31 ms·

Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem. May

• onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago
  Then, like, what's the point of even being a human instead of a robot?
  • MattGaiser 8mo ago
    You would be free to decide, instead of having it being biologically required that you socialize.
  • Aaargh20318 8mo ago
    To learn, to create, to grow? None of these things necessarily involve other humans.
    • Tepix 8mo ago
      But why if no-one is around to see it, admire it, comment on it, use it?
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      • Towaway69 8mo ago
        If a human lives and no one noticed that human, did that human really live or have a life? Much like a soundless tree in the forest.
        • vuln 8mo ago
          a human can not be brought into this world without being painfully noticed.
    • TaupeRanger 8mo ago
      Absolutely wrong, of course. At the risk of engaging with apparent rage bait: social interaction is one type of human yearning. So are learning, creating, and growing. Each of them requires other humans. Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans. Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans. Growing requires learning, so by extension, other humans.
      • charcircuit 8mo ago
        >Learning requires studying the knowledge created by other humans. You can learn from AI. Just because it comes from another human you doing have to socialize with that human. >Creating requires materials and methods created by other humans. You can AI generate these materials. And even if you don't, downloading an image or using a method from someone else does not require socialize with them.
        • TaupeRanger 8mo ago
          > You can learn from AI. Try learning to box from an AI. > You can AI generate these materials Um...no...I meant actual material things that you use to create what you want. The supply chains that manufacture the materials necessary for you to "create" all require social interaction at multiple levels throughout the process. Sorry, your depressing anti-social hermit paradise can't exist.
  • jatari 8mo ago
    Nothing wrong with being a robot.
    • knowitnone3 8mo ago
      [dead]
  • Telaneo 8mo ago
    I'd rather be a robot than a human, so from my perspective, the answer is clearly clearly none. I just don't have the option of turning into a robot.
    • Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      There are already robots, well I suppose LLM's and average person treats them like utter shit because we can (In a similar way to how the rich might treat average person sometimes* [not all and that's not really my point either] but yea) My point is that even if you were a robot, if you had feelings. you wouldn't be spared. So are you asking the lack of feelings? And even if that's the case then, there are people who had gone into accidents who lost their feelings/emotional part of the brain. They sucked at making decisions because I remember reading how the person binge watched shows instead of watching his son's football games, how he couldn't decide what is more important, buying a stapler or filing his taxes (I can be wrong about this one but something similar related to pencils) but my point is that he couldn't make good decisions. He couldn't really compare between two decisions. Now look at robots, look at LLM's. They can't decide if a car is 50m away then should it be drove or should you walk. They are essentially just a corpus of human data congested into a servant while being nothing more than auto correct on steroids in its true form. Humanity has its flaws. I absolutely agree. But I think that the reason we have good is also because humanity has flaws. Much of my morality stems from the fact that if I die and I am gonna die someday, that's for sure, then what's my footprint on the world no matter how tiny and questions like these. I suppose every human feels that way. A robot has no purpose other than being spawned in to create something brittle like yet-another-crud-app. Perhaps one can argue that humanity is the same seeing the horrors we unleash on each other and tbh we humans have just spawned here and we weren't asked by anyone to exist in our form or not. But at some point, we do have free-will and freedom no matter how tiny might it seem in algorithms the size of mountains and we can exercise it to bring meaningful change maybe. I'd rather be human and go watch my children's football game in future rather than be robot. Maybe the surrounding and family and the community as say even hackernews around us give some meaning as we bump into each other.
      • Telaneo 8mo ago
  • mock-possum 8mo ago
    1. That’s not an option and 2. There is no point. Life is what you make of it, whether you’re a robot or a human.
• piekvorst 8mo ago
  > The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to "belong," is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.) https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/loneliness.html https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/loneliness.html
  • mock-possum 8mo ago
    I do wonder at the loneliness I might have felt if I’d never found friends who would accommodate my intense desire to share values.
• sa-code 8mo ago
  What’s there to live for otherwise? Can you flesh this idea out more?
  • MattGaiser 8mo ago
    It would be up to you. These people who are lonely otherwise have lives.
  • Aaargh20318 8mo ago
    There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t. I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction. Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
    • charlie0 8mo ago
      You don't go far enough, every flu season should be lockdown and social distancing protocol should be followed on pain of death.
    • aliher1911 8mo ago
      So is food. If we switch to IV feeding you can also avoid many harms food and drink brings. We can do a soylent green as a stopgap.
      • Telaneo 8mo ago
        I'm not a big fan of eating, so yes please? Even if I then want to indulge in something tasty every now and then, the option to just 'top up' without actually eating is hugely attractive.
        • deleted 7mo ago
          [deleted]
• neilv 8mo ago
  Techbros are thinking: "Don't eliminate their need! They need a subscription AI app!"
  • qingcharles 8mo ago
    Daily AI conversations for seniors: (there are a few of these products...) https://intouch.family/en https://intouch.family/en
• kelipso 8mo ago
  This is the kind of detached from humanity viewpoint that I come to hacker news for. Keep it up.
  • swed420 8mo ago
    I mean, the first part of their comment got my hopes up: > Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem. But then I realized we differed on what the root problem/solution were. What economic/social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families? Another point the article doesn't mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they'd inevitably die.
  • keiferski 8mo ago
    Lots of startup opportunities here. Instead solving the problem, just make a product that convinces people it’s not actually a problem.
    • brailsafe 8mo ago
      So... every popular platform we're already on
    • fy20 8mo ago
      So AI girlfriends and Clawdbot?
    • blitzar 8mo ago
      Ai powered metaverse on the blockchain.
  • Sol- 8mo ago
    I unironically think so, though. I though this was a great though-provoking comment by OP. I think it's a totally legitimate thing to ponder and on most internet forums you'd just be ridiculed for it. OP even qualified it by saying they don't have anything against human connection per se.
• fsckboy 8mo ago
  >Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic... you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.
  • Aaargh20318 8mo ago
    Exactly. This need to be social is being used against us. Not just to sell yoghurt, it’s weaponized by the social media networks to manipulate entire countries.
  • 7952 8mo ago
    And building genuine resiprocity beyond money can be good for business and absolutely essential for sole traders.
• jatari 8mo ago
  Yes, how do we optimize social interaction out of our lives, maybe we can all live in VR with simulated girlfriends and never have to interact with another human again.
  • the_af 8mo ago
    End goal: Asimov's Solaria, where everything is done by robots and the mere thought of breathing the same air as another human becomes repulsive.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• nobodyandproud 8mo ago
  https://fablesofaesop.com/the-fox-who-lost-his-tail.html https://fablesofaesop.com/the-fox-who-lost-his-tail.html
  • mock-possum 8mo ago
    Holy shit is this an allegory for circumcision??
    • the_af 7mo ago
      I don't think so, no. The person being circumcized doesn't usually get to decide or even understand what's going on.
• throwaway613746 8mo ago
  [dead]
• kakacik 8mo ago
  Not everybody is wired in same way. Some have 'pathological' need, some see it as beneficial but optional item. Same folks definitely don't enjoy loud parties or bars full of strangers yelling on each other, and find a bit of lonely time healing/recharging. I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.
• rexpop 8mo ago
  The framing of human sociality as a flaw to be eliminated invites the dangerous notion that we can—or should—simply re-engineer ourselves. However, the ambitious project of "rewiring" human nature to eliminate our spontaneous connections and dependencies is not a path to liberation, but the ultimate goal of totalitarianism and oppressive social engineering. Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles. To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal". James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects". When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative. Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human". If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination. Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
• vuln 8mo ago
  > we can fix the human condition by removing humanity wild take.
• Telaneo 8mo ago
  On some level I agree, but I don't think most of my fellow humans would agree. Either way, editing away the need for social connections from humans seems to be quite a long way from our current level of technology, so it's not really worth considering as something that can actually be done. There's a philosophical discussion worth having despite that though.
• arjie 8mo ago
  Haha! I really like your comment though I couldn't disagree more[1]! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it's not all wrong. Here's the part where I think you're right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks ("a somewhat foolish friend of mine said" / "a junior intern who's not doing so well thinks" / etc.) but it's pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it. By contrast, many humans can't even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There's nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct. So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don't think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us. So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is "why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?" and I think that's silly. When I was a child, we kids "had a relationship with" or "had some of our needs met" by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike. I don't think there's any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one's own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I'd say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), "Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way". 0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had. 1: In fact, I'm of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin's Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book. 2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go "I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn" and X always happens to be what they're studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn't be studying it. 3: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
• anal_reactor 8mo ago
  The problem is, even if we somehow could do that, it's not possible to predict the consequences. Being social is exactly the one specific trait that gave humans massive advantage over other species, and was the backbone of our evolution.
• analog8374 8mo ago
  The part of the brain that needs human contact could be chemically or surgically neutralized.
  • the_af 7mo ago
    As a two for one, we could also chemically excise the need to enjoy food, so we could consume some tasteless nutritive slop while spending 100% of our time in front of a computer, being that mythical 10x programmer. Just think of all the value we could add.
• cgh 8mo ago
  Username checks out stares into abyss
• slim 8mo ago
  have you ever been by yourself for more than a few weeks ? you would find out that even you need to see people after having spent enough time alone. and it hurts if you're unable to see people when you feel that urge. it's a real human need
  • mock-possum 8mo ago
    You’re projecting, not everyone is so desperate for human connection. Spending a few weeks completely alone sounds like heaven to me.
    • slim 7mo ago
      It sounded like heaven to me too before experiencing it
      • mock-possum 7mo ago
        Well I’m sorry to hear that, but at least you’ve learned something about yourself - do you think you might be able to manage it better next time, being more prepared for the experience?
• hto209423432 8mo ago
  Thanks for the comment. This sadly is the default zeitgeist within Liberalism as a political philosophy - which is why elites across the world treat humans as cannon fodder. They'd sell them a "dream" and destroy them and communities they're part of in order to create cheap labourers and needy consumers.Once that has passed, they'll throw them under the bus. Once our overlords get AI/Robots to work for them, we'll quickly see mass-eugenics (positive & negative) programs instituted across the world. As Dugin et.al note, this is infact the central flaw in modernity - which was moderated occasionally by nationalism, fascism and communism - but ultimately all within the same broad loci.
  • tdeck 8mo ago
    For folks who don't know, Duginism is just Russian-supremacist fascism.
• 7952 8mo ago
  I don't think a maximalist solution exists for something like this. And in fact historic trends are doing exactly what you talk about. And the best example is money. It eliminates social resiprocity in favour of a transaction that completes in the moment. And for many people that satisfies a substantial portion of their basic needs. But everything else is then left with just an emotional side as the primary objective. Relationships are based on fulfilling some barely understood emotional need rather than practical benefit. And we feel more and more need to use hacks to try and satisfy that.
• xyzzy9563 8mo ago
  I'm guessing you haven't considered evolutionary psychology? If we didn't yearn for other people, there would be a lot less reproduction, and the human species would die.
• gozucito 7mo ago
  At first, I laughed. But it's a good question. My answer is social contact sharpens our mind. Without it, we would be stupider. And God knows we're stupid enough as it is without degrading our intellectual faculties further. At a basic level, loners will get hunted down by tribes because they are easy prey and because their behavior can be misconstrued or spun by grifters as nefarious because they are different.