Reading the article, and the top comments here on HN it feels like an incredible myopia people have against obvious solutions that are staring them in the face.

Reading the article, and the top comments here on HN it feels like an incredible myopia people have against obvious solutions that are staring them in the face. Here’s my solution to solve social isolation, that will never be implemented in South Korea or in the current Zeitgist but will definitely work and possibly future generations will lay in shock that we did not do this (In fact we active prevented this): Create a brotherhood organization, force every male who’s not gainfully employed to join that organization. If they don’t join they go to jail. The fact that no one even suggests some solution in this form shows to me the irrational bias against forcing people to do stuff. Sometimes people of their own volition make bad decisions, this might be mental health or a host of other reasons. Sometimes the solution to the problem if the very thing those people are desperately avoiding and at those times, as someone who knows better, you force them to do what they don’t want and they will be happier for it. I will be the first to admit, this solution won’t work for everyone. There is small percentage (probably as small as 0.1%) who actually don’t need constant social contact and are isolating for other reasons. They might also be geniuses (Gregory Perelman comes to mind). The rest crave social contact, probably need it much more than the average human, and they’re just not getting it because they’ve fallen into a hole and taking small steps to dig yourself out gives huge amounts of negative feedback that they would rather not try. In such a case a higher authority like the government should just force them out of their hole and they’ll thank you for it. The crazy thing is a hundred years ago, this was known everywhere. People were basically not allowed to be alone. In primitive Europe, (around 1600-1700s), if a man was seen idle he was put to work under the law. Every man till around 1900s was forced to be a part of multiple social structures, from your guild, to church, to family, to neighbour hood communities and it was often illegal to not be a part of these structures nor was it clear why one would choose to not be in these structures. Sometimes these structures were enforced by law (such as guilds) and sometimes with social pressure (such as church), but all these structures forced men to have regular contact in multiple forms, multiple times a day. Since late 1950s, most of these structures across the world have vanished and people have suffered with modern afflictions that were very rare in the past. The solutions are still the same, and giving people money, incentivizing sex etc is a bandaid not a long term solution.