Posted by publicdebates 3 days ago
Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
Basically all discussion platforms are broken for any sort of long term meaningful discussion which I think is at least part of the problem. Even this thread and this comment just the fact that the thread is now 4 hours old the amount of views and chance of getting many responses drops precipitously. On most platforms unless you are someone with a large following you basically have to think like a marketer and post often and early on posts to stand a chance of getting a discussion going. It's always so ephemeral too. Even though posts on a platform like HN on reddit still exist and you can comment on old threads probably 99% of the activity happens in the first 6 or so hours and then it largely ends.
It makes me miss forums where at least you had long lived threads with simple time based post order and a good chance of replies. This doesn't seem to exist on only platforms now and forums have largely faded away.
The fragmentation of discussion has also messed things up. For example yesterday I was listening to a HardFork podcast episode which is a fairly popular pod, topping the charts in at least the tech category, and after listening I wanted to check for discussion around the episode and probably leave a comment or two. I assume this episode had to have gotten at least in the low tens of thousands of plays though perhaps that is way off. I went searching for discussion and basically found a largely dead subreddit for the podcast with no threads being regularly created for the episode and an empty comment section on nytimes which any site comment section is a useless place for discussion anyways. The pod is also posted on youtube which the youtube comment section had the most activity of anything I found but the youtube comment section and the way it is structured/operates is perhaps the most useless of all the platforms for trying to have any discussion. I just don't understand how if at least say ten thousand people listened to the episode surely at least 1% would be interested in discussing it and 100+ people going back and forth would be a large, active, healthy discussion somewhere.
Even threads that seem "active" on sites like HN or Reddit in the context of the actual audience sizes are shockingly small and confuse me. For example The Pitt season 2 just premiered and posted 5.4 million viewers, the subreddit post ep discussion currently has 5.3k comments which is quite high for a show. That is a joke of a percentage though, 0.1%! and even worse in the context of people that are posting probably post more than once in the thread. I understand many and even most people not wanting to post to discuss a show they just watched but how the hell is less than 1 in a thousand!
This post got long which also damages the chance of any engagement due to TLDR culture.
I found community through a shared enjoyment of an activity that must be done as a group. Grass roots motorsports in my case, but any activity that needs you to be there with others should work the same. The key is that you should enjoy it and you should have time to interact with people. I like to make car go vroom, but generalize the approach and it should work.
My first season, I won an event with a hero run that sent me from 5th to 1st. When I parked, a random guy stuck his head in my window and started hyping me up for it. I still think about that 3 years later and it still makes me feel good. That feeling made me want to do that for others.
I started approaching random people I'd seen before and just starting a conversation. It was rough the first few times but it gets easier. You already have a shared activity so just start with that. I made a point to remember people's names or at least their car (bad with names, but cars stick for some reason). If the name didn't stick, I'll ask again next time and maybe bring up their car so they know I remember them. When I know their name, I use it when I see them again. Maybe just "Hey bob!" as I'm passing, but something to let them know someone there knows them and cares enough to say hi. They're not a stranger at least. If I haven't seen them in a while, I ask how they've been and spend a bit more effort on the conversation than just a "hey".
It started with the regulars. Now I'm looking for the new faces. I know stuff and they need to know that stuff, so it's easy to talk. If they come back, they should be able to find someone to talk to so I introduce them to some of the other regulars.
I look for people eating lunch alone and I go talk to them. Maybe 2 to 5 minutes, maybe longer. Depends on them. Sometimes I'm awkward. Sometimes I say dumb stuff. Whatever. I'm trying to help these people not be alone at a social event if they don't want to be. If they do, that's fine too, but I'll try again next time.
Some people are closed off and don't really want to talk. That's fine. I still say hi by name and see how it goes. Not trying to push, just keeping the door open. After a few times of trying, a lot of people will start to open up our let the guard down. Some don't.
I'm an introvert and all of this takes extra mental energy on top of the events being competition and work. I don't have the time to compete at the highest level every event because I'm spending time helping others. Rather than getting a better driver in my car to tell me where I'm making mistakes, I'm trying to get the less skilled drivers in my car so they can see why I'm faster. Instead of reviewing data over lunch to see where I'm losing time, I'm trying to build community. I want people to come back. There's a cost to it.
I moved to the middle of nowhere 10 years ago and had no local friends. Work friends are rarely real friends. Tech meets, young professionals groups, nothing came out of those. It sucks to go to a bar alone. None of that produced anything.
Motorsport has been the only activity I've tried where I've started making friends who I talk to outside the events. A lot of it is still about motorsports, but I've gained a few friends who I sim race with or talk to online in the off season. It could have been any other group or activity, but those are the people who made me feel welcome.
Real figures, there are at least 25 people I can walk up to and start a conversation with at an event and have good rapport, more that I know by name and just haven't clicked with, 2-3 people I consider actual friends. I started putting in the effort like this after my first season, so this is the product of 2 seasons of effort (winter doesn't count because there are no events). I'm still kind of lonely, but it's better and getting better.
I think it's that I put in effort. I know I've helped some of those people feel like part of a community. I gave them a few people they could talk to so they didn't feel so alone. Maybe my role was just keeping them coming back until they found their clique. Maybe I need more time to get to know them. Some introverts need an extrovert to help them get started. Sometimes that extrovert is an introvert tryhard.
The reason I do this is cause one guy stuck his head in my window after a run and said something like "bro that was awesome! Nice run!" And he was genuinely happy for me even though he barely knew me. I'm not good at that specific thing so I try in my own way.
I think people look for community. I did. I bounced off a few groups because I didn't fit in. I'm trying to do my part to help people "fit in". Tech solutions ain't gonna help here. Get face to face, make outsiders feel accepted, and see what happens.
And thanks, Clarke.
From a practical perspective, there is the whole "3rd place" issue. How can I open a business that caters to the public, who will just sit there and loiter on their phones and laptops all day and be profitable. Starbucks sort of did it in the 90s, but they're not tolerating that anymore.
Forget businesses, can you walk to a park, a beach, a hiking trail on a whim and run into people? Can you hold events, watch parties,etc.. on public places easily like that? It's not easy at all these days.
I blame cars. I despise the idea that electric cars are the replacement to cars, without considering changing transportation so that it is more efficient with trams, trains,etc... The side-effect of that is you run into strangers on public transport. This doesn't just affect the loneliness epidemic, it is in my opinion a direct cause of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, and of course obesity. You can't even be homeless and sleep on the streets these days. Even the park benches are built to be hostile to anyone that wants to chill there for too long.
Society was restructured between 1950s-1980s so that it is suburbanized. It's all about the family unit, single family homes, freeways and roads built to facilitate single family homes (after WW2, starting families was all the rage, plus white-flight didn't help). Shopping centers built to cater to consumers driving from their suburban homes. Malls you can walk in, after you drove some time to park there. Even when you buy food items at grocery stores, pay attention to serving sizes, it is improving a little, but you'll see at minimum a serving size of two typically.
Society was deliberately engineered so that you have more reasons to spend more as a consumer. Families spend more per-capita. suburbs mean more houses purchased, entire generations renting with their bank as a landlord via mortgages, home repair, home insurance, car insurance, car repairs, gas stations for cars where you can get the most unhealthy things out there in the most frequented and convenient places. Make kids, make wives, make ex-wives, get sick the whole lot of you for hospitals, health insurances,etc..
It wasn't planned by some central committees or secret cabal, but it was planned nonetheless by economists and policy makers.
If everyone just got married and had kids, they won't be lonely would they? you don't need to hang out at park with strangers, you'll feel less of a member of your local neighborhood who look and think like you, and start thinking more as one people.
All the interpersonal interactions and opportunities to build relationships with people are commercialized and controlled.
For one reason or another, people are just not getting married in their early 20's anymore, or having that many kids later on like before. Even when you get married, your interaction is by design with other married people, who are busy commuting in their cars to and fro work, kids school,kids sports, plays,etc... imagine taking your kids on busses and trains every day to these places which are fairly near-by, by necessity. you'll be spending time with them instead of operating machinery. They'll be meeting stranger kids from other schools, seeing random strangers all the time, you'll be talking to randos as you walk to the train, wait on the bus,etc.. but this can't be monetized.
Blame the economists and policy makers if you want to blame someone.
If you want solutions, let's talk explicitly about the policy changes that need to happen.
Too much traffic? tear down the freeways instead of building more lanes.
It costs $10B to build a simple metro line? pass better laws to regulate bidding and costs, investigate fraud and waste.
But to dig even deeper into the root of the matter, look at what is celebrated and prized in society. Most of its ills come from there. For most Americans, it is inconceivable to be able to just go out of your house without any plans or destination in mind and just start walking and see where you end up, and who you run into. That's a crucial and tragic ability that's been lost. We really have more urgent things to address to be fair, but ultimately, this can only be solved one small step at a time, but also big sweeping changes are needed. The first step is to define and accept what the problem is, and where the blame and cause lie.
I wouldn't go as far as blaming, but American society should at least acknowledge their responsibility for this. Its not like the KGB imposed zoning laws in Texas. You (Americans) did. Americans chose the urban model they wanted.
It is up to them to change. They won't change, and this "loneliness epidemic" is starting to become really fucking annoying. It is almost a grift now to shit on tech by mids.
These people don't want to go outside or engage with other people.
It is like people who are drug/alcohol/tobacco/gambling/sex/etc addicts. It is up to the individual to change. How is it anyone else's responsibility?
I surveyed a bunch of people on reddit, discords, etc. a couple years ago to figure out why people are lonely, back when this whole "loneliness" movement was starting.
A lot of these people say they have "trauma" or some other mental block as a primary reason why they're lonely (btw they're in discords with thousands of people, and playing online games with OTHER PEOPLE). I'm sorry but everyone has shit going on in their lives. You aren't really that special.
Maybe 1-5% of people have dealt with actual, really horrific trauma, and even they have managed to go on to have fulfilling lives. They chose to move on.
I'm an asshole, no doubt, and I've dealt with my own traumas in the past that were honestly way more fucking horrible than "I'm shy" or "nobody likes [insert some esoteric niche]" and guess what? Who cares? Go outside.
There is no helping these people, or anyone to be honest, unless they really want to make a change. These aren't starving Sudanese or people who live in India or something where you can't just "go outside". Mfs be in CALIFORNIA and crying. I'd understand if they were lonely because they were living in Iraq or Venezuela or something.
The only solution is we build a Matrix, and put all these people into it. I will bet 100% of my net worth and any earnings from my entire lineage for perpetuity that they will still fucking complain and be lonely. I was really hopeful for metaverse, too bad but maybe there's still a chance.
I never want to hear about "loneliness epidemic" again, to me it just sounds like DEI/ESG/Eacc and other bs grifting now to hate on tech. Everything is a choice. You press A in a video game even though you're lonely, why not press A to go outside?
These people aren't lonely, they exist in massive online echo chambers with other people. And honestly? I think they like it. Most drug addicts loved being on drugs even though it was a horrific existence. They don't like it when they're narcan'd during OD. But when they decide to get clean, I am proud that they actually did it how amazing is that? SO these lonely people have to stop crying and step outside.
- millions of indians go outside daily and are doing just fine.
- social media algorithms are rigged against india for reasons i do not understand or comprehend.
- you can easily review this by comparing the amount of engagement on youtube to positive stuff about india vs negative stuff.
- while our country is most certainly not perfect and has problems of its own, problems are not the only thing our country has
You have the right to your opinion, and your own relative experience. You don't need to get so easily offended, relax.
I wasn't being a dick, sry if it came off that way.
Crux of the issue right here. Idiots online keep blasting into their eyeballs that they are worthless and society has already collapsed. All they need to do is go down the road and join a club or a church or something.
Especially for users of this website. Almost all clubs are in dire need of a webmaster.
I've lost count of the times I've seen women praised while men were castigated, in the same space, for expressing any kind of honest sexual preference.
Ultimately, we need to begin by destigmatizing the male libido. Simply saying "male desire is good and it's fine to have it" is literally heretical anywhere except among gay men. Men never got any kind of sexual liberation. Young boys need only to look at their own usually mutilated manhoods to see what modern society thanks of their desire.
To even begin to teach them that they can relate to sex without domination, first teach them that their own desires are not evil.
Yes, we live in a patriarchal society. That same patriarchy is at the core of our modern loneliness. Teaching young people that "it doesn't have to be this way" isn't lying. Telling them it's the natural order of things is the lie that ultimately tears people apart because their bodies know differently.
> To even begin to teach them that they can relate to sex without domination, first teach them that their own desires are not evil.
This is exactly what I was saying.
... what? No, that's a niche that you'd have to go out of your way to find.
> Young boys need only to look at their own usually mutilated manhoods to see what modern society thanks of their desire.
I assume you refer to circumcision. Maybe it's "usual" in your country. In Canada it's the minority condition: https://cps.ca/en/documents/position/circumcision
Though I usually consider myself progressive (to an annoying degree to some), the progressive "answer" to young men right now on how to find friends and partners is essentially something like:
> You should just be yourself!
> But, if you aren't practically perfect and even slightly express your social and physical needs you are a monster.
> But, even if you are perfect, we reserve the right to hate you based on experiences with other people of your gender, or because of your privilege, even though you probably have never felt it, and we're also allowed to make fun of you because of said privilege, since making fun of you is "punching up".
> Also, you also should accept that you will *always* be considered a threat to half the population due to how you were born, and if you don't accept that or even try to prove the opposite, that makes you even more dangerous.
> If you aren't happy with this you are an incel, and don't even mention the word "misandry", that's not a thing. The only way to change this is to either be gay or transition into a woman.
Meanwhile the hardliners on the opposite side of the spectrum espouse the idea that actually men should be evil because it's manly. That women are lesser to them and that patriarchy is super cool actually. See Andrew Tate as an example, who has captured the ears of millions of teenage boys around the world. At first it's hard to comprehend why his ideology speaks to them, but you have to remember that most of them are just entering the time of their life where they have to figure themselves out, where they have to, for the first time in their life, find friendship, respect and companionship on their own outside of the family or the playground. And after all, everyone wants to be loved and respected in some way, and Andrew Tate offers them an answer: You can be an asshole and still be loved and respected, while the leftie answer tells them that you can be as perfect as you like, but you probably still won't be loved and respected, and if you fuck up, don't expect any grace.
And now the question is what should society actually do so that both young men and young women can find a harmonious place in it? I think really the only answer is to stop playing the blame game, stop trying to make one side the constant bad guy and scapegoat, try to comprehend that we are all equally human, and that whatever a person's gender is doesn't give you the right to be shitty to them. I don't know, maybe this is simply another utopian idea, of men and women living together in perfect unison, never being mean to each other. I think we should still strive to achieve some sort of balance, but sadly I don't really see an easy answer to this.
Sorry for this long rant, I've wanted to put this into words for a while. Occasionally I think about how bad it must be being a teenage boy right now, the thought scares me and I feel lucky not being one. Every time I read another woman saying that she's afraid of every man on the street walking in proximity to her, and every time it's dark out and I hear a man behind me and I get physically afraid, I think, what if I was a man and she was afraid for her life because of me? Just because I exist in the space next to her? Just because of a random coin-flip during my conception? And it feels awful. I don't want anyone to go through that.
Otherwise I agree with you.
Where would you expect to see it addressed? bell hooks wrote The Will To Change more than twenty years ago.
(The promulgation of the term "patriarchy" is itself an example of the harm I'm talking about. Feminists and other progressives will insist that the meaning of terms cannot be divorced from their etymology, and cite questionable-at-best etymology when complaining about words and campaigning for replacements. But then they have an entire canon of words that were deliberately coined to associate masculinity with harmful or undesirable things and femininity with virtue and resistance to oppression. As Karen Straughan put it: "[Feminists are] not blaming men, [they] just named everything bad after them.")
Then I heartily recommend you read the book I referenced.
> From New York Times bestselling author, feminist pioneer, and cultural icon bell hooks, an evergreen treatise on how patriarchy and toxic masculinity hurts us all.
Which is the exact thing I complained about.
I blame the on-line attention economy - which always rewards yet-more-extreme reactions, positions, and performative "virtues". But attaches zero value to actual pro-social behavior.
It is super easy to understand. He tells them they are superior and that feels good. He tells them they are entitled to dominate others and that makes them feel powerful. People LOVE to hear they are superior over others.
And all your complains about progressives boils them to them acknowledging that Tate adjacent people exist, that philosophy runs in top levels of the government and the rest of us have to react to it. Like, all your complains about progressives are super mild compared to what conservative people say and think about the rest of us.
> And now the question is what should society actually do so that both young men and young women can find a harmonious place in it?
There is no harmony possible when the woman is degraded or subjugated. There is only fake harmony possible when it is not allowed to speak about threat of Tate like conservatives, because someones feelings might be hurt.
> I think we should still strive to achieve some sort of balance, but sadly I don't really see an easy answer to this.
There is no balance with "I think women are inferior and should be mistreated".
> Every time I read another woman saying that she's afraid of every man on the street walking in proximity to her, and every time it's dark out and I hear a man behind me and I get physically afraid, I think, what if I was a man and she was afraid for her life because of me? Just because I exist in the space next to her?
In the context of male gendered violence literally promoted by conservative thinkers, it is women talking about the impact it has on them who is causing the unfair harm to men. This is absurd.
This is, frankly, a thing feminists books claim and I did not believed is a real thing. Except here you are, writing exactly those words.
By the same token, it feels bad to be told that one is inferior and deserves to be subordinate to others. Which is messaging that, as a man in contemporary society, I receive constantly, and have been noticing for decades. Despite knowing on some level that it is BS.
But there was a period (this specific thing seems to have improved) when everyone would have been subjected to this narrative in any advertising break on any TV channel in the US or Canada.
> And all your complains about progressives boils them to them acknowledging that Tate adjacent people exist, that philosophy runs in top levels of the government and the rest of us have to react to it. Like, all your complains about progressives are super mild compared to what conservative people say and think about the rest of us.
First off, feminism vis-a-vis the issues of men has nothing to do with progressivism vs conservatism, except in the minds of American political tribalists.
But my own primary complaint about progressives is of the exact form that you describe (except perhaps substitute "academia" and "bureaucracy" for "government").
And in my own experience, it's not common for "conservatives" to say anything actually objectionable about "progressives" (and it's frankly inappropriate to assert what they think outside of what they say or otherwise overtly indicate), even in the US. On HN for example those comments are quite rare and almost universally flagged and killed. Whereas live, upvoted comments decrying the supposed current "fascist regime" are all over the place and the large majority of political submissions are clearly only there because they could be used as an excuse to fulminate about Trump, Musk, Thiel etc.
> There is no harmony possible when the woman is degraded or subjugated.
But this by and large is not actually happening. People like Tate are ultimately irrelevant grifters. I can't even name any "Tate-adjacent people". In my circles, Warren Farrell has way more name-brand recognition. I would never even know about Tate but for people complaining about him. Even other critics of feminism and progressivism rarely bring him up, and then only because of the specific manner in which he is attacked.
And, again, framing this as a two-party conflict is entirely inappropriate reductionism. "Conservatives" by any reasonable definition have no common cause with someone like Tate. The lifestyle he promotes is utterly opposed to "traditional family values".
> In the context of male gendered violence literally promoted by conservative thinkers, it is women talking about the impact it has on them who is causing the unfair harm to men. This is absurd.
This is a bizarre misrepresentation of what you're quoting.
First, it's unreasonable to present the quote as if it denied harm to women. It does not.
That said, the statistics make it clear that the fear is largely unreasonable; men do not report feeling fear in situations that are objectively much more dangerous to them.
But most importantly: you are repeating the conflation of Tate with "conservative thinkers", and conflating a very specific approach to conduct in sexual relationships (and the attempt to form them) with random assaults (physical and/or sexual) on the street by strangers. That is the absurd thing here.
> This is, frankly, a thing feminists books claim and I did not believed is a real thing. Except here you are, writing exactly those words.
I don't know why you'd have to read feminist literature to find the claim that men are afraid of being falsely perceived as sexual threats just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could just ask men.
Women are constantly told that a man in that place at that time would be a sexual threat in ways that men can obviously hear. Men are told it, too. Feminists even resist well-meaning education about personal safety, calling it "victim-blaming" and then turning it around to describe ways that entirely innocent men ought to go out of their way instead.
I have nearly had anxiety attacks when I walked into a nominally unisex bathroom and saw a feminine hygiene disposal unit and no urinal. Or when the men's bathroom was out of order at a shop and the clerk said to use the women's instead.
(And all of this happens against a backdrop of refusal to acknowledge that men can also be raped, including by women. Even the language used to describe female teachers sexually assaulting their male students is different from that used for male teachers and female students. I've heard women say those male students should consider themselves lucky. It's disgusting.)
I'm sorry that people like Andrew Tate still exist, in some number, who will say the kinds of things that validate your narrative. But in my experience, there are way more people who are willing to say the mirror image of it.
This makes a ton of sense but the language needs so much work here to be digested into a real conversation by your average parent, let alone preteen/teenager.