For the us, I feel like it’s late stage individualism. This is what happens I think when people prioritize themselves over their communities, I think we have less dependence on our communities than ever thanks to the internet and being able to physically avoid community. We have less interaction than before. We can order grocery pickup and not even have to be physically around people for basic life tasks. We order next day delivery on Amazon and don’t even have to go out in the world and be in the physical presence of others :(
The article talks about how it’s more of a younger generation phenomenon suggesting older generations still maintain their friendships
I’m grappling with this myself, it requires a lot of energy to form adult friendships. I keep seeing my neighbors out at the playground, I reach out and say hey and hi and ask them how they are doing but stop short of investing the time necessary to form real friendships with them and I know deep down that it’s perpetuating late stage individualism
It’s not only lack of dependence, but also lack of idleness.
Most of my friend interactions would come from things like having a moment with nothing to do in the bus, realizing I have no particular plans this weekend and reaching out to a couple friends to see if they’re available.
Now those moments are instantly drowned by opening instagram before a thought bubbles up. And when the weekend eventually comes and there’s no plan, Netflix is just a button press away.
We need moments of boredom and reflection to push us into action, the attention economy is robbing us from that.
I’d even say the increase in anxiety related symptoms is due to this lack of idleness. The mind feels as if it’s super busy moving from active task to active task when in reality there were hours of just defaulting to reels.
It's not only modern technology taking up time. I foolishly bought a project house and have spent nearly every weekend and some weeknights doing repairs and improvements. My SO also tends toward time consuming hobbies like gardening and aquariums. Add young children and every free moment in between is precious.
But people have had activities that take up their time since time immemorial. But the "friendship recession" seems to be much newer.
FWIW, my friend recently built a summer home. I went over about four weekends to help drywall, put in flooring, build stud walls, etc. He's had other friends over other weekends. Sometimes it's just one friend, sometimes a few of us go up together. It's a great time, and definitely strengthens our social bonds.
I'm also friends with my kids' parents (one of whom is the one with the house). Playdates turn into dinner invites.
I think we're lucky that we're on the older end -- mid-40s -- so maybe we had time to work our social muscles before social media and Netflix, and have socialization as an expectation.
I'm also personally lucky I have a wife who does a lot of the social reaching-out. For whatever reason, this seems like it's more and more a gendered role, and I'm definitely worse at it -- if I were a bachelor I'd probably be happy staying home alone much more, to my long-term detriment.
I think you're right that those of us that had to socialize either before or when the Internet was more in its infancy are just a lot more used to small talk and meet ups. I've noticed younger family members seem to not value that kind of community. The boomers and their parents would say the same about my generation as we have nothing on them. That's literally all they do is drink beer with friends and socialize at various clubs. D&D is the closest equivalent that the younger generation has and half of the people I see playing at my local game shop have gray hair.
That is true, but real hobbies will rarely take up your micropauses - going to the bathroom, coffee break at work, commuting, waiting between sets at the gym, and so on.
You won’t do social stuff in those micropauses anyway, that’s true, but I think those moments are where you’d normally “mentally review”. Wondering how a friend is, feeling like you miss a connection, etc.
Without that, I think we mentally drift away from social connections.
You could involve friends in those hobbies. In fact men do better hanging out if they have a goal.
My stepbrother has declined hang out invitations for decades but the minute I need the most minor house or car repair he’ll drop everything and be there all day.
I can relate to your step brother. I don’t want to “hang out”- full stop. I want to build and make and do things, and when I can combine that with friendship, all the better.
There’s something about needing to feel and appear independent that discourages the ask, and it’s worth challenging.
My project has involved neighbors, family, and even a few contractors. But unlike a barn built from scratch there are a lot of random bespoke tasks. Many of them require judgement and experimenting to make it work. Sadly the property was neglected a long time, and poorly built in the first place. Bulldozing and having a new house professionally built would've been faster, produced a better outcome, and only been moderately more expensive--in hindsight.
In the old world you would have the distinct privilege of bringing this experience to your community. No naive youth can afford even a “starter” house for you to help them rebuild.
There’s Habitat for Humanity which I think would fit this description.
I’ve personally never involved myself with it but over the last few months the group built a modest house on a small lot next to my ex-spouse’s place. Every weekend I saw a group of folks (ranging in age from early 20s to retirement) there building, chatting and generally being very friendly with one another. Really cool to see.
On one hand I'm inclined to believe this particular example relies on personality. My aunts and uncles had their home hobby projects and so did they're friends. They'd help either other out on their projects and then take a break over a beer or cigs, chatting the rest of the evening away.
I don't think it's just the attention economy. I think the Internet was bound to replace a lot of the time that people spent with friends. There's just too much interesting stuff too conveniently accessible.
Maintaining adult relationships post-Covid is hard as a millennial. Or rather, getting friendly relationships started/restarted has gotten very awkward. But I’ve noticed that most people respond very well to my efforts.
I started texting my acquaintances and old friends at random just to ask what’s up every once a week or two. I also started calling some people instead. Almost everyone responded really well to that. When I go out to eat, I often check with a few people if they want to go if I swung by and picked them up.
This is how things used to be for me before the pandemic. But it was difficult to get back to it. What I found though is that most people are lonely but they don’t want to put much effort into building friendships. And that’s ok, I can be the one who initiates the outings and chats.
It’s okay to be the one who initiates. It seems like not everyone can, somehow the level of social anxiety has gone up in the world. In the end, I get my socialization full and so do they. So I’d recommend to whoever feels a bit lonely — reach out to your past friends and current acquaintances.
The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains. Validation, trust, confidence, and friendship itself forms better when there is reciprocation. It’s best not to overthink it, the world is different and what it means to have friends has changed. This is the new normal. It’s better to be the one who leads all the friend groups and activities all the time than to be lonely.
That's the impression I got at first as well. However, then I realized a really big proportion of people I'd contact this way would say they'd love to meet up but either repeatedly decline suggestions to meet up or even ghost me. I feel like the positive response is just out of general politeness, not willingness to reconnect.
> It’s okay to be the one who initiates...The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains.
It's also about gauging whether the other person cares about you. I carried out the experiment where I stopped texting people with whom I was always the contact initiator. Years later, they still haven't written a single message to me. To me, it's clear that those people never cared about me, I was just their plan B for a saturday hangout in case their real plans fell through.
> It’s okay to be the one who initiates. It seems like not everyone can, somehow the level of social anxiety has gone up in the world. In the end, I get my socialization full and so do they. So I’d recommend to whoever feels a bit lonely — reach out to your past friends and current acquaintances.
Agreed. Before Covid I used to have a pretty vibrant social life but I was the initiator and back then I could easily set up physical events. Covid obviously added a lot of friction to that. Now that we are half-way through the 2020s I have enough perspective to say the bad habits that a lot of folks developed during Covid have stuck and it's a shame.
> The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains. Validation, trust, confidence, and friendship itself forms better when there is reciprocation. It’s best not to overthink it, the world is different and what it means to have friends has changed. This is the new normal. It’s better to be the one who leads all the friend groups and activities all the time than to be lonely.
How do you set boundaries?
It would be great if I could go back to how things were, but unfortunately I've changed. I was a lot more naive back then, and usually leaned into giving people the benefit of the doubt. It didn't help that the friendships / acquantainces I'd developed weren't exactly high quality.
In retrospect none of it was sustainable. All this happened when (1) I had lots of free time (2) Could physically meet with friends and (3) Hadn't suffered through betrayals from people I thought I was close to.
As much as it pains me to admit, I just don't have the emotional reserves to deal with one-sided interactions anymore. I would really love to hear from folks who have been in such a situation and have gotten over the hump.
I don’t, I just naturally hang out with the people who are most reciprocating and being the most good vibes.
Ultimately, it’s about me first. I function better and am happier when I have recently socialized. I’m not doing this for others, so it’s all good and I don’t feel like anyone particularly pushes me in a way where I’d need to maintain boundaries for myself in this particular context.
Regarding your three points, I hear them. But you probably have enough free time to text a friend, and sometimes physically meet up with them. I’d say, if you really don’t have time for that (and I was there myself), then probably you’re neglecting your social needs (basic socialising, safety net) for something else. Consider if that something else is worth it. Regarding point 3, I used to expect something reciprocal from friendships, but now I just expect to spend time with/among people. Yeah, most won’t help you in a time of need, and some will speak ill of you behind your back. But you’ll also meet many great people that legitimately will be great friends. So I’d say don’t worry about it — “trust the process”.
Overall, I hear some social anxiety in the 3rd point. Social interactions aren’t always ideal but don’t catastrophize them. Just do what’s good for you yourself first. Make sure your social needs are met. Let all other things and friendships develop or not as they would.
> It would be great if I could go back to how things were, but unfortunately I've changed.
I'm in agreement. I do think it would be a nice thing for friendship to work out, but I've been burned one too many times and the motivation just isn't there any longer.
I sometimes view this as a positive. I used to very much be a people-pleaser and thought that I was going to suffer and die if I didn't come out of one of my social outings with an acquaintance at some point. I was always told humans are tribal, we have a need to feel listened to, and not having friends leads to premature death. In practice I was just forcing myself to socialize based on that doomerism and that rubbed off onto the people I met, so it wouldn't have helped anyone.
When I turned inward and chose to put my own needs in front of those of others, I did become more comfortable with being myself. That's a prerequisite to having healthy relationships anyway (though I still wouldn't say I have any). Since then I've had lots of great conversations with people I've met at outings and large gatherings. I sometimes have conversations that go on for hours about all sorts of topics I may or may not know about and they're satisfying in hindsight.
...But I don't feel like being friends with any of those people anymore. I just let them pass and cherish the moments we did have together. I decided that the only person I have the capacity to fight for is myself from now on.
Nobody said you had to have friends in order to have a source of socialization to stave off bad health outcomes. "Having friends" and "being a bit social occasionally" are two different beasts.
> Before Covid I used to have a pretty vibrant social life but I was the initiator and back then I could easily set up physical events. Covid obviously added a lot of friction to that. Now that we are half-way through the 2020s I have enough perspective to say the bad habits that a lot of folks developed during Covid have stuck and it's a shame.
Another thing that maybe people don't like to talk about so much: COVID outed a lot of really mentally unwell people who had prior to it managed to keep that part of their personality to themselves. COVID and stay-at-home brought out so much anti-social nastiness: Selfishness, anger, belligerence, rudeness, conspiracy theories, defiance, and just this sense of contrariness for the sake of contrariness. I got a text during the height of the pandemic from a (now former) friend saying "Dude, did you know there's a bar downtown that's ignoring stay-at-home and letting people in the back door? We should go!" Like, what the fuck, man, don't you see there's a deadly disease going around? What the hell is wrong with you? I think during that time we really saw a lot of "true selves" that we now can't unsee.
I added a little bit about that in my comment above. Yeah, I feel the same way, it’s not a pleasant feeling.
I think many people don’t make the effort anymore, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you if you do — nothing to be anxious about, I’d say. Besides, leading and organizing things has its advantages.
Honestly, I think that is related to the algorithmic collapse of facebook. Facebook was legitimately good for keeping people connected in the first decade or so.
Then the monetization enshittification happened, both at the overarching corporate level of facebook and internet advertising in general, and with people becoming exhaustingly self-promoting, which devalued trust between friends and degraded new connections.
The weird thing about the world is seeing everyone turn into me when I was in my teens and twenties ... and I was a product of extreme social bullying that really only alleviated in my 40s.
Which scares me because it means there is some either low-key or high similarity to the trauma / rejection / betrayal I felt from society being exerted on a massive scale.
I used to go around errands trying to engage with people as little as possible, but now, maybe it is projection, I see the effects of isolation on so many people in public, that I get great joy in having a quick exchange with someone. Granted I am now far better at making smalltalk, strangely I slingshotted from being absolutely abysmal at it to well above average.
Smalltalk almost seems like rebellion against the oppressive antisocial time-stealing inferiority-inducing powers that have gatewayed using the mobile phone into all parts of people's lives.
I rather think FB was always part of the problem for most. Having 200 FB friends, but not a single one to go out with and meet them, that's not a healthy social life.
Some people might have used FB in a different way, but they would have been fine without FB existing in the first place.
Facebook was probably part of the _problem_ for people like me who refuse to create accounts inside of walled gardens.
An _illusion_ that 'everyone you know' (and might want to know) is in a single place; while ignoring the razor wire fence surrounding the compound that keeps others out.
> The article talks about how it’s more of a younger generation phenomenon suggesting older generations still maintain their friendships
Yea, this tracks my observations. A lot of adults make connections in their community through their kids and kids' friends. Kids pick their friends and their parents and guardians just go along for the ride, so when the kids play together, it kind of forces the parents to meet and interact.
Without exception, the parents I meet in the 25-40 age range are what I'd charitably call totally anti-social. Not actively mean (although some are), but just not interested at all in even saying a word to you to pass the time when the children are playing together. They just sit there on their phones trying to get through the experience. In general, these parents project outward an attitude of vague grumpiness and annoyance.
A few of the kid-friends are evidently raised by the 50-70 year old grandparents (never even seen the parents), and these folks tend to be much more social and will shoot the shit with you while the kids play. Much more pleasant and willing to interact while we're forced together. My relationships with them have been civil at worst and friendly at best.
Of course, this is just one person's observations, and yea they are a crude generalization. I'm in my mid-40s so don't have that much in common with either of these groups, but the attitude and behavior difference has been stark!
This sounds weird to me. What's the context? Toddler group? Play date? Playground?
Also as somebody said, if you are male which from your username I guess you are, then that will change the dynamic - it will be easier for an older person to make conversation without there being any worries of sending the wrong message.
If there are lots of children playing together then parents aren't always social but at a play date I would definitely expect them to be. Also looking after young children is intensive and it might be the only break they get.
I mostly went to toddler groups when mine were young so that I could socialise not them!
A couple example scenarios (tween kids, suburban setting: which are other variables that probably matter), ordered from least to most weird (IMO):
- Public park, where kid just spontaneously starts playing with other kids, and parents are temporarily, and more or less randomly associating: In this case, I can sorta see that maybe people just doesn't want to talk to a total random person in a park. Fine. Not my style but it's forgivable--they don't know if I'm deranged or dangerous.
- Public park, or commercial indoor play place where the kids pre-arranged to play together with known friends: This is where it starts getting weird. We all deliberately bring the kids, the kids find each other and go off to play, and at that point, some parents will just totally ignore the other parents, and other parents slink away over to a corner with their phones where they won't have to interact. In these cases I end up just chilling with the grandparents.
- Private setting, kids pre-arranged to come over to our house to play together: This is to me the wildest case, and where the different generations of parents behave totally differently. The youngest parents will just drop the kid off at the end of the driveway and speed away in their car, not even entering our property. The semi-young parents will drive the kid up to our house and drop them off, but leave without coming up to the door or anything. The older generation (grandparents) typically drives up, exits their car, comes up to the door with the kid, and we say hi, exchange pleasantries, and then off they go. It really does seem like socialization norms are changing generation to generation.
I see this in other social situations too (though social may be stretching it a little bit) e.g. in the gym, on the bike paths, and inside my apartment complex. I'm in my early 50s and people in their 20s and 30s aren't interested in saying hello in a polite way (and as neighbours especially), whereas older people (my age or older) are always interested in at least being friendly.
You can argue that, in gyms and on the bike path, people are more focused on their goal, but I still find in those situations that oldies are happy to chat for a bit, but younger people just want to block you out.
TBH I hate saying "young people" in this way. I feel like I'm running them down for what is their choice, and that feels bad. But it is something I have noticed in general i.e. not just 1 or 2 individuals.
I recently went back to studying, and it's almost the opposite there. Lots of people need "tutorial/lab friends," and so the barriers to conversation are really low. You literally stand next to someone and bam, instant friend (at least during the lab).
Yea, I also hesitated to post because I feel bad and don't want to be the stereotypical "grumpy old man complaining about young people" but the generational differences in attitudes towards IRL socializing are so stark and clear. It's hard to ignore.
Maybe they are not anti-social, they are just not being social to you! They have no obligation to entertain you even if your kids are playing together.
> They have no obligation to entertain you even if your kids are playing together.
This is a really cynical and negative way to view basic human interaction, the cornerstone of our species and civilization. I've been seeing it a lot lately online, and it doesn't surprise me that people are lonely and aren't making friends if they adopt an attitude like that.
That's right. The whole "He is under no obligation to [do nice thing | be social | act friendly]" is a very Reddit attitude. Yes, it's technically correct: You don't have to be nice. But you are allowed to be nice, and that choice doesn't hurt or cost anything.
If you go up to a fellow parent and say, "Hey, nice to see you again." and they just ignore you scrolling their phones, sure, they have a Constitutional right to do that and are under no obligation to return the greeting. But going through life only doing what you are "obligated" to do seems like a very miserable and anti-social way to live.
Right, this reminds me of the threads around here on teleworking vs working in-office.
Once someone points out that they like going to the office because they get to socialize with co-workers, the replies typically sound like ‘don’t care, I’m not paid to socialize but to do my job’
While I understand the context can vary, it always struck me as an anti-social behavior.
You are not being nice of social here. When you care only about what you can get from the interaction while villyfying them for not providing it, your interest is inherently selfish.
> But you are allowed to be nice, and that choice doesn't hurt or cost anything.
Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but as someone who suffers from social anxiety, talking to someone I don't know very well absolutely does cost me.
That said, I do try to be nice despite the anxiety it causes me, and if someone came up to me and said something to me I probably would respond. But I certainly wouldn't go approach someone else.
In the proposed setting I’d say that’s just anti social behaviour. If you need to be obligated to act socially, you’re within a hairs width of antisocial.
Many of us still can't afford housing anywhere near where the jobs are. How could we possibly put down roots and be a real part of a lasting community worth investing time, effort, and possibly savings in?
What if you can afford the housing but don't want what you can afford? How many immigrant families lived in 2 bedroom apartments in brooklyn while working in the city?
That's also part of it. The generation before me, 3 brothers bought houses in the same cul de sac. The chance of any 3 siblings being able to do that anywhere in the US nowadays is extremely slim. Home prices have gone out of whack with wages. On a side note another reason we have less friends is that we work far longer hours than generations before us did. We are the most overworked generation in history, strangely enough...
You don’t need that at all. I’ve seen people temporarily renting in a location act as better community members than someone who has owned a home for 10 years.
Dorms are a poor example. Everyone there expects it to be a temporary community other than larger structures like fraternal organizations that slowly nibble in new members and continuously digest them as things progress.
It's not like you're in an apartment or house where you don't know if it'll be next year, 4-5 years, or 10 years when you move; only that someone's going to raise the rent, or you'll get a different job somewhere far enough away and have to endure the hardship of moving everything yet again.
Do you expect it to be commonplace that someone who starts living in a college dorm will still be there in 10 years? I hope they'd graduate by then, and failing that it seems likely they'd run out of debt to continue funding education.
Meanwhile, 'the golden days' of the American Dream included a stable house that lasted most of an adult's life, and maybe moving again at retirement. It also included a career track at a corporation that continued to pay well as an employee developed into a more valuable 'resource'. (back before Human Resources wasn't as transparently about harvesting all the value they could...)
Do you actually want to make friendships/connections? If so, the park is probably not the play.
Identify your hobbies/interests and figure out which ones have budding local groups. E.g. sports, bird watching, hiking, camping, volunteering, etc.
It takes a ton of energy to form and grow new friendships, but once you pass the critical phase, it's much easier to keep them.
I don't think what we're seeing is late stage individualism. It's more like forced/bred isolationism invoked by modern technology. Newer gens are more trapped since they were bred to be on a screen. It's pretty evil, albeit unintentionally (by their parents, at least). Tech giants absolutely love it.
This sounds the most legit to me out of any comment so far. I think there's a tendency to want to either 1.) innovate our way out of this with a novel solution, or 2.) be really passive like "this happening to me and it's hopeless." I think the way out is less profound, less complicated, and ultimately more fulfilling and efficacious than people imagine. Virtually everyone who is researching/writing in the friendship space talks about finding common interest groups, regularly occurring interactions, consistent effort (supposedly 200 hours to form a close friend), candid conversations to strengthen commitment, etc. Honestly, it's all the same stuff that a romantic relationships requires, just with a couple significant variations ;)
A helpful corollary (from writer Shasta Nelson author of "Frientimacy") is that we all understand that working out requires some amount of pain and struggle (also fun, enjoyment, accomplishment, etc...) in order to get a great bod. We would do well to expect the same experience in friendship. It's not a question of access to people, like Facebook, or even Bumble BFF would have us believe. Again from Shasta "We don't need better friends, we need better friendships."
The less dependence on community started with desegregation. There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free. These things and more all ended with desegregation. Now we live in a society in which people don’t walk and don’t have places in their neighborhood where others congregate. Kids rarely play in the street anymore. The notion of it taking a village gets laughed at and as you say get individualistic. We live in a deeply unhealthy society from a social standpoint of view.
Having talked to folks from the segregation era, you may be thinking of red-lining and white flight. As folks realized cities and schools were desegregating many moved out of urban environments to suburbs and rural areas, then excluded POC through zoning.
Even if we accept that as the primary cause (which I don't) that would mean cowardice and racism are the root cause. An irrational fear of people who don't look and talk like us.
You can't argue your way into making a homogeneous population.
The reality is that the groups are distinct, and immediately changes the dynamic from "a facility used and maintained by the group who established it", to "a facility maintained by a third party, to be shared".
These do not have equal value to an individual.
The reality was that whites were disgusted over idea that black guy could swimm in the same pool as a white girl. It made them feel dirty. It was really that dynamic, not just abstract "who established it".
There is this knee jerk wish to constantly make that dynamic into something nicer or "normal outside of racist interactions". But, it is not. The same effect does not happen when two groups just merge.
Redlining and white flight definitely happened. It also happened that cities stopped funding municipal pools and other services. Things like Elks Lodges went into long term decline when women and blacks had to be admitted.
I don't deny white flight and red-lining happened, continues in some places, and is horrible. I'm not convinced that's the sole or even primary reason for modern loneliness.
> Things like Elks Lodges went into long term decline when women and blacks had to be admitted.
People don't need institutionalized racism and misogyny to make friends. They already have a right to be racist and privately associate / not associate.
I think you don’t understand what happened. When the laws were changed and forced communities to allow blacks to use municipal pools and when places like Elks Lodges were forced to accept women and minorities white men abandoned these things. Cities stopped funding municipal pools and membership in clubs drastically declined. White men gutted the idea of communal activity in response to civil rights.
> There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free.
All of that is still true of everywhere I have lived in the US, except for the free ambulances. And I think the cost of ambulances has more to do with the evolution of health insurance in the US than desegregation.
It absolutely has to do with insurance. Without insurance or government funding, ambulance service would be prohibitively expensive for most people.
The fact that in America health insurance is often part of worker compensation, meant that cities could transfer the cost of ambulances from taxes to insurance premiums.
Getting rid of municipal ambulance service did not occur for insurance reasons. It was gutted along with the gutting of municipal services in general. Insurance had nothing to do with why the service was cut.
> There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free.
I live in place where this is still true. The rec centers are barely solvent and it's mostly retirees and summer camps (cheap daycare) that keeps them afloat.
Desegregation coincided with the mass "multicultural" migration initiatives in the rest of the western world.
Unfortunately in reality there is a huge difference between a facility used by one group, and one shared between several. Many community facilities become unpleasant when they are anonymous.
Why does the presence of multiple ethnic groups make facilities anonymous? That would only be true if people never knew anyone of a different "race".
Immigration is only relevant if immigrant communities do not integrate. If it was the cause then you would expect a strong correlation between loneliness and populations of immigrant origin. It certainly does not leap out from a quick look at the numbers: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbein...
The timing of the numbers in the paper do not match either. SOme of them happened in the last two years. A bit recent for desegregation to be a factor.
On the other hand the article does mention a lot of far more plausible possible causes: online only friendships, working hours, decline of religion etc.
The idea that multiculturalism is incompatible with a harmonious society is empirically denied by the existence of basically utopias like Singapore. All citizens have to learn 4 languages and there is a huge amount of tourists which add to the already multicutral demographics of the country. Lowest crime in the world, best education in the world. Among the best public transit in the world, etc.
What it really is is that some minorities have shittier cultures than others, and some states have handled the integration and assimilation better than others.
Even the USA, for example, is blessed that nearly all of our illegals are Catholics (or more recently evangelical protestants...). Compare this to Europe where it's often muslims who try to bring their Burkas and sharia law with them.
The mass rise of latino voters for trump indicates a very strong effort from America's latino minorities to "act white", to "integrate", and to "assimilate".
I am fine with a multicultural society, as long as it's good culture - and yes, it is quite easy to nearly objectively quantify if a culture or cultural practice is good or not. For example, Americans except for asian americans don't wash their asses with bidets after using the toilet. This leads to swampass/BO, increased toilet paper usage/resource consumption, and far more rectal related health problems. America objectively should change it's cultural practices around bathroom usage.
Unfortunately, cultural critique against bad culture has a tendency for folks to call you "racist", so we aren't allowed to have this conversations with more specificity...
Singapore is not multicultural in the sense it is often used: different communities have to learn each others languages, as you said, for example. A huge effort was made to create a common identity.
This is very different from multicultural meaning groups having separate communities. That is de facto segregation.
" Compare this to Europe where it's often muslims who try to bring their Burkas and sharia law with them."
I think this is much exaggerated.
Its also not immigrant groups pushing Islamic fundamentalism as much as international funding and ideology that is global.
There are also groups (mostly white people!) who are politically committed to this multiculturalism vs integration.
No, it is NOT a lie. Latino men had a HUGE shift. Trump won 54% of latino men. This was an over 20 point shift in ONE election. He won 39% of latino women. YOU are lying by even implying that it was a "minor" change. Please educate yourself before spewing lies on the internet. 46% of latino voters in general voted for Trump.
The reality is that the sheep voted for the wolves - mostly because the sheep hate the other sheep, and wanted the wolves to eat those other sheep - hoping they'd ignore themselves.
The only group who voted more for Harris than biden, demographically, was white women - specifically old white women.
There is evidence that voter suppression efforts and the closing of thousands of polling stations lead to the many millions fewer Democratic votes. Despite this there was a clear neo masculine backlash.
Anecdata, but quite a few people I met in alternative music and politics sphere a good decade ago, I meet again in unrelated non-music/political bubbles focused on heavy community involvement.
Further confirming the joke, many of those either apreach own or look to buy a bunch of power tools.
Today’s grown-up counter culture seems to be building sheds and growing wide variety of tomatoes.
Agree. The book "WEIRDest" people in the world was kind of eye-opening in arguing that the Western world (especially the US) is unique (both in time, and geographically) in being so individualistic.
And it's getting worse. Decline of the local church or equivalent religious community, decline of even the workplace especially after Covid, etc. And of course, social media giving people a way to consume time and feel some (fake) version of being connected.
My wife and I moved our kids from the US back to our country of origin last year. Partly because we wanted to be closer to family. But partly because we didn't want them growing up in a society that lacks community and social fabric.
>I think we have less dependence on our communities than ever thanks to the internet and being able to physically avoid community. We have less interaction than before.
And are more depressed, sexless, purposeless, and lonelier than before...
I think you are on to something there. Already doing more than most people, I guess. Most people wouldn't even make the effort of going to the neighbors and saying hello.
I often ask myself, why some people, who are closest to what I would call friends, do not initiate any shared activity at all and how they can always be "busy". Do they not realize, that they are squandering the time they could have with friends?
Do you feel that politically "extreme" movements are a reaction to that and actually mostly about community and community interaction?
For example, during covid I believe the anti vaccination movement was largely about community and only tangentially about political goals. Especially because it was an otherwise hard time for people to interact.
It's probably largely the same for the maga movement, the rationalism movement, etc.
It feels nice to be a part of something and to be able to identify with something and such movements tend to easily accept new members as long as they at least aesthetically support the same cause.
>Do you feel that politically "extreme" movements are a reaction to that and actually mostly about community and community interaction?
Yes. Great writing on this from Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind), Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) and Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized) and Vivek Murthy (Together). Haven't read these, but I've read about them. One of their main ideas is that when people lose trust in institutions and feel disconnected, they’re more likely to embrace extreme ideologies or groups that promise belonging.
Look at a specific microcosm: dating. Dating is "awful" now (according to people both young and old), in a particular way that it wasn't even ten years ago. And sure, this is in part because we do everything online these days, and online dating has a few inherent problems with it. But not as many as you'd think; online dating used to "work" at least alright, in a way that it very much doesn't today / with none of the particular pathologies that it has today.
Dating sites and apps used to do things that actually helped people meet — vaguely optimizing for relationships. So people increasingly gravitated toward using dating apps. And for a while (peaking, I'd say, around the early 2010s), this actually increased the number of people meeting and getting into relationships.
And then one company, Match Group, came along and gradually bought up every "good" dating site, and enshittified them all, in a particular way that maximizes user retention + profit margins (and thereby minimizes the chance of a successful, happy relationship being formed.) They made dating apps bad at being dating apps. But there are no good dating apps — so people now feel stuck/confused, flailing around trying to make "online dating" work when there are only bad options for doing so.
I posit that online social networking in general went through the same evolution. Not because of one asshole company buying up and enshittifying everything, mind you; more because of market consolidation under a few companies who were all willing to copy one-another's homework in advancing the frontier of enshittified social experiences.
Facebook (and Facebook-like experiences) used to be a place you'd turn in the expectation of seeing updates from your actual literal friends, and engaging with those updates. Now it's radioactive for that purpose — and so is abandoned to being a sea of advertisements (and memes from boomers too inattentive to realize when the people they're talking at have left the table.)
And Instagram and even Snapchat have just copied TikTok's enshittified-from-the-start model of "personalized TV but all programs are 10 seconds long."
I have many friends I met in the 2000s and 2010s, where I recall heavily relying on social media as a fit-to-purpose tool to maintain and deepen those friendships. But I can't imagine what social network I could lean on to serve as that kind of tool for me today.
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Yes, IM and group-chat apps always existed and still exist today. But that's not what traditional social networks got you.
It's funny that I even feel the need to explain this, but here's what social-networks-as-tools had to offer:
1. profile pages — like dating profiles or LinkedIn profiles, but from a lens of "this is what I want potential friends to know about me"!
2. "walls" — a specific semi-public place, attached to a person's profile, to leave a message "performatively" for not only that person, but also anyone else who looked at that person's wall, to see (think: birthday wishes.) Critically, walls are owned and therefore moderated by the profile they're attached to — so, unlike a feed, you can't really (successfully) cyberbully someone on their own wall. They can just delete your message; block you (which will block you from posting to their wall); or disable non-friends from posting to their wall entirely.
3. a home page view, that is simply a dumb chronological view of anything your direct friends have posted to their own walls. Not including friends-of-friends content. It was a social norm, back in the heyday of social networking, that you'd always be caught up on on everything your friends have posted — because it shouldn't add up to much. Nobody could "share" anything out of its originally intended broadcast audience (the poster's friends), and thus there was no benefit to "posting performatively, as if for a mass audience" — and therefore, posts were sparse and personal, making it practical to truly inbox-zero your feed in maybe 20 minutes per day.
Modern social networks don't have profile pages (at least, not that anyone populates with anything — Facebook has vestigial ones nobody uses), owner-moderated public walls, or non-re-shareable "just for mutuals" posts. They have none of the tools that we originally associated with the category of "a tool that makes it easier to network socially." And yet these apps that do not successfully accomplish social networking, are what we today refer to as "social networking apps." And are what everyone therefore thinks to turn to when trying to network socially online.
Personally I really miss Google+.
Maybe it was not a perfect fit for what you are describing, but it sure was the best fit for my own interests and use cases.
This is unrelated to individualism. Individualists still can have strong communities and lots of friendships. Collectivists can just as easily be extremely anti-social.
The examples you gave of grocery delivery and overnight prime delivery are things that city people have, who generally vote against individualism and for collectivist policies.
Even in some socialist utopia where the community provides everything and individualism has been snuffed out entirely, that wouldn’t force more or less human interaction to create friends.
Older generations who received a proper education recognize the dangers, but are often unable to communicate it effectively to others that have been indoctrinated during their formative years.
Specifically it relates to what putting your ability to communicate with others into malicious hands represents. If you allow third-parties to dictate what you see, you'll never be able to make correct decisions based on reality. This distorted reality, or more aptly called distorted reflective appraisal. Reflected appraisal is inherent in our ability to form culture, society, and personal identity. The distortion takes advantage of that, and it happens at a pre-awareness level. Our internal psychology warps to it without us recognizing it, to retain internal consistency.
When you are raised to believe something is impossible, you discard anything to the contrary unless you've experienced direct and extreme personal loss associated to it.
Most people today earnestly believe that they make their own minds up about things and nothing external can change that, which is untrue, but places perceptual blinders so they can't see it no matter how much you may point it out.
Most dependents are unable to adapt after being tortured (which occurs during indoctrination).
The social environment has been shifting towards isolation because that's one of the main elements needed for torture, which is the imposition of psychological stress to induce involuntary hypnotic states.
One good counter-force against this wave is dependence. If you depend on someone for something, or you owe them a lot(I don't mean monetarily), you will not cut ties with them even if you have a temporary fallout. You'll push through it. Yes, this has negative effects (abuse) but at the system level you need to optimize for the majority case not the minority case. One of the things an overly financialised society does is to commoditise/securitize every dependency. Homes, food, care, groceries, maintenance, health, everything is attached a value. It is now possible for someone to live entirely on their own, with fully commoditised dependencies. Even when they start a family, the kids go to day care, and eventually the parents go to an old age home - more things commoditised. In fact, the number of old age homes is the best sign of a failing society. Like a nail in the coffin, these commoditized fractures increase the perceived wealth of everyone, rally the stock market and the variety of casinos around us, and people celebrate it.
Another factor I'd mention is, ironically enough, government social programs. Humans were always social because they needed each other. If you don't depend on your community or your family, you'll be much less inclined to invest in those relationships. It used to be if you fell on hard times you might rely on your community to help you out, which would however require you to take part in it, and contribute to it in some way. If instead you just automatically get money or housing from some faceless govt institution, that incentive is removed. Black children growing up in one-parent households was 9% in the 1950s. Today it's 65%. It's controversial what the causes are of course, but it makes sense: Make it easier for people to replace their relationships with government assistance, and it removes any need for taking responsibility for your peers. I'm not saying government-provided social safety nets should be abandoned, but the devaluing of human connection – even if transactional – is an unintended social consequence that isn't talked about nearly enough.
I'm not sure what caused this, but I think the expectations of modern friendship have become unrealistic.
Maybe it's movies and TV, where a "close friend" is more or less a non judgemental therapist that will throw down in a fight for you.
What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
In my experience, most friends come and go. That's OK. People change. Circumstances change. One person is always putting in more effort than the other. Some friends will always be aloof. Some friends will pretend they are independent and don't need friendship "like everyone else does," but they're generally full of it. Some friends will seem clingy.
Just roll with it.
The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.
At that point, it's on you. People are out there and in my experience they are excited to meet new folks.
We can write a huge dissertation on why we think The Friendship Recession has happened, but it's quite simple. Inertia is human nature. It takes effort to learn something new and join a community where people are practicing that thing. It takes vulnerability and effort. It's kinda scary.
It's a lot harder than turning on YouTube or flipping through TikTok. And most people understandably don't want to do hard things, especially after the stresses of work and life.
>> What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
I've come to this same conclusion, but rarely express it because it's possible I'm just different. And I'd even go one step further, I think what a lot of people say friendship is, isn't actually what human friendship is in practice. I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
Theoretical friendship:
- Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
- No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
- Timeless and immortal
- No effort involved
- Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
- Able to talk about every topic
Realistic friendship:
- Temporary at first, may or may not build into something more
- Often starts with a simple exchange of banter on common interests
- Multiple opinions/topics that are mutually avoided
- One person often tries harder, one person often values the relationship more
- The relationship may or may not even be mutually healthy
- Many will hit a point where they become more effort than they're worth and end (e.g. moving)
- Some will never grow out of one or two common things to bitch about
These don't represent real or Hollywood friendships at all.
> - Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
Friendships are relationships that stand the test of time and hardship. You work through problems, illnesses including mental health struggles, deaths, employment and money problems, family and relationship problems, legal problems, all sorts.
> - No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
There are obviously always mixed emotions, but generally you won't harbour serious ill will towards your friends. This is something you can work on, though, as jealousy and envy are personality traits that can be controlled. Healthy competition is a positive, though.
> - Timeless and immortal
Friendships change and sometimes have to be ended, even when you like the other person. I think this is quite common and almost a trope of Hollywood movies.
> - No effort involved
Short of family and maybe employment, friendships require the most work in life. This one is particularly baffling from a Hollywood perspective, as going a friend in need is like the all-time Hollywood trope.
> - Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
Obviously this isn't true, but this isn't portrayed either. Flawed characters are the only compelling characters in Hollywood.
> - Able to talk about every topic
Again, changing the uncomfortable topic trope is an ultra-trope.
Your "realistic friendship" section fits acquaintances rather than friends.
>I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
I think some self-reflection is in order here, as this is projection.
The comment you replied to isn't about whether friendships are transactional. They detailed a long list of ways that your theoretical and "realistic" friendships are bad and unrealistic definitions. If you didn't have friends closer to your first definition in most ways than your second, you haven't had a close friend, which isn't something to be shamed over but is something to consider.
> Is the idea that friendship might be transactional too scary a thought to consider head on?
Rather than be defensive, it was designed to shock you out of your current thought patterns on friendship, because they are almost delusional. Neither movie idealised friends nor real-life friendships have any of the characteristics you describe, and that is distorting your view of the world.
Pretending real friendship is a Hollywood myth is self-selecting yourself out of one of the most rewarding aspects of life. Don't do it to yourself.
> The study authors gave a survey to 84 college students in the same class,
Come on, time to get offline and go make some friends.
No, you're misreading the tone here. It's more gentle paternal nudging.
Don't let confirmation bias mislead you into a lonely life, especially not based on a study on somecollege students.
I know it's more comforting to believe real friendships exist only in fiction rather than admit you haven't experienced it, but in the long run, this belief only hurts you.
>The relationship may or may not even be mutually healthy
My best friend of 30 years now met me because I distributed warez in Junior High. He hung around because I had something useful and wanted to maintain a relationship with me. This grew into something more meaningful
With respect, I think this is quite a sad and revealing comment, but your Hollywood definition of a friend fits my friends. I wonder if you maybe never experienced friendship but rather just acquaintances.
I’m 40. I didn’t throw down for my friends when I was 19, but I support those same friends through divorces, cancer, deaths now. They’ll do the same for me.
Some friends are closer than family. That’s luck, but also intention.
My best friend asks me what I had for lunch on random days. Sometimes I get drunk and message him how I was reminiscing about the good times together. Things don’t have to be as complex as you think. Just appreciating the simple stuff might go long way.
>The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.
The article follows similar lines, but I feel "forcing friendships" just leads to shallow "friendships" with little meaning. In fact so many modern friendships are sustained by small talk, which Carl Jung derides as meaningless..
> If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
I’m probably bottom quintile for social skills and I have done some extremely unwise things for one of my friends who was there for me when I needed a hand. The Hollywood idea of “close friend” is a great deal nearer to my own life experience than its representation of many other important relationships.
Friendships that started in 20s often include this kind of dynamic. Friendships that started in 30s at least talk the talk. In 40s I can't imagine we would bother. I haven't experienced life beyond that but the trend of "evaluating friendships against the expectations of our 20s" sure seems like a losing proposition.
Have I been watching the wrong movies? Because from my perspective Hollywood's depiction of friends is a rather sorry benchmark - most depictions are of exemplarily bad friends.
I think what everyone wants to do with all this postulating and explaining is avoid the fact that it is hard and takes time and is awkward and there's no clear metric of success. But still worth it, somehow. Like life.
That's pathetic thinking. It's inoffensive until someone turns the keys.
Plane accidents often occur by sabotage or failure of multiple systems.
There has been an interplay and "intellectual curiosity" from both movie studios and internet giants on online personas and social groups. They even married recently!
This bait and switch of blaming the other will backfire.
Back in the day, more children meant more wealth and prosperity for the family. More friends meant more support, bigger communities were stronger against others. It was need based, as they have a need to support and survive by themselves.
The nation concept now drains out the need and viability of communities, families and friendships. It's like a whale swallowing animals. Animals can no longer keep their own structure and identity once they are inside the whale. They will be disintegrated into individual molecules and become citizens of the whale. Nations do the same. The existence and strength of a nation requires disintegration of internal structures and autonomous bodies. Communities, families and friendships all go against the individualistic nation concept. The best citizens are individual workers with no connections and no opinions and maybe no gender.
I love heavy metal. So I go to metal pubs. I meet people, we talk and listen to each other. I've been talking to the same people for 30+ years but I meet new people EVERY time I venture out. I may see them again, I may not. Who cares?
We lend PHYSICAL copies of albums, video games and books to one another. This increases trust, knowledge and love for one another. We share stories about all sorts of things. We create stories by doing things together.
This is how friendships are formed and maintained. This is humanity. This is who we are and how we behave.
I’m more of a hardcore guy but stopped going to shows when I got out of college and got a job. I’m in my 40s now, well my point is it’s amazing how you are still going to shows.
Idk how you're not still going to shows, and my 40-something show-going friends would probably think the same. Just not a concept i can wrap my head around lol
Luckily I live in London, UK. There are many metal, rock and alternative pubs. Most cities will have at least one. Small rural town will not though :(
But the metal pub is really just an example. Any activity where people regularly come together just to chew the fat is better than online for creating friendships.
> The government slowed down its investment in and construction of third spaces—such as community centers, parks, and coffee shops—which has left fewer places for organic social interactions.
My anecdotal impression is that people don't really use those that are available very much and the drop in investment is because of that.
I have organized a few events in community halls over the past few years and I have been struck by just how available the event spaces we looked at were. No conflicts, no competing priorities, nobody using any of the other rooms at the same time, etc. Some communities are no longer bothering to have community halls at all, as nobody really uses them.
Where I live, the local community centres are not heavily used. Community social events have dwindled due to being poorly attended. The coffee shops, bars, and pubs have cut seating and replaced it with dedicated pickup areas for those who send in orders or are buying it through a delivery app. Schools have cut all manner of parent activities as the parents don't participate.
Same thing for anything that isn't a flagship park or flagship sports facility. Sure, the top city parks are crowded, but most are pretty empty even on sunny days.
So I have to ask, is there actually much demand for more social interaction? As it seems that the drop is mostly in demand, not supply.
I think this is less about demand, and more about habits.
I’ve personally become aware of the fact that I need more social contact. I want to attend events, but never really built the habit of organizing. My ex was always the social instigator, and I didn’t realize how much I relied on that (we were together for most of my adult life).
The more people I talk to about this, the more I hear them lamenting the lack of in-person gatherings.
I think social media has kind of filled the need poorly, and this has changed habits. It’s not what people want, but it has them hooked, and IRL gatherings have suffered as a result.
It reminds me of some of the comments from the younger crowd about TikTok. “I hate it, but I can’t stop using it, because everyone else is on it”.
I really think people want real social interaction but have gotten caught in this social media habit that just barely meets the need. Junk food vs. a nutritious meal.
I suppose at the end of the day you could still say this means demand is down, but I think there are more layers than that.
Third places have to be convenient for people to go there. It needs to be a walking distance away from your home. It's an extension of your living room. Rent also needs to be low so that beverages are cheap enough for people to drink daily. I have recently been to Vietnam and every neighbourhood is flooded coffee shops and tea carts.
I don't really get where people with kids found these 6.5 hrs / wk to spend on friendships, or even the quoted current averages of 4 hrs / wk.
On a workday, there isn't much time. I roll out of bed at 6:30, get the kids up and fed breakfast and out the door. I finally get actually working at 8:30-9:30, depending on if I exercise or not. Stop work in the 5:30-6 range, switch into making dinner, getting kids to eat dinner, policing screen time and homework. Then bedtimes and such, following up on the zillion school emails, PTA newsletters, scheduling. If I have 45 min of downtime, typically in the 10-11pm range, if I'm lucky.
On weekends, there's all the deferred housework, like cleaning and laundry. Kids have swim and sports. Visits to grandparents, from grandparents. Every now and then we have someone over for a games afternoon, or someone is visiting from out of town, but I really doubt that adds up to 4 hr / wk.
One technique that I think needs to come back into fashion, which was familiar to us Gen Xers, is to drag your kids along when socializing for you. Instead of prioritizing their play dates and sitting in the corner on our phones, we should be bringing the kids to our friend's house and they can wander around and be bored while we sit and talk as friends.
The problem we have as a parenting culture is that we're not comfortable ignoring our kids. We need to teach kids that ignoring them is not the same as not caring for them. In fact, they need to feel the sensation of not being the most important thing for once. It's better to get some attention from a happy parent than all of the attention of a sad parent.
Throughout her teenage years, my wife's father would drag her along to his bowling trainings and matches. A smokey dingy bowling alley with drunk middle aged men may not seem the best place to take a young teenage girl, but there were no issues.
If anything the opposite - the other men respected her more, because they knew she was her father's daughter. They would also have fatherly protective instincts towards her.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I generally hated being dragged to the friends houses of my parents. It was just needlessly boring.
On the contrary, it sometimes was okay if that friend had children. I think the issue in the modern day however, is that less people are having children, so there simply isn't the opportunity. For example, I'm the only person in my friend group who has children.
that's different. in my home i can disappear into my room and keep myself busy there. when at another place i have to behave, i can't go run around and explore (unless they have a garden and kids are allowed to go outside)
as a parent i would not drag my kids to a place unless there are other kids or i know there is something interesting for them.
but right on topic, the solution is to not live alone with your kids. we are in a multifamily compound where other families have children too, and there is no problem for some of the adults to go out while others stay back and make sure the kids are safe. (they are not providing entertainment but someone is always around should something happen).
this of course is only possible because i did connect to the neighbors. or rather, they connected to us. i always wanted to live in a place like that, but finding this one was pure serendipity. we weren't actually looking. it just happened that the neighbors turned out that way.
Just a 'temporary boredom as a child is/was pretty normal' datapoint, I remember sometimes falling asleep at the table in the restaurant out of sheer boredom while the adults finished chatting. I don't harbour any resentment for that, and I completely understand that they needed to hang out once in a while.
yes, but i needs to be boredom in an environment/situation where they can do something about it. being forced to sit still and be quiet in a foreign house while the adults have fun is not it.
I mean, as much as the modern world wants to convince you to revolve your life around making your kid comfortable at every moment of the day, this is actually a super important life skill and you need your kid to develop it.
I mean, that's probably a different dynamic. I didn't have to interact with the adults in that scenario, I could just be alone in my room.
To be fair, I think I was just a shy child/teenager. I didn't really feel comfortable talking, it's more I'd just sit and listen. In the back of my mind, all I really wanted to do was watch TV or playing videos, and often what would happen is I would just sit in front of their TV.
That's not to say that their friends weren't interesting people. It's just more, as a child I didn't really feel like I could directly interact.
That’s true, I regularly remember going to pubs, friends houses and sporting events that I was far to young to be at, but was just there because my parents where doing a thing.
My mum used to do this - I loved going to various places because either there were kids there to play with OR they had something that I found interesting. For example, one of the places had a 12-inch very detailed sculpture of a prawn which I found very intriguing. Some of the places had lots of books which I loved to raid. And there were always snacks.
Yeah I used to hang out with my friends while their kids were around, it was fun to get to know their kids honestly, and if we were lucky we could get the kids to bed and then have a drink on the porch before calling it a night.
I have 2 young kids, run a widely used open source project and a startup, eat dinner with my kids 6/7 nights a week and do this. Here’s some ways how:
My best friend comes over once a weekend and we watch the TV that my wife doesn’t want to.
I participate in a sport (powerlifting) where I’ve made friends and there’s room to socialise while exercising.
I chose to move back to my home town and also go to college there.
I go to metal gigs with friends when the kids are asleep.
I’m happily married, my wife is training for a marathon and sees friends too.
We pay for a cleaner.
Don’t know that this is 6.5 hours in person with friends every week but I’d say it’s at least a couple of hours each.
It’s doable, it just might require not doing some stuff you already do and enjoy. There’s a bunch of stuff I did pre-kids that I don’t any more and would like to find time for again one day.
You just said all the things that you do while raising kids. What is it that you are doing differently that allows you to do all those things? Is it simply just a matter of hiring a cleaner?
Because otherwise, as the father of a 1 and 5 year old, I completely agree with OP and find your story unbelievable. Like OP I work/exercise/do chores from 6 am to 10 pm. I'm on HN right now only because it's Saturday and I'm relaxing.
I have kids in similar ages and I also find time with friends. Even on some weekdays.
> Like OP I work/exercise/do chores from 6 am to 10 pm.
I hear this a lot, but let’s be honest: You don’t need to exercise and do chores every single day for the entire time outside of work, do you? Would it be the end of the world if you met up with a friend one night instead of going to the gym? Could you invite a friend to the gym?
The house doesn’t need to be spotlessly cleaned every night. If you’re cooking dinner, switch to recipes that are easy to prepare and then double them so you can have leftovers.
It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of doing things constantly until they expand and fill all of your time. Becoming more efficient and flexible about the things I did outside of work opened up a lot of free time.
For me, I have to go to the gym. Its my only me thing. Taking someone to the gym sounds excruciating. For me the gym is all about disconnecting from everything requiring higher order thinking. Just loud music and heavy weights. Without that time I feel things would go very badly indeed.
The only time I really just spontaneously smile is during the walk from my car to the front door of the gym.
You’re on HN because it’s Saturday and you’re relaxing.
I’m in an Uber to go see some gym friends because my kids are in the bath and almost ready for bed. Another night this week: I’ll do the same for my wife.
Zero judgment here, genuinely, but: I keep hearing people say my life is impossible and it doesn’t seem like it.
I think so much of this is mentality, which as a word really undersells the problem but I can't think of a better one. You and the other commenters are probably about equally busy, but you are able to see your various tasks and obligations as opportunities to invite your friends in or otherwise socialize. They see them as blockers where nothing else and especially not socializing can happen.
As a childless person with far more "free time" than either of you, I've fallen into the same trap. I build it up in my head that I'm "just too busy" and during my downtime I'm "too tired," but the reality is often that I've just lost the habit and fail to perceive the opportunities.
None of this is meant to undersell the problem. I don't think human beings evolved for this pervasive, isolated busyness, and I think a lot of societal dysfunction cascades from it. I think it has real, negative effects on our biology and psychology, and no one should be shamed for succumbing to those effects. But at the same time I don't think the situation is hopeless and I admire and aspire to your initiative and creativity, and I think the rest of us can get there too.
Young kids are a different story but that doesn’t last forever. My kids are older, 13 and 15, and there’s a lot more time for personal interests and friends. Also, as kids get older you begin to have mutual interests. I’m watching/helping my 15 year old play an Indiana Jones game on his ps5 while typing this and have no desire to do anything else.
Y'all sound like the people in an infomercial that can't pour juice without spilling it everywhere or they get egg in ridiculous places when they try to crack it. With dishwashers, instapots, roombas, microwaves, and so on modern life just isn't that hard. Or, more accurately, it's mostly as hard as you make it.
You’re working too much and/or misorganized at home. Happens to many people. Unless you’re a single parent you can make a plan this weekend to at least alternate the days when someone has to do chores nonstop after work. I have kids those same ages.
I'm similar to the person you are directly applying to. I also have a 5 and 3yo.
Unlike the first OP, I don't get involved with the PTA and we don't really email with the school at all. I don't understand the emailing constantly with school thing, but to each their own and I'm sure there's a valid reason for those that do.
We, like the person you're replying to, also pay for a cleaner, but that's for deep cleaning and only happens once every two weeks. I've somehow settled into a routine that has me doing basic cleaning right after dinner.
My wife and I share chores and swap out tasks evenly. This allows one of us to clean and have some "me" time while the other bathes the kids/does bedtime, before we meet together and hang out for a bit in the evening before bed. Sometimes during the week we'll have a friend over during this time. Our weekend hours are limited in the evenings, because I have to get up early for work, but we make it work.
On the weekends, we are good about balancing our fun time. Grandparents come over and watch the kids as we go out together, or, just for one example, my wife will handle dinner/bedtime (or breakfast, if I go to something dance-musicy that runs late) while I go out to a show. I'll do likewise for her if she wants to go out with friends.
Also on the weekends, we often meet up during the day with friends of ours who also have kids. We get to hang out with our friends while our kids play together.
Additionally, my work has a gym and my work schedule is earlier than most - 6 to 3PM. I work out before and after work, and then go pick my kiddos up, make dinner and play with them after cleaning. I also chose a job that insisted they prioritize family and work/life balance and I leaned into that, and they leaned back! No notifications hit my phone after 4PM and in the four years I've worked here, I have never had to work a weekend nor been pressured to do any work outside of when I'm at the office.
My wife is also super nice about letting me go on 3-4 day backpacking trips multiple times through the summer.
We prioritized finding some time for us for our own sanity, and kinda naturally settled into this schedule. It might not work for everyone, and I feel very fortunate to have space for us.
Edit: Don't get it twisted, though... I'm tired. I can't get a full 8 hours of sleep on a regular basis, closer to 7, sometimes a bit less. The daytimes are also constant in order to ensure we get time at the end. It's hard.
Edit 2: We also prioritized ensuring our kids were great sleepers from day one. They go down for bed anywhere between 7 and 8, and don't wake up until ~7AM. We're also very lucky in that they've never really come into our bedrooms in the middle of the night and stay in their beds until we get them in the mornings. I don't know how we got fortunate there, but /shrug.
> My wife and I share chores and swap out tasks evenly.
Having some give and take between parents makes such a big difference.
I think every time I’ve talked to friends who are new parents who complain about not having any free time ever, they eventually reveal some excessive rigidity in how they share the parenting load. Some parents try to have both parents involved in everything all the time. Some parents refuse to let the other parent handle a task like bedtime. Some parents let their kids get demanding about which parent does a task and they never push back on it. And of course some couples have one lazy parent who just doesn’t do the thing, leaving it to fall to the other parent.
There’s often a lightbulb moment when parents realize that there can be flexibility and trading back and forth between parents.
I once coached a young guy who was struggling at his job because his ~9 month old still wasn’t sleeping well. After some questions he revealed that both he and his wife were getting up with the baby every time and staying up together.
It took some convincing to break him of the notion that every interaction with the baby required two parents. Once they started staggering their sleep schedules and taking shifts during the night everything improved.
Depending on where you live this is pretty affordable for even an average midwestern senior dev salary. Especially in a two income household. As in cut out daily Starbucks level affordable.
It’s the first “luxury” I pay for when able to right after air conditioning, and I did it even when I was single with a roommate.
Costs where I live are $200 or so twice a month to have my entire place cleaned top to bottom and I live in an above average sized house.
It’s not nothing, but it’s affordable enough to prioritize. The best thing you can buy with money is time, and I’ve found this is one of the largest RoI possible in terms of dollars per hours given back.
Others will prioritize different spending but overall I find it a better return than even taking a vacation.
5k/year is serious money. It’s affordable the way most things are affordable making it a priority over other things. IMO it’s low on the dollars per hour saved to use a regular cleaning service, where it’s worth it is you want a clean home and just don’t keep it up.
However, there’s significant diminishing returns on weekly or biweekly cleaning service vs monthly or by monthly. Especially if you can use a robotic vacuum and have decent air filtration.
Also, one of the major upsides of cleaning is to reduce dust, pollen, etc in the air. So things don’t get dirty as quickly and it matters less when they are dirty.
I don’t pay for a cleaner and still have plenty of time for friends.
I think people overestimate how much time a cleaner saves. It’s helpful if you can afford it but IMO it’s not the life-changing improvement that you hear about on Reddit and other places. Someone who comes once per week to spend an hour or two cleaning could give an hour or two back (usually not 1:1 because they clean deeper than you would yourself most times to show that a good job was done). It’s not going to make the difference between having tons of time to spend with your friends if your scheduled is already packed though. That is, unless you plan to pay for a daily cleaner which is a different level of expense.
I have a 3x/week housekeeper and it means I practically don't clean at all, including tidying/putting things away. Costs around $15k/yr though, so not for everyone. I wouldn't do this if not for kids though.
I mean, with 3x/week or even 7x/week housekeeper you'll be cleaning something. Even Jeff Bezos probably wipes a plate clean once in a while, or makes a sandwich. They're not going to be right next to you 24/7.
In many cases, it's slavery (immigrants whose documents have been taken away). Occasionally, you have tragedies occur, like the Kenyan woman who received 3rd degree burns over most of her body, and her family didn't know until she was shipped back home to die.
Extreme, but is that what we're aspiring to?
But then, it would be incorrect of me to say that I'm making a purely economic argument because I've clearly moved into making a value judgment. I think that's still valid though. Do we want to live in a country where wealthy people - or even just the well-off top half/three-fifths/whatever - expect never to have to clean up after themselves? We don't even have to ask what kind of society that creates, it's in our national memory.
This is every job. The rich paying the poor to do something that will bring them value. Every work visa is slavery by your argument. The reason cleaning as a job icks people out is because they see it as a "lesser" job. I am fine with it as long as the pay is good.
No, you're wrong. Someone with a work visa can leave if they want, they just can't stay if they don't meet certain conditions. However, they can travel to wherever they're authorized to. Difficult as it might be, they can also find another employer to sponsor them. They can also leave to visit home.
Someone who has their passport taken cannot leave. They may be deported, like someone with a lapsed visa, but unlike the aforementioned, they don't have the option to go somewhere other than the destination the deporting country decides is their home. Without documenation, they may be detained for an extended time, and cannot avail themselves of the resources available to people who can prove themselves citizens of another country.
I can leave my job - both permanently and for the evening. I can leave this country and come back (same for many foreign countries). Work life in America sucks, but it's not the same as modern day slavery.
Also, I explained why cleaning (specifically, employing a live-in maids) can be an issue, socially. It's not icky and it's not lesser; however, it can create in the society that encourages it class divisions and abuses, especially since it can only ever become ubiquitous and accessible to anyone but the wealthy if pay is not good. We have concrete examples of this in the regions GP mentions.
1. You do realise that not every house help is on some work visa where the employer takes away their passport right? That's illegal. These things happen a lot in arab countries not just for house helps but engineers too. Wanting to have a house help doesn't mean aspiring for "slavery" or taking away someones passport.
2. Work visa conditions if harsh enough are akin to slavery. You have Indians on H1B visas for over a decade with no chance of getting a green card. They have bought houses and raised families here. And can be kicked out in 3 months if they are out of a job. They are stuck.
> encourages it class divisions and abuses
Do you feel the same about a personal driver? A chef? A live-in nurse? What professions are socially ok in your opinion? If someone can pay good wages for a maid its absolutely ok. In fact its good that money flows into poorer communities. If you want real class equality ensure that every job gets paid similar amounts. A rich engineer not hiring a maid just makes wealth inequality worse. Its far better for the community than stuffing it in some index fund.
> 2. Work visa conditions if harsh enough are akin to slavery. You have Indians on H1B visas for over a decade with no chance of getting a green card. They have bought houses and raised families here. And can be kicked out in 3 months if they are out of a job. They are stuck.
Sounds very stressful. Is there no way for them to replace the H1B visa with something more permanent? Kinda like a middle step to green card?
£3.2k a year here. Most people on HN have tech jobs. I don’t drink coffee. I barely drink alcohol. I’ve never bought a new car. Again: it’s probably possible for many people here but some people prefer to convince themselves it’s impossible. Learned helplessness.
I don’t live in the US so have no idea about that. I have friends who are parents who make below the median household income in the U.K. who make time for hobbies and socialising (including with me). Resources help but I know many people with far more resources than I who would say on forums like this my life is impossible.
If you moved from a high cost of living city back to your home town, how much did that have to do with it? In HCOL cities the crazy rent or mortgage costs keep everyone running and cut into discretionary funds for assistance.
The more interesting question is: If people in HCOL areas are so poor that they can't even afford to make time to bask in friendships with the people the city has to offer, why are they still there?
Most small towns and medium sized cities, at least in the USA, have a serious lack of stepping stone opportunities. There are low-paying service and entry level jobs and there are high paying jobs that require extensive experience. There is often nothing in between.
Isn’t it the opposite? Moving from HCOL to LCOL can be somewhat easy as the home equity or savings you built up in HCOL goes a longer way in the destination. Surely easier than moving from LCOL to HCOL?
Not when the real estate market is in the chaos it is right now, most of the ‘easy’ LCOL areas are not only not as LCOL, but have turned politically unpalatable, and there are large efforts now to do things like RTO in HCOL areas.
>Part of the reason I don’t live in America is I see a lot of people on salaries 2-4x mine who seem to be unable to have time to see their friends.
This is just a choice though. A choice Americans absolutely love making, but a choice none-the-less. On Reddit some dude was trying to argue that an individual needs $70,000 a year in fixed expenses just to live. Bare minimum. OTOH, I have what I consider an absurdly luxurious life and I spend less than $60,000/year TOTAL.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DwlQ_5A2mKU - this is a video of someone who makes $2,200/month and has zero expenses (her parents pay for everything) and is in serious financial trouble.
Spend some time on bogleheads and you’ll see it all - from people saving $120k a year on $140k salary, to those spending $700k a year and not finding anything to save.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that if you have a monthly expense, it becomes “necessary fixed expense” damn quickly.
Even if it’s $50 a month for telephone sanitizing.
> On Reddit some dude was trying to argue that an individual needs $70,000 a year in fixed expenses just to live. Bare minimum.
... Wait, how the hell did they figure that out? Did they itemise it? Was most of it just going on a very expensive mortgage or something? Are they including retirement savings?
(I've no rent or mortgage, due to having been very lucky with employer equity, but I'm not sure I could spend 60k EUR a year on myself even if I wanted to; there is only so much stuff that you'd reasonably want to spend money on.)
Yeah, I can't find the post again but they itemized it according to what they thought was normal basics.
I remember there was large car payments.
OI have been driving for more than 25 years, I've had a car payment for maybe 10 months in those 25 years. To me a car payment is a massive luxury, to this dude it's a minimum basic.
Frighteningly common attitude amongst Americans, including my parents. Never made sense to me. I get that American cities are basically designed to require a car, but that doesn't mean you need to finance or lease something brand new all the time.
Huh, I would argue that someone who has 70k after tax per year to spend generally shouldn't be buying a car with debt _at all_; they should be able to afford to save and buy one outright.
I save for my cars, I don't, generally, finance them. I did finance one car once when I was a young engineer and still had student loans. I did it because I was just starting my career. Paid off the loan completely within a year.
I basically think everyone, no matter your income, should strive to save for their cars as much as possible, and try to avoid financing. Always financing a car is a trap to always spend more than you can really afford on a car. Saving and paying cash allows you to really gauge what is affordable. Even my sister in law who makes close to minimum wage has always been able to save for her cars and pay cash.
I have a rough idea of my friend’s schedules, and I call them when I’m driving the kids around, or we text. Staying in constant contact with a few very close friends about my mental health has floated me through my mid-40s.
A tip I got from a friend in his 60s was that even when you lose friends, life is great because you constantly have the opportunity to find new ones. I am in a new close friends renaissance in my 40s, just be vulnerable and don’t take rejection personally.
Are you a single parent? If so then yeah you have it hard, no doubt there.
But if not shouldn't your spouse be doing some of this? Why are you getting the kids ready and making dinner and doing all the homework/school stuff and working full time?
Why not have grandparents watch the kids when they visit (or you drop them off)? Why do you need to be there at all? Great time to go meet a friend for lunch. Or grandparents can take the kids to sports. Or you make friends with other parents at those sports activities so you can interact while the kids are there.
This is almost identical to my experience. And during that brief sliver of time that I do get to myself, I simply don't have the mental energy to engage with others. Instead, I usually decompress by working out or reading or something else solitary, because for me socialising requires effort.
It used to be possible in most areas to raise a family and kids on a single middle-class income. So that left one person free to handle domestic tasks instead of them being split between two people in the spare time they have after the kids are all in bed.
It still may be possible now but that will require reducing your standard of living to what was common then. Think no stone counter-tops. Not driving a 0-3 year old car with $10,000 just in electronics. Having linoleum floors instead of high-end tile. Eating Hamburger Helper, spaghetti, not ordering door dash 5x a week. Resisting the constant stream of social media, influencers, advertisements that are telling you everyone else lives better than you and making you feel bad about it, which causes you to spend money on things you don't need but raise the aesthetic of your life and make you feel like you're living better.
I'd bet that if someone was happy to live in the standard of living that was 20-30 years ago, it could still be done on a single middle class income which would allow for the leisure time required to spend 6.5hrs+ with friends [citation needed]
No stone countertops? Linoleum? Sounds like absolute hell! Positivity inhumane. Next you’ll tell me that they don’t even have cable AND Netflix or gasp go to the library.
Money: You pay people to do things that take up time.
We have a house cleaner. That's a few hours right there. When the kids were little, we had a nanny. But the nanny didn't just watch the kids. She also washed and folded the laundry, tidied the house daily, and sometimes cooked dinner. In fact, now that they are in school, I'm thinking of hiring a home helper to do those things because those chores get neglected right now (although the kids can almost do it now instead).
Locality: Visit people who live nearby.
Most of my friends that I see regularly are either my wife's brothers and their families, since they all live locally, or the parents of our kids friends, who all live nearby since we go to the local school, or the neighbors who we like. We have family dinner a few times a week, either at someone's house or out to eat (see point one about money), and especially on weekends and summer break, we hang out a lot with the neighbors.
I don't however see my college friends or work buddies much anymore. That is what I had to give up when I had kids. We have some group chats and will occasionally get together, but that requires arranging babysitting, or one of us going on a trip with those friends (see the point about money again). But both my wife and I try to do that at least once a year (go on a friends trip).
Locality is increasingly unaffordable for people as it's far more common for people who rent to move often (to avoid paying high rent increases) and people who own to be forced into living in a small sunset of places where they can actually afford a home (often far away from their communities or friends)
I mean, I could walk down to a bar at 10pm, if I wanted to. I live in a city. But if I'm getting up at 6:30, I don't think I want a pint let alone three that late.
Plus, I'd still have two kids up, asking me to extend the wifi because they're not done with English yet or to help scan a page for math. I'm not going to just leave that to my partner.
Even the more traditional pint-after-work would leave me coming home tipsy at 7pm, having slacked off on all of dinner prep and child-wrangling. If I made a habit of that, it would get me my ass handed to me, and rightfully so.
I do wonder if the whole "pub-culture" thing was entirely predicated on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of women. And how much of that extended to other traditional extracurriculars like bowling leagues and clubs and such.
True, if your family is such a burden maybe you should focus on making better choices. Probably better off turning the kids over to the state vs forcing them to through 18 whole years and a childhood suffering your resentment.
I'm confused by how your question relates to the one above it. It sounds like you're saying the person above should feel free to go to the pub frequently because the mom should feel happy taking care of the house and kids without them?
> was entirely predicated on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of women
It was paid and acknowledged. It was paid in a wage to husbands meant to run an entire household under. It was acknowledged also, though we probably also took it for granted.
That being said, we're never realistically going back to a time when only one spouse worked. It's just a fact that households where both spouses work will get ahead, so that time and that type of life isn't ever coming back.
You do it like you do in Europe. Your friends pop by and sit around while you're doing what you're doing, chatting here and there, helping out occasionally too. If you're thinking about "outings" then yes, those are cooked with your schedule.
There were more kids around, which meant there were more kids for your kids to play with instead of hanging on you and more parents in the same boat to form a support network.
It’s one of the problems with birth rate collapse. The fewer people have kids, the harder it is in very hard to measure ways.
This doesn't make sense, the population has only increased.
Quick Google tells me 40 years ago, in 1985, there was 62.6 million children in the US. In 2025 there are 74.7 million. That is more children in 2025 than 1985.
Parents not allowing their children to play independently isn't due to lack of other children, it's a choice.
I suspect the number of children born to the kind of parents who's kids six figure white collar professionals want their kids in contact with has gone down.
The most successful people at work I see have a stay at home partner that looks after the kids, or no kids, or kids left for college. Its pretty impossible to have a demanding job and family life and your own life.
I have zero IRL friends, not even acquaintances.
I stopped having friends once I had kids. So its been at least a decade. At the point now where my oldest is 13 and the youngest is 11 that I could probably have the time for them if I wanted but I haven't had any for so long that the desire is just gone. The effort required just doesn't seem like its worth it. I work remotely as well so I can actually go days without speaking to an adult aside from my wife. I don't even work on a team so literally not a word to anyone.
My wife had a good friend via our oldest being best friends with her oldest. We would do family get togethers and I would hang out with the husband but I had zero desire to hang out with him 1:1 despite both wives pushing for it. Our kids stopped being friends and we stopped being friends with the family. Honestly it was a relief. Having to pretend to be interested in what they were saying was exhausting.
I get up at 7am to get kids ready for school and start work at 9. Work until 4ish and then go get the kids. Everyone is home by 4:30 or so but then we have sports 4 nights a week until about 7. Then dinner. Wife is not remote so generally gets home around 6pm. Weekends is sports on Saturdays. We have Sundays to ourselves right now which is great. I'm writing this in the 2 hour break between kids sports games. I took the youngest to football, came home, the wife took him to a birthday party and now I have to take the oldest to his game in an hour.
I hit the gym for an hour or so 4x a week sometime between 7 and 9 during the week depending on if I am having dinner with the family (sometimes I'll go during work). Then I go again on Sunday. Gym is pretty much the only me time I have and I will not miss it.
Gotten to the point where I struggle to think of people I meet as real. I feign interest until we can part ways. I don't even know people's names at work. They are all offshore as well so our hours don't really overlap. Can't even pretend to be interested in my siblings anymore. I have to see my wife's dad once a week and its a struggle. I dread him passing away as I am going to have to try and pretend to be upset. He is a great guy, I have nothing against him, just no connection.
It just is what it is, I love my wife and kids but just have zero attachment or empathy for anyone else.
Instead of doom scrolling on social media we called a friend.
Instead of binge watching another meh show, we had friends over to play cards or a board game.
Instead of over scheduling kids with constant activities, parents had a regular night out with friends while kids spent quality time at home with the other parent.
The time is there. It was in the past. We just have a finite amount of time and use it differently.
Imagine the time when kids could actually do things on their own and learn resilience, independence, and community alongside their friends. Instead, their parents now need to drive them everywhere alone because communities got rid of school buses, sidewalks, and speed bumps to help make cars go faster. We've done the real-life version of gamers min-maxing the fun out of a game.
All of this assumes people have friends to start with.
This becomes much harder for those without friends which I think is what the article was about. Not disagreeing with you though, untold hours have been wasted on social media.
Invite your childless friends to come visit you. I'm childless but all of my oldest friends have kids and all of those kids know me. It's probably easier for them to travel and if they stay a few nights you'll have time for both family time and adult time. Plus, I think it's great for kids to interact with adults who are trusted but aren't an authority figure.
A lot of people integrate both friends and kids into their lives, instead of wearing different hats and splitting time. Dinner with friends on a weekday or Friday. Playdates are a good excuse to spend 8 hours hanging out with with another parent. Drag the kids along to BBQs and campouts.
Combine it with kids stuff. Chat to fellow parents at PTA and sports. I have a circle of friends consisting mostly of fellow school parents and sports players still going 10 years after kids left school. We get together for beers and poker and some coffee mornings.
I do think 6.5 hours is much easier if only one spouse works. My wife and I both work demanding jobs, but during times when one of us has been in-between jobs or off work, things look very different.
I also have young kids but I pull off more than 4hrs per week with friends.
These conversations are difficult online because people who fall into routines without friend or personal time often refuse to believe that anything else is possible. Even in this comment thread there are accusations that other people are lying about spending time with friends because they just can’t believe it’s possible.
The common thread I see in discussions is the claim that every day is filled from start to finish with every activity. Now realistically we know you’re not exercising every single day, not doing laundry all weekend start to finish, and not reading a zillion PTA newsletters every night because those are just examples. Yet those lists are always given as reasons why people can never have free time even though they aren’t always happening.
It’s much harder for single parents, obviously, but for a household with two parents it shouldn’t be hard for one parent to go out with friends after the kids are down one night each week and/or for a couple hours on the weekend. This alone would get to 4hrs/week or beyond. I’m not exaggerating when I say every set of parent friends I know does some variation of this. Friend groups will sync up their nights away to get together.
Second, playing with kids is an easy opportunity to meet up with parent friends. We take the kids to a local park with local parents a couple days a week in the afternoon briefly before dinner. Really easy way to catch up while the friends are playing.
Third, once the kids are old enough to not require extreme supervision at dinner time we like to have friends over for dinner. Obviously this isn’t a fancy 3-course meal with wine afterward, but we don’t care. Friends like to stop by for a quick dinner.
Fourth, if you’re cramming your schedule so full of kids activities and cleaning tasks to keep the house constantly clean that you have zero wiggle room for finding a couple hours with friends each week, that’s a choice. Saying this makes a lot of people angry, but the truth is you have to prioritize and compromise. Some times we decide we don’t have time for another activity commitment. Other times we decide the house can stay messy for an extra day to catch an opportunity to meet up with someone. Most of the time we trade off parent to parent.
Like I said, it’s different if you’re a single parent. However every parent friend I know does some variation of this and we spend time with each other. If finding a measly 4 hours per week feels completely impossible, I would suggest stepping back and looking at priorities and how your splitting time between parents.
I should also mention that paying attention to things like screen time and distractions is important. I’ve had a few friends who were exasperated at how impossible it felt to do anything, until they checked their screen time tracker and realized that 3-4+ hours of every day was disappearing into their phone. For others this could be TV or computer Internet browsing. Some of this is always okay, but you have to realize it’s a choice you’re making about where the time goes.
Almost all my in-person friends nowadays are parents of kids who my kids associate with. Mostly through sports. You get to kill two birds - support your kids and associate with adults. A few you’ll make good bonds with.
Its all fun and games until the kids have a falling out. Then its clear it was very much a friendship of convenience. I always saw them as such but it was a little upsetting for my wife.
But my wife still meets at least monthly with a group of the moms from our first travel team when the kids were in 3rd grade - almost a decade since they were teammates. There was probably some trauma bonding that occurred.
I had a TV in my room since I was 8 (1988) and my parents didn't police anything. Maybe this is a newer concern due to a greater understanding of tech dangers
I come from a large family and have a large family. It’s hard, but definitely worth it.
More objectively, research seems to indicate happiness tends to be less vs childless during the first hard years, but it slowly evens out and pale with kids are generally much happier later in life.
I have a few opinions here. Unhappiness spreads faster than happiness. You don’t hear about all the happy families down the road, but you will hear about the dysfunctional one. Your friends don’t talk much about the good feelings snuggling up with their toddler, but will tell you about the massive meltdown that their toddler had a few weeks ago.
If you aren’t dysfunctional, set a consistent example, and are consistent with your kids boundaries, you don’t have to be unhappy with your kids. Along those lines, put your screens down and go do something with your kids (don’t just passively watch between doomscrolling) and you’ll find there’s a lot of enjoyment to be found for you too.
This a legit question before having kids, I don’t mean to belittle it, but after having kids, for me, it’s like asking if I wished the people I loved most never existed. The question no longer makes sense.
> human kids are exotic pets for the wealthy or crazy
I'm having a hard time parsing that statement.
Are you suggesting that only the wealthy can realistically afford to have children today, or that parents increasingly treat their children like status symbols or pets?
Both interpretations strike me as pretty dystopian.
> Are you suggesting that only the wealthy can realistically afford to have children today, or that parents increasingly treat their children like status symbols or pets?
A little of both. Kids are a luxury good in the current macro.
The cost to raise a child from 0-18 in the US in 2023 dollars is ~$330k (Brookings, USDA). This does not include daycare (~$1k/month if you can find a slot) nor college. No sick leave nor paternal leave mandate, no job security, and so on. 2.5M children experience homelessness each year in the US. 14M are food insecure.
Look at wage data, correlate against housing and other non discretionary expenses, back out to affordability.
> Both interpretations strike me as pretty dystopian.
Welcome to the shit show. “To know is to suffer.” —- Nietzsche
I’m unsure I agree with this. South Korea, Japan, China, etc. This is clear from the total fertility rate, how it presents is just a different shade in each country. Outside of the Nordics and parts of Europe, I don’t think anywhere else puts an effort into making being a parent not suck. And even places putting material resources into family and parent support, it doesn’t move the needle.
ok, i don't know about south korea and what's going on there with the extremely low fertility rate. but china has way more support for children than the US. china's low fertility rate is not because of social or economical factors like elsewhere but because of the one-child policy which has been abolished a few years ago.
I don’t think anywhere else puts an effort into making being a parent not suck
i don't believe that is true. not even in developing countries. the reason we can't see that is that developing countries suffer from other problems. but those problems don't motivate people there to not have children. on the contrary.
And even places putting material resources into family and parent support, it doesn’t move the needle
because material considerations are not a big factor. you were arguing that having children is expensive, and that children are only to be afforded by the wealthy, and treated as a status symbol.
but if that is a factor then it is only a factor in the united states and nowhere else in the world. especially not in developing countries.
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but most of the parents I know do not have these extreme schedules and lack of flexibility that leave zero time for friends.
I do know some parents who fell into the parenting version of “the cult of busy”. I think it’s easy to stack your calendar with a million things and commitments and then wonder where your time went. When someone starts complaining about never having any free time but then in the same paragraph mentions optional commitments like PTA involvement taking up their free time, you have to read between the lines to see what’s really happening. If I didn’t have enough time to see friends for even 4 hours per week, dropping PTA involvement would be an easy target.
Honestly, the time crunch trap happens to people in all situations, kids or not. I did some volunteer mentoring for a while and it was shocking to hear so many 20-somethings without kids or relationships tell me how they never had time to see their friends any more between their 9-5 job and chores. When pressed for details they reveal that they’re doing things like grocery shopping every day, spending 2 hours making and cleaning up dinner every night, an hour at the gym, 2 hours catching up on their Netflix, and on and on.
Life is all about priorities. Honestly as a parent I don’t know how anyone could get less than 4 hours/week with other parent friends. We always meet up with parent friends at the park or do other activities together. If you’re strictly entertaining kids alone and you’re not in a remote location, it would be my top priority to make some other parent friends quickly.
For me, absolutely. I have not accomplished anything nearly as personally satisfying. Watching my kid make a new friend or catch a pass in a game is far more rewarding than any personal accomplishment. Just going for a walk with them and enjoying the random conversations and questions is amazing. Would not trade that for the world
People didn't used to work this much. Now that both spouses in a household typically work the kind of schedule you mentioned along with increasingly longer commutes due to housing unaffordability, we spend more time at work cumulatively than generations before us did.
It's simple: they didn't work as much. Typically one parent would go out and work while the other took care of the home. When the first parent got back the house would be clean and dinner would be ready. Work was over.
The work parent tended to socialise in the evening and the home parent during the day.
The home parent was essentially self-employed, working directly for themselves and the family. A real "hustler" lifestyle.
Nowadays we've got everyone working full time for someone else leaving only evenings and weekends to work for ourselves. Or you spend a huge chunk of that salary on childcare, cleaners and dog walkers. We're addicted to work.
This is all feeding wealth directly to the owning class. People used to own a lot more themselves. They used to own clothes that could be repaired; furniture that could be polished, restored and lasted for generations; machines that could be serviced etc. Now nobody has time for any of that stuff. What you "own" is just worthless commodities like IKEA or Zara. Things that used to be assets are just another expense now.
The problem is there's no real way out for individuals. House prices are driven up by couples who both work. Tax systems benefits such couples too. So you're doubly screwed if you want to opt out of building billionaire wealth and instead work for yourself like they used to. Then you've got factors like settlements being built around cars, so now you need two cars, another huge expense (not an asset) or the stay at home parent is basically trapped at home all day. So now you're triply screwed.
What we really need AI for is a way out of these ridiculous local optima we get ourselves into. We desperately need to solve inequality. Unfortunately we also like to feel like we're in control, so any AI has its work cut out: guide humanity to happiness but trick them into thinking it was their idea. I have no idea why an AI would bother to do this for a species that themselves chooses not to do this for other animals and even each other, though.
all the dogs and furniture and hobbies and subscriptions and running around. Grasping, grasping, grasping...
my partner and I are people of simple means. We garbage pick or get off Facebook marketplace most of our stuff for super cheap (nice OLD stuff... Which I repair!) but have a fairly nice home that we’ve bought. She saved a lot just working for the post office in there pay: She didn’t go anywhere, and enjoys things like house cleaning and doing the dishes and reading. It’s the same as the Buddhist monks I spent time with. I give this example and people flat out rage at me, saying how awful a life that is. But my partner is one of the kindest, happiest people and adores simple things (she's also really fit and stellar in bed, so that helps...) She has found ways to legitimately enjoy the small moments and being present in life, not chasing a bunch of shiny flashy things all around the world. I’ve learned a lot from her.
In short: we don’t need AI, we need to just do less and learn to get back to simplicity. THAT would afford time to socialize.
The article already mention physical changes (car dependent suburbs, lack of 3rd places) and cultural shift (work as identity and nuclear family) but I think the two last things can be expanded to: we now have higher expectations of friends/people we meet.
I recently moved back from Asia to Northern Europe, famous for being a place hard to make friends. I made a new friend, when I one day went to the local swimming pool and just started to talk with an old, pensioner guy.
He reached out to me later, we set up a coffe chat and now it's a biweekly routine.
It was a fun story so I told it to friend & partner/families. All of my women friends first reaction was caution. "what does he want? Be careful with your drink!". My guy friends were more perplexed on why I'd even bother befriending someone almost 50+ year older than me. What's there to be gained.
I realized a few years back that meeting people with absolute zero expectations is the most fun way. It even worked good on online dating. As long as I enjoy taking to the person (a low bar) it's not time wasted.
Time is not to be wasted. Everything needs a goal/reason. Most people cultivate this mindset and the added expectations on new connections, to me seems like a cultural shift that happened as a result of what the article describes. One can remove that sentiment even with the work/nuclear family stuff. (not sure about the physical constraints)
> It was a fun story so I told it to friend & partner/families. All of my women friends first reaction was caution. "what does he want? Be careful with your drink!". My guy friends were more perplexed on why I'd even bother befriending someone almost 50+ year older than me. What's there to be gained.
It's pretty sad and telling that people's first reaction to something as wholesome and positive as making a new friend is suspicion and selfish apathy. Illustrative of the widespread anti-social mental illness that we somehow have managed to normalize.
Go into the Reddit threads of anyone doing something interesting like showcasing their skill. All the top threads will comments like "he's lucky he still has fingers", "hope he washed his hands afterwards", "damn that's ugly", and on and on, on a video where I will see a skillful guy doing something that would be dangerous for me, but is clearly within normal safe boundaries for his skill level. It's just a feedback loop of negativity unless the person is both extremely beautiful and skilled in which case all the comments are about how hot they are. The threshold of quality is ridiculous, the only people who can meet it are genetic lottery winners who also have a makeup and camera team.
This is what we are judging potential friends against. They have to be both perfect and beautiful to get even close to matching what we see everyday on the internet.
In the same way porn can make your real sexual partners feel lacking, these perfect people on reddit/Instagram/TikTok will make any potential real friends seem lacking and worthless. Not worth the effort.
Meanwhile the fact that we are also less than perfect is kept bottled up, we avoid looking at ourselves in the mirror too closely, all of that gets shunted into the subconscious and bubbles back up as depression, lack of self worth, workaholism, addiction, and other mental health issues.
Good point. To uncover new good things, you have to jump in blind without much preexisting knowledge, e.g. when meeting people. You have to enjoy that process itself as well as any connections that come out of it.
I agree with all the points made in the article, and chuckle to see some comments here (let bad communities fail!) that are manifestations of the lack of vulnerability brought about by living in online, single-player mode.
But in my experience, friendship quality is much more important than quantity.
I’m only truly friends with people I admire and am interested in, and grow to care about. Some of these friendships happen fast and others are slow burners - they aren’t all alike. But they are definitely hard to come across, particularly in middle age.
I believe those friendships give me the kind of benefits that experts suggests we lose in isolation. These are the kinds of friendships you carry with you wherever you are - often wondering what those friends would or do think about the things you are experiencing.
On the other hand, I have many acquaintances, some quite longstanding, where the friendship switch never got flipped. Perhaps I am viewed as a bit stand-offish. I am never not gracious but I just don’t have the small talk gene.
Quality is very important. For example, when people have serious issues such as drugs, it often turns out to be strongly related to the poeple they surround themselves with. So socializing purely for the sake of it, is not ideal. Some standards are needed. But being too picky and judgemental won't work. So a balanced approach is needed.
People saying it’s impossible with a family have really never frequented third spaces in Europe. Kids go everywhere with their parents and are allowed to roam as long as they remain within sight. The adults make friends and so do the kids. Most importantly, even if hypothetically nuclear families with young children couldn’t do it, younger and older people alike would be able to, which is still a major improvement to the current status quo. Second order effects from the existence of third spaces are simply a more open, pleasant, higher trust society with more independent, resilient adults. Say what you want about GDP, but fact is, I was much happier in Europe than the US and I live in a relatively walkable town close to NYC.
Oh, and you can absolutely have friends AND children. I have both.
I'm way out on the edge of the bell curve in terms of desire for 1 on 1 quality time with friends. Almost everyone enjoys time when it is given to them, but almost no one is proactive. I hear "Thanks so much for reaching out I am so bad at it" from practically everyone. I've concluded that most people simply don't have the executive function to manage and overcome such a disconnected social environment.
I am an introvert who prefers solitude to human interaction as my base mode. I find most interactions to be draining and unnecessary. They basically only increase or serve as a source of stress while offering nothing meaningful that somehow improves my mental state. I probably had this tendency but never had enough solitude to really recognize how much I preferred it. It is actually addicting and almost impossible to go back. I understand that in terms of social or financial success it’s not conducive or beneficial but in terms of spiritual growth it is. Even for me it’s certainly a useful skill to be able to connect with others and share experiences or material goods. I see many articles about a loneliness crisis so I guess for most people solitude is actually an unwanted state of affairs that causes them distress.
For the first 22 years of my life I was spending my hours in crowded school buildings. It turns out that most of my productivity happens in solitude. Learning through doing and self study. But now that I finally don't have that terrible rigid school structure anymore (for over a decade), the tables have turned. I am in complete isolation for entire days, most days. I found that I do want and need a bit of interaction, but not much is needed, and certainly not in the way that school provided that.
Yeah, I'm totally equipped with the empathy and wit to make friends and I do it sort of naturally at work, but whenever I change jobs and look back at the friendships I'm like, why did I bother. Solitude is so much better now that we have computers to interact with costlessly.
One curiosity I've noticed about close friendships through religious communities compared to other modern circles of "friendship": it is largely independent of age, socioeconomic status, and stage of life. In every other friendship circle I've been a part of, the basis has either been age (school/college), economics (work), extended family, or skill (sports and hobbies like motorbikes). Some friendships seem to be made through some shared interest (somebody here mentioned heavy metal, i consider you guys my friends on HN) but those tend to be heavily segmented by age/skill/socioeconomic status too. Religious communities are the only friendship circle I've ever been in where you easily connect with both young and old, regardless of skill/ability or stage of life. The unifying factor is "belief" and adherence to tradition. To this day, they remain the strongest and most stable relationships over time and space, even as we moved cities, changed jobs, and entered new stages of life.
They happen to coincide and support the most destructive with conservative tendencies and goals. The friendship there exiat on basis of common ennemy. Common ennemy put people together, but overall they are harming us all.
No-one ever suggests the simplest explanation... maybe socialising is just getting worse?
Where I live there were long covid lockdowns and most people expressed relief about not having to go to parties and make painful small-talk with strangers. They were already forcing themselves to go to social engagements because they didn't want to be seen as a loser, but they weren't enjoying it. This is historically unusual, people didn't see socialising as a chore necessary to maintain one's mental health a century ago.
Every article on the issue though takes as its starting point that socialising is obviously great and there must just be small obstacle which prevents people doing more of it. IMO there wouldn't be an epidemic of self-diagnosed social anxiety / high-functioning autism / 'introverts who get drained by social interactions' if people were actually enjoying their social engagements.
I agree with what you said in the other two paragraphs, but I think people _are_ suggesting what you said, and it is not really an "explanation": it is part of the observation itself
The article is claiming that people need to put more effort into organising social events with tips on how to do it. And the tips around escalating discloure etc. are very much like workplace ice-breakers... utterly awful experiences that everyone hates.
Unless you first diagnose why people dislike socialising nowadays you're unlikely to fix the problem. Enjoining people to 'invest' in relationships is entirely missing the point, people used to hang out with their friends because they enjoyed it not because they thought it was an investment.
Almost across the board in western countries, people have less friends, weaker friendships, and there’s less dating, sex, and marriage happening.
IMO this is the biggest challenge ahead of us. What’s the point of all this amazing life enhancing technology if we’re lonely, sad, and severed from our tribes.
What would happen if your friend relationships had a lot more similarities to romantic relationships? Scheduled outings, regular discussions about what is pissing you off, regular apologies, mundane/unscheduled time together, discussions about hopes and dreams, declarations of affection. Probably less physical touch...
Anyway, I feel like people think they can let friendships develop by osmosis. I don't think ANY deeply fulfilling relationship can just happen without real relationship work.
This is exactly why we built Soonly (https://soonly.com)! It's about scheduled time to connect with friends rather than relying on osmosis like you mentioned.
I wonder how much the polarization of politics contributes to this. I have friends on opposite sides of the political spectrum than me, but were able to basically segment off that area of discussion to enjoy each others company in other areas. It may be because we go back 20+ years with many shared experiences. I would guess many friendships do not have that level of bedrock to ground them, so developments like the recent political climate can easily uproot them
People certainly seem to be much pickier the past few years about only being friends with those that have matching political views. I try to avoid political discussions for this reason... though as someone that doesn't belong to either "camp" it's easy enough for me to find common ground with both sides on some issues so I can chat in a way that avoids major conflict.
I don't think the polarization merely contributes to these divisions, I'd say it's the whole point. It's easy to steer a democracy when 50% won't talk to the other 50%. Much more difficult if they occasionally agree on something.
I'm not sure I follow the metaphor. You can use a mirror to cause stress to one betta fish, but it seems like there would need to be more than just one fish and a mirror to capture this. I'm talking about the political machine working to ensure that 50% of voters are not friends with the other 50%.
I am asking what it has to do with friendship, implying that it has nothing to do with it. Unless... (now you complete my sentence either by denial, confirmation or deflection)
Uhh, nothing I guess. You need two fish for friendship (nevermind that bettas are too aggressive for that). With a fish and a mirror you only have one fish.
For friendship you need someone who doesn't talk like that.
Once you have been exposed to this kind of paranoid thinking, there is no way of building relationships of any kind anymore. It is like a spiritual death.
What is the bubble? The world of friends and healthy relationships, or the cold shitty place with cultural wars and divides everywhere?
If you bring someone to the shitty place, you better have the guts to acknowledge that that person will never, ever see friendship anywhere.
Wow, you see absolutes everywhere. Exposed once, spiritual death. World of friends, world of wars--pick one. It's all more complex than that.
Some relationships are easy because nobody is trying to sabotage them, others are hard because somebody is, others are hard for entirely different reasons. It's the middle case that I'm concerned with here. I agree that it's a pretty awful thing to harm a friendship by injecting it with unnecessary culture war bullshit but my claim is that in most cases it's neither of the friends who want that outcome, it's some remote third party who has decided to interfere. Sure it's a failing of one friend or the other if they take the bait, but they have not spiritually killed the other by doing so.
It’s one thing when being on different sides of the political spectrum meant disagreeing about supply side economics. It’s another when it means they are racist, homophobic, etc.
I have a friend who on one hand believes all of the anti-vax, evil illegal immigrate stuff and might even believe that Trump’s tariffs are okay. But on the other hand, I have never heard him say anything negative about other people, cultures, sexualities etc.
I consider him a good friend. On the other hand, there was this other guy I was friends with for awhile. He became full MAGA. It got to the point where I just couldn’t deal with him anymore.
I guess the people I won’t deal with or Trump conservatives (ie populists). I’m good with traditional conservatives we can usually even have polite intellectual conversations about politics.
I think it's the mass immigrations that (some) people are calling out as not in their own best interest, without necessarily believing the immigrants are bad or in any way worse humans than themselves to call it racist.
It’s relatively easy for someone to understand just by taking a slight step back out of their world view why a man may be attracted to another man or a woman may be a attracted to another woman or someone may be attracted to both sexes.
But trans goes against everything they know about science. And even for those who are very much “let you do you” thinks it’s a bridge too far to have biological men in women’s sports.
This is a bridge too far for even me (yes I know it’s an unpopular opinion) and I’m a “f*! the police”,BLM, universal healthcare, free college education, religious skeptical, increase the safety net and lean liberal
I've found it's generally not worth it to push the discussion when it comes to politics. People will just dig in and there goes the friendship.
I'm (apparently, or so I'm told) a flaming lefty lib, who recently moved out of the Bay Area to a very "red" part of California. If I limited my friends to only people like me politically, I'd have to be a hermit. I basically take it as given that any new person I strike up a conversation with will not agree with my politics, so I just don't bring it up. Most of my friends got the hint clearly when they brought some of their Trump shit up and I immediately steered the conversation away. We have a good understanding--let's talk about positive things we have in common: hobbies, beer, cars, whatever. Don't bring up politics or religion, and you can make friends with anyone!
Some of them just can't bear to live even a few minutes without talking about their politics at every possible moment, and they're just not friends anymore.
That must be where we differ. I don't want friends who vote for Republicans. I am trans so I have less choice. It's my head on the chopping block once they get bored of hurting immigrants
> while the percentage of those with ten or more close friends has fallen by nearly threefold
I genuinely think it's not possible to maintain close friendship with this many people, especially if they're not in the same group. Or perhaps my definition of a "close friend" differs from an average american, both now and back then.
Can we say that friendship has shifted from being an assumed part of life to something you have to consciously work at. It made me realize how rare certain friendships have become - like with my two best friends, we can go a long time without talking, but when we meet up, it feels like no time has passed at all. We don't message constantly, but when one of us is going through something, we're always there for each other. It feels like that kind of bond is getting harder to find these days.
One thing I’m considering is that maybe it’s ok if friends don’t reciprocate. I think some people just have to be the inviters or relationships fall apart.
I struggled with this after a divorce. I relied on my wife to be the inviter. When I lost her, I lost my social group too because I didn't take initiative to maintain friendships.
Now I'm 40, divorced, and have an atrophied social network. Forcing myself to become an inviter is the only path out of loneliness.
> I think some people just have to be the inviters or relationships fall apart.
As annoying as it is, this is definitely true. I've only recently become an inviter, and it's made all the difference. It helps to recognize that not everybody is an inviter/organizer.
It really is exactly this. My default mindset is "everybody's busy with their own lives, so they probably don't have time so I won't even try to invite them to X." Change your assumptions a little bit to instead assume people want to do things. If they say no, so be it. But I've found that people want to be invited out to do more things than they are, so send the invites.
I started swimming with a community team two years ago, and about 4 months in I invited them to also lift weights with me. Now there are about 8 of us that are together 5 mornings per week. Took a chance and invited them on a trip, and now 5 of us are going on a week long trip together.
Find a group of people doing something you like. If it's a tech meetup, community organization, hobby group, whatever. What it is doesn't matter. What matters is that you find people with whom you share _an_ interest. Then take a chance there and say "hey, want to meet up for lunch next week?" Or just say "hey, I'm going to see X next weekend, want to come?"
Yes here too, and I’m guilty of the focus on family over friends, but also my peers are too and it creates a bunch of people that used to be close that never really see each other because they prioritize their immediate family
Does this also apply to texting? (some people always have to text first, otherwise the other will never write again). Or is it just that the other doesn't want to be your friend?
It depends on how they respond and how it goes. If the attitude is great and the time together is great, all is well. There are two sides to the coin. Being the inviter means you get to choose who to invite. Of course you have to invite people you really want to spend time with. And times change, things could always flip around, maybe one day you'll be in a position where people are reaching out. It's dynamic, like the wind.
It’s not what it used to be. I find people are more self-centered than ever. What to speak of friends even family will not spare a moment for you. Many couples do not have kids for this reason. Who wants to make that sacrifice. Covid accelerated this. People got burned out, then realized they needed to take care of themselves better since no one else will (especially after layoffs). I don’t think the pendulum has swung back yet. Obviously I’m generalizing here and this is biased by my own experiences.
Again, it depends. I have friendships that I made over the internet, that lasted 8 years before I even learned their real name. Now we work together and live in the same city. Maybe the times were different though.
yes, this and the hope that i'll find a better opportunity to reconnect, like a better reason to call, so that the risk of rejection is reduced.
i recently reconnected to a bunch of people that i haven't spoken to in 20 years. i figured i am not going to find a better opportunity, and if i don't reconnect soon i'll probably never do it.
The content was alright but the fade-in animation of every single paragraph was annoying. This is a text article, not a startup company's marketing page! It was especially bad when I was hitting Page Down quickly to try to skim the content; the animation forced me to wait until the text showed up.
4. Third places are money making establishments now rather than community focused. So people save up to go to the ones that they'll remember. So there's competing money for these attractions, and the experience undergoes enshitification.
Solutions?
- lower the cost of community space so more people can enjoy them.
- social etiquette needs be enforced through culture. Conformity has its benefits. We don't need planes to land because Johnny had too much to drink.
that's why i enjoy going to hackerspaces. they are not free of drama, but generally welcoming and give the freedom to do a lot of things, including sitting in a corner in front of your computer ignoring everyone, giving you the freedom to join in whenever you feel comfortable.
Having friends is great but not "having" to have them is also great, which is what individualism allows us to do. Many people get in trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd. Many people also become wealthy by hanging out with the right people.
But being able to live your life alone without dying is a privilege that we should be thankful for.
You chose very interesting two different outcomes. Super vast majority of people just hang out with decent people, have drinks, talk about stupid stuff and call it a day. I’d like to think that people don’t strive to have friends for “networking” or are scared to have friends because “wrong crowds”. It just feels wrong.
My friends have been there at my low lows, and knowing that I can theoretically call them at any point of my day just makes me feel good about myself. Conversely, I’d like to think that my friends can call me at any point of the day for no reason at all. Stupid stuff like having a small joke group chat of “rags to riches” where we just share stupid ideas is just liberating. Meeting them in person and doing stuff together, even if some of them (or me) hates it, is still objectively a nice feeling.
The foundations are shaky when they don't compare to other countries : there are probably many mistakes they missed, that would have been obvious when looking at it from another perspective.
Been chewing on all this - yeah, making new friends these days feels way harder than it used to. I catch myself thinking its just easier not to try at all. Idk if Ill ever really get that energy back but seeing people push through is kinda inspiring tbh.
I have thought a lot about this, and I think one large cause is low- and zero- effort interactions. Anything that requires constant effort eventually dies out. If someone has to initiate, pick up the phone and text you and invite you out, one of you is going to eventually stop doing that. We used to have lots of low- and zero- effort interactions. You saw people at church, at family events, you run into them around town, at the bar, etc. As the article says: in the past people participated more in clubs and organizations, sports leagues and volunteered more. Young people have replaced alcohol and bars with weed and abstinence. Now even when people do see each other, the friction is far higher. It's hard to strike up a conversation with someone on a phone, or with earbuds in. Polarization has made it so that every issue is life or death (because many things truly are [1]) and so now it is only acceptable to talk to the correct portion of society. The worst things in the world are constantly livestreamed to our faces in 4K, from the news to social media to the Citizen app, so now you know that the public is insane and you'd be insane to talk to them. In 2005 the news might feature the 95th percentile bad shit because that's the best they could find, but now we all have 4K cameras on us all the time, so on social media you can find the 99.999th percentile bad shit. In a world of eight billion unique humans, that microscopic sliver of the bell curve is a horrifying place.
I come to HN for insightful comments, and of course there is one in the 335 posted here: that socializing is no longer necessary for survival. In 2025 your crises are for your therapist and your financial issues are for a fintech and you move house with Dolly and your career is for LinkedIn and your Ikea assembly is for Angi. In 2001 nearly everyone would use their friends or family for those things; in 2025 you don't need them.
And so we are left with a world where you don't strike up a conversation anymore; it's too hard and too dangerous and too risky. You don't go to church (too problematic) or the bar (bad for you.) You don't hit on people (there's Tinder.) You don't go to the store (Amazon) and if you do go to a restaurant you don't talk to anyone (pickup.) You don't see your friends and family; you don't need them to move (use an app) or put together a sofa (use an app) or talk about your feelings (go to therapy.) As it turns out, you can replace love and touch and hugs and hate and bus conversations and bank tellers and racist neighbors and unprotected sex and and and and all of the things in all of the people with one little screen just a few inches square.
Technology is destroying our society and our lives.
I was just telling my son that 90% of the time I visited my granddad one of his friends would be there. I have only met up with one of my friends this year!
That is a spectacular change. I put it down to the amount of time he had to pursue his hobbies and interests (most of these friends were a part of that) vs me who is at work all the time.
I agree with solitude as a preference. I do have a couple of good friends, but an occasional weekday lunch or a much more occasional holiday dinner is good enough to connect.
Other than that, every minute I don't have to spend with my family is precious. And every such a minute with enough energy to do something productive is even more precious. So yeah, for me solitude is absolutely a preference.
I have zero friends. I tried to treat few as friends and helped alot but they were always busy when I was in need so decided to not treat anyone as a friend
> Neuroscience helps us make sense of these findings. Research shows that hearing a familiar voice reduces cortisol and boosts oxytocin—hormones tied to stress relief and bonding—while text-based communication and video calls fail to trigger the same response .
this… feels a bit off. I would have to look at that article to see what they are saying.
I’ll add in a hot take. I think the entitlement of the more recent generations has a strong cause for this as well. I’m not one to say that millennials or whomever are more entitled than previous ones but when it comes to romantic connection - I definitely believe some are.
We see the rise of online dating apps being the number one way (by a large margin) for urban educated singles to meet their future partners. If you’re in a place like SF or NYC, you can completely forget about meeting your future spouse at some hobby, the gym, or even in a friend group. I think a lot of this has to do with entitlement - a strong belief that a person deserves a match that is unwaveringly perfect/better-than-themselves. This Disney-ification of romance is very strong among certain crowds.
In my view, this has a strong effect on social circles. People won’t introduce anyone anymore. You might have a party and people might end up together but the idea of specifically inviting people or introducing friends to each other for romantic purposes is, practically speaking for yuppie circles, gone. The main reason I’ve seen is that certain people have gotten increasingly hostile to anyone even suggesting a person to them that is less than perfect/godly. To the point where many people are afraid of suggesting anything and therefore will not risk their own reputation and friendship because they really feel they’ll lose their friend if they even suggest a potential romantic connection.
So, anyway, my belief is romance within social circles is quickly dying due to entitlement and this has a strong pusher for people to not put as much effort into them. Once that is established, it carries over into the rest of your life because you didn’t ever prioritize it. Therefore, even if you’re partnered, you have learned to live without.
It’s shocking how few relationships I’ve seen are from social circles. If anyone ever studies how people 25-35, educated, and living in major cities dates… being single will be more common than any non-app method.
I tend to believe that individualist societies tend to fracture families, and make people live with their own kitchen and living room. That's not good, it's like a social prison.
I can understand that people want to have 100% privacy and not exist near people they don't get along with, but not sharing a kitchen and living room seems a bit too far.
Also I am sad that apps like the defunct foursquare or social network are not actively trying to make neighbors connect with each others. I fail to understand why.
I suspect that in the 70s, sexual liberation, despite its advantages, caused an epidemic maternal deprivation, where people are now unable to feel comfortable near others.
o/t but who made that web design? Text blocks loading one by one as you scroll down, but not at all with JS off. However you can hold [PageDown] to force-load them all and then scroll normally both up and down. WHY?
"Taken together, these trends suggest that Americans are increasingly retreating inward instead of engaging in communal activities. "
I have seen, over the ,last ten years, a great depression, as in mood. People are getting more depressed, and that leads them inward, and it is driven by anxiety. Most people are "flight" when they are faced with anxiety.
And the capitalism and online world has made isolation much easier and way more "enjoyable". Movies, porn, food, all of it acquired without a single human contact. Now people are clamoring they want to work from home as well, making loneliness even more available.
This is the outcome of hypercapitalism[1]. Extracting labor from the humans while feeding it all its' needs through the tubes of the internet.
I am writing this in a Starbucks right now. Ten years ago I would find couches and comfy chairs in every store. Now? stiff Uncomfortable chairs in a cold industrial setting, the store and counter set up for rushed to go orders.
This is not about something being wrong with people, it is a system that is tearing us apart.
It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival.
Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
Until recently, individuals needed to be part of some sort of kinship group to get their needs met and to survive. To communicate with anyone in near real time you had to be close by.
We have managed to engineer a society where individuals can survive "on their own" - basically outside their kinship groups. This is possible thanks to globe-spanning networks of communication and trade.
Kinship groups are great, but many of them have painful costs. Some 60 percent of Americans, for example, suffered an adverse childhood experience in kinship groups. Some of these could not be avoided - like a loved one's untimely death. Most of these negative experiences were intent or neglect by kinship group members.
If your early experiences of kinship groups are negative, you are less likely to seek out other human connection. You have learned that your kinship group is not reliable. If people genetically close to you cannot be relied on, then why should it be different for strangers?
The connections you do find tend to be focused on your interests, and those people don't need to be nearby for you to have a strong connection. But you still have your prior experiences keeping you skeptical of human reliability.
Personally, I sympathize with everyone who is sad about communities becoming fragmented.
I think, though, that if these communities were as supportive, inclusive, or beneficial as they imagine themselves to be this would not be a problem.
Bad communities should be allowed to fail. That is probably what is happening here.
> It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival.
The psychological argument is that it is necessary for survival — that a society that has long taken underlying healthy behaviours for granted is discovering that it's losing what defines society itself.
Altruism, trust, and cooperation often emerge from acts and choices that seem completely self-interested.
Heck, cooperation is a survival strategy that came out of evolution. It exists outside of humans. It doesn’t need to come from human intent.
It feels weird to me that people think they can intelligently design cooperative societies and groups. You can try, but there’s always going to be trade offs between individuals and the group.
In this moment, individuals are in a place where they can avoid many of those trade offs and costs. I think this is generally positive considering my own experience of costly kinship groups. But I can see why others disagree.
> In this moment, individuals are in a place where they can avoid many of those trade offs and costs.
This sounds like what some call the Libertarian Housecat position. "My needs are met, and I am unaware of complex externalities that make meeting my needs possible."
> Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
This is wishful thinking. The resilience of communities is orthogonal to their moral worth, which is inherently subjective. Many communities which have horrific traits survive and thrive for centuries and even millennia. Many which I'm sure you would consider morally good are perilously close to failure.
> Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder.
And, what would be some sensible ways of detecting and handling failure at such scale.
Broadly agree. I'm probably too upset to write about the local elites with anything bearing even a passing resemblance to objectivity, but an outbreak of incompetence is the overall impression.
> sensible ways of detecting and handling failure at such scale
War and revolution. 'Burn it down and start from scratch' is an extreme path to fix a failing country. Historically, the people that rebuild are rarely the same people that burned it down.
> Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder.
No. Imagined communities are fake communities with none of the feedback mechanisms that make real communities resilient to elements that have extremely different priorities to the median member. See how the Swedish Social Democrats imported over 1% of the Swedish population in one year from Syria.
In "On Love", bell hooks points out just how screwed children are by their circumstance and their lack of agency/autonomy. Highly recommend reading her.
So, "no one should ask" a suicidal person to not kill themselves "or force them" not to.
It is when people cannot fight for themselves that those of us who can fight have to fight even harder. I am saying this as someone who has attempted suicide twice.
You are literally arguing in favor for shrugging your shoulders to things like slavery.
No one should ask a suicidal person not to kill themselves.
If you believe in autonomy, every human has the right to decide when and how to end their lives. Slavery denies human autonomy by taking all control away.
Even when you think their decision is a bad one, it’s their life and their decision.
Asking isn’t forcing. And people who are suicidal are often in an unhealthy state of mind that doesn’t persist over an extended period of time. And we obviously place limits on autonomy in all sorts of ways.
I don’t make the distinction between asking and forcing. To me, you can ask why someone wants to die. But stopping them? Or asking them to stop? Eh, not up to me.
> The act of inquiring or requesting; a petition; solicitation.
forcing
> The accomplishing of any purpose violently, precipitately, prematurely, or with unusual expedition.
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unless you’re a psychopath, your 20 year old offspring calling you at 4am about to kill themselves is gonna result in you doing basically anything you can to save them.
it’s very easy to sit on the internet and take a perceived moral high ground. it’s much harder to retain that high ground when you get that phone call.
i used to have all sorts of bullshit “rules” like this [0]. but life ain’t binary man. absolutisms don’t really exist out there in the real world. i know it probably makes you feel “safer” knowing that you have a “rule” for this that you feel you can apply carte blanche — it used to for me — but it’s all bullshit man. it’s just the policeman in our own heads.
Suicidal people are in a broken state, overcome by emotions and irrationality. When over that they’ll likely thank you for stopping them and likely to not understand themselves what the drive to kill themselves was except for remembering how cloudy they felt.
In American culture, hyper-individualism has become a virtue somehow but this too is just a symptom of capitalism. Why? Because people who act collectively are a threat to capitalist power structures.
The whole "gig economy" is nothing more than needing a 2nd and 3rd job just to survive as real wages continue to stagnate or decline and costs keeping going up. That's less free time.
The Internet is a negative here too. Physical proximity has historically had huge power in creating freindships. But capitalism rears its ugly head here too in the destruction of so-called "third places".
High housing prices hurt everybody. It destroys community spaces. Hobbies that were once cheap escapes become way too expensive. Housing costs are an input into everything. Take spiraling childcare costs. You need physical space. That's now way more expensive.
Lastly, there is a natural trend for people who marry and have children to replace friends with family. There is an issue of shared life experiences. 50+ years ago pretty much everyone is in the same boat. Now? By choice or necessity, people are opting out of this "traditional" life and this naturally creates a divide.
> when people feel isolated, they become more sensitive to social threats and more likely to misinterpret interactions negatively, through the lens of rejection
"I think they are saying that they want lasagna."
C'mon, don't be assholes.
There is plenty of evidence that teenagers were encouraged to ostracize certain personas (other teenagers!), and that behavior spread out of control to more age groups and unforseen interactions.
The hubris of trying to generate little soldiers destroyed our cultural inheritance.
"The lens of rejection", great.
I heard pagliaci is in town, you should go see him, he can cheer you up. I mean, I heard psychology is in vogue, maybe you should all see one.
Please, stop this shit. Let the internet die in peace instead of juicing the last drops of it to try and make yourselves look good.
It may be. Generally stimulants (legal, soft ones such as cafeiine and nicotine, as well as stronger ones) stimulate parts of the brain that facilitate productivity and focus, but at the cost of "warm" things such as empathy, romance, comradry. Whereas depressants, such as THC and opioids, lower productivity but facilitate these "warm" behaviours. Due to coffee being relatively light, the effect may not be as obvious as the behaviour you see when people take large amounts of stimulants.
This may also tie in to work, as more mentally taxing office work I believe is much easier to do while on a mild stimulant such as caffeine. I could let go of cafeeine, but I think I'd struggle to make money.
It is indeed a hot take, an argument you don't hear often.
What on earth does this word salad mean? Fallen by 300%? 200%? 75%? 2/3? All are reasonable interpretations of this incoherent math.
> to tolerate the messy work of forming friendships
If it's true that people are becoming worse at maintaining friendships and losing some skill or tendency they require, then people are ipso facto also worse at being friends. (And even if there's no ipso facto corollary, the following seems just as valid an explanation for the decline in friendship as the author's expnarion: not that anybody is worse at maintaining friendships but rather that there are fewer friendships worth maintaining, fewer people worth the effort.)
I have no idea whether this is actually happening. I'm just stunned by the article's poor, predictable reasoning and odious, sanctimonious, middle-brow, TED-talk moralism: the author takes it as a given that we "manifest" our social lives, that somehow (magically?) our intention and dedication create the desired reality. The author doesn't consider an alternative hypothesis.
But if I tell you that someone is a bad, tedious, or insufferable friend, you won't expect, let alone (I hope) encourage, me to "tolerate the messy work," demonstrate the "courage" this author has decided is missing, or "show up" and be "vulnerable." You'll encourage me, rather, to save my energy for those who deserve it.
If social skills have withered in some portion of a person's pool of available, possible friends, then that person not only cannot be blamed for ending friendships; doing so is actually the best outcome, short of "manifesting" more tolerable people.
Edit:
> embedded myself in existing social structures and prioritized in-person social activities —ecstatic dance gatherings at the Harvard Divinity School, morning prayers at Memorial Church
Uh huh. If you're the kind of person who decides, I don't know, to seek friendship through daemonic possession, speaking in tongues, or, I don't know, shaman-guided spirit journeys, you're not someone whose advice I particularly want.
You're right that it's normal(ish), but it's sloppy. The new value isn't 3x lower than the original. The old value is 3x the new, and the new is 2/3 lower than the old.
> that those who engaged in face-to-face interactions at least once a week experienced better physical and mental well-being, whereas communication through calls or texts did not have the same effect. Neuroscience helps us make sense of these findings. Research shows that hearing a familiar voice reduces cortisol and boosts oxytocin—hormones tied to stress relief and bonding—while text-based communication and video calls fail to trigger the same response .
The HN majority "work from home" advocates disagree with this
My friends get to know the real me. The rap loving, occasionally inappropriate, skepticism of the police, occasional f bomb throwing, shit talking while playing cards, can drink most people under the table without breaking a sweat etc.
The work me is the “looking at things from a 1000 foot view”, “taking things to the parking lot”, “and adding on to what Becky said”.
When I talk to them about what concert I went to, it’s limited to Maroon 5, Stevie Wonder and my friend who is in a punk band. I don’t discuss the concert where my wife and I were at lil Jon screaming “bia bia” or Ice Cube was rapping “F** the Police”.
Code switching is a real thing. I’m in a customer facing role (cloud consulting) and I always have to filter everything I say through the corporate lens. At home and with my friends, I can be the real me.
Not necessarily: they might just prefer to to try to keep their social lives separate from work so that their employer doesn't have the power to suddenly cut off their main source of human connection.
> It’s often said that if you ask an American what they do, they’ll tell you about their job, whereas a European might talk about their hobbies or passions. Data backs this up;
> But the role of work in shaping identity and social life in the United States has perhaps never been stronger. For example, 77% of Americans work more than 40 hours per week, and few take their full paid leave.
I guess people aren’t making friends at work the way they thought they were?
This is why my conversation starter is always “what keeps you busy”? and not what you do for work.
I hate talking about what I do for work. My life is so much more than my job. I’m also much more interested in learning about other people’s live outside of work, hobbies, where they travel, etc.
Change the way you connect - I have some friends I made over the last two years over... IRC. There's something personal about on-line pure text based communication (with bots/bouncers not being allowed). Like really being in a room with everyone else.
For a more modern alternative, discord in a relatively small server should work well. Especially if you connect over a shared interest.
I bet Social Media (and even Texting) is almost entirely to blame for the "loners" phenomenon (i.e. lack of close friends). Almost everyone has a desire for social interactions, but Social Media is where they can get that, with the least effort, and money.
Smaller contributing factors are 1) Slow economy, where people don't have the money for social activities or even dating like the boomer generation did for example, and 2) Rise of Autism rates, which makes people disinterested in social activities and even fearful of them.
For the us, I feel like it’s late stage individualism. This is what happens I think when people prioritize themselves over their communities, I think we have less dependence on our communities than ever thanks to the internet and being able to physically avoid community. We have less interaction than before. We can order grocery pickup and not even have to be physically around people for basic life tasks. We order next day delivery on Amazon and don’t even have to go out in the world and be in the physical presence of others :(
The article talks about how it’s more of a younger generation phenomenon suggesting older generations still maintain their friendships
I’m grappling with this myself, it requires a lot of energy to form adult friendships. I keep seeing my neighbors out at the playground, I reach out and say hey and hi and ask them how they are doing but stop short of investing the time necessary to form real friendships with them and I know deep down that it’s perpetuating late stage individualism
It’s not only lack of dependence, but also lack of idleness.
Most of my friend interactions would come from things like having a moment with nothing to do in the bus, realizing I have no particular plans this weekend and reaching out to a couple friends to see if they’re available.
Now those moments are instantly drowned by opening instagram before a thought bubbles up. And when the weekend eventually comes and there’s no plan, Netflix is just a button press away.
We need moments of boredom and reflection to push us into action, the attention economy is robbing us from that.
I’d even say the increase in anxiety related symptoms is due to this lack of idleness. The mind feels as if it’s super busy moving from active task to active task when in reality there were hours of just defaulting to reels.
It's not only modern technology taking up time. I foolishly bought a project house and have spent nearly every weekend and some weeknights doing repairs and improvements. My SO also tends toward time consuming hobbies like gardening and aquariums. Add young children and every free moment in between is precious.
But people have had activities that take up their time since time immemorial. But the "friendship recession" seems to be much newer.
FWIW, my friend recently built a summer home. I went over about four weekends to help drywall, put in flooring, build stud walls, etc. He's had other friends over other weekends. Sometimes it's just one friend, sometimes a few of us go up together. It's a great time, and definitely strengthens our social bonds.
I'm also friends with my kids' parents (one of whom is the one with the house). Playdates turn into dinner invites.
I think we're lucky that we're on the older end -- mid-40s -- so maybe we had time to work our social muscles before social media and Netflix, and have socialization as an expectation.
I'm also personally lucky I have a wife who does a lot of the social reaching-out. For whatever reason, this seems like it's more and more a gendered role, and I'm definitely worse at it -- if I were a bachelor I'd probably be happy staying home alone much more, to my long-term detriment.
I think you're right that those of us that had to socialize either before or when the Internet was more in its infancy are just a lot more used to small talk and meet ups. I've noticed younger family members seem to not value that kind of community. The boomers and their parents would say the same about my generation as we have nothing on them. That's literally all they do is drink beer with friends and socialize at various clubs. D&D is the closest equivalent that the younger generation has and half of the people I see playing at my local game shop have gray hair.
That is true, but real hobbies will rarely take up your micropauses - going to the bathroom, coffee break at work, commuting, waiting between sets at the gym, and so on.
You won’t do social stuff in those micropauses anyway, that’s true, but I think those moments are where you’d normally “mentally review”. Wondering how a friend is, feeling like you miss a connection, etc.
Without that, I think we mentally drift away from social connections.
You could involve friends in those hobbies. In fact men do better hanging out if they have a goal.
My stepbrother has declined hang out invitations for decades but the minute I need the most minor house or car repair he’ll drop everything and be there all day.
I can relate to your step brother. I don’t want to “hang out”- full stop. I want to build and make and do things, and when I can combine that with friendship, all the better.
There’s something about needing to feel and appear independent that discourages the ask, and it’s worth challenging.
You just found the ultimate hack to getting your friends to rebuild an entire house for you
But you see the Amish, they just rebuilt a whole lumber sawmill in only eight days.
https://x.com/matt_vanswol/status/1915121027820159414
Your project house was an individual pursuit when it should be a collective one.
My project has involved neighbors, family, and even a few contractors. But unlike a barn built from scratch there are a lot of random bespoke tasks. Many of them require judgement and experimenting to make it work. Sadly the property was neglected a long time, and poorly built in the first place. Bulldozing and having a new house professionally built would've been faster, produced a better outcome, and only been moderately more expensive--in hindsight.
In the old world you would have the distinct privilege of bringing this experience to your community. No naive youth can afford even a “starter” house for you to help them rebuild.
There’s Habitat for Humanity which I think would fit this description.
I’ve personally never involved myself with it but over the last few months the group built a modest house on a small lot next to my ex-spouse’s place. Every weekend I saw a group of folks (ranging in age from early 20s to retirement) there building, chatting and generally being very friendly with one another. Really cool to see.
Most of my friends don't like doing manual work, they think it's below them unfortunately.
There's just one that really loves to do it, the rest would feel exploited.
On one hand I'm inclined to believe this particular example relies on personality. My aunts and uncles had their home hobby projects and so did they're friends. They'd help either other out on their projects and then take a break over a beer or cigs, chatting the rest of the evening away.
Real hobbies are great though. I enjoy doing them so much more than just visiting people.
I don't think it's just the attention economy. I think the Internet was bound to replace a lot of the time that people spent with friends. There's just too much interesting stuff too conveniently accessible.
I’ve got a feeling that if you looked at the average persons average internet usage it would not be full of interesting stuff.
The world is full of people who find things interesting that I don’t but that’s a fact about me, not the world.
What would happen if you tried a meetup with nearby people to read&discuss what you found interesting?
Key word: "conveniently".
I can now (probably, not sure if this exists) don my Apple VR set and walk around Machu Picchu or the Sistine Chapel.
But this would be a vicar experience. Just like reading lots of Wikipedia pages on, I dunno, Brutalism will not make an architect out of me.
> It’s not only lack of dependence, but also lack of idleness.
While I enjoy listening to podcasts I recognize how much its reduced the amount I'm idle. Particularly while commuting.
you're right. Now delete that app!
Maintaining adult relationships post-Covid is hard as a millennial. Or rather, getting friendly relationships started/restarted has gotten very awkward. But I’ve noticed that most people respond very well to my efforts.
I started texting my acquaintances and old friends at random just to ask what’s up every once a week or two. I also started calling some people instead. Almost everyone responded really well to that. When I go out to eat, I often check with a few people if they want to go if I swung by and picked them up.
This is how things used to be for me before the pandemic. But it was difficult to get back to it. What I found though is that most people are lonely but they don’t want to put much effort into building friendships. And that’s ok, I can be the one who initiates the outings and chats.
It’s okay to be the one who initiates. It seems like not everyone can, somehow the level of social anxiety has gone up in the world. In the end, I get my socialization full and so do they. So I’d recommend to whoever feels a bit lonely — reach out to your past friends and current acquaintances.
The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains. Validation, trust, confidence, and friendship itself forms better when there is reciprocation. It’s best not to overthink it, the world is different and what it means to have friends has changed. This is the new normal. It’s better to be the one who leads all the friend groups and activities all the time than to be lonely.
> Almost everyone responded really well to that
That's the impression I got at first as well. However, then I realized a really big proportion of people I'd contact this way would say they'd love to meet up but either repeatedly decline suggestions to meet up or even ghost me. I feel like the positive response is just out of general politeness, not willingness to reconnect.
> It’s okay to be the one who initiates...The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains.
It's also about gauging whether the other person cares about you. I carried out the experiment where I stopped texting people with whom I was always the contact initiator. Years later, they still haven't written a single message to me. To me, it's clear that those people never cared about me, I was just their plan B for a saturday hangout in case their real plans fell through.
> It’s okay to be the one who initiates. It seems like not everyone can, somehow the level of social anxiety has gone up in the world. In the end, I get my socialization full and so do they. So I’d recommend to whoever feels a bit lonely — reach out to your past friends and current acquaintances.
Agreed. Before Covid I used to have a pretty vibrant social life but I was the initiator and back then I could easily set up physical events. Covid obviously added a lot of friction to that. Now that we are half-way through the 2020s I have enough perspective to say the bad habits that a lot of folks developed during Covid have stuck and it's a shame.
> The only issue with always being the initiator is that no reciprocation is a bit of an… issue to our social brains. Validation, trust, confidence, and friendship itself forms better when there is reciprocation. It’s best not to overthink it, the world is different and what it means to have friends has changed. This is the new normal. It’s better to be the one who leads all the friend groups and activities all the time than to be lonely.
How do you set boundaries?
It would be great if I could go back to how things were, but unfortunately I've changed. I was a lot more naive back then, and usually leaned into giving people the benefit of the doubt. It didn't help that the friendships / acquantainces I'd developed weren't exactly high quality.
In retrospect none of it was sustainable. All this happened when (1) I had lots of free time (2) Could physically meet with friends and (3) Hadn't suffered through betrayals from people I thought I was close to.
As much as it pains me to admit, I just don't have the emotional reserves to deal with one-sided interactions anymore. I would really love to hear from folks who have been in such a situation and have gotten over the hump.
> How do you set boundaries?
I don’t, I just naturally hang out with the people who are most reciprocating and being the most good vibes.
Ultimately, it’s about me first. I function better and am happier when I have recently socialized. I’m not doing this for others, so it’s all good and I don’t feel like anyone particularly pushes me in a way where I’d need to maintain boundaries for myself in this particular context.
Regarding your three points, I hear them. But you probably have enough free time to text a friend, and sometimes physically meet up with them. I’d say, if you really don’t have time for that (and I was there myself), then probably you’re neglecting your social needs (basic socialising, safety net) for something else. Consider if that something else is worth it. Regarding point 3, I used to expect something reciprocal from friendships, but now I just expect to spend time with/among people. Yeah, most won’t help you in a time of need, and some will speak ill of you behind your back. But you’ll also meet many great people that legitimately will be great friends. So I’d say don’t worry about it — “trust the process”.
Overall, I hear some social anxiety in the 3rd point. Social interactions aren’t always ideal but don’t catastrophize them. Just do what’s good for you yourself first. Make sure your social needs are met. Let all other things and friendships develop or not as they would.
> It would be great if I could go back to how things were, but unfortunately I've changed.
I'm in agreement. I do think it would be a nice thing for friendship to work out, but I've been burned one too many times and the motivation just isn't there any longer.
I sometimes view this as a positive. I used to very much be a people-pleaser and thought that I was going to suffer and die if I didn't come out of one of my social outings with an acquaintance at some point. I was always told humans are tribal, we have a need to feel listened to, and not having friends leads to premature death. In practice I was just forcing myself to socialize based on that doomerism and that rubbed off onto the people I met, so it wouldn't have helped anyone.
When I turned inward and chose to put my own needs in front of those of others, I did become more comfortable with being myself. That's a prerequisite to having healthy relationships anyway (though I still wouldn't say I have any). Since then I've had lots of great conversations with people I've met at outings and large gatherings. I sometimes have conversations that go on for hours about all sorts of topics I may or may not know about and they're satisfying in hindsight.
...But I don't feel like being friends with any of those people anymore. I just let them pass and cherish the moments we did have together. I decided that the only person I have the capacity to fight for is myself from now on.
Nobody said you had to have friends in order to have a source of socialization to stave off bad health outcomes. "Having friends" and "being a bit social occasionally" are two different beasts.
> Before Covid I used to have a pretty vibrant social life but I was the initiator and back then I could easily set up physical events. Covid obviously added a lot of friction to that. Now that we are half-way through the 2020s I have enough perspective to say the bad habits that a lot of folks developed during Covid have stuck and it's a shame.
Another thing that maybe people don't like to talk about so much: COVID outed a lot of really mentally unwell people who had prior to it managed to keep that part of their personality to themselves. COVID and stay-at-home brought out so much anti-social nastiness: Selfishness, anger, belligerence, rudeness, conspiracy theories, defiance, and just this sense of contrariness for the sake of contrariness. I got a text during the height of the pandemic from a (now former) friend saying "Dude, did you know there's a bar downtown that's ignoring stay-at-home and letting people in the back door? We should go!" Like, what the fuck, man, don't you see there's a deadly disease going around? What the hell is wrong with you? I think during that time we really saw a lot of "true selves" that we now can't unsee.
Being the one that initiates triggers my own anxieties lol. I start wondering how come no one else ever is?
I added a little bit about that in my comment above. Yeah, I feel the same way, it’s not a pleasant feeling.
I think many people don’t make the effort anymore, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you if you do — nothing to be anxious about, I’d say. Besides, leading and organizing things has its advantages.
Honestly, I think that is related to the algorithmic collapse of facebook. Facebook was legitimately good for keeping people connected in the first decade or so.
Then the monetization enshittification happened, both at the overarching corporate level of facebook and internet advertising in general, and with people becoming exhaustingly self-promoting, which devalued trust between friends and degraded new connections.
The weird thing about the world is seeing everyone turn into me when I was in my teens and twenties ... and I was a product of extreme social bullying that really only alleviated in my 40s.
Which scares me because it means there is some either low-key or high similarity to the trauma / rejection / betrayal I felt from society being exerted on a massive scale.
I used to go around errands trying to engage with people as little as possible, but now, maybe it is projection, I see the effects of isolation on so many people in public, that I get great joy in having a quick exchange with someone. Granted I am now far better at making smalltalk, strangely I slingshotted from being absolutely abysmal at it to well above average.
Smalltalk almost seems like rebellion against the oppressive antisocial time-stealing inferiority-inducing powers that have gatewayed using the mobile phone into all parts of people's lives.
I rather think FB was always part of the problem for most. Having 200 FB friends, but not a single one to go out with and meet them, that's not a healthy social life. Some people might have used FB in a different way, but they would have been fine without FB existing in the first place.
Facebook was probably part of the _problem_ for people like me who refuse to create accounts inside of walled gardens.
An _illusion_ that 'everyone you know' (and might want to know) is in a single place; while ignoring the razor wire fence surrounding the compound that keeps others out.
> The article talks about how it’s more of a younger generation phenomenon suggesting older generations still maintain their friendships
Yea, this tracks my observations. A lot of adults make connections in their community through their kids and kids' friends. Kids pick their friends and their parents and guardians just go along for the ride, so when the kids play together, it kind of forces the parents to meet and interact.
Without exception, the parents I meet in the 25-40 age range are what I'd charitably call totally anti-social. Not actively mean (although some are), but just not interested at all in even saying a word to you to pass the time when the children are playing together. They just sit there on their phones trying to get through the experience. In general, these parents project outward an attitude of vague grumpiness and annoyance.
A few of the kid-friends are evidently raised by the 50-70 year old grandparents (never even seen the parents), and these folks tend to be much more social and will shoot the shit with you while the kids play. Much more pleasant and willing to interact while we're forced together. My relationships with them have been civil at worst and friendly at best.
Of course, this is just one person's observations, and yea they are a crude generalization. I'm in my mid-40s so don't have that much in common with either of these groups, but the attitude and behavior difference has been stark!
This sounds weird to me. What's the context? Toddler group? Play date? Playground?
Also as somebody said, if you are male which from your username I guess you are, then that will change the dynamic - it will be easier for an older person to make conversation without there being any worries of sending the wrong message.
If there are lots of children playing together then parents aren't always social but at a play date I would definitely expect them to be. Also looking after young children is intensive and it might be the only break they get.
I mostly went to toddler groups when mine were young so that I could socialise not them!
A couple example scenarios (tween kids, suburban setting: which are other variables that probably matter), ordered from least to most weird (IMO):
- Public park, where kid just spontaneously starts playing with other kids, and parents are temporarily, and more or less randomly associating: In this case, I can sorta see that maybe people just doesn't want to talk to a total random person in a park. Fine. Not my style but it's forgivable--they don't know if I'm deranged or dangerous.
- Public park, or commercial indoor play place where the kids pre-arranged to play together with known friends: This is where it starts getting weird. We all deliberately bring the kids, the kids find each other and go off to play, and at that point, some parents will just totally ignore the other parents, and other parents slink away over to a corner with their phones where they won't have to interact. In these cases I end up just chilling with the grandparents.
- Private setting, kids pre-arranged to come over to our house to play together: This is to me the wildest case, and where the different generations of parents behave totally differently. The youngest parents will just drop the kid off at the end of the driveway and speed away in their car, not even entering our property. The semi-young parents will drive the kid up to our house and drop them off, but leave without coming up to the door or anything. The older generation (grandparents) typically drives up, exits their car, comes up to the door with the kid, and we say hi, exchange pleasantries, and then off they go. It really does seem like socialization norms are changing generation to generation.
I see this in other social situations too (though social may be stretching it a little bit) e.g. in the gym, on the bike paths, and inside my apartment complex. I'm in my early 50s and people in their 20s and 30s aren't interested in saying hello in a polite way (and as neighbours especially), whereas older people (my age or older) are always interested in at least being friendly.
You can argue that, in gyms and on the bike path, people are more focused on their goal, but I still find in those situations that oldies are happy to chat for a bit, but younger people just want to block you out.
TBH I hate saying "young people" in this way. I feel like I'm running them down for what is their choice, and that feels bad. But it is something I have noticed in general i.e. not just 1 or 2 individuals.
I recently went back to studying, and it's almost the opposite there. Lots of people need "tutorial/lab friends," and so the barriers to conversation are really low. You literally stand next to someone and bam, instant friend (at least during the lab).
> TBH I hate saying "young people" in this way.
Yea, I also hesitated to post because I feel bad and don't want to be the stereotypical "grumpy old man complaining about young people" but the generational differences in attitudes towards IRL socializing are so stark and clear. It's hard to ignore.
Social networks invite an inner monologue of extreme critique ... and an inevitable self-critique.
Which leads to social paranoia of judgment and withdrawal.
This is of course by design. Because while people like this are less social, they consume more.
If the young parents are women and you're a guy, the situation could fall into a different category to them.
Maybe they are not anti-social, they are just not being social to you! They have no obligation to entertain you even if your kids are playing together.
> They have no obligation to entertain you even if your kids are playing together.
This is a really cynical and negative way to view basic human interaction, the cornerstone of our species and civilization. I've been seeing it a lot lately online, and it doesn't surprise me that people are lonely and aren't making friends if they adopt an attitude like that.
That's right. The whole "He is under no obligation to [do nice thing | be social | act friendly]" is a very Reddit attitude. Yes, it's technically correct: You don't have to be nice. But you are allowed to be nice, and that choice doesn't hurt or cost anything.
If you go up to a fellow parent and say, "Hey, nice to see you again." and they just ignore you scrolling their phones, sure, they have a Constitutional right to do that and are under no obligation to return the greeting. But going through life only doing what you are "obligated" to do seems like a very miserable and anti-social way to live.
We (most of us) live in a society. Therefore we are obligated to be social.
If you don’t want to be social go live in a cabin out in the woods.
> "He is under no obligation to [do nice thing | be social | act friendly]" is a very Reddit attitude
It's also a very Hacker News attitude, as you are witnessing in this thread.
I don't understand why people HN talk down about Reddit so much when it's really no better here, either.
I wonder if someone will try to put a monetary value on socializing lower in this thread...
Right, this reminds me of the threads around here on teleworking vs working in-office.
Once someone points out that they like going to the office because they get to socialize with co-workers, the replies typically sound like ‘don’t care, I’m not paid to socialize but to do my job’
While I understand the context can vary, it always struck me as an anti-social behavior.
You are not being nice of social here. When you care only about what you can get from the interaction while villyfying them for not providing it, your interest is inherently selfish.
> But you are allowed to be nice, and that choice doesn't hurt or cost anything.
Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but as someone who suffers from social anxiety, talking to someone I don't know very well absolutely does cost me.
That said, I do try to be nice despite the anxiety it causes me, and if someone came up to me and said something to me I probably would respond. But I certainly wouldn't go approach someone else.
In the proposed setting I’d say that’s just anti social behaviour. If you need to be obligated to act socially, you’re within a hairs width of antisocial.
From the GP's description, they're not being social with anyone. They're on their phones.
Anyone at the playground. Maybe they have enough people to be social with elsewhere.
The mindset you excibit is already antisocial...
That’s anti-social…
What community?
Many of us still can't afford housing anywhere near where the jobs are. How could we possibly put down roots and be a real part of a lasting community worth investing time, effort, and possibly savings in?
What if you can afford the housing but don't want what you can afford? How many immigrant families lived in 2 bedroom apartments in brooklyn while working in the city?
That's also part of it. The generation before me, 3 brothers bought houses in the same cul de sac. The chance of any 3 siblings being able to do that anywhere in the US nowadays is extremely slim. Home prices have gone out of whack with wages. On a side note another reason we have less friends is that we work far longer hours than generations before us did. We are the most overworked generation in history, strangely enough...
You don’t need that at all. I’ve seen people temporarily renting in a location act as better community members than someone who has owned a home for 10 years.
Look at the communities that form in dorms
Dorms are a poor example. Everyone there expects it to be a temporary community other than larger structures like fraternal organizations that slowly nibble in new members and continuously digest them as things progress.
It's not like you're in an apartment or house where you don't know if it'll be next year, 4-5 years, or 10 years when you move; only that someone's going to raise the rent, or you'll get a different job somewhere far enough away and have to endure the hardship of moving everything yet again.
Every community is temporary. The folly is thinking you need to find a “permanent” one to join.
Do you expect it to be commonplace that someone who starts living in a college dorm will still be there in 10 years? I hope they'd graduate by then, and failing that it seems likely they'd run out of debt to continue funding education.
Meanwhile, 'the golden days' of the American Dream included a stable house that lasted most of an adult's life, and maybe moving again at retirement. It also included a career track at a corporation that continued to pay well as an employee developed into a more valuable 'resource'. (back before Human Resources wasn't as transparently about harvesting all the value they could...)
Do you actually want to make friendships/connections? If so, the park is probably not the play.
Identify your hobbies/interests and figure out which ones have budding local groups. E.g. sports, bird watching, hiking, camping, volunteering, etc.
It takes a ton of energy to form and grow new friendships, but once you pass the critical phase, it's much easier to keep them.
I don't think what we're seeing is late stage individualism. It's more like forced/bred isolationism invoked by modern technology. Newer gens are more trapped since they were bred to be on a screen. It's pretty evil, albeit unintentionally (by their parents, at least). Tech giants absolutely love it.
This sounds the most legit to me out of any comment so far. I think there's a tendency to want to either 1.) innovate our way out of this with a novel solution, or 2.) be really passive like "this happening to me and it's hopeless." I think the way out is less profound, less complicated, and ultimately more fulfilling and efficacious than people imagine. Virtually everyone who is researching/writing in the friendship space talks about finding common interest groups, regularly occurring interactions, consistent effort (supposedly 200 hours to form a close friend), candid conversations to strengthen commitment, etc. Honestly, it's all the same stuff that a romantic relationships requires, just with a couple significant variations ;)
A helpful corollary (from writer Shasta Nelson author of "Frientimacy") is that we all understand that working out requires some amount of pain and struggle (also fun, enjoyment, accomplishment, etc...) in order to get a great bod. We would do well to expect the same experience in friendship. It's not a question of access to people, like Facebook, or even Bumble BFF would have us believe. Again from Shasta "We don't need better friends, we need better friendships."
> it requires a lot of energy to form adult friendships
My experience corroborates this. Reminded me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618
The less dependence on community started with desegregation. There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free. These things and more all ended with desegregation. Now we live in a society in which people don’t walk and don’t have places in their neighborhood where others congregate. Kids rarely play in the street anymore. The notion of it taking a village gets laughed at and as you say get individualistic. We live in a deeply unhealthy society from a social standpoint of view.
Having talked to folks from the segregation era, you may be thinking of red-lining and white flight. As folks realized cities and schools were desegregating many moved out of urban environments to suburbs and rural areas, then excluded POC through zoning.
Even if we accept that as the primary cause (which I don't) that would mean cowardice and racism are the root cause. An irrational fear of people who don't look and talk like us.
You can't argue your way into making a homogeneous population.
The reality is that the groups are distinct, and immediately changes the dynamic from "a facility used and maintained by the group who established it", to "a facility maintained by a third party, to be shared". These do not have equal value to an individual.
The reality was that whites were disgusted over idea that black guy could swimm in the same pool as a white girl. It made them feel dirty. It was really that dynamic, not just abstract "who established it".
There is this knee jerk wish to constantly make that dynamic into something nicer or "normal outside of racist interactions". But, it is not. The same effect does not happen when two groups just merge.
Redlining and white flight definitely happened. It also happened that cities stopped funding municipal pools and other services. Things like Elks Lodges went into long term decline when women and blacks had to be admitted.
I don't deny white flight and red-lining happened, continues in some places, and is horrible. I'm not convinced that's the sole or even primary reason for modern loneliness.
> Things like Elks Lodges went into long term decline when women and blacks had to be admitted.
People don't need institutionalized racism and misogyny to make friends. They already have a right to be racist and privately associate / not associate.
I think you don’t understand what happened. When the laws were changed and forced communities to allow blacks to use municipal pools and when places like Elks Lodges were forced to accept women and minorities white men abandoned these things. Cities stopped funding municipal pools and membership in clubs drastically declined. White men gutted the idea of communal activity in response to civil rights.
Yeah, surely the old white men's clubs were the only communities to be found
Sorry i find this whole line of reasoning absolutely asinine
> There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free.
All of that is still true of everywhere I have lived in the US, except for the free ambulances. And I think the cost of ambulances has more to do with the evolution of health insurance in the US than desegregation.
Ambulances were a municipal service and insurance had nothing to do with them. The gutting of municipal services followed desegregation.
It absolutely has to do with insurance. Without insurance or government funding, ambulance service would be prohibitively expensive for most people.
The fact that in America health insurance is often part of worker compensation, meant that cities could transfer the cost of ambulances from taxes to insurance premiums.
Getting rid of municipal ambulance service did not occur for insurance reasons. It was gutted along with the gutting of municipal services in general. Insurance had nothing to do with why the service was cut.
> There used to be community pools and rec centers. Garbage pickup was a municipal service. Ambulances were free.
I live in place where this is still true. The rec centers are barely solvent and it's mostly retirees and summer camps (cheap daycare) that keeps them afloat.
If that was true it would only be a problem in the US. It is not. The same has happened where there never was segregation.
Desegregation coincided with the mass "multicultural" migration initiatives in the rest of the western world.
Unfortunately in reality there is a huge difference between a facility used by one group, and one shared between several. Many community facilities become unpleasant when they are anonymous.
Why does the presence of multiple ethnic groups make facilities anonymous? That would only be true if people never knew anyone of a different "race".
Immigration is only relevant if immigrant communities do not integrate. If it was the cause then you would expect a strong correlation between loneliness and populations of immigrant origin. It certainly does not leap out from a quick look at the numbers: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbein...
The timing of the numbers in the paper do not match either. SOme of them happened in the last two years. A bit recent for desegregation to be a factor.
On the other hand the article does mention a lot of far more plausible possible causes: online only friendships, working hours, decline of religion etc.
This same effect goes a long way to explaining the abandonment of public transit in the US, and strong preference for private travel in a car.
The idea that multiculturalism is incompatible with a harmonious society is empirically denied by the existence of basically utopias like Singapore. All citizens have to learn 4 languages and there is a huge amount of tourists which add to the already multicutral demographics of the country. Lowest crime in the world, best education in the world. Among the best public transit in the world, etc.
What it really is is that some minorities have shittier cultures than others, and some states have handled the integration and assimilation better than others.
Even the USA, for example, is blessed that nearly all of our illegals are Catholics (or more recently evangelical protestants...). Compare this to Europe where it's often muslims who try to bring their Burkas and sharia law with them.
The mass rise of latino voters for trump indicates a very strong effort from America's latino minorities to "act white", to "integrate", and to "assimilate".
I am fine with a multicultural society, as long as it's good culture - and yes, it is quite easy to nearly objectively quantify if a culture or cultural practice is good or not. For example, Americans except for asian americans don't wash their asses with bidets after using the toilet. This leads to swampass/BO, increased toilet paper usage/resource consumption, and far more rectal related health problems. America objectively should change it's cultural practices around bathroom usage.
Unfortunately, cultural critique against bad culture has a tendency for folks to call you "racist", so we aren't allowed to have this conversations with more specificity...
Singapore is not multicultural in the sense it is often used: different communities have to learn each others languages, as you said, for example. A huge effort was made to create a common identity.
This is very different from multicultural meaning groups having separate communities. That is de facto segregation.
" Compare this to Europe where it's often muslims who try to bring their Burkas and sharia law with them."
I think this is much exaggerated.
Its also not immigrant groups pushing Islamic fundamentalism as much as international funding and ideology that is global.
There are also groups (mostly white people!) who are politically committed to this multiculturalism vs integration.
While latinos voted for Trump a little more then last time, saying it was "the mass rise" is just a lie.
No, it is NOT a lie. Latino men had a HUGE shift. Trump won 54% of latino men. This was an over 20 point shift in ONE election. He won 39% of latino women. YOU are lying by even implying that it was a "minor" change. Please educate yourself before spewing lies on the internet. 46% of latino voters in general voted for Trump.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
The reality is that the sheep voted for the wolves - mostly because the sheep hate the other sheep, and wanted the wolves to eat those other sheep - hoping they'd ignore themselves.
The only group who voted more for Harris than biden, demographically, was white women - specifically old white women.
There is evidence that voter suppression efforts and the closing of thousands of polling stations lead to the many millions fewer Democratic votes. Despite this there was a clear neo masculine backlash.
It is though, in the English speaking world - to to Latin America or southern asia, anti-social behavior is treated like the disease it is
It possible but unlikely that there are different causes of the multiple instances of the problem. Maybe different societies had different catalysts.
Which area are you speaking about, exactly?
The convenience and isolation are so baked into modern life that choosing to invest in community feels weirdly countercultural now for many
Anecdata, but quite a few people I met in alternative music and politics sphere a good decade ago, I meet again in unrelated non-music/political bubbles focused on heavy community involvement.
Further confirming the joke, many of those either apreach own or look to buy a bunch of power tools.
Today’s grown-up counter culture seems to be building sheds and growing wide variety of tomatoes.
Agree. The book "WEIRDest" people in the world was kind of eye-opening in arguing that the Western world (especially the US) is unique (both in time, and geographically) in being so individualistic.
And it's getting worse. Decline of the local church or equivalent religious community, decline of even the workplace especially after Covid, etc. And of course, social media giving people a way to consume time and feel some (fake) version of being connected.
My wife and I moved our kids from the US back to our country of origin last year. Partly because we wanted to be closer to family. But partly because we didn't want them growing up in a society that lacks community and social fabric.
>I think we have less dependence on our communities than ever thanks to the internet and being able to physically avoid community. We have less interaction than before.
And are more depressed, sexless, purposeless, and lonelier than before...
I think you are on to something there. Already doing more than most people, I guess. Most people wouldn't even make the effort of going to the neighbors and saying hello.
I often ask myself, why some people, who are closest to what I would call friends, do not initiate any shared activity at all and how they can always be "busy". Do they not realize, that they are squandering the time they could have with friends?
Do you feel that politically "extreme" movements are a reaction to that and actually mostly about community and community interaction?
For example, during covid I believe the anti vaccination movement was largely about community and only tangentially about political goals. Especially because it was an otherwise hard time for people to interact.
It's probably largely the same for the maga movement, the rationalism movement, etc.
It feels nice to be a part of something and to be able to identify with something and such movements tend to easily accept new members as long as they at least aesthetically support the same cause.
>Do you feel that politically "extreme" movements are a reaction to that and actually mostly about community and community interaction?
Yes. Great writing on this from Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind), Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) and Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized) and Vivek Murthy (Together). Haven't read these, but I've read about them. One of their main ideas is that when people lose trust in institutions and feel disconnected, they’re more likely to embrace extreme ideologies or groups that promise belonging.
Is it us, or is it corporations?
Look at a specific microcosm: dating. Dating is "awful" now (according to people both young and old), in a particular way that it wasn't even ten years ago. And sure, this is in part because we do everything online these days, and online dating has a few inherent problems with it. But not as many as you'd think; online dating used to "work" at least alright, in a way that it very much doesn't today / with none of the particular pathologies that it has today.
Dating sites and apps used to do things that actually helped people meet — vaguely optimizing for relationships. So people increasingly gravitated toward using dating apps. And for a while (peaking, I'd say, around the early 2010s), this actually increased the number of people meeting and getting into relationships.
And then one company, Match Group, came along and gradually bought up every "good" dating site, and enshittified them all, in a particular way that maximizes user retention + profit margins (and thereby minimizes the chance of a successful, happy relationship being formed.) They made dating apps bad at being dating apps. But there are no good dating apps — so people now feel stuck/confused, flailing around trying to make "online dating" work when there are only bad options for doing so.
I posit that online social networking in general went through the same evolution. Not because of one asshole company buying up and enshittifying everything, mind you; more because of market consolidation under a few companies who were all willing to copy one-another's homework in advancing the frontier of enshittified social experiences.
Facebook (and Facebook-like experiences) used to be a place you'd turn in the expectation of seeing updates from your actual literal friends, and engaging with those updates. Now it's radioactive for that purpose — and so is abandoned to being a sea of advertisements (and memes from boomers too inattentive to realize when the people they're talking at have left the table.)
And Instagram and even Snapchat have just copied TikTok's enshittified-from-the-start model of "personalized TV but all programs are 10 seconds long."
I have many friends I met in the 2000s and 2010s, where I recall heavily relying on social media as a fit-to-purpose tool to maintain and deepen those friendships. But I can't imagine what social network I could lean on to serve as that kind of tool for me today.
---
Yes, IM and group-chat apps always existed and still exist today. But that's not what traditional social networks got you.
It's funny that I even feel the need to explain this, but here's what social-networks-as-tools had to offer:
1. profile pages — like dating profiles or LinkedIn profiles, but from a lens of "this is what I want potential friends to know about me"!
2. "walls" — a specific semi-public place, attached to a person's profile, to leave a message "performatively" for not only that person, but also anyone else who looked at that person's wall, to see (think: birthday wishes.) Critically, walls are owned and therefore moderated by the profile they're attached to — so, unlike a feed, you can't really (successfully) cyberbully someone on their own wall. They can just delete your message; block you (which will block you from posting to their wall); or disable non-friends from posting to their wall entirely.
3. a home page view, that is simply a dumb chronological view of anything your direct friends have posted to their own walls. Not including friends-of-friends content. It was a social norm, back in the heyday of social networking, that you'd always be caught up on on everything your friends have posted — because it shouldn't add up to much. Nobody could "share" anything out of its originally intended broadcast audience (the poster's friends), and thus there was no benefit to "posting performatively, as if for a mass audience" — and therefore, posts were sparse and personal, making it practical to truly inbox-zero your feed in maybe 20 minutes per day.
Modern social networks don't have profile pages (at least, not that anyone populates with anything — Facebook has vestigial ones nobody uses), owner-moderated public walls, or non-re-shareable "just for mutuals" posts. They have none of the tools that we originally associated with the category of "a tool that makes it easier to network socially." And yet these apps that do not successfully accomplish social networking, are what we today refer to as "social networking apps." And are what everyone therefore thinks to turn to when trying to network socially online.
No wonder, I think, that people find it hard.
Personally I really miss Google+. Maybe it was not a perfect fit for what you are describing, but it sure was the best fit for my own interests and use cases.
You described orkut on its heyday.
This is unrelated to individualism. Individualists still can have strong communities and lots of friendships. Collectivists can just as easily be extremely anti-social.
The examples you gave of grocery delivery and overnight prime delivery are things that city people have, who generally vote against individualism and for collectivist policies.
Even in some socialist utopia where the community provides everything and individualism has been snuffed out entirely, that wouldn’t force more or less human interaction to create friends.
Older generations who received a proper education recognize the dangers, but are often unable to communicate it effectively to others that have been indoctrinated during their formative years.
Specifically it relates to what putting your ability to communicate with others into malicious hands represents. If you allow third-parties to dictate what you see, you'll never be able to make correct decisions based on reality. This distorted reality, or more aptly called distorted reflective appraisal. Reflected appraisal is inherent in our ability to form culture, society, and personal identity. The distortion takes advantage of that, and it happens at a pre-awareness level. Our internal psychology warps to it without us recognizing it, to retain internal consistency.
When you are raised to believe something is impossible, you discard anything to the contrary unless you've experienced direct and extreme personal loss associated to it.
Most people today earnestly believe that they make their own minds up about things and nothing external can change that, which is untrue, but places perceptual blinders so they can't see it no matter how much you may point it out.
Most dependents are unable to adapt after being tortured (which occurs during indoctrination).
The social environment has been shifting towards isolation because that's one of the main elements needed for torture, which is the imposition of psychological stress to induce involuntary hypnotic states.
> individualism
Yes.
One good counter-force against this wave is dependence. If you depend on someone for something, or you owe them a lot(I don't mean monetarily), you will not cut ties with them even if you have a temporary fallout. You'll push through it. Yes, this has negative effects (abuse) but at the system level you need to optimize for the majority case not the minority case. One of the things an overly financialised society does is to commoditise/securitize every dependency. Homes, food, care, groceries, maintenance, health, everything is attached a value. It is now possible for someone to live entirely on their own, with fully commoditised dependencies. Even when they start a family, the kids go to day care, and eventually the parents go to an old age home - more things commoditised. In fact, the number of old age homes is the best sign of a failing society. Like a nail in the coffin, these commoditized fractures increase the perceived wealth of everyone, rally the stock market and the variety of casinos around us, and people celebrate it.
In fact, the number of old age homes is the best sign of a failing society.
Great insight.
Another factor I'd mention is, ironically enough, government social programs. Humans were always social because they needed each other. If you don't depend on your community or your family, you'll be much less inclined to invest in those relationships. It used to be if you fell on hard times you might rely on your community to help you out, which would however require you to take part in it, and contribute to it in some way. If instead you just automatically get money or housing from some faceless govt institution, that incentive is removed. Black children growing up in one-parent households was 9% in the 1950s. Today it's 65%. It's controversial what the causes are of course, but it makes sense: Make it easier for people to replace their relationships with government assistance, and it removes any need for taking responsibility for your peers. I'm not saying government-provided social safety nets should be abandoned, but the devaluing of human connection – even if transactional – is an unintended social consequence that isn't talked about nearly enough.
If this was true, Europeans would be much more lonely then Americans. It is not the case.
I'm not sure what caused this, but I think the expectations of modern friendship have become unrealistic.
Maybe it's movies and TV, where a "close friend" is more or less a non judgemental therapist that will throw down in a fight for you.
What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
In my experience, most friends come and go. That's OK. People change. Circumstances change. One person is always putting in more effort than the other. Some friends will always be aloof. Some friends will pretend they are independent and don't need friendship "like everyone else does," but they're generally full of it. Some friends will seem clingy.
Just roll with it.
The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.
At that point, it's on you. People are out there and in my experience they are excited to meet new folks.
We can write a huge dissertation on why we think The Friendship Recession has happened, but it's quite simple. Inertia is human nature. It takes effort to learn something new and join a community where people are practicing that thing. It takes vulnerability and effort. It's kinda scary.
It's a lot harder than turning on YouTube or flipping through TikTok. And most people understandably don't want to do hard things, especially after the stresses of work and life.
>> What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
I've come to this same conclusion, but rarely express it because it's possible I'm just different. And I'd even go one step further, I think what a lot of people say friendship is, isn't actually what human friendship is in practice. I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
Theoretical friendship:
- Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
- No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
- Timeless and immortal
- No effort involved
- Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
- Able to talk about every topic
Realistic friendship:
- Temporary at first, may or may not build into something more
- Often starts with a simple exchange of banter on common interests
- Multiple opinions/topics that are mutually avoided
- One person often tries harder, one person often values the relationship more
- The relationship may or may not even be mutually healthy
- Many will hit a point where they become more effort than they're worth and end (e.g. moving)
- Some will never grow out of one or two common things to bitch about
These don't represent real or Hollywood friendships at all.
> - Completely perfect and devoid of all realities of life
Friendships are relationships that stand the test of time and hardship. You work through problems, illnesses including mental health struggles, deaths, employment and money problems, family and relationship problems, legal problems, all sorts.
> - No jealousy, no competition, no negative feelings
There are obviously always mixed emotions, but generally you won't harbour serious ill will towards your friends. This is something you can work on, though, as jealousy and envy are personality traits that can be controlled. Healthy competition is a positive, though.
> - Timeless and immortal
Friendships change and sometimes have to be ended, even when you like the other person. I think this is quite common and almost a trope of Hollywood movies.
> - No effort involved
Short of family and maybe employment, friendships require the most work in life. This one is particularly baffling from a Hollywood perspective, as going a friend in need is like the all-time Hollywood trope.
> - Completely balanced and healthy for everybody at all times
Obviously this isn't true, but this isn't portrayed either. Flawed characters are the only compelling characters in Hollywood.
> - Able to talk about every topic
Again, changing the uncomfortable topic trope is an ultra-trope.
Your "realistic friendship" section fits acquaintances rather than friends.
>I think these unrealistic expectations undermine real-world friendships because they always fall short.
I think some self-reflection is in order here, as this is projection.
I don't know, that seems like a rather defensive response to me. Perhaps self-reflection is in order.
Is the idea that friendship might be transactional too scary a thought to consider head on?
Here's some science on the topic that is food for thought: https://www.thecut.com/2016/05/half-of-your-friends-probably...
The comment you replied to isn't about whether friendships are transactional. They detailed a long list of ways that your theoretical and "realistic" friendships are bad and unrealistic definitions. If you didn't have friends closer to your first definition in most ways than your second, you haven't had a close friend, which isn't something to be shamed over but is something to consider.
> Is the idea that friendship might be transactional too scary a thought to consider head on?
Rather than be defensive, it was designed to shock you out of your current thought patterns on friendship, because they are almost delusional. Neither movie idealised friends nor real-life friendships have any of the characteristics you describe, and that is distorting your view of the world.
Pretending real friendship is a Hollywood myth is self-selecting yourself out of one of the most rewarding aspects of life. Don't do it to yourself.
> The study authors gave a survey to 84 college students in the same class,
Come on, time to get offline and go make some friends.
I liked the answers from both of you. I can see both sides.
At the end of the day though? Yeah, maybe just a good reminder for us all to get outside and meet people.
> Come on, time to get offline and go make some friends.
Oof, I really struck a nerve huh?
I'm sure you're smart enough to know you shouldn't try to hurt people's feelings just because they believe and idea that you don't believe.
> Oof, I really struck a nerve huh?
No, you're misreading the tone here. It's more gentle paternal nudging.
Don't let confirmation bias mislead you into a lonely life, especially not based on a study on somecollege students.
I know it's more comforting to believe real friendships exist only in fiction rather than admit you haven't experienced it, but in the long run, this belief only hurts you.
Paternalism in all of its forms is bad on face. You clearly got triggered hard by these comments.
I suspect this may be projection.
Based on your comments, maybe some paternal advice wouldn't go astray.
>The relationship may or may not even be mutually healthy
My best friend of 30 years now met me because I distributed warez in Junior High. He hung around because I had something useful and wanted to maintain a relationship with me. This grew into something more meaningful
I don’t disagree but I do have a friendship that matches your theoretical definition and I appreciate how rare a thing it is.
I have friends like the first set of criteria, and there's nothing Hollywood about them or me.
I wonder whether you actually watch movies and modern series, because the ones I have seen dont have friendships like you describe in them.
Friendships in movies are neither effortless nor healthy. They have conflicts and personality issues to create drama and comedy.
Like, I don't know what it is that you watch in TV ... but what I watch is much different.
With respect, I think this is quite a sad and revealing comment, but your Hollywood definition of a friend fits my friends. I wonder if you maybe never experienced friendship but rather just acquaintances.
The friends who would throw down for you in a fight at age 19
when you reach age 40, will have families to look after and a lot more to lose than they used to have, like a nice house and a good job
or they'll be at the far end of a skype link / international flight
or they'll have discovered a new chill side to themselves now they don't have 19-year-old energy and hormone levels
and you'll realise you don't want your boy to fuck up his custody arrangements by getting sent to jail over some dumb brawl
They'll still support you in the face of life's challenges, but it'll be support of a very different kind.
I’m 40. I didn’t throw down for my friends when I was 19, but I support those same friends through divorces, cancer, deaths now. They’ll do the same for me.
Some friends are closer than family. That’s luck, but also intention.
I figured the "throw down for you in a fight" was hyperbolic.
Obviously I don't want a friend who will literally run the risk of getting sent to jail over some dumb brawl. And I didn't when I was 19 either.
My best friend asks me what I had for lunch on random days. Sometimes I get drunk and message him how I was reminiscing about the good times together. Things don’t have to be as complex as you think. Just appreciating the simple stuff might go long way.
My best friend asks me what I had for lunch on random days.
Now, that's a Friend.
>The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.
The article follows similar lines, but I feel "forcing friendships" just leads to shallow "friendships" with little meaning. In fact so many modern friendships are sustained by small talk, which Carl Jung derides as meaningless..
> If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.
I’m probably bottom quintile for social skills and I have done some extremely unwise things for one of my friends who was there for me when I needed a hand. The Hollywood idea of “close friend” is a great deal nearer to my own life experience than its representation of many other important relationships.
Friendships that started in 20s often include this kind of dynamic. Friendships that started in 30s at least talk the talk. In 40s I can't imagine we would bother. I haven't experienced life beyond that but the trend of "evaluating friendships against the expectations of our 20s" sure seems like a losing proposition.
Have I been watching the wrong movies? Because from my perspective Hollywood's depiction of friends is a rather sorry benchmark - most depictions are of exemplarily bad friends.
Yes.
I think what everyone wants to do with all this postulating and explaining is avoid the fact that it is hard and takes time and is awkward and there's no clear metric of success. But still worth it, somehow. Like life.
I think people underestimate how much real friendship is built through boring repetition rather than some cinematic, instant bond
I did a double take on that "ten or more close friends"... wouldn't that be a very small fraction of the population in the first place ?
I doubt even popular school / university kids manage to sustain that many actually *close* friends for long !
> Maybe it's movies and TV
That's pathetic thinking. It's inoffensive until someone turns the keys.
Plane accidents often occur by sabotage or failure of multiple systems.
There has been an interplay and "intellectual curiosity" from both movie studios and internet giants on online personas and social groups. They even married recently!
This bait and switch of blaming the other will backfire.
Back in the day, more children meant more wealth and prosperity for the family. More friends meant more support, bigger communities were stronger against others. It was need based, as they have a need to support and survive by themselves.
The nation concept now drains out the need and viability of communities, families and friendships. It's like a whale swallowing animals. Animals can no longer keep their own structure and identity once they are inside the whale. They will be disintegrated into individual molecules and become citizens of the whale. Nations do the same. The existence and strength of a nation requires disintegration of internal structures and autonomous bodies. Communities, families and friendships all go against the individualistic nation concept. The best citizens are individual workers with no connections and no opinions and maybe no gender.
Capital is a destructive force just as much as it is a productive one.
"just as much" is letting capital off easy
I agree. I equivocated to avoid the potential tedious series of replies about “innovation”, given the leanings of much of this site.
I love heavy metal. So I go to metal pubs. I meet people, we talk and listen to each other. I've been talking to the same people for 30+ years but I meet new people EVERY time I venture out. I may see them again, I may not. Who cares?
We lend PHYSICAL copies of albums, video games and books to one another. This increases trust, knowledge and love for one another. We share stories about all sorts of things. We create stories by doing things together.
This is how friendships are formed and maintained. This is humanity. This is who we are and how we behave.
Poverty is the digital world.
See you out there!
I’m more of a hardcore guy but stopped going to shows when I got out of college and got a job. I’m in my 40s now, well my point is it’s amazing how you are still going to shows.
Idk how you're not still going to shows, and my 40-something show-going friends would probably think the same. Just not a concept i can wrap my head around lol
Yeah, taking care of my autistic kid just takes all my remaining time.
I never heard of such a thing as a metal pub. Not in small town USA anyway :(
Luckily I live in London, UK. There are many metal, rock and alternative pubs. Most cities will have at least one. Small rural town will not though :(
But the metal pub is really just an example. Any activity where people regularly come together just to chew the fat is better than online for creating friendships.
Take care.
Proper small towns no, but my old "small city" (<250k) had a pretty thriving metal scene (but not really one particular bar they centered on)
> The government slowed down its investment in and construction of third spaces—such as community centers, parks, and coffee shops—which has left fewer places for organic social interactions.
My anecdotal impression is that people don't really use those that are available very much and the drop in investment is because of that.
I have organized a few events in community halls over the past few years and I have been struck by just how available the event spaces we looked at were. No conflicts, no competing priorities, nobody using any of the other rooms at the same time, etc. Some communities are no longer bothering to have community halls at all, as nobody really uses them.
Where I live, the local community centres are not heavily used. Community social events have dwindled due to being poorly attended. The coffee shops, bars, and pubs have cut seating and replaced it with dedicated pickup areas for those who send in orders or are buying it through a delivery app. Schools have cut all manner of parent activities as the parents don't participate.
Same thing for anything that isn't a flagship park or flagship sports facility. Sure, the top city parks are crowded, but most are pretty empty even on sunny days.
So I have to ask, is there actually much demand for more social interaction? As it seems that the drop is mostly in demand, not supply.
I think this is less about demand, and more about habits.
I’ve personally become aware of the fact that I need more social contact. I want to attend events, but never really built the habit of organizing. My ex was always the social instigator, and I didn’t realize how much I relied on that (we were together for most of my adult life).
The more people I talk to about this, the more I hear them lamenting the lack of in-person gatherings.
I think social media has kind of filled the need poorly, and this has changed habits. It’s not what people want, but it has them hooked, and IRL gatherings have suffered as a result.
It reminds me of some of the comments from the younger crowd about TikTok. “I hate it, but I can’t stop using it, because everyone else is on it”.
I really think people want real social interaction but have gotten caught in this social media habit that just barely meets the need. Junk food vs. a nutritious meal.
I suppose at the end of the day you could still say this means demand is down, but I think there are more layers than that.
Junk food is the example I use for much of social media.
Third places have to be convenient for people to go there. It needs to be a walking distance away from your home. It's an extension of your living room. Rent also needs to be low so that beverages are cheap enough for people to drink daily. I have recently been to Vietnam and every neighbourhood is flooded coffee shops and tea carts.
I don't really get where people with kids found these 6.5 hrs / wk to spend on friendships, or even the quoted current averages of 4 hrs / wk.
On a workday, there isn't much time. I roll out of bed at 6:30, get the kids up and fed breakfast and out the door. I finally get actually working at 8:30-9:30, depending on if I exercise or not. Stop work in the 5:30-6 range, switch into making dinner, getting kids to eat dinner, policing screen time and homework. Then bedtimes and such, following up on the zillion school emails, PTA newsletters, scheduling. If I have 45 min of downtime, typically in the 10-11pm range, if I'm lucky.
On weekends, there's all the deferred housework, like cleaning and laundry. Kids have swim and sports. Visits to grandparents, from grandparents. Every now and then we have someone over for a games afternoon, or someone is visiting from out of town, but I really doubt that adds up to 4 hr / wk.
One technique that I think needs to come back into fashion, which was familiar to us Gen Xers, is to drag your kids along when socializing for you. Instead of prioritizing their play dates and sitting in the corner on our phones, we should be bringing the kids to our friend's house and they can wander around and be bored while we sit and talk as friends.
The problem we have as a parenting culture is that we're not comfortable ignoring our kids. We need to teach kids that ignoring them is not the same as not caring for them. In fact, they need to feel the sensation of not being the most important thing for once. It's better to get some attention from a happy parent than all of the attention of a sad parent.
Throughout her teenage years, my wife's father would drag her along to his bowling trainings and matches. A smokey dingy bowling alley with drunk middle aged men may not seem the best place to take a young teenage girl, but there were no issues.
If anything the opposite - the other men respected her more, because they knew she was her father's daughter. They would also have fatherly protective instincts towards her.
Now she plays bowling professionally herself.
Yeah my Dad used to take me to bars sometimes while he and a friend would sit and have some drinks. Not nice bars, real dives! I loved it.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I generally hated being dragged to the friends houses of my parents. It was just needlessly boring.
On the contrary, it sometimes was okay if that friend had children. I think the issue in the modern day however, is that less people are having children, so there simply isn't the opportunity. For example, I'm the only person in my friend group who has children.
Interesting. Did you also hate it when your parents hosted a party for adults in your home?
that's different. in my home i can disappear into my room and keep myself busy there. when at another place i have to behave, i can't go run around and explore (unless they have a garden and kids are allowed to go outside)
as a parent i would not drag my kids to a place unless there are other kids or i know there is something interesting for them.
but right on topic, the solution is to not live alone with your kids. we are in a multifamily compound where other families have children too, and there is no problem for some of the adults to go out while others stay back and make sure the kids are safe. (they are not providing entertainment but someone is always around should something happen).
this of course is only possible because i did connect to the neighbors. or rather, they connected to us. i always wanted to live in a place like that, but finding this one was pure serendipity. we weren't actually looking. it just happened that the neighbors turned out that way.
Just a 'temporary boredom as a child is/was pretty normal' datapoint, I remember sometimes falling asleep at the table in the restaurant out of sheer boredom while the adults finished chatting. I don't harbour any resentment for that, and I completely understand that they needed to hang out once in a while.
Honestly there's a lot of value in kids experiencing some boredom.
yes, but i needs to be boredom in an environment/situation where they can do something about it. being forced to sit still and be quiet in a foreign house while the adults have fun is not it.
I mean, as much as the modern world wants to convince you to revolve your life around making your kid comfortable at every moment of the day, this is actually a super important life skill and you need your kid to develop it.
I mean, that's probably a different dynamic. I didn't have to interact with the adults in that scenario, I could just be alone in my room.
To be fair, I think I was just a shy child/teenager. I didn't really feel comfortable talking, it's more I'd just sit and listen. In the back of my mind, all I really wanted to do was watch TV or playing videos, and often what would happen is I would just sit in front of their TV.
That's not to say that their friends weren't interesting people. It's just more, as a child I didn't really feel like I could directly interact.
That’s true, I regularly remember going to pubs, friends houses and sporting events that I was far to young to be at, but was just there because my parents where doing a thing.
My mum used to do this - I loved going to various places because either there were kids there to play with OR they had something that I found interesting. For example, one of the places had a 12-inch very detailed sculpture of a prawn which I found very intriguing. Some of the places had lots of books which I loved to raid. And there were always snacks.
Yeah I used to hang out with my friends while their kids were around, it was fun to get to know their kids honestly, and if we were lucky we could get the kids to bed and then have a drink on the porch before calling it a night.
I have 2 young kids, run a widely used open source project and a startup, eat dinner with my kids 6/7 nights a week and do this. Here’s some ways how:
My best friend comes over once a weekend and we watch the TV that my wife doesn’t want to.
I participate in a sport (powerlifting) where I’ve made friends and there’s room to socialise while exercising.
I chose to move back to my home town and also go to college there.
I go to metal gigs with friends when the kids are asleep.
I’m happily married, my wife is training for a marathon and sees friends too.
We pay for a cleaner.
Don’t know that this is 6.5 hours in person with friends every week but I’d say it’s at least a couple of hours each.
It’s doable, it just might require not doing some stuff you already do and enjoy. There’s a bunch of stuff I did pre-kids that I don’t any more and would like to find time for again one day.
You just said all the things that you do while raising kids. What is it that you are doing differently that allows you to do all those things? Is it simply just a matter of hiring a cleaner?
Because otherwise, as the father of a 1 and 5 year old, I completely agree with OP and find your story unbelievable. Like OP I work/exercise/do chores from 6 am to 10 pm. I'm on HN right now only because it's Saturday and I'm relaxing.
I have kids in similar ages and I also find time with friends. Even on some weekdays.
> Like OP I work/exercise/do chores from 6 am to 10 pm.
I hear this a lot, but let’s be honest: You don’t need to exercise and do chores every single day for the entire time outside of work, do you? Would it be the end of the world if you met up with a friend one night instead of going to the gym? Could you invite a friend to the gym?
The house doesn’t need to be spotlessly cleaned every night. If you’re cooking dinner, switch to recipes that are easy to prepare and then double them so you can have leftovers.
It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of doing things constantly until they expand and fill all of your time. Becoming more efficient and flexible about the things I did outside of work opened up a lot of free time.
For me, I have to go to the gym. Its my only me thing. Taking someone to the gym sounds excruciating. For me the gym is all about disconnecting from everything requiring higher order thinking. Just loud music and heavy weights. Without that time I feel things would go very badly indeed.
The only time I really just spontaneously smile is during the walk from my car to the front door of the gym.
Make friends with people at the gym. Kills two birds with one stone.
Is this great for everyone? Nope. Is it better than having no friends? Probably.
You’re on HN because it’s Saturday and you’re relaxing. I’m in an Uber to go see some gym friends because my kids are in the bath and almost ready for bed. Another night this week: I’ll do the same for my wife.
Zero judgment here, genuinely, but: I keep hearing people say my life is impossible and it doesn’t seem like it.
I think so much of this is mentality, which as a word really undersells the problem but I can't think of a better one. You and the other commenters are probably about equally busy, but you are able to see your various tasks and obligations as opportunities to invite your friends in or otherwise socialize. They see them as blockers where nothing else and especially not socializing can happen.
As a childless person with far more "free time" than either of you, I've fallen into the same trap. I build it up in my head that I'm "just too busy" and during my downtime I'm "too tired," but the reality is often that I've just lost the habit and fail to perceive the opportunities.
None of this is meant to undersell the problem. I don't think human beings evolved for this pervasive, isolated busyness, and I think a lot of societal dysfunction cascades from it. I think it has real, negative effects on our biology and psychology, and no one should be shamed for succumbing to those effects. But at the same time I don't think the situation is hopeless and I admire and aspire to your initiative and creativity, and I think the rest of us can get there too.
Young kids are a different story but that doesn’t last forever. My kids are older, 13 and 15, and there’s a lot more time for personal interests and friends. Also, as kids get older you begin to have mutual interests. I’m watching/helping my 15 year old play an Indiana Jones game on his ps5 while typing this and have no desire to do anything else.
Y'all sound like the people in an infomercial that can't pour juice without spilling it everywhere or they get egg in ridiculous places when they try to crack it. With dishwashers, instapots, roombas, microwaves, and so on modern life just isn't that hard. Or, more accurately, it's mostly as hard as you make it.
You’re working too much and/or misorganized at home. Happens to many people. Unless you’re a single parent you can make a plan this weekend to at least alternate the days when someone has to do chores nonstop after work. I have kids those same ages.
I'm similar to the person you are directly applying to. I also have a 5 and 3yo.
Unlike the first OP, I don't get involved with the PTA and we don't really email with the school at all. I don't understand the emailing constantly with school thing, but to each their own and I'm sure there's a valid reason for those that do.
We, like the person you're replying to, also pay for a cleaner, but that's for deep cleaning and only happens once every two weeks. I've somehow settled into a routine that has me doing basic cleaning right after dinner.
My wife and I share chores and swap out tasks evenly. This allows one of us to clean and have some "me" time while the other bathes the kids/does bedtime, before we meet together and hang out for a bit in the evening before bed. Sometimes during the week we'll have a friend over during this time. Our weekend hours are limited in the evenings, because I have to get up early for work, but we make it work.
On the weekends, we are good about balancing our fun time. Grandparents come over and watch the kids as we go out together, or, just for one example, my wife will handle dinner/bedtime (or breakfast, if I go to something dance-musicy that runs late) while I go out to a show. I'll do likewise for her if she wants to go out with friends.
Also on the weekends, we often meet up during the day with friends of ours who also have kids. We get to hang out with our friends while our kids play together.
Additionally, my work has a gym and my work schedule is earlier than most - 6 to 3PM. I work out before and after work, and then go pick my kiddos up, make dinner and play with them after cleaning. I also chose a job that insisted they prioritize family and work/life balance and I leaned into that, and they leaned back! No notifications hit my phone after 4PM and in the four years I've worked here, I have never had to work a weekend nor been pressured to do any work outside of when I'm at the office.
My wife is also super nice about letting me go on 3-4 day backpacking trips multiple times through the summer.
We prioritized finding some time for us for our own sanity, and kinda naturally settled into this schedule. It might not work for everyone, and I feel very fortunate to have space for us.
Edit: Don't get it twisted, though... I'm tired. I can't get a full 8 hours of sleep on a regular basis, closer to 7, sometimes a bit less. The daytimes are also constant in order to ensure we get time at the end. It's hard.
Edit 2: We also prioritized ensuring our kids were great sleepers from day one. They go down for bed anywhere between 7 and 8, and don't wake up until ~7AM. We're also very lucky in that they've never really come into our bedrooms in the middle of the night and stay in their beds until we get them in the mornings. I don't know how we got fortunate there, but /shrug.
> My wife and I share chores and swap out tasks evenly.
Having some give and take between parents makes such a big difference.
I think every time I’ve talked to friends who are new parents who complain about not having any free time ever, they eventually reveal some excessive rigidity in how they share the parenting load. Some parents try to have both parents involved in everything all the time. Some parents refuse to let the other parent handle a task like bedtime. Some parents let their kids get demanding about which parent does a task and they never push back on it. And of course some couples have one lazy parent who just doesn’t do the thing, leaving it to fall to the other parent.
There’s often a lightbulb moment when parents realize that there can be flexibility and trading back and forth between parents.
I once coached a young guy who was struggling at his job because his ~9 month old still wasn’t sleeping well. After some questions he revealed that both he and his wife were getting up with the baby every time and staying up together.
It took some convincing to break him of the notion that every interaction with the baby required two parents. Once they started staggering their sleep schedules and taking shifts during the night everything improved.
Good on you. Sounds like we have mostly made the same choices. It’s possible, even if some folks like to convince themselves it’s not.
>We pay for a cleaner.
Buried lede.
Depending on where you live this is pretty affordable for even an average midwestern senior dev salary. Especially in a two income household. As in cut out daily Starbucks level affordable.
It’s the first “luxury” I pay for when able to right after air conditioning, and I did it even when I was single with a roommate.
Costs where I live are $200 or so twice a month to have my entire place cleaned top to bottom and I live in an above average sized house.
It’s not nothing, but it’s affordable enough to prioritize. The best thing you can buy with money is time, and I’ve found this is one of the largest RoI possible in terms of dollars per hours given back.
Others will prioritize different spending but overall I find it a better return than even taking a vacation.
5k/year is serious money. It’s affordable the way most things are affordable making it a priority over other things. IMO it’s low on the dollars per hour saved to use a regular cleaning service, where it’s worth it is you want a clean home and just don’t keep it up.
However, there’s significant diminishing returns on weekly or biweekly cleaning service vs monthly or by monthly. Especially if you can use a robotic vacuum and have decent air filtration.
How does air filtration reduce the frequency of cleaning?
Less dust and fewer particulates circulating and settling on surfaces.
Also, one of the major upsides of cleaning is to reduce dust, pollen, etc in the air. So things don’t get dirty as quickly and it matters less when they are dirty.
I don’t pay for a cleaner and still have plenty of time for friends.
I think people overestimate how much time a cleaner saves. It’s helpful if you can afford it but IMO it’s not the life-changing improvement that you hear about on Reddit and other places. Someone who comes once per week to spend an hour or two cleaning could give an hour or two back (usually not 1:1 because they clean deeper than you would yourself most times to show that a good job was done). It’s not going to make the difference between having tons of time to spend with your friends if your scheduled is already packed though. That is, unless you plan to pay for a daily cleaner which is a different level of expense.
I have a 3x/week housekeeper and it means I practically don't clean at all, including tidying/putting things away. Costs around $15k/yr though, so not for everyone. I wouldn't do this if not for kids though.
I mean, with 3x/week or even 7x/week housekeeper you'll be cleaning something. Even Jeff Bezos probably wipes a plate clean once in a while, or makes a sandwich. They're not going to be right next to you 24/7.
24/7 live-in maids are quite common in places like Southeast Asia, India or the Middle East. And yes, 24/7 really means that: always on call.
In many cases, it's slavery (immigrants whose documents have been taken away). Occasionally, you have tragedies occur, like the Kenyan woman who received 3rd degree burns over most of her body, and her family didn't know until she was shipped back home to die.
Extreme, but is that what we're aspiring to?
But then, it would be incorrect of me to say that I'm making a purely economic argument because I've clearly moved into making a value judgment. I think that's still valid though. Do we want to live in a country where wealthy people - or even just the well-off top half/three-fifths/whatever - expect never to have to clean up after themselves? We don't even have to ask what kind of society that creates, it's in our national memory.
This is every job. The rich paying the poor to do something that will bring them value. Every work visa is slavery by your argument. The reason cleaning as a job icks people out is because they see it as a "lesser" job. I am fine with it as long as the pay is good.
No, you're wrong. Someone with a work visa can leave if they want, they just can't stay if they don't meet certain conditions. However, they can travel to wherever they're authorized to. Difficult as it might be, they can also find another employer to sponsor them. They can also leave to visit home.
Someone who has their passport taken cannot leave. They may be deported, like someone with a lapsed visa, but unlike the aforementioned, they don't have the option to go somewhere other than the destination the deporting country decides is their home. Without documenation, they may be detained for an extended time, and cannot avail themselves of the resources available to people who can prove themselves citizens of another country.
I can leave my job - both permanently and for the evening. I can leave this country and come back (same for many foreign countries). Work life in America sucks, but it's not the same as modern day slavery.
Also, I explained why cleaning (specifically, employing a live-in maids) can be an issue, socially. It's not icky and it's not lesser; however, it can create in the society that encourages it class divisions and abuses, especially since it can only ever become ubiquitous and accessible to anyone but the wealthy if pay is not good. We have concrete examples of this in the regions GP mentions.
1. You do realise that not every house help is on some work visa where the employer takes away their passport right? That's illegal. These things happen a lot in arab countries not just for house helps but engineers too. Wanting to have a house help doesn't mean aspiring for "slavery" or taking away someones passport.
2. Work visa conditions if harsh enough are akin to slavery. You have Indians on H1B visas for over a decade with no chance of getting a green card. They have bought houses and raised families here. And can be kicked out in 3 months if they are out of a job. They are stuck.
> encourages it class divisions and abuses
Do you feel the same about a personal driver? A chef? A live-in nurse? What professions are socially ok in your opinion? If someone can pay good wages for a maid its absolutely ok. In fact its good that money flows into poorer communities. If you want real class equality ensure that every job gets paid similar amounts. A rich engineer not hiring a maid just makes wealth inequality worse. Its far better for the community than stuffing it in some index fund.
> 2. Work visa conditions if harsh enough are akin to slavery. You have Indians on H1B visas for over a decade with no chance of getting a green card. They have bought houses and raised families here. And can be kicked out in 3 months if they are out of a job. They are stuck.
Sounds very stressful. Is there no way for them to replace the H1B visa with something more permanent? Kinda like a middle step to green card?
But surely this person can still get some personal time and schedule it beforehand. Then if you want true 24/7 you need several.
£3.2k a year here. Most people on HN have tech jobs. I don’t drink coffee. I barely drink alcohol. I’ve never bought a new car. Again: it’s probably possible for many people here but some people prefer to convince themselves it’s impossible. Learned helplessness.
You have resources many parents don’t. Congrats on the luck (genuinely, no snark), but the median is having a much worse time.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
I don’t live in the US so have no idea about that. I have friends who are parents who make below the median household income in the U.K. who make time for hobbies and socialising (including with me). Resources help but I know many people with far more resources than I who would say on forums like this my life is impossible.
UK specific data source:
Childless by choice becomes new normal for young UK adults, survey finds - https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240118/Childless-by-choi...
(touches on UK childcare as being a contributing factor)
If you moved from a high cost of living city back to your home town, how much did that have to do with it? In HCOL cities the crazy rent or mortgage costs keep everyone running and cut into discretionary funds for assistance.
The more interesting question is: If people in HCOL areas are so poor that they can't even afford to make time to bask in friendships with the people the city has to offer, why are they still there?
Usually to build career.
Most small towns and medium sized cities, at least in the USA, have a serious lack of stepping stone opportunities. There are low-paying service and entry level jobs and there are high paying jobs that require extensive experience. There is often nothing in between.
shops are nearby, less or even no commute to work. access to public transport.
Doesn't that describe every cheap small town?
(Little public transport is needed as you can walk the whole town over, but there is usually transport to other towns)
Stuck. Trying to move feels like an impossibly difficult situation.
Isn’t it the opposite? Moving from HCOL to LCOL can be somewhat easy as the home equity or savings you built up in HCOL goes a longer way in the destination. Surely easier than moving from LCOL to HCOL?
Not when the real estate market is in the chaos it is right now, most of the ‘easy’ LCOL areas are not only not as LCOL, but have turned politically unpalatable, and there are large efforts now to do things like RTO in HCOL areas.
I live in Scotland. HCOL here is not very H, despite living in the most expensive city.
Part of the reason I don’t live in America is I see a lot of people on salaries 2-4x mine who seem to be unable to have time to see their friends.
>Part of the reason I don’t live in America is I see a lot of people on salaries 2-4x mine who seem to be unable to have time to see their friends.
This is just a choice though. A choice Americans absolutely love making, but a choice none-the-less. On Reddit some dude was trying to argue that an individual needs $70,000 a year in fixed expenses just to live. Bare minimum. OTOH, I have what I consider an absurdly luxurious life and I spend less than $60,000/year TOTAL.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DwlQ_5A2mKU - this is a video of someone who makes $2,200/month and has zero expenses (her parents pay for everything) and is in serious financial trouble.
Spend some time on bogleheads and you’ll see it all - from people saving $120k a year on $140k salary, to those spending $700k a year and not finding anything to save.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that if you have a monthly expense, it becomes “necessary fixed expense” damn quickly.
Even if it’s $50 a month for telephone sanitizing.
telephone sanitizing?
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy example of a "useless middle-manager" type occupation.
Yeh, for sure it’s a choice. I just feel like far more of my US friends make this choice than my Scottish ones.
> On Reddit some dude was trying to argue that an individual needs $70,000 a year in fixed expenses just to live. Bare minimum.
... Wait, how the hell did they figure that out? Did they itemise it? Was most of it just going on a very expensive mortgage or something? Are they including retirement savings?
(I've no rent or mortgage, due to having been very lucky with employer equity, but I'm not sure I could spend 60k EUR a year on myself even if I wanted to; there is only so much stuff that you'd reasonably want to spend money on.)
Yeah, I can't find the post again but they itemized it according to what they thought was normal basics.
I remember there was large car payments.
OI have been driving for more than 25 years, I've had a car payment for maybe 10 months in those 25 years. To me a car payment is a massive luxury, to this dude it's a minimum basic.
Frighteningly common attitude amongst Americans, including my parents. Never made sense to me. I get that American cities are basically designed to require a car, but that doesn't mean you need to finance or lease something brand new all the time.
Huh, I would argue that someone who has 70k after tax per year to spend generally shouldn't be buying a car with debt _at all_; they should be able to afford to save and buy one outright.
Yes, that's exactly my point.
I save for my cars, I don't, generally, finance them. I did finance one car once when I was a young engineer and still had student loans. I did it because I was just starting my career. Paid off the loan completely within a year.
I basically think everyone, no matter your income, should strive to save for their cars as much as possible, and try to avoid financing. Always financing a car is a trap to always spend more than you can really afford on a car. Saving and paying cash allows you to really gauge what is affordable. Even my sister in law who makes close to minimum wage has always been able to save for her cars and pay cash.
If you push them they always have $3,000/mo on candles, non negotiable or something. It’s silly.
Great reference https://x.com/dril/status/384408932061417472?lang=en
I have a rough idea of my friend’s schedules, and I call them when I’m driving the kids around, or we text. Staying in constant contact with a few very close friends about my mental health has floated me through my mid-40s.
A tip I got from a friend in his 60s was that even when you lose friends, life is great because you constantly have the opportunity to find new ones. I am in a new close friends renaissance in my 40s, just be vulnerable and don’t take rejection personally.
I'd definitely be better off if I didn't take rejection personally
But it's hard for me to draw the line between being vulnerable and say, oversharing or dumping
Are you a single parent? If so then yeah you have it hard, no doubt there.
But if not shouldn't your spouse be doing some of this? Why are you getting the kids ready and making dinner and doing all the homework/school stuff and working full time?
Why not have grandparents watch the kids when they visit (or you drop them off)? Why do you need to be there at all? Great time to go meet a friend for lunch. Or grandparents can take the kids to sports. Or you make friends with other parents at those sports activities so you can interact while the kids are there.
This is almost identical to my experience. And during that brief sliver of time that I do get to myself, I simply don't have the mental energy to engage with others. Instead, I usually decompress by working out or reading or something else solitary, because for me socialising requires effort.
I am the same and I’m an introvert. That’s kind of the definition of an introvert: socializing is effortful.
Still, it’s healthy. Working out is also effortful but healthy.
It used to be possible in most areas to raise a family and kids on a single middle-class income. So that left one person free to handle domestic tasks instead of them being split between two people in the spare time they have after the kids are all in bed.
It still may be possible now but that will require reducing your standard of living to what was common then. Think no stone counter-tops. Not driving a 0-3 year old car with $10,000 just in electronics. Having linoleum floors instead of high-end tile. Eating Hamburger Helper, spaghetti, not ordering door dash 5x a week. Resisting the constant stream of social media, influencers, advertisements that are telling you everyone else lives better than you and making you feel bad about it, which causes you to spend money on things you don't need but raise the aesthetic of your life and make you feel like you're living better.
I'd bet that if someone was happy to live in the standard of living that was 20-30 years ago, it could still be done on a single middle class income which would allow for the leisure time required to spend 6.5hrs+ with friends [citation needed]
Or learn how to cook and lay your own tile? One doesn't have to live in an ad campaign for the 70s just to save a few bucks
That's too stressful
Cooking is closer to stress relief for me
What city, and what do you consider a “middle class income”?
No stone countertops? Linoleum? Sounds like absolute hell! Positivity inhumane. Next you’ll tell me that they don’t even have cable AND Netflix or gasp go to the library.
Prisoners have better accommodations!
There are two key things to making this work:
Money and locality.
Money: You pay people to do things that take up time.
We have a house cleaner. That's a few hours right there. When the kids were little, we had a nanny. But the nanny didn't just watch the kids. She also washed and folded the laundry, tidied the house daily, and sometimes cooked dinner. In fact, now that they are in school, I'm thinking of hiring a home helper to do those things because those chores get neglected right now (although the kids can almost do it now instead).
Locality: Visit people who live nearby.
Most of my friends that I see regularly are either my wife's brothers and their families, since they all live locally, or the parents of our kids friends, who all live nearby since we go to the local school, or the neighbors who we like. We have family dinner a few times a week, either at someone's house or out to eat (see point one about money), and especially on weekends and summer break, we hang out a lot with the neighbors.
I don't however see my college friends or work buddies much anymore. That is what I had to give up when I had kids. We have some group chats and will occasionally get together, but that requires arranging babysitting, or one of us going on a trip with those friends (see the point about money again). But both my wife and I try to do that at least once a year (go on a friends trip).
Locality is increasingly unaffordable for people as it's far more common for people who rent to move often (to avoid paying high rent increases) and people who own to be forced into living in a small sunset of places where they can actually afford a home (often far away from their communities or friends)
In my case, the locality came after buying the house. We made friends with other people who live nearby.
At 10 PM I walk to the local and have three pints. The woman is not working and socializes during the day with other moms.
I mean, I could walk down to a bar at 10pm, if I wanted to. I live in a city. But if I'm getting up at 6:30, I don't think I want a pint let alone three that late.
Plus, I'd still have two kids up, asking me to extend the wifi because they're not done with English yet or to help scan a page for math. I'm not going to just leave that to my partner.
Even the more traditional pint-after-work would leave me coming home tipsy at 7pm, having slacked off on all of dinner prep and child-wrangling. If I made a habit of that, it would get me my ass handed to me, and rightfully so.
I do wonder if the whole "pub-culture" thing was entirely predicated on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of women. And how much of that extended to other traditional extracurriculars like bowling leagues and clubs and such.
When did staying at home and taking care of house/children become such a terrible punishment?
True, if your family is such a burden maybe you should focus on making better choices. Probably better off turning the kids over to the state vs forcing them to through 18 whole years and a childhood suffering your resentment.
I'm confused by how your question relates to the one above it. It sounds like you're saying the person above should feel free to go to the pub frequently because the mom should feel happy taking care of the house and kids without them?
Just an observation; it used to be fine, but these days people talk about it like a wasted life.
I wouldn't mind staying home with children myself, but I'm convinced children need their moms more during early years.
Stay home and have a pint with the boys! Literally.
It’s sad. There’s more to life than Friends (the show).
> was entirely predicated on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of women
It was paid and acknowledged. It was paid in a wage to husbands meant to run an entire household under. It was acknowledged also, though we probably also took it for granted.
That being said, we're never realistically going back to a time when only one spouse worked. It's just a fact that households where both spouses work will get ahead, so that time and that type of life isn't ever coming back.
You do it like you do in Europe. Your friends pop by and sit around while you're doing what you're doing, chatting here and there, helping out occasionally too. If you're thinking about "outings" then yes, those are cooked with your schedule.
There were more kids around, which meant there were more kids for your kids to play with instead of hanging on you and more parents in the same boat to form a support network.
It’s one of the problems with birth rate collapse. The fewer people have kids, the harder it is in very hard to measure ways.
This doesn't make sense, the population has only increased.
Quick Google tells me 40 years ago, in 1985, there was 62.6 million children in the US. In 2025 there are 74.7 million. That is more children in 2025 than 1985.
Parents not allowing their children to play independently isn't due to lack of other children, it's a choice.
I suspect the number of children born to the kind of parents who's kids six figure white collar professionals want their kids in contact with has gone down.
Where did you find the time to read HN and write this comment? It's about prioritization. (My priorities are pretty much the same as yours)
The whole point is that working for 8:30 to 6 is the problem.
and its usually not enough lately... I see myself working all the time or thinking about jobs to be done.
The most successful people at work I see have a stay at home partner that looks after the kids, or no kids, or kids left for college. Its pretty impossible to have a demanding job and family life and your own life.
I have zero IRL friends, not even acquaintances. I stopped having friends once I had kids. So its been at least a decade. At the point now where my oldest is 13 and the youngest is 11 that I could probably have the time for them if I wanted but I haven't had any for so long that the desire is just gone. The effort required just doesn't seem like its worth it. I work remotely as well so I can actually go days without speaking to an adult aside from my wife. I don't even work on a team so literally not a word to anyone.
My wife had a good friend via our oldest being best friends with her oldest. We would do family get togethers and I would hang out with the husband but I had zero desire to hang out with him 1:1 despite both wives pushing for it. Our kids stopped being friends and we stopped being friends with the family. Honestly it was a relief. Having to pretend to be interested in what they were saying was exhausting.
I get up at 7am to get kids ready for school and start work at 9. Work until 4ish and then go get the kids. Everyone is home by 4:30 or so but then we have sports 4 nights a week until about 7. Then dinner. Wife is not remote so generally gets home around 6pm. Weekends is sports on Saturdays. We have Sundays to ourselves right now which is great. I'm writing this in the 2 hour break between kids sports games. I took the youngest to football, came home, the wife took him to a birthday party and now I have to take the oldest to his game in an hour.
I hit the gym for an hour or so 4x a week sometime between 7 and 9 during the week depending on if I am having dinner with the family (sometimes I'll go during work). Then I go again on Sunday. Gym is pretty much the only me time I have and I will not miss it.
Gotten to the point where I struggle to think of people I meet as real. I feign interest until we can part ways. I don't even know people's names at work. They are all offshore as well so our hours don't really overlap. Can't even pretend to be interested in my siblings anymore. I have to see my wife's dad once a week and its a struggle. I dread him passing away as I am going to have to try and pretend to be upset. He is a great guy, I have nothing against him, just no connection.
It just is what it is, I love my wife and kids but just have zero attachment or empathy for anyone else.
Imagine the time we would have if....
Instead of doom scrolling on social media we called a friend.
Instead of binge watching another meh show, we had friends over to play cards or a board game.
Instead of over scheduling kids with constant activities, parents had a regular night out with friends while kids spent quality time at home with the other parent.
The time is there. It was in the past. We just have a finite amount of time and use it differently.
Imagine the time when kids could actually do things on their own and learn resilience, independence, and community alongside their friends. Instead, their parents now need to drive them everywhere alone because communities got rid of school buses, sidewalks, and speed bumps to help make cars go faster. We've done the real-life version of gamers min-maxing the fun out of a game.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/09/school-dr...
All of this assumes people have friends to start with. This becomes much harder for those without friends which I think is what the article was about. Not disagreeing with you though, untold hours have been wasted on social media.
Invite your childless friends to come visit you. I'm childless but all of my oldest friends have kids and all of those kids know me. It's probably easier for them to travel and if they stay a few nights you'll have time for both family time and adult time. Plus, I think it's great for kids to interact with adults who are trusted but aren't an authority figure.
A lot of people integrate both friends and kids into their lives, instead of wearing different hats and splitting time. Dinner with friends on a weekday or Friday. Playdates are a good excuse to spend 8 hours hanging out with with another parent. Drag the kids along to BBQs and campouts.
Combine it with kids stuff. Chat to fellow parents at PTA and sports. I have a circle of friends consisting mostly of fellow school parents and sports players still going 10 years after kids left school. We get together for beers and poker and some coffee mornings.
I do think 6.5 hours is much easier if only one spouse works. My wife and I both work demanding jobs, but during times when one of us has been in-between jobs or off work, things look very different.
I also have young kids but I pull off more than 4hrs per week with friends.
These conversations are difficult online because people who fall into routines without friend or personal time often refuse to believe that anything else is possible. Even in this comment thread there are accusations that other people are lying about spending time with friends because they just can’t believe it’s possible.
The common thread I see in discussions is the claim that every day is filled from start to finish with every activity. Now realistically we know you’re not exercising every single day, not doing laundry all weekend start to finish, and not reading a zillion PTA newsletters every night because those are just examples. Yet those lists are always given as reasons why people can never have free time even though they aren’t always happening.
It’s much harder for single parents, obviously, but for a household with two parents it shouldn’t be hard for one parent to go out with friends after the kids are down one night each week and/or for a couple hours on the weekend. This alone would get to 4hrs/week or beyond. I’m not exaggerating when I say every set of parent friends I know does some variation of this. Friend groups will sync up their nights away to get together.
Second, playing with kids is an easy opportunity to meet up with parent friends. We take the kids to a local park with local parents a couple days a week in the afternoon briefly before dinner. Really easy way to catch up while the friends are playing.
Third, once the kids are old enough to not require extreme supervision at dinner time we like to have friends over for dinner. Obviously this isn’t a fancy 3-course meal with wine afterward, but we don’t care. Friends like to stop by for a quick dinner.
Fourth, if you’re cramming your schedule so full of kids activities and cleaning tasks to keep the house constantly clean that you have zero wiggle room for finding a couple hours with friends each week, that’s a choice. Saying this makes a lot of people angry, but the truth is you have to prioritize and compromise. Some times we decide we don’t have time for another activity commitment. Other times we decide the house can stay messy for an extra day to catch an opportunity to meet up with someone. Most of the time we trade off parent to parent.
Like I said, it’s different if you’re a single parent. However every parent friend I know does some variation of this and we spend time with each other. If finding a measly 4 hours per week feels completely impossible, I would suggest stepping back and looking at priorities and how your splitting time between parents.
I should also mention that paying attention to things like screen time and distractions is important. I’ve had a few friends who were exasperated at how impossible it felt to do anything, until they checked their screen time tracker and realized that 3-4+ hours of every day was disappearing into their phone. For others this could be TV or computer Internet browsing. Some of this is always okay, but you have to realize it’s a choice you’re making about where the time goes.
Almost all my in-person friends nowadays are parents of kids who my kids associate with. Mostly through sports. You get to kill two birds - support your kids and associate with adults. A few you’ll make good bonds with.
Its all fun and games until the kids have a falling out. Then its clear it was very much a friendship of convenience. I always saw them as such but it was a little upsetting for my wife.
In some cases.
But my wife still meets at least monthly with a group of the moms from our first travel team when the kids were in 3rd grade - almost a decade since they were teammates. There was probably some trauma bonding that occurred.
>policing screen time
I had a TV in my room since I was 8 (1988) and my parents didn't police anything. Maybe this is a newer concern due to a greater understanding of tech dangers
Was having kids worth this in your opinion -- genuine question?
I come from a large family and have a large family. It’s hard, but definitely worth it.
More objectively, research seems to indicate happiness tends to be less vs childless during the first hard years, but it slowly evens out and pale with kids are generally much happier later in life.
I have a few opinions here. Unhappiness spreads faster than happiness. You don’t hear about all the happy families down the road, but you will hear about the dysfunctional one. Your friends don’t talk much about the good feelings snuggling up with their toddler, but will tell you about the massive meltdown that their toddler had a few weeks ago.
If you aren’t dysfunctional, set a consistent example, and are consistent with your kids boundaries, you don’t have to be unhappy with your kids. Along those lines, put your screens down and go do something with your kids (don’t just passively watch between doomscrolling) and you’ll find there’s a lot of enjoyment to be found for you too.
This a legit question before having kids, I don’t mean to belittle it, but after having kids, for me, it’s like asking if I wished the people I loved most never existed. The question no longer makes sense.
The only answer I give is “I wish I’d started sooner.”
Chasing kids is hard when you’re also chasing 50!
Not OP, but have kids, and no, I would not do it again if I could do it over for similar reasons they enumerate.
Plants are the new pets, pets are the new kids, and human kids are exotic pets for the wealthy or crazy (or a combination of those traits).
> human kids are exotic pets for the wealthy or crazy
I'm having a hard time parsing that statement.
Are you suggesting that only the wealthy can realistically afford to have children today, or that parents increasingly treat their children like status symbols or pets?
Both interpretations strike me as pretty dystopian.
> Are you suggesting that only the wealthy can realistically afford to have children today, or that parents increasingly treat their children like status symbols or pets?
A little of both. Kids are a luxury good in the current macro.
The cost to raise a child from 0-18 in the US in 2023 dollars is ~$330k (Brookings, USDA). This does not include daycare (~$1k/month if you can find a slot) nor college. No sick leave nor paternal leave mandate, no job security, and so on. 2.5M children experience homelessness each year in the US. 14M are food insecure.
Look at wage data, correlate against housing and other non discretionary expenses, back out to affordability.
> Both interpretations strike me as pretty dystopian.
Welcome to the shit show. “To know is to suffer.” —- Nietzsche
1k/month daycare? That would be amazing!
The sources I found do include daycare in the cost to raise a child, indeed child care is around 50% of that number.
Please provide them. Here are mine.
https://www.northwesternmutual.com/life-and-money/how-much-d...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/its-getting-more-expensiv...
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil...
https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-...
https://childcaredeserts.org/
Welcome to the shit show
no no no. welcome to america. in no other country in the world is raising kids so expensive and receives so little support.
I’m unsure I agree with this. South Korea, Japan, China, etc. This is clear from the total fertility rate, how it presents is just a different shade in each country. Outside of the Nordics and parts of Europe, I don’t think anywhere else puts an effort into making being a parent not suck. And even places putting material resources into family and parent support, it doesn’t move the needle.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/babies-birth-rate-d...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
ok, i don't know about south korea and what's going on there with the extremely low fertility rate. but china has way more support for children than the US. china's low fertility rate is not because of social or economical factors like elsewhere but because of the one-child policy which has been abolished a few years ago.
I don’t think anywhere else puts an effort into making being a parent not suck
i don't believe that is true. not even in developing countries. the reason we can't see that is that developing countries suffer from other problems. but those problems don't motivate people there to not have children. on the contrary.
And even places putting material resources into family and parent support, it doesn’t move the needle
because material considerations are not a big factor. you were arguing that having children is expensive, and that children are only to be afforded by the wealthy, and treated as a status symbol.
but if that is a factor then it is only a factor in the united states and nowhere else in the world. especially not in developing countries.
Not OP but definitely worth it for me.
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but most of the parents I know do not have these extreme schedules and lack of flexibility that leave zero time for friends.
I do know some parents who fell into the parenting version of “the cult of busy”. I think it’s easy to stack your calendar with a million things and commitments and then wonder where your time went. When someone starts complaining about never having any free time but then in the same paragraph mentions optional commitments like PTA involvement taking up their free time, you have to read between the lines to see what’s really happening. If I didn’t have enough time to see friends for even 4 hours per week, dropping PTA involvement would be an easy target.
Honestly, the time crunch trap happens to people in all situations, kids or not. I did some volunteer mentoring for a while and it was shocking to hear so many 20-somethings without kids or relationships tell me how they never had time to see their friends any more between their 9-5 job and chores. When pressed for details they reveal that they’re doing things like grocery shopping every day, spending 2 hours making and cleaning up dinner every night, an hour at the gym, 2 hours catching up on their Netflix, and on and on.
Life is all about priorities. Honestly as a parent I don’t know how anyone could get less than 4 hours/week with other parent friends. We always meet up with parent friends at the park or do other activities together. If you’re strictly entertaining kids alone and you’re not in a remote location, it would be my top priority to make some other parent friends quickly.
For me, absolutely. I have not accomplished anything nearly as personally satisfying. Watching my kid make a new friend or catch a pass in a game is far more rewarding than any personal accomplishment. Just going for a walk with them and enjoying the random conversations and questions is amazing. Would not trade that for the world
Many of my friends are similar age and they have kids. Our kids play together.
same. tag teaming has helped. our weekends are essentially split.
People didn't used to work this much. Now that both spouses in a household typically work the kind of schedule you mentioned along with increasingly longer commutes due to housing unaffordability, we spend more time at work cumulatively than generations before us did.
you are in the "intensive parenting" box as stated in the article
It's simple: they didn't work as much. Typically one parent would go out and work while the other took care of the home. When the first parent got back the house would be clean and dinner would be ready. Work was over.
The work parent tended to socialise in the evening and the home parent during the day.
The home parent was essentially self-employed, working directly for themselves and the family. A real "hustler" lifestyle.
Nowadays we've got everyone working full time for someone else leaving only evenings and weekends to work for ourselves. Or you spend a huge chunk of that salary on childcare, cleaners and dog walkers. We're addicted to work.
This is all feeding wealth directly to the owning class. People used to own a lot more themselves. They used to own clothes that could be repaired; furniture that could be polished, restored and lasted for generations; machines that could be serviced etc. Now nobody has time for any of that stuff. What you "own" is just worthless commodities like IKEA or Zara. Things that used to be assets are just another expense now.
The problem is there's no real way out for individuals. House prices are driven up by couples who both work. Tax systems benefits such couples too. So you're doubly screwed if you want to opt out of building billionaire wealth and instead work for yourself like they used to. Then you've got factors like settlements being built around cars, so now you need two cars, another huge expense (not an asset) or the stay at home parent is basically trapped at home all day. So now you're triply screwed.
What we really need AI for is a way out of these ridiculous local optima we get ourselves into. We desperately need to solve inequality. Unfortunately we also like to feel like we're in control, so any AI has its work cut out: guide humanity to happiness but trick them into thinking it was their idea. I have no idea why an AI would bother to do this for a species that themselves chooses not to do this for other animals and even each other, though.
Do. Less.
all the dogs and furniture and hobbies and subscriptions and running around. Grasping, grasping, grasping...
my partner and I are people of simple means. We garbage pick or get off Facebook marketplace most of our stuff for super cheap (nice OLD stuff... Which I repair!) but have a fairly nice home that we’ve bought. She saved a lot just working for the post office in there pay: She didn’t go anywhere, and enjoys things like house cleaning and doing the dishes and reading. It’s the same as the Buddhist monks I spent time with. I give this example and people flat out rage at me, saying how awful a life that is. But my partner is one of the kindest, happiest people and adores simple things (she's also really fit and stellar in bed, so that helps...) She has found ways to legitimately enjoy the small moments and being present in life, not chasing a bunch of shiny flashy things all around the world. I’ve learned a lot from her.
In short: we don’t need AI, we need to just do less and learn to get back to simplicity. THAT would afford time to socialize.
Off topic but have you seen the app Orgo? Meant for parents juggling kids sports schedules.
The article already mention physical changes (car dependent suburbs, lack of 3rd places) and cultural shift (work as identity and nuclear family) but I think the two last things can be expanded to: we now have higher expectations of friends/people we meet.
I recently moved back from Asia to Northern Europe, famous for being a place hard to make friends. I made a new friend, when I one day went to the local swimming pool and just started to talk with an old, pensioner guy.
He reached out to me later, we set up a coffe chat and now it's a biweekly routine.
It was a fun story so I told it to friend & partner/families. All of my women friends first reaction was caution. "what does he want? Be careful with your drink!". My guy friends were more perplexed on why I'd even bother befriending someone almost 50+ year older than me. What's there to be gained.
I realized a few years back that meeting people with absolute zero expectations is the most fun way. It even worked good on online dating. As long as I enjoy taking to the person (a low bar) it's not time wasted.
Time is not to be wasted. Everything needs a goal/reason. Most people cultivate this mindset and the added expectations on new connections, to me seems like a cultural shift that happened as a result of what the article describes. One can remove that sentiment even with the work/nuclear family stuff. (not sure about the physical constraints)
> It was a fun story so I told it to friend & partner/families. All of my women friends first reaction was caution. "what does he want? Be careful with your drink!". My guy friends were more perplexed on why I'd even bother befriending someone almost 50+ year older than me. What's there to be gained.
It's pretty sad and telling that people's first reaction to something as wholesome and positive as making a new friend is suspicion and selfish apathy. Illustrative of the widespread anti-social mental illness that we somehow have managed to normalize.
Go into the Reddit threads of anyone doing something interesting like showcasing their skill. All the top threads will comments like "he's lucky he still has fingers", "hope he washed his hands afterwards", "damn that's ugly", and on and on, on a video where I will see a skillful guy doing something that would be dangerous for me, but is clearly within normal safe boundaries for his skill level. It's just a feedback loop of negativity unless the person is both extremely beautiful and skilled in which case all the comments are about how hot they are. The threshold of quality is ridiculous, the only people who can meet it are genetic lottery winners who also have a makeup and camera team.
This is what we are judging potential friends against. They have to be both perfect and beautiful to get even close to matching what we see everyday on the internet.
In the same way porn can make your real sexual partners feel lacking, these perfect people on reddit/Instagram/TikTok will make any potential real friends seem lacking and worthless. Not worth the effort.
Meanwhile the fact that we are also less than perfect is kept bottled up, we avoid looking at ourselves in the mirror too closely, all of that gets shunted into the subconscious and bubbles back up as depression, lack of self worth, workaholism, addiction, and other mental health issues.
Good point. To uncover new good things, you have to jump in blind without much preexisting knowledge, e.g. when meeting people. You have to enjoy that process itself as well as any connections that come out of it.
> What's there to be gained
What are you gaining then? It must be something right?
Dispelling the existential fear of death through good feeling by sharing time with your fellow man?
Shared experiences, conversations and connection with another human being?
I agree with all the points made in the article, and chuckle to see some comments here (let bad communities fail!) that are manifestations of the lack of vulnerability brought about by living in online, single-player mode.
But in my experience, friendship quality is much more important than quantity.
I’m only truly friends with people I admire and am interested in, and grow to care about. Some of these friendships happen fast and others are slow burners - they aren’t all alike. But they are definitely hard to come across, particularly in middle age.
I believe those friendships give me the kind of benefits that experts suggests we lose in isolation. These are the kinds of friendships you carry with you wherever you are - often wondering what those friends would or do think about the things you are experiencing.
On the other hand, I have many acquaintances, some quite longstanding, where the friendship switch never got flipped. Perhaps I am viewed as a bit stand-offish. I am never not gracious but I just don’t have the small talk gene.
Quality is very important. For example, when people have serious issues such as drugs, it often turns out to be strongly related to the poeple they surround themselves with. So socializing purely for the sake of it, is not ideal. Some standards are needed. But being too picky and judgemental won't work. So a balanced approach is needed.
People saying it’s impossible with a family have really never frequented third spaces in Europe. Kids go everywhere with their parents and are allowed to roam as long as they remain within sight. The adults make friends and so do the kids. Most importantly, even if hypothetically nuclear families with young children couldn’t do it, younger and older people alike would be able to, which is still a major improvement to the current status quo. Second order effects from the existence of third spaces are simply a more open, pleasant, higher trust society with more independent, resilient adults. Say what you want about GDP, but fact is, I was much happier in Europe than the US and I live in a relatively walkable town close to NYC.
Oh, and you can absolutely have friends AND children. I have both.
I'm way out on the edge of the bell curve in terms of desire for 1 on 1 quality time with friends. Almost everyone enjoys time when it is given to them, but almost no one is proactive. I hear "Thanks so much for reaching out I am so bad at it" from practically everyone. I've concluded that most people simply don't have the executive function to manage and overcome such a disconnected social environment.
> I hear "Thanks so much for reaching out I am so bad at it" from practically everyone.
I feel the same way. you are our hero!
Honestly, I feel that a lot of people do not appreciate this kind of behavior as much as they should
Thanks, I appreciate that!
I am an introvert who prefers solitude to human interaction as my base mode. I find most interactions to be draining and unnecessary. They basically only increase or serve as a source of stress while offering nothing meaningful that somehow improves my mental state. I probably had this tendency but never had enough solitude to really recognize how much I preferred it. It is actually addicting and almost impossible to go back. I understand that in terms of social or financial success it’s not conducive or beneficial but in terms of spiritual growth it is. Even for me it’s certainly a useful skill to be able to connect with others and share experiences or material goods. I see many articles about a loneliness crisis so I guess for most people solitude is actually an unwanted state of affairs that causes them distress.
For the first 22 years of my life I was spending my hours in crowded school buildings. It turns out that most of my productivity happens in solitude. Learning through doing and self study. But now that I finally don't have that terrible rigid school structure anymore (for over a decade), the tables have turned. I am in complete isolation for entire days, most days. I found that I do want and need a bit of interaction, but not much is needed, and certainly not in the way that school provided that.
Yeah, I'm totally equipped with the empathy and wit to make friends and I do it sort of naturally at work, but whenever I change jobs and look back at the friendships I'm like, why did I bother. Solitude is so much better now that we have computers to interact with costlessly.
One curiosity I've noticed about close friendships through religious communities compared to other modern circles of "friendship": it is largely independent of age, socioeconomic status, and stage of life. In every other friendship circle I've been a part of, the basis has either been age (school/college), economics (work), extended family, or skill (sports and hobbies like motorbikes). Some friendships seem to be made through some shared interest (somebody here mentioned heavy metal, i consider you guys my friends on HN) but those tend to be heavily segmented by age/skill/socioeconomic status too. Religious communities are the only friendship circle I've ever been in where you easily connect with both young and old, regardless of skill/ability or stage of life. The unifying factor is "belief" and adherence to tradition. To this day, they remain the strongest and most stable relationships over time and space, even as we moved cities, changed jobs, and entered new stages of life.
They happen to coincide and support the most destructive with conservative tendencies and goals. The friendship there exiat on basis of common ennemy. Common ennemy put people together, but overall they are harming us all.
No-one ever suggests the simplest explanation... maybe socialising is just getting worse?
Where I live there were long covid lockdowns and most people expressed relief about not having to go to parties and make painful small-talk with strangers. They were already forcing themselves to go to social engagements because they didn't want to be seen as a loser, but they weren't enjoying it. This is historically unusual, people didn't see socialising as a chore necessary to maintain one's mental health a century ago.
Every article on the issue though takes as its starting point that socialising is obviously great and there must just be small obstacle which prevents people doing more of it. IMO there wouldn't be an epidemic of self-diagnosed social anxiety / high-functioning autism / 'introverts who get drained by social interactions' if people were actually enjoying their social engagements.
I agree with what you said in the other two paragraphs, but I think people _are_ suggesting what you said, and it is not really an "explanation": it is part of the observation itself
The article is claiming that people need to put more effort into organising social events with tips on how to do it. And the tips around escalating discloure etc. are very much like workplace ice-breakers... utterly awful experiences that everyone hates.
Unless you first diagnose why people dislike socialising nowadays you're unlikely to fix the problem. Enjoining people to 'invest' in relationships is entirely missing the point, people used to hang out with their friends because they enjoyed it not because they thought it was an investment.
yes i like internet better. most ppl are boring asf to talk to
Almost across the board in western countries, people have less friends, weaker friendships, and there’s less dating, sex, and marriage happening.
IMO this is the biggest challenge ahead of us. What’s the point of all this amazing life enhancing technology if we’re lonely, sad, and severed from our tribes.
What would happen if your friend relationships had a lot more similarities to romantic relationships? Scheduled outings, regular discussions about what is pissing you off, regular apologies, mundane/unscheduled time together, discussions about hopes and dreams, declarations of affection. Probably less physical touch...
Anyway, I feel like people think they can let friendships develop by osmosis. I don't think ANY deeply fulfilling relationship can just happen without real relationship work.
This is exactly why we built Soonly (https://soonly.com)! It's about scheduled time to connect with friends rather than relying on osmosis like you mentioned.
I wonder how much the polarization of politics contributes to this. I have friends on opposite sides of the political spectrum than me, but were able to basically segment off that area of discussion to enjoy each others company in other areas. It may be because we go back 20+ years with many shared experiences. I would guess many friendships do not have that level of bedrock to ground them, so developments like the recent political climate can easily uproot them
People certainly seem to be much pickier the past few years about only being friends with those that have matching political views. I try to avoid political discussions for this reason... though as someone that doesn't belong to either "camp" it's easy enough for me to find common ground with both sides on some issues so I can chat in a way that avoids major conflict.
I don't think the polarization merely contributes to these divisions, I'd say it's the whole point. It's easy to steer a democracy when 50% won't talk to the other 50%. Much more difficult if they occasionally agree on something.
What does the betta fish mirror has to do with anything regarding friendship?
I'm not sure I follow the metaphor. You can use a mirror to cause stress to one betta fish, but it seems like there would need to be more than just one fish and a mirror to capture this. I'm talking about the political machine working to ensure that 50% of voters are not friends with the other 50%.
I am asking what it has to do with friendship, implying that it has nothing to do with it. Unless... (now you complete my sentence either by denial, confirmation or deflection)
Uhh, nothing I guess. You need two fish for friendship (nevermind that bettas are too aggressive for that). With a fish and a mirror you only have one fish.
For friendship you need someone who doesn't talk like that.
Once you have been exposed to this kind of paranoid thinking, there is no way of building relationships of any kind anymore. It is like a spiritual death.
What is the bubble? The world of friends and healthy relationships, or the cold shitty place with cultural wars and divides everywhere?
If you bring someone to the shitty place, you better have the guts to acknowledge that that person will never, ever see friendship anywhere.
Wow, you see absolutes everywhere. Exposed once, spiritual death. World of friends, world of wars--pick one. It's all more complex than that.
Some relationships are easy because nobody is trying to sabotage them, others are hard because somebody is, others are hard for entirely different reasons. It's the middle case that I'm concerned with here. I agree that it's a pretty awful thing to harm a friendship by injecting it with unnecessary culture war bullshit but my claim is that in most cases it's neither of the friends who want that outcome, it's some remote third party who has decided to interfere. Sure it's a failing of one friend or the other if they take the bait, but they have not spiritually killed the other by doing so.
That is irrelevant.
I can see the "complexity" of the world just as clear as the absolute points of view.
It's a choice. If I recover and see beauty again, it means it was all fine. It wasn't, it will never be.
People who use social triggers must not get away. There will be blood on their hands, and there is nothing that can be done to avoid it or hide it.
It’s one thing when being on different sides of the political spectrum meant disagreeing about supply side economics. It’s another when it means they are racist, homophobic, etc.
I have a friend who on one hand believes all of the anti-vax, evil illegal immigrate stuff and might even believe that Trump’s tariffs are okay. But on the other hand, I have never heard him say anything negative about other people, cultures, sexualities etc.
I consider him a good friend. On the other hand, there was this other guy I was friends with for awhile. He became full MAGA. It got to the point where I just couldn’t deal with him anymore.
I guess the people I won’t deal with or Trump conservatives (ie populists). I’m good with traditional conservatives we can usually even have polite intellectual conversations about politics.
I think if you push your friend, specifically on the trans argument, you might learn something about him.
I'm not sure how anyone could believe immigrants are intrinsically bad without racism tbh.
I think it's the mass immigrations that (some) people are calling out as not in their own best interest, without necessarily believing the immigrants are bad or in any way worse humans than themselves to call it racist.
Illegal immigration is what he is opposed to.
It’s relatively easy for someone to understand just by taking a slight step back out of their world view why a man may be attracted to another man or a woman may be a attracted to another woman or someone may be attracted to both sexes.
But trans goes against everything they know about science. And even for those who are very much “let you do you” thinks it’s a bridge too far to have biological men in women’s sports.
This is a bridge too far for even me (yes I know it’s an unpopular opinion) and I’m a “f*! the police”,BLM, universal healthcare, free college education, religious skeptical, increase the safety net and lean liberal
Are you okay with me living as a woman as long as I promise not to play any professional sports? :P
Yep. I would call you by your preferred name and pronoun and fight anyone who discriminated against your ability to get a job, a passport, etc.
I've found it's generally not worth it to push the discussion when it comes to politics. People will just dig in and there goes the friendship.
I'm (apparently, or so I'm told) a flaming lefty lib, who recently moved out of the Bay Area to a very "red" part of California. If I limited my friends to only people like me politically, I'd have to be a hermit. I basically take it as given that any new person I strike up a conversation with will not agree with my politics, so I just don't bring it up. Most of my friends got the hint clearly when they brought some of their Trump shit up and I immediately steered the conversation away. We have a good understanding--let's talk about positive things we have in common: hobbies, beer, cars, whatever. Don't bring up politics or religion, and you can make friends with anyone!
Some of them just can't bear to live even a few minutes without talking about their politics at every possible moment, and they're just not friends anymore.
That must be where we differ. I don't want friends who vote for Republicans. I am trans so I have less choice. It's my head on the chopping block once they get bored of hurting immigrants
> while the percentage of those with ten or more close friends has fallen by nearly threefold
I genuinely think it's not possible to maintain close friendship with this many people, especially if they're not in the same group. Or perhaps my definition of a "close friend" differs from an average american, both now and back then.
Can we say that friendship has shifted from being an assumed part of life to something you have to consciously work at. It made me realize how rare certain friendships have become - like with my two best friends, we can go a long time without talking, but when we meet up, it feels like no time has passed at all. We don't message constantly, but when one of us is going through something, we're always there for each other. It feels like that kind of bond is getting harder to find these days.
It’s crazy out there for a 40yo.
One thing I’m considering is that maybe it’s ok if friends don’t reciprocate. I think some people just have to be the inviters or relationships fall apart.
I struggled with this after a divorce. I relied on my wife to be the inviter. When I lost her, I lost my social group too because I didn't take initiative to maintain friendships.
Now I'm 40, divorced, and have an atrophied social network. Forcing myself to become an inviter is the only path out of loneliness.
> I think some people just have to be the inviters or relationships fall apart.
As annoying as it is, this is definitely true. I've only recently become an inviter, and it's made all the difference. It helps to recognize that not everybody is an inviter/organizer.
Any tips?
Invite people to things. You’re probably overthinking it
It really is exactly this. My default mindset is "everybody's busy with their own lives, so they probably don't have time so I won't even try to invite them to X." Change your assumptions a little bit to instead assume people want to do things. If they say no, so be it. But I've found that people want to be invited out to do more things than they are, so send the invites.
I started swimming with a community team two years ago, and about 4 months in I invited them to also lift weights with me. Now there are about 8 of us that are together 5 mornings per week. Took a chance and invited them on a trip, and now 5 of us are going on a week long trip together.
Find a group of people doing something you like. If it's a tech meetup, community organization, hobby group, whatever. What it is doesn't matter. What matters is that you find people with whom you share _an_ interest. Then take a chance there and say "hey, want to meet up for lunch next week?" Or just say "hey, I'm going to see X next weekend, want to come?"
Yes here too, and I’m guilty of the focus on family over friends, but also my peers are too and it creates a bunch of people that used to be close that never really see each other because they prioritize their immediate family
Guilty? Your family is your priority. Your duties toward them come first.
Someone’s got to host the salon man. Alternatively someone organises “the gang’s[1]” nights outs and trips.
[1] Overwhelmingly it’s one guy and if they leave the nights out and trips just stop.
Does this also apply to texting? (some people always have to text first, otherwise the other will never write again). Or is it just that the other doesn't want to be your friend?
It depends on how they respond and how it goes. If the attitude is great and the time together is great, all is well. There are two sides to the coin. Being the inviter means you get to choose who to invite. Of course you have to invite people you really want to spend time with. And times change, things could always flip around, maybe one day you'll be in a position where people are reaching out. It's dynamic, like the wind.
It’s not what it used to be. I find people are more self-centered than ever. What to speak of friends even family will not spare a moment for you. Many couples do not have kids for this reason. Who wants to make that sacrifice. Covid accelerated this. People got burned out, then realized they needed to take care of themselves better since no one else will (especially after layoffs). I don’t think the pendulum has swung back yet. Obviously I’m generalizing here and this is biased by my own experiences.
If you don’t see your friends in person, you’ll lose the thread, and it’s hard to pick up again.
Of course that’s an over generalization but for the most part it’s true.
Make an effort, make the calls, maintain the relationship by giving it your time, in person. Or the friendship will wither and die.
Again, it depends. I have friendships that I made over the internet, that lasted 8 years before I even learned their real name. Now we work together and live in the same city. Maybe the times were different though.
For most part it is the fear of rejection that prevents someone from making that effort or call to organize.
yes, this and the hope that i'll find a better opportunity to reconnect, like a better reason to call, so that the risk of rejection is reduced.
i recently reconnected to a bunch of people that i haven't spoken to in 20 years. i figured i am not going to find a better opportunity, and if i don't reconnect soon i'll probably never do it.
While I can attest to the accuracy, concerning the US, at least a few European countries where I live(d) do not appear to suffer of the same issue.
The content was alright but the fade-in animation of every single paragraph was annoying. This is a text article, not a startup company's marketing page! It was especially bad when I was hitting Page Down quickly to try to skim the content; the animation forced me to wait until the text showed up.
1. People have lower tolerance for jerks.
2. A few bad apples can spoil a group.
3. Maintaining a group is a thankless job.
4. Third places are money making establishments now rather than community focused. So people save up to go to the ones that they'll remember. So there's competing money for these attractions, and the experience undergoes enshitification.
Solutions?
- lower the cost of community space so more people can enjoy them.
- social etiquette needs be enforced through culture. Conformity has its benefits. We don't need planes to land because Johnny had too much to drink.
that's why i enjoy going to hackerspaces. they are not free of drama, but generally welcoming and give the freedom to do a lot of things, including sitting in a corner in front of your computer ignoring everyone, giving you the freedom to join in whenever you feel comfortable.
Having friends is great but not "having" to have them is also great, which is what individualism allows us to do. Many people get in trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd. Many people also become wealthy by hanging out with the right people.
But being able to live your life alone without dying is a privilege that we should be thankful for.
You chose very interesting two different outcomes. Super vast majority of people just hang out with decent people, have drinks, talk about stupid stuff and call it a day. I’d like to think that people don’t strive to have friends for “networking” or are scared to have friends because “wrong crowds”. It just feels wrong.
My friends have been there at my low lows, and knowing that I can theoretically call them at any point of my day just makes me feel good about myself. Conversely, I’d like to think that my friends can call me at any point of the day for no reason at all. Stupid stuff like having a small joke group chat of “rags to riches” where we just share stupid ideas is just liberating. Meeting them in person and doing stuff together, even if some of them (or me) hates it, is still objectively a nice feeling.
The foundations are shaky when they don't compare to other countries : there are probably many mistakes they missed, that would have been obvious when looking at it from another perspective.
Been chewing on all this - yeah, making new friends these days feels way harder than it used to. I catch myself thinking its just easier not to try at all. Idk if Ill ever really get that energy back but seeing people push through is kinda inspiring tbh.
> Higher cost of living and stagnating wages for low-and middle-income earners means that everyday Americans must work harder to keep up
where are wages stagnating and for whom?
I have thought a lot about this, and I think one large cause is low- and zero- effort interactions. Anything that requires constant effort eventually dies out. If someone has to initiate, pick up the phone and text you and invite you out, one of you is going to eventually stop doing that. We used to have lots of low- and zero- effort interactions. You saw people at church, at family events, you run into them around town, at the bar, etc. As the article says: in the past people participated more in clubs and organizations, sports leagues and volunteered more. Young people have replaced alcohol and bars with weed and abstinence. Now even when people do see each other, the friction is far higher. It's hard to strike up a conversation with someone on a phone, or with earbuds in. Polarization has made it so that every issue is life or death (because many things truly are [1]) and so now it is only acceptable to talk to the correct portion of society. The worst things in the world are constantly livestreamed to our faces in 4K, from the news to social media to the Citizen app, so now you know that the public is insane and you'd be insane to talk to them. In 2005 the news might feature the 95th percentile bad shit because that's the best they could find, but now we all have 4K cameras on us all the time, so on social media you can find the 99.999th percentile bad shit. In a world of eight billion unique humans, that microscopic sliver of the bell curve is a horrifying place.
I come to HN for insightful comments, and of course there is one in the 335 posted here: that socializing is no longer necessary for survival. In 2025 your crises are for your therapist and your financial issues are for a fintech and you move house with Dolly and your career is for LinkedIn and your Ikea assembly is for Angi. In 2001 nearly everyone would use their friends or family for those things; in 2025 you don't need them.
And so we are left with a world where you don't strike up a conversation anymore; it's too hard and too dangerous and too risky. You don't go to church (too problematic) or the bar (bad for you.) You don't hit on people (there's Tinder.) You don't go to the store (Amazon) and if you do go to a restaurant you don't talk to anyone (pickup.) You don't see your friends and family; you don't need them to move (use an app) or put together a sofa (use an app) or talk about your feelings (go to therapy.) As it turns out, you can replace love and touch and hugs and hate and bus conversations and bank tellers and racist neighbors and unprotected sex and and and and all of the things in all of the people with one little screen just a few inches square.
Technology is destroying our society and our lives.
- - -
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43357719
I was just telling my son that 90% of the time I visited my granddad one of his friends would be there. I have only met up with one of my friends this year!
That is a spectacular change. I put it down to the amount of time he had to pursue his hobbies and interests (most of these friends were a part of that) vs me who is at work all the time.
I agree with solitude as a preference. I do have a couple of good friends, but an occasional weekday lunch or a much more occasional holiday dinner is good enough to connect.
Other than that, every minute I don't have to spend with my family is precious. And every such a minute with enough energy to do something productive is even more precious. So yeah, for me solitude is absolutely a preference.
I have zero friends. I tried to treat few as friends and helped alot but they were always busy when I was in need so decided to not treat anyone as a friend
> Neuroscience helps us make sense of these findings. Research shows that hearing a familiar voice reduces cortisol and boosts oxytocin—hormones tied to stress relief and bonding—while text-based communication and video calls fail to trigger the same response .
this… feels a bit off. I would have to look at that article to see what they are saying.
I’ll add in a hot take. I think the entitlement of the more recent generations has a strong cause for this as well. I’m not one to say that millennials or whomever are more entitled than previous ones but when it comes to romantic connection - I definitely believe some are.
We see the rise of online dating apps being the number one way (by a large margin) for urban educated singles to meet their future partners. If you’re in a place like SF or NYC, you can completely forget about meeting your future spouse at some hobby, the gym, or even in a friend group. I think a lot of this has to do with entitlement - a strong belief that a person deserves a match that is unwaveringly perfect/better-than-themselves. This Disney-ification of romance is very strong among certain crowds.
In my view, this has a strong effect on social circles. People won’t introduce anyone anymore. You might have a party and people might end up together but the idea of specifically inviting people or introducing friends to each other for romantic purposes is, practically speaking for yuppie circles, gone. The main reason I’ve seen is that certain people have gotten increasingly hostile to anyone even suggesting a person to them that is less than perfect/godly. To the point where many people are afraid of suggesting anything and therefore will not risk their own reputation and friendship because they really feel they’ll lose their friend if they even suggest a potential romantic connection.
So, anyway, my belief is romance within social circles is quickly dying due to entitlement and this has a strong pusher for people to not put as much effort into them. Once that is established, it carries over into the rest of your life because you didn’t ever prioritize it. Therefore, even if you’re partnered, you have learned to live without.
It’s shocking how few relationships I’ve seen are from social circles. If anyone ever studies how people 25-35, educated, and living in major cities dates… being single will be more common than any non-app method.
I tend to believe that individualist societies tend to fracture families, and make people live with their own kitchen and living room. That's not good, it's like a social prison.
I can understand that people want to have 100% privacy and not exist near people they don't get along with, but not sharing a kitchen and living room seems a bit too far.
Also I am sad that apps like the defunct foursquare or social network are not actively trying to make neighbors connect with each others. I fail to understand why.
I suspect that in the 70s, sexual liberation, despite its advantages, caused an epidemic maternal deprivation, where people are now unable to feel comfortable near others.
What are plausible antidotes to this trend? I was reminded of the Stoop Coffee blog post about two months ago.
Found it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618
Friends were the Internet of a now bygone era.
o/t but who made that web design? Text blocks loading one by one as you scroll down, but not at all with JS off. However you can hold [PageDown] to force-load them all and then scroll normally both up and down. WHY?
"Taken together, these trends suggest that Americans are increasingly retreating inward instead of engaging in communal activities. "
I have seen, over the ,last ten years, a great depression, as in mood. People are getting more depressed, and that leads them inward, and it is driven by anxiety. Most people are "flight" when they are faced with anxiety.
And the capitalism and online world has made isolation much easier and way more "enjoyable". Movies, porn, food, all of it acquired without a single human contact. Now people are clamoring they want to work from home as well, making loneliness even more available.
This is the outcome of hypercapitalism[1]. Extracting labor from the humans while feeding it all its' needs through the tubes of the internet.
I am writing this in a Starbucks right now. Ten years ago I would find couches and comfy chairs in every store. Now? stiff Uncomfortable chairs in a cold industrial setting, the store and counter set up for rushed to go orders.
This is not about something being wrong with people, it is a system that is tearing us apart.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978047067059...
It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival.
Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
Until recently, individuals needed to be part of some sort of kinship group to get their needs met and to survive. To communicate with anyone in near real time you had to be close by.
We have managed to engineer a society where individuals can survive "on their own" - basically outside their kinship groups. This is possible thanks to globe-spanning networks of communication and trade.
Kinship groups are great, but many of them have painful costs. Some 60 percent of Americans, for example, suffered an adverse childhood experience in kinship groups. Some of these could not be avoided - like a loved one's untimely death. Most of these negative experiences were intent or neglect by kinship group members.
If your early experiences of kinship groups are negative, you are less likely to seek out other human connection. You have learned that your kinship group is not reliable. If people genetically close to you cannot be relied on, then why should it be different for strangers?
The connections you do find tend to be focused on your interests, and those people don't need to be nearby for you to have a strong connection. But you still have your prior experiences keeping you skeptical of human reliability.
Personally, I sympathize with everyone who is sad about communities becoming fragmented.
I think, though, that if these communities were as supportive, inclusive, or beneficial as they imagine themselves to be this would not be a problem.
Bad communities should be allowed to fail. That is probably what is happening here.
> It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival.
The psychological argument is that it is necessary for survival — that a society that has long taken underlying healthy behaviours for granted is discovering that it's losing what defines society itself.
Trust, cooperation, sustainable development, sound policy-making, education, child-care...
Altruism, trust, and cooperation often emerge from acts and choices that seem completely self-interested.
Heck, cooperation is a survival strategy that came out of evolution. It exists outside of humans. It doesn’t need to come from human intent.
It feels weird to me that people think they can intelligently design cooperative societies and groups. You can try, but there’s always going to be trade offs between individuals and the group.
In this moment, individuals are in a place where they can avoid many of those trade offs and costs. I think this is generally positive considering my own experience of costly kinship groups. But I can see why others disagree.
> In this moment, individuals are in a place where they can avoid many of those trade offs and costs.
This sounds like what some call the Libertarian Housecat position. "My needs are met, and I am unaware of complex externalities that make meeting my needs possible."
Indeed. For me, being aware of those complexities is what gives me hope that there’s a new emerging paradigm.
> Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
This is wishful thinking. The resilience of communities is orthogonal to their moral worth, which is inherently subjective. Many communities which have horrific traits survive and thrive for centuries and even millennia. Many which I'm sure you would consider morally good are perilously close to failure.
Communities, like all living things, are subject to the whims of extinction events.
When a mountain falls out of the sky, it’s no one’s fault (not even the bad people) that the community failed.
> Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder. And, what would be some sensible ways of detecting and handling failure at such scale.
Sure. That said, the nation state is often little more than regional elites legalizing their control over workers and capital.
If your local elites are generally better than the alternative people tend to stick around
Broadly agree. I'm probably too upset to write about the local elites with anything bearing even a passing resemblance to objectivity, but an outbreak of incompetence is the overall impression.
> sensible ways of detecting and handling failure at such scale
War and revolution. 'Burn it down and start from scratch' is an extreme path to fix a failing country. Historically, the people that rebuild are rarely the same people that burned it down.
Grim and plausible.
> Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder.
No. Imagined communities are fake communities with none of the feedback mechanisms that make real communities resilient to elements that have extremely different priorities to the median member. See how the Swedish Social Democrats imported over 1% of the Swedish population in one year from Syria.
Interesting take. And yeah, indeed, Sweden. It breaks my heart.
Yes, when the nation is ethnically homogenous you can have that. But it's not a guarantee.
"I against my brother. I and my brother against my cousin. I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" -Arab Proverb
It’s a Bedouin proverb, not an Arab one, and it’s me, not I.
well put.
I did nazi this coming …
How a child is supposed to survive "on their own" ? And why do you think this would even be a good thing ?
“On their own” is in air quotes because it’s a vast simplification.
In kinship group days, and especially before vaccines, children simply didn’t survive. They died by the millions.
Today, a child has a viable alternative to the abusive or neglectful kinship group. Very often it is The State, but still. An alternative!
Ah, I had a different interpretation of "until recently"...
I am afraid that the child is still pretty screwed... especially if you try to generalise this to 60% of children !
In "On Love", bell hooks points out just how screwed children are by their circumstance and their lack of agency/autonomy. Highly recommend reading her.
"Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail."
Are you not assuming something is not killing these communities from the outside?
Should all people who get an infection be allowed to die?
People are being squeezed to death by hypercapitalism and you blame the communities?
Life has a 100 percent fatality rate
People fight for communities they want to preserve. There’s no guarantees that fight will be successful.
But when they don’t fight? Maybe it’s because they can’t. Or don’t want to. No one should ask them or force them to.
"Life has a 100 percent fatality rate"
So, "no one should ask" a suicidal person to not kill themselves "or force them" not to.
It is when people cannot fight for themselves that those of us who can fight have to fight even harder. I am saying this as someone who has attempted suicide twice.
You are literally arguing in favor for shrugging your shoulders to things like slavery.
No one should ask a suicidal person not to kill themselves.
If you believe in autonomy, every human has the right to decide when and how to end their lives. Slavery denies human autonomy by taking all control away.
Even when you think their decision is a bad one, it’s their life and their decision.
Asking isn’t forcing. And people who are suicidal are often in an unhealthy state of mind that doesn’t persist over an extended period of time. And we obviously place limits on autonomy in all sorts of ways.
I don’t make the distinction between asking and forcing. To me, you can ask why someone wants to die. But stopping them? Or asking them to stop? Eh, not up to me.
asking
> The act of inquiring or requesting; a petition; solicitation.
forcing
> The accomplishing of any purpose violently, precipitately, prematurely, or with unusual expedition.
-
unless you’re a psychopath, your 20 year old offspring calling you at 4am about to kill themselves is gonna result in you doing basically anything you can to save them.
it’s very easy to sit on the internet and take a perceived moral high ground. it’s much harder to retain that high ground when you get that phone call.
i used to have all sorts of bullshit “rules” like this [0]. but life ain’t binary man. absolutisms don’t really exist out there in the real world. i know it probably makes you feel “safer” knowing that you have a “rule” for this that you feel you can apply carte blanche — it used to for me — but it’s all bullshit man. it’s just the policeman in our own heads.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43803874
I get why you see this as me having an inflexible black and white rule. I see it differently.
I see respecting individual autonomy as the best way to respond to the shades of grey in life.
This respect for autonomy goes all the way to the ultimate act of choosing if and when to end your own life.
Even if that decision is a mistake, I believe individuals are free to make fatal mistakes.
Suicidal people are in a broken state, overcome by emotions and irrationality. When over that they’ll likely thank you for stopping them and likely to not understand themselves what the drive to kill themselves was except for remembering how cloudy they felt.
That's all valid, but I'm going to stick to my autonomy rule. People are free to make fatal mistakes.
Let’s call it what it is, a frecession
Friends without benefits
I have two groups I meet with every week around 6 am for an hour for about 10 years. Been a huge blessing!
Yeah, we "optimized" connection using tech, like everything else these days.
What happened? Capitalism.
In American culture, hyper-individualism has become a virtue somehow but this too is just a symptom of capitalism. Why? Because people who act collectively are a threat to capitalist power structures.
The whole "gig economy" is nothing more than needing a 2nd and 3rd job just to survive as real wages continue to stagnate or decline and costs keeping going up. That's less free time.
The Internet is a negative here too. Physical proximity has historically had huge power in creating freindships. But capitalism rears its ugly head here too in the destruction of so-called "third places".
High housing prices hurt everybody. It destroys community spaces. Hobbies that were once cheap escapes become way too expensive. Housing costs are an input into everything. Take spiraling childcare costs. You need physical space. That's now way more expensive.
Lastly, there is a natural trend for people who marry and have children to replace friends with family. There is an issue of shared life experiences. 50+ years ago pretty much everyone is in the same boat. Now? By choice or necessity, people are opting out of this "traditional" life and this naturally creates a divide.
What happened? Capitalism.
It was desegregation. Read about the decline of public pools, municipal trash service and free ambulances.
But there is a world outside of the USA and some of the same problems are happening there too.
Don’t know about other countries. The point you made is relevant and interesting.
Thank you kindly, good sir.
Maybe it's b/c vast majority not doing well financially?!
> when people feel isolated, they become more sensitive to social threats and more likely to misinterpret interactions negatively, through the lens of rejection
"I think they are saying that they want lasagna."
C'mon, don't be assholes.
There is plenty of evidence that teenagers were encouraged to ostracize certain personas (other teenagers!), and that behavior spread out of control to more age groups and unforseen interactions.
The hubris of trying to generate little soldiers destroyed our cultural inheritance.
"The lens of rejection", great.
I heard pagliaci is in town, you should go see him, he can cheer you up. I mean, I heard psychology is in vogue, maybe you should all see one.
Please, stop this shit. Let the internet die in peace instead of juicing the last drops of it to try and make yourselves look good.
My personal hot take is it's because the majority of people are consuming caffeine and that drug harries you to no end.
It may be. Generally stimulants (legal, soft ones such as cafeiine and nicotine, as well as stronger ones) stimulate parts of the brain that facilitate productivity and focus, but at the cost of "warm" things such as empathy, romance, comradry. Whereas depressants, such as THC and opioids, lower productivity but facilitate these "warm" behaviours. Due to coffee being relatively light, the effect may not be as obvious as the behaviour you see when people take large amounts of stimulants.
This may also tie in to work, as more mentally taxing office work I believe is much easier to do while on a mild stimulant such as caffeine. I could let go of cafeeine, but I think I'd struggle to make money.
It is indeed a hot take, an argument you don't hear often.
interested -- can you tell more?
It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival.
> has fallen by nearly threefold
What on earth does this word salad mean? Fallen by 300%? 200%? 75%? 2/3? All are reasonable interpretations of this incoherent math.
> to tolerate the messy work of forming friendships
If it's true that people are becoming worse at maintaining friendships and losing some skill or tendency they require, then people are ipso facto also worse at being friends. (And even if there's no ipso facto corollary, the following seems just as valid an explanation for the decline in friendship as the author's expnarion: not that anybody is worse at maintaining friendships but rather that there are fewer friendships worth maintaining, fewer people worth the effort.)
I have no idea whether this is actually happening. I'm just stunned by the article's poor, predictable reasoning and odious, sanctimonious, middle-brow, TED-talk moralism: the author takes it as a given that we "manifest" our social lives, that somehow (magically?) our intention and dedication create the desired reality. The author doesn't consider an alternative hypothesis.
But if I tell you that someone is a bad, tedious, or insufferable friend, you won't expect, let alone (I hope) encourage, me to "tolerate the messy work," demonstrate the "courage" this author has decided is missing, or "show up" and be "vulnerable." You'll encourage me, rather, to save my energy for those who deserve it.
If social skills have withered in some portion of a person's pool of available, possible friends, then that person not only cannot be blamed for ending friendships; doing so is actually the best outcome, short of "manifesting" more tolerable people.
Edit:
> embedded myself in existing social structures and prioritized in-person social activities —ecstatic dance gatherings at the Harvard Divinity School, morning prayers at Memorial Church
Uh huh. If you're the kind of person who decides, I don't know, to seek friendship through daemonic possession, speaking in tongues, or, I don't know, shaman-guided spirit journeys, you're not someone whose advice I particularly want.
I think it's pretty normal"
threefold = three times = 3x
fallen by 3x means now it is 3x lower, so if the old value was x now the value is x/3
You're right that it's normal(ish), but it's sloppy. The new value isn't 3x lower than the original. The old value is 3x the new, and the new is 2/3 lower than the old.
> that those who engaged in face-to-face interactions at least once a week experienced better physical and mental well-being, whereas communication through calls or texts did not have the same effect. Neuroscience helps us make sense of these findings. Research shows that hearing a familiar voice reduces cortisol and boosts oxytocin—hormones tied to stress relief and bonding—while text-based communication and video calls fail to trigger the same response .
The HN majority "work from home" advocates disagree with this
My friends get to know the real me. The rap loving, occasionally inappropriate, skepticism of the police, occasional f bomb throwing, shit talking while playing cards, can drink most people under the table without breaking a sweat etc.
The work me is the “looking at things from a 1000 foot view”, “taking things to the parking lot”, “and adding on to what Becky said”.
When I talk to them about what concert I went to, it’s limited to Maroon 5, Stevie Wonder and my friend who is in a punk band. I don’t discuss the concert where my wife and I were at lil Jon screaming “bia bia” or Ice Cube was rapping “F** the Police”.
Code switching is a real thing. I’m in a customer facing role (cloud consulting) and I always have to filter everything I say through the corporate lens. At home and with my friends, I can be the real me.
Not necessarily: they might just prefer to to try to keep their social lives separate from work so that their employer doesn't have the power to suddenly cut off their main source of human connection.
Supply considerations aside, things get confused without clear boundaries. Your friend gets more favor than your manager. Soft power and so on.
I've found wisdom in the phrase "Don't shit where you eat". Most consistent way I've found to regret a role: introduce friends/family
Also From the article:
> It’s often said that if you ask an American what they do, they’ll tell you about their job, whereas a European might talk about their hobbies or passions. Data backs this up;
> But the role of work in shaping identity and social life in the United States has perhaps never been stronger. For example, 77% of Americans work more than 40 hours per week, and few take their full paid leave.
I guess people aren’t making friends at work the way they thought they were?
This is why my conversation starter is always “what keeps you busy”? and not what you do for work.
I hate talking about what I do for work. My life is so much more than my job. I’m also much more interested in learning about other people’s live outside of work, hobbies, where they travel, etc.
You can have face-to-face interaction with people other than your colleagues.
> online friendships require a different set of social behaviors than in-person ones
Yeah. In real life there's no karma value next to your name and no string of reactions next to every statement you utter.
Imagine a VR-based dystopia which displayed such information to everyone you encounter.
Change the way you connect - I have some friends I made over the last two years over... IRC. There's something personal about on-line pure text based communication (with bots/bouncers not being allowed). Like really being in a room with everyone else.
For a more modern alternative, discord in a relatively small server should work well. Especially if you connect over a shared interest.
> no string of reactions next to every statement you utter.
I always assumed reactions were meant to be analogous to people making facial expressions as you spoke.
Yes, but IRL those expressions are not persisted to Redis
Thanks, that's an important point. Potentially never being able to move on from what you said or how it was perceived is a big difference.
The Orville had an episode about that.
I bet Social Media (and even Texting) is almost entirely to blame for the "loners" phenomenon (i.e. lack of close friends). Almost everyone has a desire for social interactions, but Social Media is where they can get that, with the least effort, and money.
Smaller contributing factors are 1) Slow economy, where people don't have the money for social activities or even dating like the boomer generation did for example, and 2) Rise of Autism rates, which makes people disinterested in social activities and even fearful of them.