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I'm going to be transparent: I'm interested in a structural analysis as to why there's a crisis of loneliness. Humans are wired for sociality and interdependen

I'm going to be transparent: I'm interested in a structural analysis as to why there's a crisis of loneliness. Humans are wired for sociality and interdependence. Our brains pretty much literally wither away, in ways, without meaningful social stimulus. Given this, I can't immediately simply lay the blame at the feet of individuals as to why people seem increasingly lonely and thirsty for meaningful connection. So what might be some other causes for this type of isolation that seems increasingly common?

r3trohack3r 4y ago
TL;DR: I was stuck in a local optimum where the screen provided so much relative value, and leaving the screen required so much relative energy and vulnerability, that I’d opt for screen time. I can only share my experience, can’t do a structural analysis. For me, it was screens. Not anything in particular about the screen being bad in and of itself, but that the screen was so easy and efficient. I can do my work better on a screen. I can create more value on a screen. I can have a meeting more efficiently on a screen. I can communicate more efficiently on a screen. I can entertain myself more efficiently on a screen. Going out requires effort. I have to “get ready.” I have to go somewhere. I might not know people so I have to be vulnerable to cross a threshold of familiarity. I have to either be comfortable with myself and how others see me or I have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. These things pretty much aren’t a problem for me on a screen. So my default is to wake up, go to a screen to work (I WFH because it’s more efficient), get done with work and find entertainment on another screen. Go to bed and start over again. I just bounced from screen to screen. Being social. Taking care of my body. Taking care of my mind. These all require effort above that baseline. It took me a long time to realize and appreciate that I was stuck in a local optimum and being inefficient in the short term was necessary to break out of it.
softsound 4y ago
Why is loneliness more common? Look at the work week. Everyone is working long hours, doesn't get time off, or is too broke to spend it doing social stuff in America or other countries. Lots of fear increases this too, with people working too much social skills go down and mental health issues become an issue. And lack of interactions with others increases fear in general. Now if you are lucky enough to be well off enough not to have that issue then the second thing is tech replaces people in a lot of areas - food, entertainment, health, ways we connect with others etc. If you had to rely on others more I bet most people would be less lonely in general. Isolation becomes easier the more tech you have available - be it cars or computers it can easily isolate you if you don't purposely avoid isolation. Now tech can bring people together, I'm in a long distance relationship and tech makes it very easy nowadays but it's still not the same, as in person face to face experiences. But I also think people will always face loneliness in every generation, it just might go by other names.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  But people worked a lot more in the past. The 5 day work week is a relatively recent invention. The 8 day work hour is also relatively recent. Why are we having a crisis of loneliness now and not when 18 hour workdays 7 days a week was the norm in a factory somewhere?
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    I think it mostly boils down to how trivial it is to entertain yourself these days with a smartphone. I was just on a weekend beach trip with friends and, at the end of the day, we considered playing some card games, but frankly we all wanted to just chill on our phones in bed for the last hour of the day, and we chuckled that we would have opted for the card games back in the days without smartphones. It’s hard for going out and socializing to compete with solitary smartphone time. And it’s easy to avoid ever doing the former, especially once you need it the most.
    - badpun 4y ago
      Smartphones are just the final nail to the coffin. Before smartphones, TV had already killed a of people's sociability (and radio did a lot of damage before TV as well). The book "Bowling Alone" was written well before the era of smartphones.
    - whstl 4y ago
      Agree. This is chilling to hear. Sometimes I really hate the industry I work on. We're really destroying mankind, and it's not in the ways most people predicted. Even Huxley's Brave New World looks optimistic compared to what we're doing.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    The 5 day workweek and 8-hour workday weren't won that long after unvarying (same job every day, same amount every day, no seasonal variation) optimized cog-in-a-machine industrial wage labor started to not just exist, but be common. Incidentally, a ton of early cinema (1900-1930, say) is very concerned about the dehumanizing effects of industrial (and office!) work, and the anti-social lost-in-the-crowd effects of cities (usually contrasted with rural or small town living) which nonetheless draw the masses with promises of money and glamor. Those seem to have been their major anxieties, in this realm of thinking.
whstl 4y ago
It's the modern stuff we have. People prefer binge watching a 10 episode Netflix show on a weekend rather than hanging out. Or playing video games. Or Youtube. I know some streamers and some people spend 5 hours a day watching them play video games on Twitch. Others spend 2, 3 hours an evening on TikTok or Instagram. Or are on Twitter all day, that's their hang. Or Reddit and 4chan. Or Hacker News! Even older generations are spending an awful amount time on messaging apps. My father isn't much into that but he's all day on news websites looking for whatever important thing. I know some Guitar web-forums where the average age is between 50 and 60 and they complain all day about kids these days and they Polyphia guitars. Back when TV was king I remember only going out when the boring stuff started. Whenever I hear the Full House theme song I get the urge to go hang out with my friends. I was really really lucky there was enough boring stuff. I also remember a teacher jokingly answering why he had 10 or so siblings to a classmate when we were in our teens: "well my parent's didn't have TV". I remember going to random shops with friends as a teenager to play guitars we couldn't afford, think of video games we wanted to buy, or which anime figures were cool. If we were kicked out, we would go hang in a park, or at the front of a specific building that had cool looking stairs we could sit. Can I even do this today? I can still do the other stuff, but as an adult it seems that this is only possible with my significant other. Whenever I visit, there's no groups of friends in those hobby shops anymore, it's only couples or solo people. Everything was a social activity back then. Today you gotta call people before you go to their houses because they're incredibly busy with Netflix or some video game. We need more boredom. Not you and me, but society.
- themaninthedark 4y ago
  That but I would also add: We feel that it is taboo to approach others, rather than try and start a conversation and seem weird we all stare at our phones. We are also hesitant to try something new, when we were young we had parents who would push us but now when we are independent we no longer have that push. The thread started gave a list of social clubs, the reply is that all of them are old white men who would not be accepting. Perhaps they had visited each club and experienced rejection but the Eagles and the Odd Fellows don't strike me as particularly conservative organizations. Neither do the Optimists, Kiwanis and Active 20-30. In order to meet people, you must step out of your comfort zone!
unity1001 4y ago
The current economic system - capitalism - and the philosophy and behavior patterns that it enforces on people. I saw how the system changes a society first hand when the free market ideology took over the society I grew up. People started to compete with each other, everybody was pushed to make more money, a 'good' career, the youth were pushed to study hard for getting good jobs to acquire such good careers, even as the society started to prioritize monetary/wealth gain before everything else. Social relations, from friends to relatives get loosened as everybody was immersed in his or her own survival and self gain. Worst impacted were the youth, who were pushed to drop social concerns and work harder to secure their future. It caught the youth in their early teenage years by them being pushed to prioritize studying and success over any social relation. So, in such a society, you enter a rat race very early in your life by starting to study hard for qualifying for a good college, and it chains forward from there on while destroying any social connections that you might have built. You already move to another city when going to college. Then the college itself quite short, merely 4 years, without enough time to create and solidify bonds. That is if the students can even find enough time to socialize in between the classes. Whatever bond was forged gets immediately broken by people moving to different cities, regions or even countries after graduation, to maximize their income and career chances. By this point the person is already hampered in the social department. Not only he or she was not able to socialize with his or her peers and the system already forced him to isolation and alienation from the peers to compete, but also because his peers have been brought up and educated with the same competitive mentality, the human social traits that our species have developed are already hampered or repressed. The peers are competition, not people to cooperate, collaborate, less, live together to support each other. The co-workers or acquaintances frequently leaving their jobs for a better opportunity somewhere does not help - you know that even if you hit it off with some person you met in your job or locale, that person can move away tomorrow in a flash. Which makes you further wary of creating any social bond that can be broken by next week. When the entire society is taken over by this mentality that enforces its behavior patterns, there is no escape - everybody is in a fight for survival or bettering his or her circumstances. Its a societal level alienation of people from each other and from what makes us humans a social species.
- panaffa 4y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Marketing. If you recognize my user name at all then you've heard me bang this drum a few times before, but marketing is among the top reasons Everything Sucks in modern society. Your attention is constantly being assaulted by people who want to sell you something. In order to sell you something, they have to convince you that you need it, but chances are you don't need it, so they exploit your insecurities. You're not manly enough, buy our pickup truck. You're not pretty enough, buy our makeup. You're not working hard enough, buy our productivity enhancement programme. You're not healthy enough, buy our fad diet. You're entitled to money because of a minor screw up, join our class action. Everything sucks because of that other political party, vote for us instead. We're encouraged to treat each other as competitors and seek the material above all, because that makes it easier for companies to sell us shit. We're encouraged to be entitled, because that makes us get angry when we don't get things, like the stuff they're trying to sell us. Carl's Junior: Fuck you, I'm eating. The side effect is we isolate ourselves, but that's just fine by them because they are selling us the junk we try to fill the hole in our lives with anyway. The message fucks us up on a personal level, and that radiates out to the sociological level. It forces us to be defensive with the systems we put in place to keep people connected (email, phone calls, the web, search results, etc.) because they will exploit any opportunity to hijack your attention. Is it any wonder we're wary of connecting with people too?
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  Additionally: We don't email with friends because our inboxes are overflowing with marketing so we don't use it to communicate anymore. We don't answer phone calls because most of the time it's just marketing calls (or scams) And so on.
svachalek 4y ago
I'm gonna trot this one out again: I read somewhere that people reflexively choose convenience over happiness, and I don't have a source for that but I find that it explains nearly everything about modern life. Sitting at home watching Netflix fails to fulfill all kinds of basic needs, but it's _easy_. Similar patterns are everywhere; our lives are so filled up with the path to least resistance, there's very little room for intentional effort to do things that are actually fulfilling.
tomgp 4y ago
The commodification of social spaces? If you can’t spend time in places without paying (in the cost of coffee, beer, gym fees, etc ) then that excludes big chunks of people, or they alert ration their social times to some extent

r3trohack3r 4y ago

TL;DR: I was stuck in a local optimum where the screen provided so much relative value, and leaving the screen required so much relative energy and vulnerability, that I’d opt for screen time. I can only share my experience, can’t do a structural analysis. For me, it was screens. Not anything in particular about the screen being bad in and of itself, but that the screen was so easy and efficient. I can do my work better on a screen. I can create more value on a screen. I can have a meeting more efficiently on a screen. I can communicate more efficiently on a screen. I can entertain myself more efficiently on a screen. Going out requires effort. I have to “get ready.” I have to go somewhere. I might not know people so I have to be vulnerable to cross a threshold of familiarity. I have to either be comfortable with myself and how others see me or I have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. These things pretty much aren’t a problem for me on a screen. So my default is to wake up, go to a screen to work (I WFH because it’s more efficient), get done with work and find entertainment on another screen. Go to bed and start over again. I just bounced from screen to screen. Being social. Taking care of my body. Taking care of my mind. These all require effort above that baseline. It took me a long time to realize and appreciate that I was stuck in a local optimum and being inefficient in the short term was necessary to break out of it.

softsound 4y ago

Why is loneliness more common? Look at the work week. Everyone is working long hours, doesn't get time off, or is too broke to spend it doing social stuff in America or other countries. Lots of fear increases this too, with people working too much social skills go down and mental health issues become an issue. And lack of interactions with others increases fear in general. Now if you are lucky enough to be well off enough not to have that issue then the second thing is tech replaces people in a lot of areas - food, entertainment, health, ways we connect with others etc. If you had to rely on others more I bet most people would be less lonely in general. Isolation becomes easier the more tech you have available - be it cars or computers it can easily isolate you if you don't purposely avoid isolation. Now tech can bring people together, I'm in a long distance relationship and tech makes it very easy nowadays but it's still not the same, as in person face to face experiences. But I also think people will always face loneliness in every generation, it just might go by other names.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
But people worked a lot more in the past. The 5 day work week is a relatively recent invention. The 8 day work hour is also relatively recent. Why are we having a crisis of loneliness now and not when 18 hour workdays 7 days a week was the norm in a factory somewhere?
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  I think it mostly boils down to how trivial it is to entertain yourself these days with a smartphone. I was just on a weekend beach trip with friends and, at the end of the day, we considered playing some card games, but frankly we all wanted to just chill on our phones in bed for the last hour of the day, and we chuckled that we would have opted for the card games back in the days without smartphones. It’s hard for going out and socializing to compete with solitary smartphone time. And it’s easy to avoid ever doing the former, especially once you need it the most.
  - badpun 4y ago
    Smartphones are just the final nail to the coffin. Before smartphones, TV had already killed a of people's sociability (and radio did a lot of damage before TV as well). The book "Bowling Alone" was written well before the era of smartphones.
  - whstl 4y ago
    Agree. This is chilling to hear. Sometimes I really hate the industry I work on. We're really destroying mankind, and it's not in the ways most people predicted. Even Huxley's Brave New World looks optimistic compared to what we're doing.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The 5 day workweek and 8-hour workday weren't won that long after unvarying (same job every day, same amount every day, no seasonal variation) optimized cog-in-a-machine industrial wage labor started to not just exist, but be common. Incidentally, a ton of early cinema (1900-1930, say) is very concerned about the dehumanizing effects of industrial (and office!) work, and the anti-social lost-in-the-crowd effects of cities (usually contrasted with rural or small town living) which nonetheless draw the masses with promises of money and glamor. Those seem to have been their major anxieties, in this realm of thinking.

whstl 4y ago

It's the modern stuff we have. People prefer binge watching a 10 episode Netflix show on a weekend rather than hanging out. Or playing video games. Or Youtube. I know some streamers and some people spend 5 hours a day watching them play video games on Twitch. Others spend 2, 3 hours an evening on TikTok or Instagram. Or are on Twitter all day, that's their hang. Or Reddit and 4chan. Or Hacker News! Even older generations are spending an awful amount time on messaging apps. My father isn't much into that but he's all day on news websites looking for whatever important thing. I know some Guitar web-forums where the average age is between 50 and 60 and they complain all day about kids these days and they Polyphia guitars. Back when TV was king I remember only going out when the boring stuff started. Whenever I hear the Full House theme song I get the urge to go hang out with my friends. I was really really lucky there was enough boring stuff. I also remember a teacher jokingly answering why he had 10 or so siblings to a classmate when we were in our teens: "well my parent's didn't have TV". I remember going to random shops with friends as a teenager to play guitars we couldn't afford, think of video games we wanted to buy, or which anime figures were cool. If we were kicked out, we would go hang in a park, or at the front of a specific building that had cool looking stairs we could sit. Can I even do this today? I can still do the other stuff, but as an adult it seems that this is only possible with my significant other. Whenever I visit, there's no groups of friends in those hobby shops anymore, it's only couples or solo people. Everything was a social activity back then. Today you gotta call people before you go to their houses because they're incredibly busy with Netflix or some video game. We need more boredom. Not you and me, but society.

themaninthedark 4y ago
That but I would also add: We feel that it is taboo to approach others, rather than try and start a conversation and seem weird we all stare at our phones. We are also hesitant to try something new, when we were young we had parents who would push us but now when we are independent we no longer have that push. The thread started gave a list of social clubs, the reply is that all of them are old white men who would not be accepting. Perhaps they had visited each club and experienced rejection but the Eagles and the Odd Fellows don't strike me as particularly conservative organizations. Neither do the Optimists, Kiwanis and Active 20-30. In order to meet people, you must step out of your comfort zone!

unity1001 4y ago

The current economic system - capitalism - and the philosophy and behavior patterns that it enforces on people. I saw how the system changes a society first hand when the free market ideology took over the society I grew up. People started to compete with each other, everybody was pushed to make more money, a 'good' career, the youth were pushed to study hard for getting good jobs to acquire such good careers, even as the society started to prioritize monetary/wealth gain before everything else. Social relations, from friends to relatives get loosened as everybody was immersed in his or her own survival and self gain. Worst impacted were the youth, who were pushed to drop social concerns and work harder to secure their future. It caught the youth in their early teenage years by them being pushed to prioritize studying and success over any social relation. So, in such a society, you enter a rat race very early in your life by starting to study hard for qualifying for a good college, and it chains forward from there on while destroying any social connections that you might have built. You already move to another city when going to college. Then the college itself quite short, merely 4 years, without enough time to create and solidify bonds. That is if the students can even find enough time to socialize in between the classes. Whatever bond was forged gets immediately broken by people moving to different cities, regions or even countries after graduation, to maximize their income and career chances. By this point the person is already hampered in the social department. Not only he or she was not able to socialize with his or her peers and the system already forced him to isolation and alienation from the peers to compete, but also because his peers have been brought up and educated with the same competitive mentality, the human social traits that our species have developed are already hampered or repressed. The peers are competition, not people to cooperate, collaborate, less, live together to support each other. The co-workers or acquaintances frequently leaving their jobs for a better opportunity somewhere does not help - you know that even if you hit it off with some person you met in your job or locale, that person can move away tomorrow in a flash. Which makes you further wary of creating any social bond that can be broken by next week. When the entire society is taken over by this mentality that enforces its behavior patterns, there is no escape - everybody is in a fight for survival or bettering his or her circumstances. Its a societal level alienation of people from each other and from what makes us humans a social species.

panaffa 4y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Marketing. If you recognize my user name at all then you've heard me bang this drum a few times before, but marketing is among the top reasons Everything Sucks in modern society. Your attention is constantly being assaulted by people who want to sell you something. In order to sell you something, they have to convince you that you need it, but chances are you don't need it, so they exploit your insecurities. You're not manly enough, buy our pickup truck. You're not pretty enough, buy our makeup. You're not working hard enough, buy our productivity enhancement programme. You're not healthy enough, buy our fad diet. You're entitled to money because of a minor screw up, join our class action. Everything sucks because of that other political party, vote for us instead. We're encouraged to treat each other as competitors and seek the material above all, because that makes it easier for companies to sell us shit. We're encouraged to be entitled, because that makes us get angry when we don't get things, like the stuff they're trying to sell us. Carl's Junior: Fuck you, I'm eating. The side effect is we isolate ourselves, but that's just fine by them because they are selling us the junk we try to fill the hole in our lives with anyway. The message fucks us up on a personal level, and that radiates out to the sociological level. It forces us to be defensive with the systems we put in place to keep people connected (email, phone calls, the web, search results, etc.) because they will exploit any opportunity to hijack your attention. Is it any wonder we're wary of connecting with people too?

bluefirebrand 4y ago
Additionally: We don't email with friends because our inboxes are overflowing with marketing so we don't use it to communicate anymore. We don't answer phone calls because most of the time it's just marketing calls (or scams) And so on.

svachalek 4y ago

I'm gonna trot this one out again: I read somewhere that people reflexively choose convenience over happiness, and I don't have a source for that but I find that it explains nearly everything about modern life. Sitting at home watching Netflix fails to fulfill all kinds of basic needs, but it's _easy_. Similar patterns are everywhere; our lives are so filled up with the path to least resistance, there's very little room for intentional effort to do things that are actually fulfilling.

tomgp 4y ago

The commodification of social spaces? If you can’t spend time in places without paying (in the cost of coffee, beer, gym fees, etc ) then that excludes big chunks of people, or they alert ration their social times to some extent