deciding what posts you see), twitter and other "social" networks.
fleddr 4y ago
And to make matters worse, AI is coming for us. Specifically for our creativity, soon destroying any sense of remaining human meaning. And we're on the verge of a AR/VR breakthrough, probably making the screen time issue even worse.
trh0awayman 4y ago
Is anyone talking to these friendless people one-on-one? I bet you there's a very easily spotted trend/cause that isn't explainable with anonymous surveys. As far as I can tell, it's easier than ever before to make a close friend, for those willing. I suspect that peoples bandwidth of acceptance is narrowing with the popularization of the internet. They imagine friendship to be something other than a close bond. They've idealized it, so of course reality never matches up.
fleddr 4y ago
An uncomfortable way to look at it, but the more freedom and convenience we acquire, the less social we end up being. Starting with religion. I'm not religious myself, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge it as a powerful community builder. You'll get to know everyone in the community. Neighbors, business owners, friends, possible spouses. And their families and all their life events. There's no real replacement for this "forced" social bonding at scale. Meeting friends used to require physical co-location. You'd ring their doorbell and asks if they're available to play. It would all be in-person. Now this happens occasionally but far less, a lot of this is digitized. Early teenager years: boys live in their bedroom, gaming with a headset. Girls spent their time chatting or posting on social networks. Later teenager years (party years). Far less in person. Some gatherings of friends at home, much less in public settings where you can meet new people. Work: from home but even when in the office: increasingly virtualized due to outsourcing, complicated vendor models, etc. Leisure: at home. Not just spending time on passive entertainment, also shipping shit to your door so that you don't have to go out and actually interact with people. In the case that people do go out in the physical world, they see disengaged people. In a rush, unapproachable (always on phone). We've become self-centered, anti-social. The old way which forced you to interact with the physical world and its people produced far healthier human beings.

248 points by antonomon 4y ago

Less friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.

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1270018080 4y ago

As someone who likes looking at charts, I hate being in the "middle" of the story on the social recession. In addition to everything listed in the article, we also have ever increasing partisanship, declines in education, climate destruction etc. Instead of everything getting .5% worse every year, it would be nice to see something dramatically change, good or bad. Some shift that actually changes things just to get this current failing society out of the way. Is this what life is always like in declining empires? Will it just get worse every year until we have a few wars and genocides until there's enough destruction to start rebuilding?

willnonya 4y ago
Which empire are you imagining is in decline?
- deleted 4y ago
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antonomon 4y ago
It feels like things are a bit primed for something like that, in a way. Although it could easily not and just continue indefinitely if the public is pacified completely. Still, I think if this drip drip drip of a decline continues, then I think we might start seeing some weird fascination with war as an “outlet." A lot of fine de siecle 20th century writers talked about this same thing with regards to mass industrial society, as if they wanted WWI. When Wittgenstein was sent to the front, his response was basically, “I really needed that,” as if it was some kind of cleanse. People are built for narratives, they derive meaning from them, and a drift cannot persist indefinitely. Amid the collapse of traditional meta-narratives that once gave meaning, there are today many competing ones, none of which are truly for the now. It feels like we need a new way to live otherwise we will exhaust ourselves.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I'd recommend The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd DeMause [1] if you aren't already aware of it. The actual child abuse part is not apropos the technological aspects, but there's a deep (one of the most direct and powerfully written) account of perennial sacrificial cleansing rituals and the societal death-drive (Thanatos).
  - antonomon 4y ago
    Wow, great suggestion. I will check it.
    - parthianshotgun 4y ago
      I'd really look into the validity of the book, a cursory google search reveals that's it's basically a load of shit. Also the book is narrated by Stefan Molyneux, which, I wouldn't say is a 'happy accident' when it comes to Molyneux oeuvre
      - antonomon 4y ago
        Lol wtf? Jesus christ, nevermind then.
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        Someone you don't like read a book. Therefore the book is rubbish. I suppose this is the logic we get from kids raised by algorithms.
        parthianshotgun 4y ago
        My perspective is velenced by my own biases, just like yours. My function here was just to provide a countering force to your force, and let the OP atleast be presented with the opportunity to be skeptical (mirroring the discourse around this topic, no doubt). It's worth pointing out that psychohistory is not a serious field, and largely considered a pseudoscience.

seydor 4y ago

The US must not be a low-trust society. You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can't trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan). The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple. Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today's technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as 'problems' and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.

rayiner 4y ago
Every single highly individualistic society seems to be in population decline (more so if you factor out immigrants from “anti-progressive” Muslim or Catholic countries). Individualism seems to be a self-limiting feature of society: it’s unpleasant to raise children in highly individualistic societies, which makes such societies inherently transitory.[1] Is societal self-obsolescence how you define “progress?” How successful can your society really be if your people don’t seem to want to raise kids in it and perpetuate it? If you have to import people from collectivist societies just to take care of your elderly? [1] The inverse is not true—many collectivist societies are also facing population walls—but for quite different reasons.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Birth rates dropped to below replacement rate in the 70s near universally among developed countries, far before many of them became increasingly more individualistic. American culture and attitude seeping into most of those countries kicked into overdrive the 21st century, but birthrates were already low by then.

errantmind 4y ago

The more time people spend passively consuming entertainment, the less time they spend doing everything else, including socializing. Most everyone I know just sits on their phones, computers, or TVs a good portion of the day. All boredom is banished, all gaps are filled. The threshold for participation and collaboration is higher, because why risk boredom when you have guaranteed-minimum-satisfaction available.

juunpp 4y ago
The best part isn't even "sitting on their phones", but walking on their phones past other humans.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Every time I'm stuck behind someone who inexplicably stopped in the middle of a walkway to answer their phone, I just imagine to myself that it's a book and think of how engrossing the plot must be for them to pull it out and read it at the worst possible time, and at least I'm a little more amused than annoyed.
  - juunpp 4y ago
    Lucky you. I get the equivalent of road rage... but on the sidewalk.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Well, now you know my trick for dealing with it, maybe you can try it or work on one of your own ;)
  - henriquemaia 4y ago
    Thank you for sharing such a beautiful strategy to make what is now a common occurrence into something so meaningful. It's like opening up to so many possibilities, even to creativity, as you can start imagining the all possible threads that create those amazing stop-inducing plots. Thank you!

cowpig 4y ago

I wonder how much of this can be explained by social media? Feels like a feeling of impending doom with climate change could also be a factor. Also, I'd really like to see this trend in a broader context. How much did these kinds of indicators dip during, say, the great depression?

trgn 4y ago
Very little. This has been an ongoing process, it's called modernity. It's the evaporation of reality due to mass media and commoditization. It's a reductive process that turns actual people into widgets, the adaptation of man to machine. Human relations, since these cannot be quantitied, are transmuted into transactions that can be measured, quantitied, monetized. Affection, intimacy, loyalty thus become replqced by countable things like swipes, nft drops, car infotainment packages, yoga cruise experiences, ... The matrix is real. Not that we are living in a computer (thats just stupid), but that we are being reduced to particiption in algorithm, mere conduits of information. That malaise, hard to pinpoint but ongoing since 150 years, is the driver of the social recession
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  I genuinely fail to see how social media does not fit perfectly into the description of mass media commoditization in modernity.
  - trgn 4y ago
    For sure, it fits into it, apologies if I gave the impression it didn't.
robocat 4y ago
> Feels like a feeling of impending doom with climate change could also be a factor. My generation in my country feared nuclear war and economic collapse (15% inflation when I was growing up). Each demographic has its own impeding doom: climate change fear is new, but I don’t think there is more fear than the past. I think people in the US from my generation had communism to worry about, and communists probably worried about the US. The big change is social media and mass media driving more fear - hard to measure the difference though - does our capacity for fear remain constant regardless of input? Edit: and when I think of the fear in the lives of my friends, their personal situation is far more critical than any distant fear of global warming. Their kids, their job, their marriage, their parents, their friends, their status. I am interested in the demographic differences because that give good hints as to cause and effect.

tchock23 4y ago

I wonder how much of the lack of close friends is due to people moving more frequently. After college most of my close friends did a stint in various cities making it very difficult to maintain a relationship with them. I’d be curious to see a graph of reported close friendships against mobility.

Gigachad 4y ago
Along with low density car based transport. Used to live in the suburbs a few years ago and had very few social interactions because there was way too much friction. Easier to just play video games or watch TV. Now I live in a high rise and have a few friends in the same building. Social events are spontaneous, I'll get a message like "Hey we are having a party now, come down to level 5" so I end up spending a lot of time with friends and building social groups.
- c1ccccc1 4y ago
  I like this explanation and the one in the parent comment quite a bit. Rather than a grand thesis about internet / social media [0] / polarization that one's likely to see in a think-piece, it's the little things about how we've chosen to structure our society. These things that seem like trivial inconveniences [1], like just making some new friends when yours have moved away, or if you live the suburbs just taking that 20 minute drive whenever you want to see someone, end up having a disproportionate impact on our behaviour. After all, we evolved in an environment where one was pretty much automatically embedded in a community, with very little effort required to socialize other than following the social norms of the tribe. One other thing I'd also point to is network effects. If lots of people are all finding it easier to be online all the time rather than be social, then for any given person, that results in a reduced number of potential friends. [0] I would actually put some blame on social media for being a poor substitute for socialization, but just good enough that it makes people less likely to dig themselves out of being isolated. But blaming the internet in general, including things like blogs makes as little sense as blaming books. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
- 4y ago

readthenotes1 4y ago

I tried her this but it must be infected with some virus because an overlay popped up that made it so I couldn't read anything past the first paragraph!

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rafaelero 4y ago

I find this subject fascinating. We young people have been detaching from the old ways of living without really building a new narrative. I still think it's cringe how some subsections of society want to revive the traditional life ™. I mean, there's a reason we went away from that, so that ends up being very patronizing and unhelpful.

mistermann 4y ago
> We young people have been detaching from the old ways of living without really building a new narrative. George Hotz, are we living in a simulation (6 minutes) https://youtu.be/_SpptYg_0Rs https://youtu.be/_SpptYg_0Rs
soared 4y ago
That’s a common viewpoint of current times v older times on many topics. But it’s not like the 70s people were consciously building a narrative of free love, that’s just how the culture was at the time. Largely the narrative was not assessed and applied until after the fact. We have just as much of a narrative know, we just lack the ability to look at it independently and define it.
- rafaelero 4y ago
  I don't know. Competition (be it to accomplish the best career, the best body, the best public persona) seems to be at an all time high. That suggests that we don't have any narrative that binds us and promote some type of cooperation. I could be wrong, but I don't think previous generations dealt with this level of individualism.
  - trashface 4y ago
    Late 40s guy here, I agree competition (for everything) seems much more intense now at all age levels. Wasn't like this when I was younger. As a person who prefers co-operation, I'm not liking it, and since that is my strength, it feels like I'm less able to excel in this environment.
- 4y ago

debacle 4y ago

Look at the reddit front page and tell me it isn't enabling much of these behaviors.

seydor 4y ago
Look at russia and see a society that is trying to disable those behaviors
mistermann 4y ago
I thinks it's fascinating how it evades significant study, attention, and curiosity.
cr4nberry 4y ago
> Look at the reddit front page I'd rather jump off a bridge tbh

jesuscript 4y ago

Here’s a wild question: Are we not all friends here on HN? Or am I so depraved and desperate? Have I socially died and don’t even know it, friends? We’re all friends right? Right? What the fuck is going on.

dgfitz 4y ago
I don’t consider anyone on HN a friend if that means anything.
- jesuscript 4y ago
  Maybe that’s the intangible the linked post is not addressing. What does friendship even mean to the people they tracked? Being able to talk to people who are willing to spend time talking back is a basis for friendship, at least in my book. Friendship doesn’t always have to be so serious.
  - Viliam1234 4y ago
    For me, a friend is a person I can discuss personal topics with. On HN, the topic is given (the article we comment on), and it is usually not personal. If it happens to be personal, it is most likely not the personal topic I would like to discuss now. Also, if any of us died today, most likely no one else on HN would ever notice. That too is not exactly what I imagine as "friendship".
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      >For me, a friend is a person I can discuss personal topics with. And for me, a friend is family I get to choose for myself. Anyone else is, at best, a friendly acquaintance. I expect there are many other definitions out there as well.
- conductr 4y ago
  Me either but I can see how it serves the purpose of a friend and for some people it could support increased isolation

paulpauper 4y ago

I think there are some key factors: 1. Lower trust society, probably made worse by increased political division. 2. Loss of social skills. People are more testy and angry or on a hair-trigger. You look at photos from 70+ years ago and people seemed friendlier , more approachable, and more gregarious. Same for online, in which people have gotten angrier and more intolerant with each election cycle. Campus guest speakers have been shouted-down when trying to give talks, such as Charles Murray. This suggests poor social skills. 3. Individual preferences. Perhaps people are choosing to withdrawal or be alone, because it's more enjoyable. Maybe the internet, smart phones, Netflix, and social media are more enjoyable than social outings. There are more ways then ever for people to do things together, such as group events which are posted and scheduled online, yet people are voluntarily choosing to be alone.

Ancalagon 4y ago
I think your #2 is spot on, and your #3 is the cause. Tech is being used as a replacement for so many aspects of our lives now: social networking, online dating, shopping, even asking for information ("just google it"), all reducing in-person interactions and replacing what were once very involved processes.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  I have to wonder if it’s sort of like ads. Previously, if you wanted any entertainment, you probably had to put up with ads of some sort. On TV, there were commercial breaks. In the newspaper, there were print ads, etc. Then the internet and streaming and ad blocking came along. I never liked ads, but I would begrudgingly put up with them before. (I’d mute them, not look at them, fast forward, etc. But it was impossible to get away from them.) Now I have zero tolerance for them because I have tons of media without them. Previously, you could put up with someone who had a few quirks or was a little obnoxious because, hey, that’s part of life and there are only so many people you can interact with in a day, and some of them suck. But now, I can find the other 10 people who like whatever band I’m into, or weird sport, or whatever, and I can spend a bunch of time with them. I no longer have the patience to hear about your stupid hobby, or your horrible politics. I can just walk away, go to my computer and hang out with other like-minded people. Just like here on Hacker News!

cr4nberry 4y ago

> The healthier alternative involves rethinking internet infrastructure on pro-social ends: platforms owned by the people using them with community prerogatives in mind. The author essentially cites a bunch of unrelated (albeit interesting) statistics, talks (sighs) about "broader cultural shifts", and then on top of all of this drops this little pseudo solution at the end. A pseudo problem followed by a pseudo solution, go figure There are too many of these bloggers (and opinion columnists) sitting around in armchairs, recycling the same gibberish they read in the Atlantic and waving their hands in the air with respect to "broader cultural shifts" The second one of these bloggers starts "broader cultural shift"ing is the second I put their blog in the hosts file

antonomon 4y ago
Why is it a psuedo problem? I deal with its effects every day. Your excessive aggression seems to be symptomatic of the anti-social, terminally online.
hexatin 4y ago
I agree that the blogger doesn’t give anything close to a thoughtful or meaningful solution, but I don’t agree that it’s a pseudo-problem. Anecdotally, from every person I have spoken to around my age and above my age, it seems that something is causing socialization to not work as effectively as it did in my parents’ generation, and the data appears to support this phenomenon. It may be poorly characterized, in that the blogger may be incorrect about what’s driving it or how it manifests, but I feel like it is inarguable that something is happening, and whatever we’re currently doing to deal with it is not working.
- cr4nberry 4y ago
  I agree with you that the solution offered was woefully inadequate. What I meant by pseudo problem wasn't necessarily the problem itself, but the framing of it. The author cites a statistic about when students start driving, start drinking alcohol, etc. Then the author cites a statistic about "declining trust in institutions". It's easy to put a bunch of statistics like this together and imply that they indicate a lack of socialization (a common cause) or something like that, but all they really show us is a changing culture that the author (and many others) are bothered about It's a pseudo problem (in my view) because it outlines several different (supposedly related) sub problems and then tries to tie them together as a single problem with some implicit common cause

jackcosgrove 4y ago

I see the collapse of authority as mostly a product of more information at our fingertips. The authorities were always lying double-dealers; we just had less of a clue of the extent of it. In that way, I see the collapse of institutional trust as a good thing. Not because I'm an anarchist or iconoclast, but because systems built upon illusions are less stable than systems built upon truths. We are in the process of a shift from an unstable equilibrium to a stable equilibrium. That shift is shaking a lot of people loose from society's safety nets, but ultimately will lead to a better place. It had to be done.

pmichaud 4y ago
What signs do you see that we’re headed toward a new, stable equilibrium, instead of just catastrophically destabilizing?
- jackcosgrove 4y ago
  The emergence of a shared global culture, especially online, and especially spoken in one language, is momentous historically. After thousands of years of separation by geography, which produced cultural differentiation and foreignness, we are now starting to come together with one culture and one language. This is a stable equilibrium because it's global rather than local. That's the view from the cockpit. My view from the ground also suggests it's not catastrophic. I'm an early digital native. Twenty-five years after access to the internet, I now have a spouse whom I met online and two children. I work remotely and spend most of my waking time online. I have no friends outside family, which could be better but it's not catastrophic as shown by my ability to create a family and carve out some life for myself. I've adapted. Maybe I am just an optimist. Really the status quo ante was untenable and we must move forward and make the best of what we have.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    There is no shared global culture forming online. It’s deeply fractured multicultures that have very little in common with each other. You assume everyone is in your bubble but everyone has their own bubble and the cultures are in direct opposition.

tjr225 4y ago

We all got to see what life would be life if we put our entire existence on the internet. What we built does not make the world a better place.

ilaksh 4y ago

Its not just the internet. The economy also plays a role.

worik 4y ago

"Putnam’s trends can be assessed more contemporaneously through a simple metric: screen time, a proxy for time spent not doing community activities in person." No it is not. There is no reason to believe that screen time is displacing social time. It could well be displacing reading novels or watching TV. I do a lot of socialising. I make an effort. I see other people around me doing the same thing. Here I am at a screen. I cannot remember the last novel I read from start to finish.

analyte123 4y ago

I don't know how you can look at a graph of how many teenagers work, drive, and go out that suddenly declines after 2008 and not mention the major economic recession at the time. While I agree that there are technological changes and purely social changes that have happened, I think there's more to the economic causes of this issue that aren't usually examined by this type of commentator.

bradlys 4y ago
Cause capitalism can never be at fault. We must continue to grind and support our overlords. The reasons for societal collapse could never be attributed to capital - for capital is what will save us all and lead us all to nirvana. Capital is holy!

martin_drapeau 4y ago

What do we make of online communities (i.e. gamers), sports & recreation (parents sit down with other parents to chat), startups who's cluture is team/family like (easily replaces religion), etc... Maybe the definition of individualism should evolve a little.

gernb 4y ago

WFH is only going to make this worse. A top place people spend long amounts of time with others is work. Work is in top 2 places people make new romantic partners, marriage partners, and friends. There's nothing on the horizon to replace it as a socializing force. Even if you WFH those ~8 hours a day, 40 days of week of sitting alone can't be made up for by socializing outside of that time, something you could already do before WFH. I'm not saying you should therefore be forced to go to the office. Rather I'm just pointing out WFH will arguably make this worse, maybe not for your specific situation, but in aggregate across the population, if WFH is the new normal then we'll need to social institutions to fix the lack of socialization opportunities that are being discarded.

vanilla_nut 4y ago
Great point. Personally I think this is a good thing -- I've never seen work as a great place to socialize, so I felt "left out" of that aspect of work life in the past. Now with WFH, maybe we'll see alternatives pop up more and more.
cirgue 4y ago
> WFH is only going to make this worse. My social life has improved massively since WFH became the norm. I eat lunch with my neighbors most days, I work from friends places/they work at mine on the reg, and it is way easier to have the energy to go out for dinner/drinks/other activities after work. I went to Chicago for a week last month to hang out with my friend and his wife and no one had to take any vacation days to make it happen. Everyone's situation is different, but I have a tough time imagining that WFH is going to lead to a reduction in socialization on balance if people are now able to control their schedules more easily.
- rabuse 4y ago
  Mind if I ask what location this is where your neighbors are so "neighborly"?
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago

nimbius 4y ago

it may be a little obtuse but i find a rather interesting parallel between this social recession and the open ended presupposition of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in the context of leninist revolutionary theory. the party has repeatedly insisted socialism will triumph 'eventually' without much allusion to anything but historic tendency, however i wonder if US capitalisms hyper-individualism in the throughs of social recession may be the elusive driving force that fulfills the parties prophetic declaration. that, as many more find themselves shut out and alone the notion of collaborative public forum itself could prove enticing enough to walk back some of the most egregious excesses of neoliberalism in the 21st century

colinsane 4y ago

> Skepticism toward the state has evolved into more generalized distrust toward society at large, amplified by the internet. the trust angle is presented too broadly. the article opened with how many close friends the individual has. i trust my close friends with my life. i trust my neighbors enough to leave my door unlocked at night. i trust the larger neighborhood to go on midnight walks with headphones, eat/drink at a new place knowing i won’t get sick, etc. these forms of trust are what allows for IRL friendships to form. trust in gov institutions, or any large-scale system is only relevant to IRL friendships to the same degree that connecting with someone across the country over the net is relevant. > The healthier alternative involves rethinking internet infrastructure on pro-social ends: platforms owned by the people using them with community prerogatives in mind. while i do believe this to be better for the individual, socially, i don’t expect this would halt the political trends. my digital life is 90% on independently-operated services like Matrix, Mastodon, git forges and good ol’ personal blogs. the more personal/supportive social norms in these areas don’t magically lead to an environment which is pro-the-status-quo politically. almost the opposite: many of the community-operated online groups doing something they feel meaningful want to bring that same meaning to the IRL, but run into massive difficulties that they attribute to the political status quo. the Nixos convention just held in France apparently handed out a “smash the state” sticker in their swag bag. naïvely pushing for stronger/community-operated online groups may just exacerbate the clash between the online social order and offline political order in the short term. not that i’m for or against that here: merely put forth as an observation.

steve76 4y ago

moneycantbuy 4y ago

it’s the economy. increasing wealth inequality correlates with the bleak charts presented in the article. the more squeezed we are financially, the less time we have for each other and building community. also “smart” phones. how can we expect to do anything else while our eyes are glued to the little screens we carry everywhere?

markvdb 4y ago

Are cross-cultural and/or cross-national couples also part of this trend? I imagine there to be a growing number of cross-cultural couples with rising mobility. Hooking into traditional social life with one partner less aware of those traditions is less trivial. Let me also speculate that living between countries especially takes a toll on social life due to the time invested in commuting.

lucasfcosta 4y ago

This piece is brilliant. One slightly off-topic comment I have, however, is: When the author talks about delayed adulthood and mentions that the percentage of 12th graders that tried alcohol declined, how is that possibly a trait of adulthood? If anything, I'd say that not consuming alcohol demonstrates a more conscious choice that could be associated with adulthood. Also, one must consider the impact of hangovers only increases, thus increasing the correlation (I guess) between adulthood and the avoidance of alcohol.

dvsfish 4y ago
"Tried" is probably the keyword here. Everything you said is correct, but having alcohol is something that adults, not children, typically do. Whether or not more mature adults move to alcohol avoidance is a different thing. I think it definitely indicates a change in socialisation at the very least, and while labelling it an adult trait may be incorrect depending on who you ask, it is still relevant.

unrealp 4y ago

- I help people in a mental health support group, (not a counseller, just informal). I see people aged below 25 going to therapists for advice that used to be given by friends in earlier era, some of the advice I saw was really common sense stuff. Indirectly it might be supportive of the statement that friendships are declining. - I wonder how much of increase in youngsters' mental health issues numbers is due to better reporting of data and better awareness of mental health issues in young people. - Friendships among young people are less confrontational and more supportive now. People want to say nice things even if they see oddities; people want to be politically correct. Previous generation used to get more honest feedback. For example, if someone doesnt want to socialize, now friends label the person as introvert and encourage acceptance of introversion vs previously friends used to encourage being social. I see the positive of 'acceptance of whatever you are' mindset, at the same time I think 'motivating to do something different' has reduced. I see positive/negative of both approaches.

bradlys 4y ago
It’s acceptance of people as they are but then ostracizing them from the community. We’re not including people who are different anymore than we did in the past. We’re just “accepting” them with words and not actions. I see this behavior a lot in my social circles and communities I’m involved in. A lot of preaching of acceptance and awareness while not including them in anything at all. It’s all idpol.
- viridian 4y ago
  It's a strange form of biological essentialism where someone is considered perfectly as they are, and not in need of any changes, but also that person must be rejected from the group based on certain characteristics. We don't invite Sarah to the Christmas party because she's Jewish and that goes against her beliefs and we don't want to offend her (regardless of how strict of an adherent she is), we aren't inviting Suzie either because almost everybody has kids, and she's deep down the /r/childfree rabbit hole (which is a perfectly fine worldview to have), etc.

jasmer 4y ago

We have such an absence of '3rd space' areas, otherwise called 'community spaces' that literally the language seems to be missing, and we can nary fathom it into the analysis! I would have imagined that the entire discussion would have been about that. I'm originally from a small town where it's almost entirely a '3rd space' - even the homes. Sitting with my grandmother for lunch, literally random people would walk in to 'say hi' - or not really 'hi' but rather to talk/pass on something 'really important' such as the cousin of the shop keeper who passed on, and that's his family at the funeral parlour - because of course you ought to know. etc.. There is a great intellectual in personal freedom in being able to leave the community, at the same time, civil society has not created a replacement; frankly it's obvious and sad. Perhaps even more perverse are generations of people who have never known what was, and have no frame of reference for it. Our leaders don't give it a thought and many would be leaders who might otherwise speak for traditional communities either lack the communication skills, are caught up in other bad ideas, or are pushed aside as relics in favour of some ideological meme. I think this is a first order cultural issue, like healthcare and social assistance. I'm not sure we have even the language to address it, as usually the most academic individuals want to talk about the most progressive ideas and 'change' of some kind. Perhaps there is hope, in that often we just find a 'new way' to describe some otherwise traditional concept. 'Organic gardens' being a good example of that; in my hometown, many people have 'organic gardens' - because they've just always had 'gardens', and really never did use a chemicals, ergo, they were hip before it was hip. Perhaps the term '3rd Space' can substitute in a similar manner to describe what we've understood since the dawn of time in social terms, i.e. 'the community'.

firstSpeaker 4y ago
When I was a 10 or something we used to gather together and watch tv with neighbours kids, we used to borrow things from our neighbours! My mother and other kids mothers used to sit and have tea and chitchat and spend time together. It was to the point that we could go to our friends house anytime and maybe even sit and have lunch with them (no invitation or preparation was needed). Comparing that with today small town that I live it feels more like people are living in in isolation cells rather than a community.

anovikov 4y ago

As an outsider, i see trust in the U.S. and the West in general as a problem. If anything, you need a lot less trust. You are taken for a ride by foreigners - from private citizens to governments with everything in between - all too often. It only works because you are way, way too trusting to people you shouldn't trust. We are now living in the globalised world when most people don't share Christian values. It means, trusting anyone at all apart from (with caution) closest immediate family members (and even that only because they are on your will), is simply a mistake.

mavu 4y ago

If there was a graph, I bet my hat that you could see the impact of Facebook (introduction of algorithm deciding what posts you see), twitter and other "social" networks.

fleddr 4y ago

And to make matters worse, AI is coming for us. Specifically for our creativity, soon destroying any sense of remaining human meaning. And we're on the verge of a AR/VR breakthrough, probably making the screen time issue even worse.

trh0awayman 4y ago

Is anyone talking to these friendless people one-on-one? I bet you there's a very easily spotted trend/cause that isn't explainable with anonymous surveys. As far as I can tell, it's easier than ever before to make a close friend, for those willing. I suspect that peoples bandwidth of acceptance is narrowing with the popularization of the internet. They imagine friendship to be something other than a close bond. They've idealized it, so of course reality never matches up.

fleddr 4y ago

An uncomfortable way to look at it, but the more freedom and convenience we acquire, the less social we end up being. Starting with religion. I'm not religious myself, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge it as a powerful community builder. You'll get to know everyone in the community. Neighbors, business owners, friends, possible spouses. And their families and all their life events. There's no real replacement for this "forced" social bonding at scale. Meeting friends used to require physical co-location. You'd ring their doorbell and asks if they're available to play. It would all be in-person. Now this happens occasionally but far less, a lot of this is digitized. Early teenager years: boys live in their bedroom, gaming with a headset. Girls spent their time chatting or posting on social networks. Later teenager years (party years). Far less in person. Some gatherings of friends at home, much less in public settings where you can meet new people. Work: from home but even when in the office: increasingly virtualized due to outsourcing, complicated vendor models, etc. Leisure: at home. Not just spending time on passive entertainment, also shipping shit to your door so that you don't have to go out and actually interact with people. In the case that people do go out in the physical world, they see disengaged people. In a rush, unapproachable (always on phone). We've become self-centered, anti-social. The old way which forced you to interact with the physical world and its people produced far healthier human beings.