8 ms·

I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mist

• rkagerer 1y ago
  I wonder how much of this is due to social media sites and how the choice to interact that way (where the medium is geared to show off shallow facets of our achievements or amplify polarized opinions) is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.
  • heresie-dabord 1y ago
    > is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together. The assumption that social-media applications are really social is robbing us of traditional ways of maintaining actual society.
    • a5c11 1y ago
      True. It's so hard nowadays to go out with a friend to grab a beer or a coffee. They don't feel the urge because they satisfy social interactions online, and they think it's enough. Well, it's undoubtedly simpler that way, but it's fake. I, personally, hate chatting through instant messengers. I lost many connections because people started moving online more and more, and I just couldn't handle that anymore. For example, I don't like interrupting what I'm doing, and people usually expect to get a response within minutes. Plus, when I don't respond immediately, I simply forget and remind myself a month later. I could be the problem too, but the way we do communication today doesn't help either.
    • skeezyboy 1y ago
      its the most fuzzy definition ever. the literal sense of social media would mean "mediums of socialising" like instant messengers or forums, but it actually covers pretty much any website or app with a messaging feature. it basically just means "the internet" to idiots
    • immibis 1y ago
      There used to be social networks. You'd tell the computer who you knew in real life and you could talk to them through the computer. Then it was social media. People could publish things and their friends would see what they did in a single feed. Like TV or radio media, it pushes info to you, about your friends. Lastly it was just media. It was the same feed pushing stuff to you, but it isn't your friends any more. It's unknown micro-celebrities, ads, whatever keeps audiences hooked and makes profit for the company. Tiktok exemplifies this but they've all done it now.
      • api 1y ago
        The next step will be removing humans from the loop entirely, a feed of personalized AI generated slop engineered to keep you staring at it. YouTube and Facebook are almost turning into this organically. YouTube seems to be trying to fight it. Zuck seems to just not care anymore, generally. Eventually one will fully embrace it. Are there even any social networks anymore? Oddly enough as weird and cringe as it is I think LinkedIn kind of qualifies. It’s business but that’s a form of social interaction that involves real people doing stuff. I think most social interaction has moved onto messengers, Discord, Slack, etc.
        • mwcampbell 1y ago
          > Are there even any social networks anymore? Mastodon?
  • dustincoates 1y ago
    This predates social media. Bowling Alone was first written back in '95.
  • rahulnair23 1y ago
    Isolating tech goes earlier than that. I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.
    • federiconafria 1y ago
      That's what I was thinking, if social media was not there, would we be more social? Or is it really the fact that our necessities can be covered without being social the real "problem".
      • 9rx 1y ago
        I expect the latter. Social media isn't social in any meaningful sense. It is more like an interactive diary or interactive television. Any human involvement behind the scenes is merely an implementation detail — and with the way AI is going, an implementation detail that may not even remain for much longer. Social media may reduce overall social interaction, but only in the same way that reading books reduced social interaction. There is only so much time in the day; but that doesn't make all uses of time equivalent.
    • Kye 1y ago
      There's an Outer Limits episode about this: https://breezewiki.com/theouterlimits/wiki/The_Haven https://breezewiki.com/theouterlimits/wiki/The_Haven Season 5, Episode 15 (1999)
  • skeezyboy 1y ago
    id like to point out that youre on social media right now.
  • federiconafria 1y ago
    I think your ordering is wrong, we don't need to spend time together anymore so we fall back to social media. I wonder how things would look like if we had social media on top of a more social world.
• mihaic 1y ago
  It's not just loneliness, it's that by being isolated you can make sweeping generalizations about other people, and fall for the hatefull narative. When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
  • r_lee 1y ago
    This goes for other stuff as well, like if you're "ungrounded" by not actually observing/communicating with the thing you're judging, you can kind of just make up the perfect villain in your head and hate that I guess same thing would go for extreme fears, like, you are so scared of something that you get even more scared of it because you know it's the scariest thing in the world, until you actually meet the thing you're scared of
  • astura 1y ago
    >When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them. I find it to be exactly the opposite. It's much easier to believe someone is inherently good but just a bit misguided if you don't have to communicate with them and aren't personally affected by their "misguided" behavior.
  • belorn 1y ago
    From the research I have heard and seen on the subject, when people communicate with people different than themselves it can both help and hurt trust. The primary factor that I took from the research is that it depend on ethical values. If the two people are different but share ethical values, especially symbolic ones, then relationships tend to improve. If however people have different ethical values, then the results of such meeting tend to create more hostility and distrust. People can generally accept that people have different ethical values only if they don't need to actually see it.
• latexr 1y ago
  Who would’ve thought that hating entire groups of humans and blaming them for every imaginary problem would lead to isolation and loneliness! In case it isn’t obvious, I’m being sarcastic and agreeing with you.
  • blueflow 1y ago
    I think this is a consequence of what the posted site explains in the last text block - social trust is gone.
  • chongli 1y ago
    Racism and tribalism were still present when we socialized more as a society. We still did all of the bad things. It’s just that we also socialized and formed kinships and families and institutions. We were connected in a social web. Now we’re heavily fragmented.
• CalRobert 1y ago
  This is (one of) the reasons I prefer places where you can walk, bike, or take public transit to get around. It’s one of the only times of day I’ll see and maybe talk to people very different from myself. Though this is also fading as people are on their phones and have ear buds in.
  • bityard 1y ago
    I joined a gym for a few months last year partly because I thought it would be a great way to meet some people. BIG misread on my part. It turns out most public gyms around here have a strong "leave me the hell alone vibe." Essentially zero eye-contact. Pretty much everyone had earbuds in and I didn't bother them. I said "hello" to those without earbuds once in a while but only got a silent death glare in response. So I stopped doing that.
    • CalRobert 1y ago
      :-\ that's a shame. I mean, I have earbuds. And sometimes I use them on the commute to work to practice Dutch (or did, before I worked remote). But there's definite downsides to the increased convenience of filling "empty" time.
      • dingaling 1y ago
        I was thinking about this today, a lovely morning run on the beach with the Sun rising in a blue sky. Should have been a wonderful shared experience but everyone I met had earbuds in and the most interaction I obtained was a nod. Why go to the shore with the sounds of the waves lapping gently on the shingle but then block it out with earpods? It irritated me.
        • CalRobert 1y ago
          Even the most beautiful setting can become mundane if you see it every day, but I generally agree.
• Aardwolf 1y ago
  I just saw a class of kids on a train and they were interacting and yelling just like we did 30 years ago. I think there's hope, they're not all zombies staring at a phone yet
  • K0balt 1y ago
    There’s still product-market fit frontiers waiting to be found out there! (/s) It’s depressing how whenever I see people doing people stuff without a screen in their face I both smile internally and reflexively wonder how we could better infiltrate their demographic. We have become the disease at this point, and now we work diligently to replace humans from any economic activity except consumption, so that the value extraction cycle can be optimized even as it collapses upon itself in a singularity of greed. Soon, humans, the last obstacle standing between the uninterrupted flow of energy and resources into the event horizon of capital, will be eliminated from the process altogether with the removal of wages and eventually money itself through the wonders of automation. Only then will the crystalline purity of technocapitalism truly shine: power as the new capital. The power to convert resources and energy directly into the will and whim of the capital class, harnessing recursive automation in a macroscopic grey-goo scenario that sidesteps both workers and customers. An ever-tightening loop of resource concentration, building from a throbbing rhythm into a deafening turbine whine of conspicuous consumption. A hollow promise of “Progress” that leaves the 99 percent outside the gilded walls, merely insects at the pointy end of excavators. I’m going to take tomorrow off and hug my grandchildren.
• 999900000999 1y ago
  Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday. In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction. At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods. Not everyone, but just having a role in society can be a major help for many people. The biggest crime of the modern era is the disposable human. You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence. You don't get to have any real status in that, for example In many places there was just one or two bread makers for the entire community. Baking bread isn't the most prestigious job, but you matter. Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
  • koliber 1y ago
    I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it. A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now. Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising: - I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it - It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago. - DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food. - Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting. Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.
    • qcnguy 1y ago
      This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing. The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs. Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others. People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.
• somenameforme 1y ago
  Argument is a great way of forming relationships. The problem in modern times is that one person, typically the person such as yourself - endlessly confident in their flawless knowledge and determined to impose it on everybody, becomes belligerent when somebody doesn't simply graciously accept their impeccably perfect argument. That doesn't typically lead to good outcomes. More generally, I think people have forgotten that two people - no less intelligent than the other - can see the exact same thing, evidence, or whatever else, and simply come to different conclusions.
  • jimkleiber 1y ago
    Yes but i see argument as not about accepting that people come to different conclusions but actively trying to seek mutual understanding. There is a wrestling, a struggle, a fight to understanding, to communicating, that so many of us simply just run away from, and i believe it gets reinforced with cultural norms of avoidance and desire for "peace" instead of connection and deeper integration.
    • s2l 1y ago
      Applicable in corporate world too: https://youtu.be/0MD4Ymjyc2I?t=410 https://youtu.be/0MD4Ymjyc2I?t=410 (Yves Morieux; Two TVs)
      • jimkleiber 1y ago
        Brilliant. I love that snippet and will try to watch the full video later. I'm thinking to frame my work for the corporate environment so i appreciate this. Thank you!
• qcnguy 1y ago
  All three of those links are claiming right wing people are mentally ill. Academics have all kinds of indirect theories for why people outside of academia don't agree with their politics. Ironically given the subject of the website, one thing they almost never do is just go outside of academia, sit down with people who disagree with them and talk to them as equals. They spam bot-filled websites like Mechanical Turk with surveys trying to prove things about the imaginary people in their own minds, and then publish "findings", but they don't actually talk to people. The most obvious and logical explanation for why right wing people exist is that they disagree with left wing politics, believing them to lead to bad outcomes. Papers like those three are a dime a dozen, but one thing you'll never find is studies that just directly ask people disagree with common academic beliefs. Instead it's taken as axiomatic that leftism is moral and correct, so anyone who disagrees must have some other deeper psychological reason to disagree (loneliness, reading the wrong websites, not getting enough sex, whatever). Lots of non-replicable studies get produced, grants are awarded, and academics give lots of interviews to the NYT about their search for One Weird Trick to convert people to their worldview that doesn't involve any actual policy changes. The professors doing such studies should look in the mirror. If they're saying social isolation and informational monoculture leads to extremism, then it's hard to find somewhere more isolated and monocultural than universities. But of course they lack sufficient insight to consider that.
• energy123 1y ago
  > loneliness is a perceptual phenomenon that represents a paradoxical component; it is not mitigated through proximity to others It might be better described as alienation. Then we can fit it into Hannah Arendt's theory of fascism being caused by alienation. In the modern world, that alienation is accelerated by social media and cost of living for those without assets, who pay the cost of inflation without benefiting from asset price inflation. Everything is more hostile, more sectarian, and you also can't even afford anything, and also you are a bad person because you are a creepy 45 year old white man with a small dick, and you better stop looking at me like that. Is it any surprise?
  • andrepd 1y ago
    Bearded German philosopher was right once again.
    • kalli 1y ago
      Famously bearded philosopher Hannah Arendt? There's an Arendt/aren't joke in there somewhere.
  • cassepipe 1y ago
    To me, alienation is philosopher's toy and they like to put what they don't like behind that word. It's been mostly used by Marxist philosophers rediscovering the "young Marx" to deal with the fact that the workers actually didn't seem that interested in a socialist revolution anymore (they have false consciousness !) I am not saying this to invalidate what you are saying but would you care to explain how you think the problem described by parent (richer societies allow for more alone time thus loneliness) is better described by Arendt's concept of alienation ? > In the modern world [...] Is it any surprise? To me you are just describing a poverty and ideological tribalism but that still doesn't tell me what Arendt can do for us here
  • xenobeb 1y ago
    I do wonder if this is really the same type of alienation that Arendt refers to. I can understand how if you are afraid the neighbor is going to be an informant, you stop interacting. Public discourse breaks down and ideology takes hold. This seems quite different to me than the type of alienation we are talking about in 2025 from online interactions. I am not sure alienation is really the right word in terms of isolation from a group. If anything the problems from social media are from too much interaction and too much political discourse. I would say that is completely opposite to what Arendt was talking about. I think it is the way "boredom" has quite a different meaning today than in 1990. While you can still be bored in 2025, I don't feel boredom the same way as in 1990 when none of my friends answered the phone and there was nothing on tv. 2025 boredom is more the lack of hyper stimulation and hyper novelty as opposed to the 1990 version of going through your "junk drawer" to find something again novel because you can't think of anything else to do. I can't even remember the last time I had junk drawer to even go through.
• alberth 1y ago
  > social isolation is the single great social ill You might find this short 60-second video of interest. https://youtube.com/shorts/XVFGEDs95MI?si=NEvRg-m2KymblwF0 https://youtube.com/shorts/XVFGEDs95MI?si=NEvRg-m2KymblwF0
• jl6 1y ago
  Humans are moored to their social web: having to exist amongst others continually pulls you towards the average feelings/views/activities of the people you are connected to. Change is slow. When humans become unmoored from this web through loneliness/isolation/alienation, they can freewheel and drift further from that average. This can be liberating! But if you don't re-connect, either with your previous web or a new one, there's nothing stopping you falling off the deep end; nothing to give you a little correction that keeps you "normal". Political extremism of various flavors, or identity crises founded in over-rumination, are what we see - but also innovation and removal of constraints. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies relates. The social isolation moonshot is to break from convention and be a hero auteur, but the risk of failure is very high. Nullum magnum dementiae sine mixtura ingenium fuit.
• ipaddr 1y ago
  You have to correct people with things you believe. But the biggest problem in life is loneliness. Not correcting people is the first step towards avoiding loneliness.
• nonethewiser 1y ago
  >I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. This seems wildly incompatible with the desire to not have social isolation. I agree with the rest of your sentiment, but that is a really anti-social idea.
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    Also, what is "correct" today was not correct 50 years ago or might not be correct 50 years from now (just to pick some numbers, the time periods obviously vary). And so much of this is a product of when and where we were born and what we were taught growing up.
• AbstractH24 1y ago
  Here's an interesting thing to ponder - how would we be different if not for lockdowns making work from home somewhat normal? The overnight disappearance of those loose connections you get in the workplace had a huge impact on my mental health. Life-altering. 5 years later, I split my time between remote tech consulting from an office I rent (to make sure I don't sit home all day) and a union-protected, but completely antiquated job from a career I left behind that I returned to mostly to be with people. By 2025, things would have probably been the same both for society and me (lockdowns coincided with me turning 30), but the abrupt change was horrible.
  • cruffle_duffle 1y ago
    Societies reaction to Covid destroyed so much community it isn’t even funny.
• teiferer 1y ago
  > if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. Why is that? I may feel that somebody is wrong, and that may be correct, but it could also be incorrect. A priori, they are not less correct than you are. Then why do you need to go to them and tell them that what they think is wrong and what you think is right? I'm glad that people don't do that all the time. I'm sure I meet lots of people every day that think I'm wrong on something. Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. If every time they would feel that I "need to be corrected", that would be terrible.
  • sorrythanks 1y ago
    There are things that are true
    • teiferer 1y ago
      Sure. But there is no objective arbitter of truth. In a similar vein, if I'm standing at a train station discussing some topic with a friend on which we have different opinions w.r.t facts, I would not feel comfortable if a stranger would come up, insert themselves into our conversation and start unasked to "correct" one of us (or both). Occasionally and if it's done very politely, maybe. But if that happened every time I'd be seriously annoyed. Correct or not.
• citruscomputing 1y ago
  Right now the solution that makes the most sense to me is intentional communities. If anyone reading this has experience living in one, I'd love to chat. Email is in profile.
• BurningFrog 1y ago
  > if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected One discovery I've made is that they really don't. Nothing terrible happens if you don't correct people. You can really just accept that people have some flaws and appreciate their positive sides!
  • Shocka1 1y ago
    Agreed. I just let people talk and have for many years now, no matter how well I know the person. Someone might start talking about chem trails or maybe another conspiracy and I always entertain them for the most part. Here and there I might do a "have you thought about it this way, or that?", but other than that, there isn't much reason to argue/debate unless it's at work or something that actually matters in the grand scheme of things.
• brailsafe 1y ago
  > if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. This was something I believed when I was 21, and then was corrected by time. There are very few instances where anyone needs to be corrected in a social setting. Learning to move on without demanding they accept your argument is hugely important.