Posted by publicdebates 1/15/2026
Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
First, social media. It's too easy to temporarily forget about your loneliness by staying home and doomscrolling or watching TV.
Second, increased mobility. People move around the whole continent now for work, removing them from their closest and oldest social connections.
Third, God is dead. Churches as community centers are dying out. Young people don't trust them anymore, because they don't believe in God, and because churches had many scandals. Secular community centers are very rare and struggle with funding.
Fourth, work is more stressful now. There used to be more time to socialize, but in our quest for productivity, work became denser with fewer idle times.
Fifth, fewer people want to have kids. Much has been written about this.
Now what can we do at societal scale? First of all, study the phenomenon more closely. Who is lonely? Who isn't? Which interventions work? Which cultural factors are important? At your local scale, you can just call or meet a friend.
The we here is not most people.
The quest for higher productivity is not something people really care about.
Allowing random people to message each other without meeting in person is a mistake. The nonverbal cues people get from in person interactions are helpful for discovering shared interested and personality compatibility.
I cured my own loneliness episode by joining a local running group. It provides the same kind of thing as church. Ritual, we meet every week and there's a few different groups. Purpose, it doesn't feel useless to be improving your fitness level. And community comes when you suffer through a run with others.
Showing up regularly means you start to integrate people into your lives as you know when they skip a week for a vacation or something.
I went from living in my town and not knowing anyone for 17 years to having 20+ friends or people I can say hello to and have a chat.
Just find a local running group, or start one. You want the "meet at Starbucks at 6:30 on Tuesday" ones. Show up and keep showing up and you'll make friends. It's impossible to be on your phone when you run and there's always something running related to keep the conversation going.
One group just meets at the start, people go off and do their own thing and then come back to the start for coffee at a cafe. That way everyone from walkers to people doing a long run can all hang out afterwards but not actually run together.
The best are trail runs with 8-10 people, you end up walking the hills and take a short break every 5-10 minutes so you can chat with almost everyone over the hour you're out there.
My #1 top priority this year is _social health_. I'm taking it into my own hands. Mostly just continuing things I'm already doing with tremendous payoff. My measurable result is going to be throwing my own birthday party in fall. I've never done that before, I've never had enough friends in my city!
No one group or app is going to come save you from loneliness. You have to get up, go outside, and find people.
0. Say yes to everything, at least if you're new in town. Don't care how scared you are of X social situation. "Do it scared" - @jxnl
1. I am part of my community's swing dancing scene. I take classes, go to social dances, I _show up_ even when I don't feel like it. People recognize me now, know my name, etc. I'm also a regular at my gym. Find a place and be a regular face there. (_how did I become a swing dancer? I got invited, and my social policy prevented me from saying no!_)
2. If I have no social plans for a week I do a timeleft dinner (dinner with 5 strangers). Always have something on the books. I call this my "social workout". If I vibe with anyone I ask if they want to grab ramen the following weekend. Leads me to point #3..
3. Initiate plans. Everyone is waiting for that text "hey, want to go do x with me?". Be that person. I have an almost 100% enthusiastic response rate to asking people to do literally anything. Go on a random walk? Go to costco? Go checkout ramen or pizza spot? You don't have to think of anything special. Whatever you're already doing.. ask someone to come with! Soon they start inviting you to do random stuff.
4. (experimental) I don't drink, which does curtail my social opportunities. I'm considering updating my drinking policy this year. My hypothesis is that the benefits of having a strong community out-weigh the health benefits of abstinence.
> 4. (experimental) I don't drink, which does curtail my social opportunities. I'm considering updating my drinking policy this year. My hypothesis is that the benefits of having a strong community out-weigh the health benefits of abstinence.
It goes beyond car culture. It's probably illegal to build a cafe within walking distance of your neighborhood or into the first floor of your apartment complex.
Americans get an idea of how bad we have it when we go on vacation, but we don't see it as something that can be built at home.
I can attest both LatAm and Europe are quickly turning the same way. At least in the bigger cities. Take public transport and 70% are frying their brains with their phones on algorithmic timelines, dumb mobile games, or worse. Women even more. You go to a bar and try to start a conversation and people look at you like you are a creep or a scammer. I've heard this happens to Gen Z, too.
Are you suggesting that American tech helped spread this loneliness worldwide? Ultimate triumph of individualism.
And yes, I was using public transport before cell phones. And yes, women are using public transport more then men, always were, because if the family have only one car, man is typically the one using it.
Growing up British means that I literally can't talk to a stranger unless I'm in a pub and have two pints inside me.
That's only if you like dogs, I guess.
Lots of factors cause this. Obviously established businesses hate competition. There seems to be a tendency for politicians to make more laws as a bandaid rather than remove old(but this isnt universally true). And finally and probably most importantly, people like the status quo. Change is scary.
Also I live in the suburbs and we have a coffee shop within 2 minutes walking. I just have a hard time paying $4 for a coffee to meet people when most people are on their laptops anyway.
My friends come from sports clubs, parties, and the parents of my kids via birthday parties.
It's so strange how this works. They go, sometimes repeatedly, to enjoy these rather basic things, but behave as though they're visiting a quaint Disneyland of sorts and as though there could be no lessons they could take away and apply toward a vision of their own community...
but back home in america, any nice thing in a public space might be an un-earned benefit to an american citizen who is slightly less rich. and we can't have that. if an American wants an amenity, they sould pay for it. parks, benches, pathways, any sort of gathering space, it all can't be had because it might attract poor people.
I wouldn't trust a cafe built into an apartment complex. I'd expect it to be low-quality, over-priced food placed specifically to try and make a quick buck off people who don't know any better or who physically can't get somewhere better.
You're right that it goes beyond car culture (and zoning laws are part of car culture), but I think it also goes beyond zoning laws. A lack of a social contract between people (individually) and businesses these days is probably involved, too. All these things are interrelated.
I’m eating a whole dinner for about $10 tonight, out. Easily like 1300 calories of very delicious food.
In the PNW.
(I didn't ask and don't care if you think your cheap meal's "very delicious," by the way. That's not the main indicator of quality. Many Americans would call a Big Mac "very delicious.")
* a coffee shop (that just closed)
* a desert shop
* a fine dining shop (that is open rarely
* a ramen shop
* a high-end burger shop
* a high-end barber shop
* a nail salon
* a hawaiian food shop
> I didn't ask and don't care if you think your cheap meal's "very delicious," by the way. That's not the main indicator of quality. Many Americans would call a Big Mac "very delicious."
What’s the point of this? This is just needlessly rude.
There are many ways to look at things
-t. not an Absurdist, but sometimes I use the tools.
Ensuring you never have to leave the comfort of your apartment complex is also of questionable relevance to solving loneliness/getting people to meet each other.
> -t. not an Absurdist, but sometimes I use the tools.
Did you accidentally paste part of a different comment or something?
When I visited Tokyo one really jarring thing was to realize that restaurants and cafes and such were often on the 2nd or 3rd floor. It’s so dense and so high-rise, in some areas at least, that these “ground floor” shops are also pushed upwards and inhabit the bottom 2-3 floors instead of just the ground floor.
Until around 80s to 90s, when we say “that album is really good”, we shared plenty of experiences along. Such as, looking up for release news, getting to the record store, purchasing, and so on.
People listened to the full tracks in that album again and again.
Nowadays, the same sentence “that album is really good” carries far more less than before. Algorithms just bring tracks to us, we buy albums by a click.
The density of shared experience itself has been degraded, and more effort is required for us to understand each other.
I’ve named this phenomena as “Experiential Thinning”.
The experiential substance to get to know each other is getting scarce.
It's a twofold problem, I believe. People are lonely because of fear of rejection and also actively avoid new people out of caution and high standards.
So two people who are otherwise lonely will make no effort to connect.
I think social networks have done a tremendous amount of damage to our collective psyche. Because on the web, you can single-click permanently block someone and never see them again. If you are admin of a group this person is in, you can also ban this person and prevent them from interacting with members of the group (in the group, that is, you cannot control private messages, but by banning someone from a community you are effectively isolating them), and I think we haven't considered how much power we are giving to random Reddit mods due to this.
Regardless ban evasion is always forbidden so if you slip up or get caught because of the way you type or whatever, you will be banned again.
so you create another account?
they don't even do IP bans, (er, so I hear)
Try an A/B test. Do days with zero screen stimuli - no TV, no phones, no online interaction. Go into the world to a cafe, or a common area with people and do stuff. See how you feel and what you feel up to. Vacations might be good and relaxing because you disconnect. Maybe do it without paying for it.