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Posted by publicdebates 1/15/2026

Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

Countless voiceless people sit alone every day and have no one to talk to, people of all ages, who don't feel that they can join any local groups. So they sit on social media all day when they're not at work or school. How can we solve this?
799 points | 1245 commentspage 28
steele 1/15/2026|
Volunteer
scotty79 1/16/2026||
> Countless voiceless people sit alone every day and have no one to talk to, people of all ages, who don't feel that they can join any local groups. So they sit on social media all day when they're not at work or school. How can we solve this?

Solve what? This is the world I have always dreamed of, before even computers became a thing in my life and community. I initially approximated it with books.

griffinlam 1/16/2026||
Find what you love to do
b65e8bee43c2ed0 1/15/2026||
undo urbanization, education, and technology. retvrn to monke.
markus_zhang 1/15/2026||
I think this is fine? I’m pretty quiet in my real life but I do talk about here.
SoftTalker 1/15/2026||
It can be fine, if you're happy in a mostly solitary life there's nothing wrong with that.

If you're unhappy and feel a need for more friends, then you'll need to take some action if all you do is sit at home on a screen all day.

10xDev 1/15/2026|||
I don't view this as socialising. It is mostly a battle of narratives.
PokemonNoGo 1/15/2026||
About what?
snovymgodym 1/15/2026||
Move to Latin America
pshirshov 1/15/2026||
Obviously, someone has to create a nice big corp which would make us nice LLM friends and family members, yes, yes, yes!
riversflow 1/15/2026||
on the topic of platonic friendship, I couldn’t disagree more with a lot of the comments. I have plenty of friends yet I don’t do clubs and will never, ever do organized religion. People advising it are religious freaks in my opinion. Some of my best friends took this advice to go to church and bible study. They complain every time I see them about the people in their church. Meanwhile I’ve made more and better friends online. Its not hard, get on social media, find an influencer/streamer that matches your vibes and go jump into the official or adjacent discord community and play video games with people in that community. If you engage in active listening and are a decent person, you will easily make plenty of friends. Additionally, I think in person hangouts are kinda mid, but I hangout with my friends in-person (at a minimum) every other day when I weight lift. Like seriously, I often would rather chill in Discord than go and hang out in-person.

To me the male loneliness epidemic is more about a lack of ability to find meaningful romantic relationships. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and as somebody who has been doing online dating since it essentially started, I am pretty sure that the problem (or at least a major piece) is that match group has commodified romantic relationships.

I know a lot of people will focus on meeting people in public or whatever, but it has been my experience that dating has become completely garbage and a large part is because all of the current popular dating apps disallow index search and funnel you into swiping. From a mate selection perspective this makes no sense. Not only does it muddy the waters about who is actually a real match, but it also does psychic damage to make so many shallow judgements.

Back before match group bought OkCupid, I used to have excellent results finding people their who shared a lot of common ground with, messaging them with a thoughtful message, and going on dates. Swiping is an absolute crap shoot, and often I feel like I am being used.

insane_dreamer 1/15/2026|
Not with technology.
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