Piggybacking off your suggestion, I like the idea of holding up a sign advertising a free activity that anyone can join, located in a very public space, with zero committment, so they can both show up and walk away at the drop of a hat. Whether it's an ad hoc organized chess tournament, or D&D game, or "one word story" or literally anything. That will have to wait until nicer weather, though, to avoid having to rent a place.

[1] https://chicagosignguy.com

If we want to solve this at the society or community level, there needs to be more opportunities for low stakes interaction. Places that people can passively gather around a communal activity. I'm reminded of the ladies dancing together in public squares / parks in China. They're usually a group, but mostly anyone can join in. You can just follow along and interact as much as you'd like. If you want to leave, leave. If you want to stay and chat, stay and chat.

Downtown San Mateo for example has the potential for this. It's already a closed off street where people go. But today there aren't group activities there that encourages passive interaction, people are still in silos. Perhaps if there were some games / puzzles, chalk boards, townhall type of table setup, that'll encourage passive interaction.

> You have to do it on a regular cadence.

I've posted about this before, but my wife and I sort of accidentally started a trivia team that's been going strong for like four years. Nearly every single week for four years, we get together with some subset of about 15 people. Most the regulars are there most days.

I also started cold plunging and have been doing it with the same regularity as trivia -- nearly every single week. It's a much smaller group, but it is absolutely part of our routine. Rain or shine.

Both these things have given several of us some really great friend time that makes that loneliness fade away.

Easier to just host a party or meetup where you can over invite and if some people don't show up it's no issue.

I've repeated this a couple times. Yeah, usually I have to do the bulk of the inviting and organizing. And yeah, it's uncomfortable being the "leader". But I know everyone enjoyed the time together. Those that didn't just never came and that's fine too.

You really can just do things!

Join an organization. For example every city has Toastmasters, most have several. Easy to find, and it is an excellent place to meet people. And you'll learn how to convert social anxiety into social adrenaline.

Do you have a faith? Actually go to church instead of just believing. Are you non-religious? Several strands of Buddhism can be followed as philosophy and practice without adopting any mystical beliefs. Vipassanā (also called Insight) and Zen are a couple of examples.

And how do you turn random people that you met into life-long friends? You can reduce the time investment by a lot. If you call someone on a spaced repetition schedule, you can make them internalize that the door is always open. Without requiring a large commitment on either side. And a spaced repetition schedule is easy to achieve - just think Fibonacci. I'll call you back in 3 days. Then 5. Then 8 (round down to a week). And so on. It feels like a lot of calls at the start. But it slows down fast. Over a lifetime, it is only around 20 calls.

Play around with it. If it was someone you met and hung out with on a cruise, maybe start at a week for that first call. Either way, you're reinforcing the idea that we like to talk, and the door is always open.

You can use a similar idea to keep people who move on from your workplace in your life. People always mean to stay in contact. Then don't. But with structured reinforcement, you can actually make it work.

I host board game days.

I organise a pub trivia team.

I organise singalong nights.

I host occasional parties. Soup nights. Zucchini parties.

I set up a lot of group chats and keep them alive.

I organise to visit my family.

For a lot of events, I get a 5-10% attendance rate compared to the number of people I invite. People are busy. It just means I need to keep expanding the circles of people to invite. If people don't want to come it eventually becomes clear and I quietly remove them from the lists. But mostly I hear the opposite - they really want to keep being invited, even if they don't make it often.

But that's the whole issue. Who am I supposed to reach out to? The 2 people at work I occasionally talk to because they happen to sit in the same office as me?

This is a thing that's always surprised me when I've been in the US. How common it is to enthusiastically arrange to do some activity together, get a meal, play a game, have a drink, whatever, and then for people to just call it off at the last minute. It seems much more socially acceptable to do so than either the UK (where I live) or France (where I have lived and still visit regularly).

The loneliness thing seems common across Europe too though so I'm not suggesting this is the root of the problem. But I do think that whilst this is a global problem the solutions are likely to be local, working with and leveraging different cultural norms.

Most importantly, you have to hear “I can’t” and be really cool about it or folks will half commit out of guilt and bail. They probably have a good reason, especially if they have kids. Or maybe they’re just exhausted! That is valid - you will sometimes feel that way too, and you should clearly (but politely) communicate it when you need.

If you consistently say yes/no and adhere to it, people will return the favor and you’ll all be better for it. My social life vastly improved post COVID when I adhered to that. My friends and I are incredibly honest so now folks rarely bail (always for good reason) and we all can reliably plan to hang out without guessing if someone actually means “no” when they say maybe and all that nonsense.

Finding new friends as an adult can be exceedingly difficult, but becoming a friend to someone is surprisingly easy.

Lots of people (and if I'm being honest I'm one of them, so no judgement) just sort of expect friendships to come to them. But if you actually do the hard (and somewhat socially risky) work of inviting people to do things, offering to help unsolicited, organizing gatherings, etc. new friendships are much easier to come by.

I moved to a new area. Searched for chess clubs. Couldn't find one.

So I created one. We now have ~10 people showing up to each meeting. From young kids, to older retired people. Facebook is a blessing for finding groups of people who are looking for things to do. It's really that simple. Just do things.

I've been working on a solution that makes it easier to meet people. When you're out for coffee or something and feeling social, you can signal you're available. Since you and your potential friend already nearby, it should reduce cancellations. I built an app for this, check it out if you have time: https://tatapp.astekita.com/

I would love to further the combat, please reach out to me Joseph de Castelnau on IG and X.

There was a post[1] sometime back about just having coffee in the afternoon outisdes and how that brought in more people.

I also write about it here [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618

[2]: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch

This is an incredibly good point. Like all things of this nature, I liken the process to panning for gold. In truth, you may not want to invest in people that aren't all that invested in you or the activity at hand. It stinks that the success rate is lower than chance, but it's probably better this way.

Problem is it gets fucking exhausting to organize and reach out after a while. Especially with DnD.

I wonder whether part of this is a habitualization of intolerance for just being with oneself - to be ok with feeling bored, for instance. Most suggestions are about "doing". Just being with oneself without a doing is painful for many from what I've seen.

in consumer societies people flee real freedom's anxiety by conforming to market ways, treating connections as consumption not production. lasting bonds need effort patience vulnerability, all anti-consumer virtues.

Fromm said that in market societies love and relations follow the commodity and labor market exchange pattern. they want low-effort replaceable humans. So they became low-effort replaceable humans.

I would like to mention this link from HN

Anthropologically, this matters because our social brains are tuned for inevitability, not optionality. We are adapted to environments where interaction is frequent, predictable, and constrained. Dunbar-scale groups, reciprocal dependence, and ritualized coordination did the work that calendars and reminders now attempt to approximate. When those constraints exist, friendship is an emergent property. When they are removed, it becomes a management problem.

Modern life systematically dismantled those constraints. Mobility replaced permanence, private space replaced shared space, and passive entertainment replaced collective activity. Flaking became costless. Absence became invisible. Optionality exploded. None of this happened accidentally; it was a deliberate trade in exchange for autonomy, flexibility, and economic efficiency. But the biological machinery did not change with the environment. We are still running hunter-gatherer social hardware in a world optimized for individual choice.

Seen through that lens, the advice to host, schedule, follow up, and accept rejection is not wrong, but it is compensatory. It asks individuals to manually recreate what used to be automatic. One person becomes the forcing function that the environment no longer provides. That can work, but it is fragile, asymmetric, and emotionally expensive, especially for people who are sensitive to imbalance or rejection. Framing this as “how friendship works” subtly turns a systems failure into a personal obligation.

If the goal is to reduce effort rather than heroically absorb it, the real lever is not better social skills or more persistence but reintroducing constraint. Social bonds form most reliably where interaction is inevitable rather than intentional: fixed schedules, shared physical spaces, repeated exposure to the same people, and light obligations that make absence noticeable. This is why gyms, religious communities, teams, classes, and other ritualized environments still produce friendships with relatively little effort. They partially restore the conditions under which our social instincts evolved.

There is no free lunch here. Effortless social life was never free; it was paid for with reduced choice, reduced mobility, and reduced privacy. You cannot fully recover that world without giving something up. But you can recover much of its function by selectively sacrificing optionality in exchange for repetition and proximity. The modern workaround of turning individuals into social project managers is effective but unnatural. Rebuilding environments that do the work for us is closer to our biology, closer to our history, and probably the only scalable way to make social connection feel less like a second job again.

This is true, but as long as the success rate is >= 1 other person, it's okay.

I started a running club for my apartment block (about 200 flats with maybe 300 residents). I posted flyers out once advertising it as a friendly social running club. Of the 300, the group has about 15 people, of which 5 are regulars (every other week at least), and just 2 of us are super regulars (multiple times per week). It's a terrible success rate, but those are 4/5 good friends.

At first it bothered me how flaky people were. Some people joined the group but have yet to show up in person. And some joined the group and are yet to even converse in the group chat, but hey, they'll come along when they're ready.

If you call 12 people, on the telephone, and invite them for a dinner party next weekend, and 12 people say yes, I give 90% odds that 12 people show up to your party

I always feel like I organize things to much. It's one sided

In all seriousness, there is no evidence to suggest that being a nerd (read: having nerdy interests) is related to being more emotionally stunted than the average person. You're just perpetuating a bad stereotype.

There are a ton of reasons for this. Work, school, coordinating plans with their partner, other commitments , other friends and family and honestly people just being flaky. For D&D this can be particularly bad if you're missing a couple of people who just flaked. Other activities don't have that problem and it can still be an issue.

There was a time when going out and doing things was necessary for social interaction. That's not true anymore. Online is sorta social. It's kinda close enough to scratch that itch for many, particularly because it has none of the coordination and/or travel issues.

But also people just have less free time. Because we have to work so much.

Hobbies in general have becom ea luxury. By that I mean you're spending your time doing something that doesn't earn an income. That's good but an increasingly large number of people don't have that as an option, hence "luxury".

Put another way, the ultimate goal of capitalism is to have all the worker bees constantly creating wealth so Bezos can have $210 billion instead of $215 billion.

Instead, a better goal is to become comfortable talking to strangers. If you could do that confidently, anything is possible socially.

Here’s a framework to do that:

1. Adopt a useful attitude.

Before any social situation, consciously choose an attitude that serves you socially: calm, relaxed, enthusiastic, curious, friendly, or simply open. This replaces the useless defaults that keep you stuck: reticent, scared, angry, confused.

Assume people will like you.

2. Set an intention for the interaction.

Decide on one small goal for the interaction. Not “be charming” or “make friends,” rather something achievable.

Example intentions, ranked from easier to more difficult: - To appear friendly (smile, make eye contact) - To greet people - To find out what’s going on around town - To enjoy talking with people - To meet people - To make someone smile - To enjoy getting to know someone - To make someone laugh - To get someone’s contact info - To flirt - To talk to the most attractive person in the room

3. Find comfort in your body.

When you arrive at a social space, take a deep breath. Know that you’re safe inhabiting your body, no matter what anyone thinks of you or says.

4. Set your expectations.

Paralyzed about what to say? Set the bar low. Say your words and expect nothing in return. Confidence in delivering your words will grow. Confidence in social acceptance will follow as you see people respond neutrally and positively.

You might be talking to a grumpy person. It’s okay if you don’t get the response you’d hoped for.

5. Start impossibly small.

If you’re severely out of practice (nervous, anxious, uncertain), set out to initiate an interaction with someone where you accomplish just one objective. Then stop and celebrate that win. Don’t try to combine all of these into one interaction—you will get overwhelmed. Then initiate another interaction on another day and accomplish another objective.

Objective: Say “hello.” If you tend to be quiet, focus on being heard. Find confidence in your voice.

Objective: Say the first thing that comes to mind and see what happens.

Objective: Notice something about a person and comment on it. “Nice shoes!”

Objective: Notice something about the environment and comment on it to someone nearby.

Objective: Ask someone a question for information.

Objective: Ask someone their opinion.

Objective: Ask a question that invites an emotional response rather than a factual one. “What do you love about living here?”

Objective: Join a circle of people in conversation.

6. Make it a habit.

Start today: say one thing to one person. Repeat tomorrow. Then the next day. Within about a week, it becomes second nature. The scariness diminishes. Soon, you’ll actually want to talk to people.

When you learn to talk to strangers, you’re more than halfway to making a friend. Friends will help keep you out of loneliness.

when i am in this mood my mantra becomes, "be an instigator".

This "hypersensitivity" and even paralytic fear must be understood as a narcissistic trait (people fail to recognize this, in part, because they have a limited view of what is narcissistic, as something necessarily bombastic, and of course, narcissism tends toward a blindness of one's own narcissism). By recognizing this to be the case, the subtle temptation toward self-pity, or normalization or even valorization of such qualities, can be prevented. Narcissistic traits are antisocial, and so it stands to reason that narcissistic traits impede one's ability to form healthy relationships.

> You are struggling against many aspects of the way we in the developed world/nerd world live.

The liberal consumerist hyperindividualism of our age is an anthropological position that conceives of human beings as atomized units that merely enter into transactional relations with other human beings. "Society" is merely something contractual and utilitarian, and in practice has the flavor of mutual exploitation. In effect, society is reduced to something like a marketplace. This is, of course, totally bogus and destructive. We are intrinsically social animals. Society is a common good, a superordinate good, toward which we have certain general, non-consensual moral obligations and something we need to flourish as human beings.

Because of the bad anthropology the contemporary world is rooted in, we often feel its practices and aims to be meaningless and hollow. We also find ourselves oscillating between the twin errors of collectivism and hyperindividualism. These two extremes are forced onto us by the paradigm of this false anthropology. One looming danger today is that, as the liberal order collapses, we do not know what will replace it. The loudest contenders are undesirable.

> more time-consuming relationship with our families than our parents ever did

That depends. On the one hand, family life was much more robust and lively in many ways than it is today. Parents weren't as careerist then in general. Families were larger, so the abundance of siblings meant you didn't have a lonely childhood at home, and a large pool of potential friends outside of it. Older siblings would assist with younger siblings, and children would participate in domestic duties, so in that sense, parents would not need to be as involved in all aspects of the daily life of the children and the functioning of the household. And in the past, families tended to concentrate more in the local area, so grandparents were typically near children and grandchildren and so on. In other words, a robust family life enables a robust society in general. Social life becomes "thicker" and mutually reinforcing.

The time-consuming element you have in mind is therefore related. All of the responsibility for taking care of aging parents falls on the few children they have or who live nearby. Without siblings or friends, parents step in socially more than they would with their children (or else consign them to the cesspool of social media and internet garbage). There are also cultural factors: parents can become overinvolved or inappropriately involved in some respects, like the proverbial helicopter parent, which itself can be spurred by the collapse of society around them, if not careerist ambitions for one's children.

Which brings us to your main point...

> You have to be the one who creates things to do.

Today, communities often need to be more intentional. If there isn't a community around you'd like to join, you have to be the one who initiates it. It's not guaranteed to function or last, but what's the alternative?

This doesn't "solve" the so-called loneliness epidemic, of course. The proposal here is more modest, namely, if you want people in your life, you have to look for them. Every community or social group needs a reason for its existence. The weakest form is rooted in utility, the second weakest in fun and pleasure. They are transient. The best and more robust kind are to be found in the common pursuit of virtue. In these and through these, we could begin to witness the birth of a healthy society.

Most of my real-life friends are people I've first met online, or as a consequence of having met someone online. Those online sites have mostly been run by enthusiasts, driven by some hobby, fandom or other interest. A couple of them have risen highly in popularity and attracted many thousands of users, and also served news and allowed vendors to use their site for interactions with customers.

Those communities that have thrived have made sure that discourse does not get poisoned. They have had active, strong but fair moderators. Many have strict rules against discussing politics or religion, but people have a need to discuss that too sometimes — and being identifiable e.g. between subreddits could put people off from doing that.

Also, where do you draw the line to what is an online community and what is "social media"? I've avoided Facebook and X-twitter, but I know genuine communities exist there too.

Also, the naive view is to place all the blame for a broad cultural shift on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/TikTok and pretend people can't choose to limit their use. Someone pretending there can only be a single factor to blame for a problem is usually a biased person with a bone to pick. The rhetoric supports your cause, but the US is not going to ban social media for adults any time soon and telling people they're helpless until the government bans social media is unhelpful at best.

But making children (and adults, because how else can you tell without checking) give their biometrics to companies (and by extension the highest bidder (palantir, paramilitaries, and police)) that helped create and then exacerbated this crisis is like asking the drug dealer association to help folks quit by giving them new exotic chemicals heretofore undiscovered.

You 'win' the war on pollution by making companies actually pay for their externalities, repeat offenders cease to exist, their assets seized, and their executives are jailed, rather than just 'paying fines' for the thousand of corpses they leave in their wake.

Likewise, if social media companies produce informational or social 'pollution' so defined, we can do likewise and insist they defray the cost of the damage. If they are no longer profitable when the cost is not paid by society, then they'll have to learn to innovate again.

You can have political/religious conversations with people who disagree but often it feels like walking in a mine field.

> most of my friends have dropped off or gone crazy

If you find yourself to be the one who is isolated, then I think you need to look inward. My best friends and I share completely polar opposite politics. We have known each other for almost 50 years now. We have had yelling matches over politics, especially during the Pandemic. We have now stopped talking... about politics. We still chat every single day throughout the day. I laugh heartily at least once a day over some extremely offensive joke that one of us sends, usually at each other's expense. But we never, ever talk about politics anymore and we are happier for it.

Maybe you need to rekindle those friendships and see if you can avoid politics. If you can't then I think it's more on you than them and you should reflect on that.

For example, I often find it quicker and easier to agree the timing and details of weekend trips to meet up with friends in other countries, involving one or both sides traveling significantly to meet, than arranging a single evening to meet for dinner with a single existing German colleague or friend living nearby. Of course these people have lives and arrangements I must fit in with, but I'm convinced that the examples I'm thinking of do not have such overwhelmingly busy schedules as to explain the observation.

This might sound like a trivial observation, but I suspect that the overall effect, if you scale even a small fraction of this behaviour across a whole country, could be huge.

One of the most fundamental reasons for my own personal loneliness is that, in many of the connections I've made, they simply do not feel sincere, genuine, authentic, and simply because the other person clearly has a different motivation for "caring" about me than actually caring about me.

For example, the churchgoers I've met have always felt like they were only spending time with me to get me to become a member of their church. They were eager to throw money at me if I lost my job, or offer to help me move, but never wanted to get coffee outside church hours.

Therapists are another example, obviously financially incentivized to talk to me. There are definitely some who care simply because it's part of their personality, but that still says nothing about me and any connection they have with me.

And I shared a story elsewhere here of a priest who I had literally just met minutes before, and who actually went in for a hug the moment I mentioned having a hard time with something, as if this random hug from a complete stranger meant anything other than him following a virtue signalling script.

No, I am convinced that the solution must be free, it must be volunteers doing it without anyone knowing about it, without the belief that they're earning brownie points from God or gaining a potential member of some organization, and without getting paid or rewarded for it, except for the reward of having a new and worthwhile friendship with the lonely person.

What you're describing here is an answer to the question "why aren't people 'just' being more social".

Certainly too, social media has played a big hand in this, but for many people, myself included, these activities feel high-risk, with a low probability of reward. Regardless of the correctness of the perceptions that have led to this feeling, the feeling exists and it is becoming more and more pervasive across society. And, like most problems centered on feelings, "have you tried not feeling that way?" is rarely, though not never, effective.

I actually have an interesting story here. For a couple of years I found a third place for myself in VRChat. It was great, I made friends, I spent time socializing for its own sake on a daily basis for hours. But something changed over time. I'll hop on now, look at each person on my friends list, look at private and public rooms I can join, and instead of being able to just jump in, the same feelings of "this is high-risk" that hold me back IRL result in me closing the game after ten minutes or so.

So what exactly happened? My theory is that, being a completely new "kind" of space, my brain didn't see the choices as "social" in the same way as IRL. But over time it relearned the same lessons in this new context, driving me away from social interaction.

Why? What are the unconscious lessons I learned, and why did I learn them? What have I unintentionally internalized that turned an enjoyable, effective, low-stakes virtual third place into an emotional slog that incentivizes self isolation in the same way IRL socializing does?

Of course, LLM generated content threatens that, so things have gotten worse.

I think your framing of history is wrong. Trains, and later cars were extraordinarily convenient compared to former methods of travel. We adapted infrastructure to maximize this convenience, not to profit companies. In fact, it's the other way around: companies profited off the demand for convenience they provided.

The same could be said for social media. People wanted small, low-risk interactions with other people over the internet. Companies capitalized on this, and realized that increasing dopamine is the only way to increase capital.

> it requires organized political and social movements, then the legislation and re-allocation of public funds for the public's good

I would reverse the first two, or maybe even remove the "political movement" part. Why is it necessary? It always starts with (a) one person taking concrete action on some principle, then (b) one small group of people joining that person on principle, then (c) this turning into a movement on principle and snowballing momentum until the change is exponentially impactful on society. Later, when the public agrees it's a good thing, they may choose to publicly fund it. Only a-c are necessary for it to make a meaningful impact.

However, I am not sure this is actually a solution to the (root) problem.

I agree. It's one reason I still come to HN and it's one of the few places I bother to comment (and the only place with more than a few dozen users). The moderation and community culture against trolling makes it a generally positive experience. I do still need breaks sometimes, though, for a few months at a time.

I'd love an online community where everyone was having discussions only in good faith. Zero trolling. I can dream.

This is so tough, though, because the things happening in the world really, genuinely, do matter and its very hard to realize that our passive emotional reaction to them is not meaningful, probably actively bad for us. If I could snap my fingers and do one thing, I'd obliterate social media from the face of the earth.

The social media trolls are running the government. This can't be a serious take in 2026.

Now everyone feeds the trolls.

Your #1 is great for after this connection with another human being has been made. Your #2 is why it hasn't been made yet. I'm trying to find solutions for the middle, to solve #2 for random strangers on the street, in order to get them both able and motivated to do #1. Those strangers are people who sit alone at home, all day, every day, and you only see them on the way to the grocery store and back.

I'm glad you got the help you needed to bootstrap your ability to find and form meaningful relationships. If only there was a reproducible way to help countless others get past that initial hump, and begin the same process. I believe it must be possible somehow.

I've been trying my surveys in Chicago as a first step. I need to do more, though, somehow. Now that I'm known as the "sign guy" by many people who pass me by every time I'm there, I think I can get more creative than surveys, and try signs that are more interactive to reach out to those people. I've been brainstorming throughout this thread on a few different ways to do this. If you or anyone has concrete ideas, I'd be very glad to hear it.

Not generalizing to all people, but I think for some a pet can reinforce anti-social tendencies.

I lived here almost 6 years before doing much more than a smile and nod to him, but my next door neighbors with a dog befriended him almost as soon as they moved in.

It wasn't until our son started walking and would stop and try and play in the dog water that we ever really talked to him.

Good god, where do you live where people think like that?

It's a little counterintuitive, but I find walking around with a camera has this effect too (depending on where you're pointing it of course).

I briefly considered it but I don't want to be the asshole. I would put any pet in exact position I am myself trying to avoid - stuck in home, alone for long periods of time.