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nuclearsugar 1 days ago [-]
These days I must make a real effort to be social on a regular basis. Personally I've found satisfaction in going to meetups to find like minds. I also go with my gut and in the moment ask to swap Instagram usernames with interesting people and promptly schedule with them to get coffee. If they prove to be as interesting and kind as I had sensed, then I invite them to a potluck dinner party which I throw every other month. In this way, I invite people under my umbrella, keep them in my life by regularly seeing them, slowly build a friendship, and hopefully they make friends with the regulars at dinner party. I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person. I don't particularly enjoy being the instigator for most social occasions but the pros outweigh the cons.
1659447091 1 days ago [-]
> I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person. I don't particularly enjoy being the instigator
Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with, it made things a lot easier. Went from making up all kinds of stories in my head about myself and others to thinking about each interaction as practice and realized lot more people were like me, thinking I'll be invited somewhere or talked to if I was liked or was interesting enough; waiting for someone else to do the inviting or talking first. I just remind myself that a lot of others also want to be invited or talked to, and that reminder greatly reduced my fear of rejection.
nuclearsugar 24 hours ago [-]
Indeed I've had a similar realization and it's a very helpful reminder. Also every time I go to a meetup, I remind myself: to be interesting, you must be interested.
1659447091 23 hours ago [-]
> to be interesting, you must be interested.
I think thats the crux of it, most people respond positively when others are interested in them. As long as its genuine, asking about, or be interested in, others goes a really long way.
rubicon33 23 hours ago [-]
It helps to know a thing or two, about a wide range of topics, for this reason.
Take for instance someone telling you about their career. "I'm a software developer".
You can express interest with a response like "Oh, thats cool, what made you go into that line of work?" but thats a very generic, shallow response.
If you know a thing or two about software, for example, you can ask more interesting questions that show your interest in them, and your knowledge of the space. "Woh cool, how is AI coding impacting your life?"
Suddenly, it seems like you're much more interesting yourself, AND you're interested in them.
The tricky part nowadays is everyone has very niche interests. It's harder than ever to really have a breadth of knowledge that is broadly applicable. This was easier before the internet, before travel, before telecommunication. When your community was your community and news traveled slowly, it was a lot easier to learn about what impacted others.
roncesvalles 16 hours ago [-]
I love being asked "what made you go into that line of work?" because I can answer with "mostly the money" (which is a very honest answer yet socially somewhat inappropriate), and their reaction to my answer immediately gives me a signal into whether we're going to be close or not.
Some people act so shocked when you tell them you did something because it would make you richer and not because an angel came to you in a dream and whispered in your ear to save the disenfranchised underclass (and all the cats) by writing code, or whatever's the current faux na pas reason to pursue a vocation these days.
vineyardmike 7 hours ago [-]
It’s considered socially crass to just care about money in life (see: Ebenezer Scrooge), but everyone does a job for money - very few jobs are actually altruistic. There are many jobs that few would do if not for the high income (eg Lawyer) or is just difficult or boring. It’s a given that the income is a motivator in a high earning job.
Answering why you picked this particular path to high income is more interesting of an answer to the person asking and carries the conversation. Did your parents do it, did you have a professor that captured your attention, did you just google “easiest job to make a lot of money?” and pick the first one?
Someone asking wants to understand how and why you make decisions. What motives you. Etc. It’s the XY problem and from the other person’s perspective, you’re answering the wrong one.
mejutoco 5 hours ago [-]
> Someone asking wants to understand how and why you make decisions. What motives you
This is too simplistic. Someone might ask that for a million reasons. Also, you will be judged not only by your answer. Being so direct might show you are not on autopilot in the conversation, your humour or that you only care about money, depending on a lot of other factors. It might make one more memorable as well. I personally would read it as light humour, unless it is accompanied by a dead eyes stare.
ZenoArrows 12 hours ago [-]
I think the reason they act that way is because you're signaling to them that you dislike your job. Which is fine, but ideally you'd find some gratification in it that isn't just monetary, since it's what you spend most of your time doing. Money can only compensate so much for a shitty job.
gn_200826 12 hours ago [-]
One of the best signals I found for whether I will enjoy my conversation with someone is if they commit a small social faux pas
dimaaan 11 hours ago [-]
I respect the honesty. Curious, though: would you say that in a job interview too?
roncesvalles 11 hours ago [-]
No, and I'd also judge the interviewer hard for asking that question. I don't like interview questions that are really just cues to start spewing rehearsed bullshit.
yshamoun 19 hours ago [-]
I agree with your point, but as a software developer I’d much prefer the generic response in your example.
hn_user82179 17 hours ago [-]
lol yeah, everyone I meet now immediately asks me what I'm going to do about AI
c0nsumer 9 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, this is what the book "How to Win Friends and Influence Others" gets at. While it's ostensibly a sales book, the very basis is how to be genuinely nice to people so they want to talk to you and be around you. And from those relationships come sales opportunities.
As another person for whom relation stuff does not come naturally, this was incredibly helpful because little pieces of advise really do work, because they really are nice things to do/say.
A favorite example of mine, when starting to talk to someone who probably already doesn't care for you is to find something -- anything -- that it's clear they like or chose, which you also happen to like, and pay it a genuine positive complement. And perhaps talk about it a little bit.
jmaw 8 hours ago [-]
I've heard a lot of negativity around this book, and haven't read it yet. Did you feel like it was positive in the sense of genuine niceness, or negative in the sense of trying to be manipulative, etc.?
c0nsumer 6 hours ago [-]
What the others have said, and also, there are folks who take and implement the advise wrongly. Like, one of the other points is that people like knowing their name was remembered and hearing it used. I take this as "remember people's names, and when you haven't seen them in a while, say 'Hi, name!'" or so.
Some folks take this over the top and do a weird, false-feeling thing like sprinkle the person's name into conversation over and over, or at the start/middle/end. And it makes the conversation feel stilted, fake, and like a situation is being forced. And that casts a negative light on the overarching idea that people like being remembered, and their own name is a big part of that.
jfyi 7 hours ago [-]
I am certainly guilty of general negativity to that book. There are plenty of legitimate gripes, like the content is simplistic and overly repetitive. It really could have been a 10 page pamphlet.
But let's put that aside, the negativity really comes from the fact that every time I have seen it brought up in real life, it is being wielded like a cudgel by a person not practicing what is in the book. It is effectively corporate short hand for "you need to learn how to be a better servant".
Fantosism 7 hours ago [-]
It's really more of a dated manual on social etiquette. The negativity is mainly that it seems every salesperson is gifted a copy and implements the same techniques. Similar to how Chick Fil A has ruined the phrase "My Pleasure". The author himself states that it's genuine interest that forms connections, but ultimately the goal is to get something like a deal closed, the employee complying or the customer buying. Just depends on how you frame it.
tekla 7 hours ago [-]
The negativity is from people who only read the title. The book content's are about skills to be friendly. Some people over index on the skills to being off-putting because it's such a popular book that many can tell when you're using "skills" from the book
Razengan 20 hours ago [-]
> most people respond positively when others are interested in them.
To be fair, most people are uninteresting.
Maybe the goal should be to be okay with being ordinary.
TRYING to be interesting (or interested) is just tiresome.
weatherlite 11 hours ago [-]
Depends on how we define interesting. Interesting in itself is pretty overrated imo, I don't need you to be some artist who lives in the streets and is addicted to heroin - I mean that's really interesting but not something I want in my life.
Be boring - have a 9-5 job like me.
But be agreeable, be interested in me as well from time to time and we can relate.
Whether we truly hit it off is not about how interesting I am to you or you are to me I think.
myaccountonhn 19 hours ago [-]
Ordinary people can be interesting though.
If you meet someone who is completely and utterly uninteresting, that in itself is interesting.
t-3 13 hours ago [-]
Most people are completely and utterly uninteresting. I feel that interest in people is largely a physical reaction rather than a thought exercise. Even people who have done cool stuff are often uninteresting. Their story may be interesting, but their person is not.
criddell 8 hours ago [-]
> Their story may be interesting, but their person is not.
What do you mean by that? What's the difference between a person and their story?
master-lincoln 11 hours ago [-]
that's subjective and not worth discussing much if you do not specify what makes a person interesting for you
t-3 9 hours ago [-]
I don't really know. Why do we get along with some people but not others? There's probably a definable reason but it's not usually a conciously-reasoned thing that can be easily specified or classified.
weatherlite 11 hours ago [-]
> Most people are completely and utterly uninteresting
How do we even define interesting ? Like interesting opinions/hobbies? Good storyteller ? Who cares about that. I do need to like you and you need to be an agreeable person imo, but no having a real unique life or opinions is really not that necessary imo. Having a sense of humor is a big plus to me though.
cindyllm 11 hours ago [-]
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inSumErgoCogito 8 hours ago [-]
Because people expect another person to be a amusement park- a show. They are not. They are a information processing system- often not even fully self-aware of the information their subconcious weaves into complex ideas. Surveilance and reflection does not improve that performance or allows to reproduce it. It instead produces distraction.
This is why you can not "interview" innovative or creative people- and only get a flat "imposter" image of the creative person. The observation hinders the process and all you get is basically the "house keeping" routines- weaving together some plausible stories, on how a "idea" came to be.
The true process is a walk in the mountains. Some scribbled notes. Glued together during some conversation on a similar topic with friends. I always found it fascinating, how the "iterrators" can dismiss something/someone that clearly works- just because they can not dissect and reproduce it.
adrianN 17 hours ago [-]
There are no uninteresting natural numbers. One, as the smallest natural number, is certainly interesting. Assume all numbers up to n are interesting. If n+1 is uninteresting it is the smallest uninteresting number and therefore interesting.
And yet everybody cares precisely nothing about almost all natural numbers.
17 hours ago [-]
Razengan 17 hours ago [-]
Also, you don't have to be interested in each other: Find a shared interest.
And it doesn't have to be anything special; you could find joy together in the mundane:
Petting cats, watching the rain, taking a walk through the woods without saying anything..
watwut 17 hours ago [-]
Normal people are interesting.
dingdongditchme 16 hours ago [-]
Being interested is also a lot more easy than to be interesting. The latter really depends on the eye of the beholder. Whereas I make it a game to find out what is interesting about the person across from me. Sometimes I strike gold, sometimes it's a dumpsterfire and we implicitly agree never to talk again. But once you strike gold and meet people you genuinely are really interested in, you get addicted.
TDelta2258 5 hours ago [-]
>Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with
I agree that it is a skill, but like any skill it helps immensely to start learning it as a child. It took me until my 30s to realize that my parents were essentially... antisocial. And that most of the social skill lessons I took from them, if any, were probably wrong and unproductive. I spent a lot of time (and money) trying to learn to overcome that, but never made any progress.
everdrive 10 hours ago [-]
>Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with,
Agreed, but I'm not so sure this was previously true. Or at least not _as_ true. There used to be a lot of more socializing by default. People who were poor in this skill set still had relatively regular social opportunities.
This seems to be gone today, and now it's purely manual.
sasaf5 20 hours ago [-]
+1 for the potluck dinners. I find much satisfaction in seeing my social circles merging.
Another lost art is keeping a contacts list and contacting them regularly. People used to have these lists on paper and then send cards at least once per year on birthdays/christmas/independence. With this being relegated to social media, your contacts often fall in the cracks of the quirks of tech companies.
decasia 12 hours ago [-]
Every year I make some (handmade) digital art and write a letter with it about our year, and then I email it (bcc’d) to all our friends, family, and other people we want to stay in touch with.
It’s not as tangible as a paper card but by being an email, people can just hit reply and answer. Every year a few dozen people write back to our card (out of maybe 350 recipients), and a lot of people have said that this is one of their favorite messages to get all year.
I think people can tell when you actually put time into something instead of just making a quick conventional card with platitudes. It’s helped us keep in touch with people from all over the place, across different continents, etc, who we might not stay in touch with so much otherwise.
hollowonepl 16 hours ago [-]
Yep, I used to merge my circles often in the past, usually at restaurants and bars. I did not think about it otherwise though than optimizing my available time to target as many friends from different groups as possible.
But this also created a group of its own that I was coining together for regular Thursday craft beer night or occasionally having wine and beef together.
I stopped though, many years ago as when I started my own family, family and work consumed me too much to have regular night life and meetup exercising and my home was always my sanctum, I rarely invite people to my home. this is where i rest and only some inner circle has entrance there.
that inner circle was developed during last 20+ years and I don't find much space to expand this circle unless somebody new spends with me 20+ years having random access to my limited time.
And that's ok. having up to 5 close friends who you see and talk to regularly if you're 45+ is already enough. Random folk... can stay online. like here to share ideas and then bring them back home.
I actually stopped looking for new friends based on the interests.. I have enough in that gang to cover already. sharing interest related insights is where I use internet mostly.
one of the reasons why place like HN started becoming attractive again as after ditching FB, Discord and many other places with just noise instead of valuable insight and content only HN, lobsters and telnet/ssh BBSes become legitimate sources of idea sharing and tech progress.
other topics are covered fine for decades and when I'm randomly at bar sometimes (usually work delegations outside my own town) then I'm open for one evening conversation about any nonsense just to stay connected with the city folk, but no huge expectactions about phone sharing or another meeting.
I never share my social accounts connection with strangers. I stopped doing that.. it's just spam after all and like collecting f* pokemon cards instead of having meaningful relationship. One can't maintain relationship with 1000+ people so I dropped all that and keep online activities either socially anonymous or narrowed to under 100 people whom I at least remember I had a drink with, once.
BLKNSLVR 17 hours ago [-]
You're doing good work, not just for yourself, but for others.
Sometimes, it may be just the knowledge that you're contributing positively to other peoples lives that makes it worth sacrificing some of your own comfort.
satellites 1 days ago [-]
This mirrors my experience quite a bit. Hobbies that involve creative thinking and leaning on each others' skills are incredible at creating lasting social bonds which go beyond the hobby itself. For me that's music (creating it) and tabletop gaming (especially D&D or any similar RPG).
Meeting others through those activities and then gradually building upon the relationships via other social outings, dinner parties, weekend trips etc.
I'm also introverted but learned early on in life that it often just takes one person instigating things to rally a whole group.
elric 13 hours ago [-]
> Personally I've found satisfaction in going to meetups to find like minds
I enjoy meetups, but those have been pretty much nonexistent here since covid.
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
Meetup.com used to be full of in person stuff, now it is full of online stuff instead.
Taikonerd 4 hours ago [-]
I really don't understand why they have virtual meetups on their platform. Their branding used to be all, "get out from behind a screen and meet people IRL!"
wookmaster 2 hours ago [-]
Pivoted during Covid and never reevaluated I guess
bubbluppugus 8 hours ago [-]
I got tired of being the planner.
As soon as I stopped it all stopped.
And like really all stopped; via digital comms everyone from the social group has said they realized after the plans I pulled together was their extent of their social life.
American culture fuckin' sucks. And it's Americans propping it up. It isn't Russia or the other usual boogeymen.
lazide 5 hours ago [-]
Well, here is the real truth - everyone’s culture sucks in the right circumstances.
We’re going through the aftermath of the old social paradigm collapsing, while dealing with the hangover from the COVID response (including massive inflation), and the robber barons are feasting on the corpse while manipulating the public because of course they are.
We’ll find a new one eventually, and people will adapt (eventually) and they won’t feel the suck in the same way everyone used to the old way does right now.
It will just be normal to them.
Of course it’s going to suck in the meantime.
You could ask anyone who grew up in the USSR, India (who wasn’t top .001% anyway), China would lived through the Great Leap Forward, etc.
weatherlite 15 hours ago [-]
Dang you're on top of things, kudos. Wish I had the mental energy to do all that.
anonzzzies 20 hours ago [-]
YMMV but I find people who want to exchange socials like insta far less likely to meet up again then just old fashioned phone numbers. To such an extent that I exchange socials and not waste the time.
Gee101 1 days ago [-]
Does it get easier overtime for you?
1659447091 23 hours ago [-]
> Does it get easier over time for you?
Not OP, but wanted add for myself it did.
I took the CBT approach. First to change how I thought about things (as a skill to practice) and then that allowed me to do a form of exposure therapy. Mostly finding something small to start with, a single relevant question or comment that is genuine. Saying something nice to someone, like a stressed out cashier at the grocery store goes a long way, or commenting on something like someone reading the packaging of a item and you know it and can give a brief review.
I didn't start trying to have deep conversations or expectations of ever seeing that person again. Only simple interaction for social skill improvement and over time this small talk started to come more naturally. Then that snowball into this lighter feeling around people (so anything would have been perceived as rejection before became not personal and moved on) and that, in gaming terms, was a level-up to more meaningful interaction, then another level-up and another etc. This is a decades long practice that is still going. Like many skills some pick up faster than others.
everforward 7 hours ago [-]
It does. It eventually sinks in that no one is watching nearly as much as you think, and are for the most part disinterested in what you’re doing. Not in a judgey way, but in the sense that nobody saw you do that slightly weird thing, and even if they did they’re still more interested in how fat the pigeon outside is than anything you do.
nuclearsugar 24 hours ago [-]
Overall yes. When I attend a meetup then I have a mindset of putting myself out there and should I meet an interesting and kind person, then just ask to get coffee with them sometime and talk shop. Also I remind myself that the current conversation went well from my perspective, so probably from theirs too.
doc_ick 1 days ago [-]
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poemxo 6 hours ago [-]
All of that sounds awful.
moralestapia 7 hours ago [-]
Join a club!
It did wonders for me.
Small side project, if you know of a nice club in you area please submit it: https://clubs.fyi
keybored 8 hours ago [-]
Same as last time.[1] The ones who “make an effort” go to top of the thread. Why are things the way they are? static Make dinner for friends.
I'm worried that although you might build up a big group of acquaintances that you hang out with on a regular basis this way, none of those would quite fit the definition of "friends".
A friend to me is someone with whom you can drop the mask of social propriety near-completely - share unpopular opinions, make racist jokes (directed at them or others), talk about the opposite sex (assuming hetero), gossip about other people, talk about your own relationships, give honest feedback, do borderline illegal stuff like smoke weed etc. Because this is what intimacy means.
If I meet my friend after a bad haircut and he doesn't immediately go "what the fuck is wrong with your hair?", he's not a true friend, just someone I hang out with.
I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university. I suspect some people have never had a friendship like this.
phatskat 16 hours ago [-]
I think the cool thing about this, especially as an older person (40's), is that it creates a low-stress, high-interactivity scenario. So while some of the people may just be acquaintances that come to one or two potlucks, some will inevitably click and become more than just once a month dinner guests.
Forming friendships after schooling isn't hard, but it takes work. That said, I've had a good number of small social interactions that usually don't even lead to an acquaintance over the last decade, and even those feel good just to get out of my shell. Then there's the people I'd recognize if I saw them again and maybe remember their names. And a small but close group of about 12 and counting have become incredibly close friends that have recently begun mingling with my prior set of really close friends (different states, so we have a couple yearly gatherings).
roncesvalles 14 hours ago [-]
But that interactivity is pretty hollow. I'm sure it cures the itch but it's not the same as having a friend.
goodmythical 7 hours ago [-]
If it is indeed always hollow rather than perhaps just usually hollow, you may find a common denominator in your mirror.
No one's just going to become a lifelong friend of radical candor bumping in to you waiting in line for coffee for the same reason that you're not going to become someone else's lifelong friend of radical candor when you bump in to them waiting for coffee.
The schoolyard friends you mentioned didn't just automagically happen either. You were thrust in to an environment with lots of variables. You remained in that environment for a significant period of time. There were some you vibed with on perhaps just the first day, and some of those continued to vibe with you in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Some of them went different ways over the years, and perhaps you stuck with one or two for the entire time, but that cohesion is effort whether it feels that way or not. It requires the right initial conditions and for the conditions to continue to be correct over time.
The bestest greatest friends of all time can fall to simple geographical distance if one or both of the participants isn't fulfilled by the new long-distance nature of the relationship. The conditions must remain sufficient for the relationship to endure.
The only way to see if the conditions are sufficient is to meet people and cultivate relationships with them. You as you are will naturally filter many or most just as many or most would filter you, but where's the harm in that? No one's friends with everyone, and not every friend need be some platonic soul mate.
phatskat 9 hours ago [-]
How do you know that it's hollow?
Beyond that, the second half of my first paragraph was about how some of those people probably become more than just acquaintances.
Larrikin 9 hours ago [-]
I think you don't realize how hollow the initial interactions were with the people you consider friends now. You have to start somewhere. It's just when you are younger you do not have a baseline of what a really good friend is.
Mashimo 14 hours ago [-]
> , none of those would quite fit the definition of "friends".
Why can't the big group of acquaintances not lead to real friendship?
I would haver guesst that's the way you find friends. Stranger -> acquaintances -> friends -> close friends?
roncesvalles 14 hours ago [-]
Often it stops there, that's what I mean. A big group of people to hang out with could give you the illusion of having friends when it's not really friendship, because it lacks the deep intimacy that comes with a good friendship.
There are more people LARPing as friends than are actually friends these days. Then I can see why many people reject "friendships" completely. Just dressing up and doing stuff with a few people is tedious unless it's mainly just about the thing you're doing (such as sports).
Mashimo 13 hours ago [-]
But how would you get ~real~ friends if not through casual meetups first?
12 hours ago [-]
roncesvalles 12 hours ago [-]
I mean sure, you could use casual meetups to meet new people, but friendship really develops and exists in a 1:1 context. I re-read the root comment and it seems like the person has the right approach initially - meet at a meetup, invite for 1:1 coffee afterward.
But then he invites them to his potluck and I think the friendship dies there. That potluck is like a graveyard of all his potential friendships. It just becomes a "hangout group" i.e. fake friends. Also, every other month is too infrequent.
Personally I think the best way to make friends is at places where you might meet them in a context that gives you sufficient and regular 1:1 time. This is almost always school or work.
goodmythical 7 hours ago [-]
I think you're missing the "slowly build a friendship, and hopefully they (I) make friends with the regulars at dinner party" and wrongly assuming that the potluck is the end of the road.
They don't say that they don't then go on to develop deeper friendships outside of the potluck, only that the potluck is a step in the road. It provides a low-stress low-stakes scene of congenially likely like-minded people in which people who are relative strangers can pair and group off if they choose to.
Approaching someone at a potluck like this, or chatting to your dinner neighbors, is way easier and likely more fruitful than chatting up strangers at a bar.
It is far easier to develop a friendship with someone who you can see interacting positively with your other friends. Easier to see more facets of an individual as they interact with people of slightly differing opinion.
I really genuinely cannot conceive how you're seeing it as a graveyard rather than a garden. Like...throwing a potluck is so vastly much more effort than showing up to someone else's event. They are putting genuine effort in to regularly surrounding themselves with people they enjoy. There's just no way that any of those people are "fake friends". They may be but mere acquantances, but even then these are people that are chosen to be invited. Everyone there is there because they were wanted and wanted to be there. If the host feelt they were fake friends, they wouldn't be invited, would they?
Compare this to a monthly coworker dinner where the only reason everyone's there is because the boss said so. Where everyone agrees Janice from accounting is always trying way to hard to laugh at everyone's jokes and Bob from QA just didn't quite grok the message behind "How to Make Friends and Influence People" and so uses everyone's name in every sentence because he figures that's important.
weatherlite 11 hours ago [-]
I hear you but maybe not everyone wants this. It sounds great but it's also high investment/high effort and sometimes hurts and disappoints. I think some people are fine with having shallower relationships than that.
watwut 11 hours ago [-]
To me, being close with someone does not involve being insulted, insulting them or making racist jokes. I also dont particularly care about other peoples haircuts, one way or the other. I do have friends I spend 1 on 1 with who I am completely open with.
> I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university.
When I was younger, I was never open with people who would be insulting to me or found it important to make racist jokes. I would simply not tell them what I think to avoid conflict or insult. They were assymetrically open, I was not.
But I genuinely did not cared about their haircuts either.
kingkawn 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe you don’t have friends because you’re a racist in your heart of hearts?
roncesvalles 14 hours ago [-]
I have plenty of legit friends who enjoy my racist humor, tyvm. Most of us are people of color btw.
watwut 11 hours ago [-]
One comment up, you had no real friends. Now, there are plenty of them.
Larrikin 9 hours ago [-]
Only other racist enjoy racist humor. Claiming you aren't white doesn't suddenly make racism ok.
cindyllm 16 hours ago [-]
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TFNA 1 days ago [-]
There's a post-Covid dynamic in large cities where people often report that meetups are not as social as they once were, that one isn't isn't likely to meet anyone outside the meetup (or perhaps ever again even inside it). It can even be cringe to some when someone like yourself acts as instigator, because there is a gnawing feeling the world has changed utterly and your approach is a futile attempt to go back to the past.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think it is general social meetups, or hobby meetups, or religions of the lax and casual type (someone posted on a previous HN thread that the Haredim and a comparable Muslim sect seem to be doing alright).
nuclearsugar 1 days ago [-]
My experience is that meetups have largely the same dynamic, but the attendees very rarely reach out to get coffee. I can't think of a single instance in recent memory where someone has asked me, and yet I have many experiences where people later thank me for instigating. That used to bother me until I spoke with some people about it and realized it seemingly doesn't happen much these days outside of business pitches.
But personally I cannot afford to worry if they think it's cringe. For a long time I was lonely, even in a healthy marriage, but having friends that I see regularly is something that I have found to be a vital aspect of having good mental health and avoiding stagnation. So I continually take the risk and put myself out there when I meet an interesting and kind person.
gambiting 14 hours ago [-]
My dad used to have our uncle and auntie over for dinner literally every other week, they'd stay until late hours of the night, they'd chat, laugh, listen to music, what have you.
And I remember once hearing my mum ask my dad - why do you keep inviting them over, they never invite us in return. And I remember what my dad said - yeah they don't, but I'm doing it because I want to be close to them and I enjoy spending time with them - even if they never invite us over it's still worth it.
satellites 1 days ago [-]
Who is reporting this? That has not been my experience at all. Social hobbies are how I make almost all of my friends as an adult (specifically: music and tabletop gaming). It's been very consistent through my entire adult life. I often have to be the instigator at first, but it has led to lasting friendships where everyone contributes. To the degree of traveling overseas together and attending each others' weddings.
EDIT: The only "cringe" meetups I've attended were "singles meetups" in my city. Mild desperation and no common interests aren't exactly a social lubricant. Hobby meetups are great because if you're truly interested in the subject matter it's an easy/exciting conversation starter.
TFNA 1 days ago [-]
If you are somewhere with live music, consider yourself lucky. That has declined in many countries in the last decade, as so widely reported in the music press.
You mention tabletop gaming. This is exactly the stereotype among friends and colleagues of unfulfilling meetups in a city I recently moved from: multiple games meetups sprung up around the university and public library as a way to get people meeting and talking, but most casual attendees didn't find the natural socializing they hoped for ("people just seem too desperate"), while players keen on the games and not looking for socializing per se complained about the casuals not being commited enough.
satellites 24 hours ago [-]
I'm near a major city in the US. While live music as an industry is under attack from corporate behemoths like Ticketmaster pricing out small working artists, the local scene for musicians just looking to jam is alive and well. If you live within an hour of any major city in the US you can easily find people to play music with. I think the distinction between live music as a business and live music as a hobby is important; the headlines are talking about the former. (Not to downplay the problems that working musicians are facing. I feel for them).
For tabletop gaming, it definitely depends on the game. There certainly are salty regulars who have been playing their specific game for decades and who lack social grace with newcomers. But there are also nicer folks who enjoy teaching newcomers and building a community. It all comes down to having good event organizers. Sounds like the ones you heard about didn't manage expectations or toxic personalities well, which is a bummer.
To be clear I've absolutely experienced salty cringe behavior from stereotypical neckbeard gamer types at these events. But I've also met really nice people that I ended up hanging out with independently. Each meetup seems to attract a different crowd so I had to try a few before finding a group that was the right vibe for me.
legerdemain 23 hours ago [-]
Where do you guys find space to play live music with a group in major cities? An apartment late at night, one floor up from where I live?
satellites 7 hours ago [-]
Haha. Most cities have rehearsal spaces for rent. The more expensive ones let you store your gear there indefinitely, like a storage unit, and cheaper ones let you rent the space hourly but you haul your gear in and out for the day.
legerdemain 4 hours ago [-]
Fascinating! I had no idea this existed or that the numbers worked out. What's a typical rate per hour for a modest space?
satellites 2 hours ago [-]
Probably about $20-30 per hour but varies by city
piva00 17 hours ago [-]
Rehearsal spaces, small venues cheap enough to be booked by a group of 5-6 people for a day/evening (not necessarily bars or concert spaces), book a studio for a few hours and everyone pitch in.
ButlerianJihad 18 hours ago [-]
Nearly 25 years ago, I had some friends from church who were able to organize a very stable meetup for tabletop gaming, and they met at least 2 times every week in a very large and popular, independent coffeehouse downtown. They had things going smoothly before I joined up, and let me tell you, it sort of saved my life. I was homeless at the time, but they kinda got me addicted to Magic: the Gathering, and at least it was a somewhat benign way to spend my evenings.
Note: this wasn't a church activity by any means, even though 3 of us were in ministry together. We didn't evangelize, although sometimes we discussed our common faith. This was strictly personal, social time for everyone.
The years we met in that coffeehouse were very successful. We often enjoyed at least 10 people around the table, all sorts of kids, although my church friends were elderly, retirement-age, but very sensitive to the needs of the poor and the street people who often joined us. That coffeehouse eventually closed, so we moved on to a Starbucks, and the stable group became smaller, but more tightly-knit. Eventually, I found a really awesome teahouse that was just a few blocks off the beaten path, and our group moved there. We no longer found ourselves yelling/screaming over the noise of crowds and steamed milk machines.
Eventually our group lost nearly everyone except us three. Sometimes we had a guest, but they didn't stay. I don't know why people drifted away. Perhaps we weren't welcoming, or fun, or young enough. But we did diversify our activities into board games, such as Clue, Rummikub, Boggle, trivia, Scrabble, you name it. And the teas and snacks were delicious there.
Now one key feature of the group is that one guy was there for the games. He was hardcore, heads-down, "we're playing these games!" with intense concentration. The other lady, she was there for socializing and chatting, but her garage-sale habit had garnered a closet full of games to bring. I was there for both, I suppose, but mainly I liked the social aspect, getting out of the house, having some good boba tea and stuff. The board games were definitely a means to an end. So we all had varying reasons for being there.
Sadly, the pandemic lockdowns killed our group for good. Not even the teahouse was able to weather that storm, and they closed their doors permanently, too. I haven't seen my friends in that long a time. We tried doing some online gaming together, coordinated, but it wasn't the same at all! I really miss them, and I really miss the excuse to get out of the house, and socialize, and I wish there was a stable activity that had that sort of impetus in 2026, but all my friends were made through those gaming activities, and as a result, I no longer have any friends.
gs17 4 hours ago [-]
> that one isn't isn't likely to meet anyone outside the meetup (or perhaps ever again even inside it).
I don't think that's a post-COVID dynamic as much as a pre-COVID one that got accelerated. When I moved to a new city in 2018, I spent a lot of time at meetups and had exactly that issue. No one would want to meetup outside the group (to be fair, most of it was that some people seemed to be willing to travel really far for a meetup group but not for other things), and you wouldn't see the same people often enough to really be friends within the group.
rightbyte 16 hours ago [-]
> It can even be cringe to some when someone like yourself acts as instigator
Yes it can feel cringe but I would argue we need to just accept it as prosocial and not cringe. We are cringe for thinking normal social things are cringe.
Like, I would probably have thought OP was after my money like 5 years ago. But now I would just assume good faith.
goodmythical 6 hours ago [-]
I am fully convinced that "cringe" is just the death throws of patriarchal societal engineering.
It's like "Well, sure, they can be gay, but ~holding hands in public~? We've got to have some sense of morality around here or we're no better than animals!"
Living with your parents in your 20s isn't cringe, it's a powerfule economic decision. Having or not having kids isn't cringe it's a personal decision. Carrying a dog in a purse is cringe, it's practical. Being an impoverished drug addict isn't cringe. Crying out for help with mental illness isn't cringe. Telling loved ones you love them in public isn't cringe.
Inviting people to continue sociallizing with you at a later date isn't cringe, that's just fucking friendship.
People are using the word to label entirely regular perfectly acceptable behavior as if it is genuinely bad simply because they don't like it. Sure, okay, you personally don't like it when people express interest in you beyond your 30 second attention span, but who the fuck gave you the right to decide that society can't make friends in public? Damn, okay, OP said it was cringe to ask people if they want to hang out, guess I'll just die a hermit.
rightbyte 50 minutes ago [-]
I agree.
There is a need for the word 'cringe' for wannabe, fake, dishonest, superficial etc. expressions that are embarrassing. But it is way over used and should not be used on people who are trying to mock them. It is way too easy to be a critique.
shimman 1 days ago [-]
Also many people simply aged out of it. When I moved to a major city I'd attend every programming meetup (had something to go to 3 nights/week for a solid 3 years), after covid I found more worthwhile hobbies with others.
What COVID broke is that there was no one to take over from the previous club leaders so they mostly just died with nothing to replace them and now the new generation doesn't really know how to rebuild it because they never experienced it.
johnnyanmac 24 hours ago [-]
On top of meetups evaporating, the big issue is post-COVID meetups meeting 3 nights/week nearly impossible. I have 3 or 4 meetups I try to regularly go to and I'm lucky if they are run monthly.
I was recently watching a video mentioning a study that it takes ~200 hours of constant contact on average to make a "close friend" and some 40-60 hours to get go from acquaintance to "casual friend", then 80-100 to be a what you'd simply call "friend".
Meeting up for 2-4 hours a month would take years upon years to make anything out if you don't supplement it yourself.
HardlyCognizant 9 hours ago [-]
The likely study in question, for those interested.
Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278-1296.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225
shevy-java 14 hours ago [-]
> being the instigator for most social occasions but the pros outweigh the cons
It depends on the personality. Some people are very open. Some are not. I find social open-ness much harder than closed-ness. The open-ness approach, though, is most likely the better strategy indeed. It just helps little when people are naturally closed off mentally already.
jdjddkkdd 1 days ago [-]
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brailsafe 21 hours ago [-]
> I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person
Ironically, the potluck style events strike me as the most introverted way to socialize. Not to denigrate the initiative at all, I have two Canadian friendsgivings this month, and they're fun, but I really wouldn't see the hosts frequently otherwise, because they're the ones packing their schedules in advance, moving to the distant suburbs, or just don't get out much. I don't feel like I can hit them up for something more casual, whether it's always true or not, it's more of a calendar event style relationship I have with them.
The reason I don't take it upon myself to host these myself is primarily because the substance of my social life comes largely from common interests outside the house that I invest deeply into, some of which are non-event hangouts just to watch movies at theirs, hiking, climbing, billiards bar, coffee and a walk etc... I don't try to find like-minded people as much as I do people that I have enough chemistry with, and build on that.
That said, in general it is important to try to take any kind of initiative you can. Friendships don't build themselves, and everyone's scared to stick their neck out.
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
flanz_10 1 days ago [-]
> Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
It turns out, being completely unbothered is also unchallenging, and challenge drives us. And being alone and bored is enabled by television and scrolling.
Honestly, I view the suburbs as the worst of both worlds (urban and rural), with few benefits.
BTW: As an aside, this is why i think the suburbs-class loves tesla self driving so much. The one downside is the long monotony of transitting to the place where people gather to do your work. I'm not against self driving cars, but they enable suburban self-imposed isolation.
galkk 19 hours ago [-]
When I rented an apartment in central part of large city for 2 years, I literally haven’t never seen people from 2 other apartments on same floor as me and maybe had one chat with last one.
I rent house in suburbs, at nice cul de sac, I know names of neighbors in 2 houses and had chats with 2 more. So your mileage may vary A LOT. Although large city offers many more chances to randomly step up. Reaching literal center of city and it’s life in 30 minutes on subway is much different from reaching another burbs on car.
torben-friis 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah the point of apartments is not to socialize with the neighbors specifically, it's more that the increased density gets you walkability and density.
It's much more appealing to get to the street and walk when you have 4 cafes, a theater, two libraries and a gym in a 10 minute radius than when you just get to walk next to lawns for an hour.
And there's a point to be made for the added friction of a small home. The more self sufficient your house is the harder it is to convince yourself to get out.
MrFantastic 4 hours ago [-]
People often don't socialize with their neighbors in a big city because it's nice to have a place where you aren't expected to socialize.
Sometimes I don't want to have a conversation with my neighbor who I really don't have anything in common with except they live next door.
In a big city you can find people that are exactly your tribe or explore a new one.
flanz_10 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of people are assuming that the main people you would be interacting with in a city are your neighbors. There are many more positive interactions you'd have, outside.
everforward 7 hours ago [-]
Thats wild to me. When I lived in an apartment I couldn’t get out the door without having the crazy cat lady telling me her new smoking spot the cameras couldn’t see (she wanted to smoke on the rooftop). It was a riot, that place had some characters.
The suburbs were soul sucking to me, the people were largely insufferable. I knew my neighbors, but hated them because 90% of our conversations were some form of “I noticed your grass wasn’t cut this week” or “your cans sat on the curb until the morning”. There were some good ones, but like me they mostly hid in their back yard to avoid the Karen’s.
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
Taking care of the lawn, etc, you will definitely meet your neighbors.
king_crimson 19 hours ago [-]
I’m from Germany so I can’t comment on the exact dynamics of American suburbia but I grew up in a medium to small town in a single family House and we were regularly in contact with the neighbors. Eventually I moved out into the next big city and in the apartment complex that I moved into it’s completely anonymous and no contact between neighbors except the occasional head nod.
avgDev 9 hours ago [-]
I live in a suburb by a major city in the US, and know so many neighbors. The sense of community is really strong. I help my neighbors remove snow and take their trash out as they are old.
I feel like some people are just making assumptions or are extremely introverted.
flanz_10 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of people are assuming that the main people you would be interacting with in a city are your neighbors. There are many more positive interactions you'd have, outside.
It's not just about neighbors.
okrad 17 hours ago [-]
This has largely been my experience as well but in the US. However, a new couple moved in next door to my apartment. We’ve done happy hour with them and I share the fruits of my cooking/baking adventures. Stop and chat when we are not in a hurry. For whatever reason we’ve not gotten to be much closer than friendly neighbors. Could be the woes of young professionals in their 30s without kids but the effort definitely feels greater than at other points of life.
gmadsen 23 hours ago [-]
Interesting experience I supposed. Mine is the exact opposite. Neighbors in the suburbs are a community , whereas in the city, it’s common for neighbors to remain strangers.
redserk 22 hours ago [-]
I've had far easier experience joining my neighborhood community in a city as many of my neighbors are literally walking around. My last 2 suburban neighborhood communities were on Facebook and the groups were less "lets get coffee" and more "that car that drove by is suspicious". One of my old neighbors in a city occasionally had a TV and cooler set up outside for people to drop by to watch baseball.
jaggederest 19 hours ago [-]
Prior to air conditioning the venerable front porch was the socialization locale of choice. A lot of houses in my city have a massive one and it's kinda sad to me to not see many people sitting on them virtually ever
scottious 10 hours ago [-]
That's not a universal truth. I grew up in the suburbs and I've lived in a city for my whole adult life. I feel a MUCH stronger sense of community in the city. I know so many of my neighbors that it's hard to leave my house without running into somebody I know.
It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.
In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.
19 hours ago [-]
scottious 11 hours ago [-]
Another problem with the suburbs is car-dependency. When you're in a car you're not interacting in a positive way with other people. In the best case scenario you're just isolating yourself and in the worst case scenario you're angry and frustrated at other people on the road.
This stands in stark contrast to my car-free life. Every time I go out of the house to travel somewhere, I run into people I know. I say hi to strangers. I nod to pedestrians crossing the street. I have a brief conversation with somebody on the bus. I didn't expect that traveling by transit or bike would have such a positive impact on my well-being.
Knowing what I know now, it's not possible for me to go back to a suburban car-dependent life. It would be a major step backwards
WarmWash 10 hours ago [-]
This sounds less like "mass transit culture" and more like extroversion.
scottious 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think anybody would call me extroverted. I'm a typical introverted engineer. humans are social creatures!
when you're in a car, the possibility for a positive social interaction is nearly 0. I don't know about you but I've never been happier after driving my car
when you're not in a car, there's just more opportunities for small social interactions. You can choose to take those opportunities or not, but they're there. There's just something different about being eye-to-eye with people and not separated by a sound proof metal and glass cage
alexpotato 23 hours ago [-]
My grandparents lived in what was then rural Pennsylvania.
Everyone had a part of their house that was essentially a bar and they would have house parties all the time.
So I don't think it's sub-urbanization per se.
akgerber 9 hours ago [-]
I grew up in suburban Wisconsin. The at-home bar was and is common there too.
People don't throw parties with them nearly as much any more because throwing a party with an at-home bar in a suburban house essentially requires drunk driving. We've gotten much more strict about since 1980 for very good reason.
Happy hours are still relatively common in cities because you can get home without driving.
Wazzymandias 23 hours ago [-]
On a larger scale I think it's _a_ factor, but not the only factor.
It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.
Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.
It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone
5 hours ago [-]
neaden 7 hours ago [-]
I live in a suburb and I know and talk to my neighbors way more than any of my coworkers who live in the city do.
wiseowise 16 hours ago [-]
> I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
What are you talking man? Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family. Kids running around in droves, BBQ with neighbors, helping around with a house, etc. Good luck having that in New York rat cages.
scottious 10 hours ago [-]
I live in a city similar to NYC (but not quite as dense) and IMO it's far better for kids than the suburbs.
I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood
One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?
I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it
Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.
kasey_junk 14 hours ago [-]
It’s interesting that you think the opposite of the suburbs is high rises (I assume that’s what you mean by rat cages).
The reality is that prewar housing in cities in the US was still frequently single family housing. The Chicago Bungalow is an obvious example.
The difference was in how close they were to each other and how much of the infrastructure was given to cars.
I’m not sure I buy that there is some tidy explanation about suburbanization leading to the decline in social interaction but if you think everyone describing city living is describing midtown manhattan you’ve got to myopic view of what urban housing means.
This is true of suburbs as well fwiw. There are lots of walkable suburbs with common community space and not a McMansion or big box shop to be seen.
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
The pre-war streetcar suburbs are great. Everything is on a grid, which makes getting around easy. After WWII it's all cul-de-sacs and arterials, and there is no place for kids to walk to.
flanz_10 7 hours ago [-]
> Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family
Where did that "utopia" ideal come from?
> Good luck having that in New York rat cages
Yeah, that isn't good either. That's poverty. Do you think poverty doesn't exist in the suburbs?
It can't possibly be something in the middle! All or nothing.
refurb 13 hours ago [-]
When I lived in the suburbs I knew all my neighbors. You’d just naturally run into people around the neighborhood.
Once I moved to the city I didn’t know my neighbors. People kept to themselves or the turnover was high.
scottious 11 hours ago [-]
My experience is literally the exact opposite. Suburbs were lifeless, soulless places and the city is where my social life got measurably better. There's no way I can ever go back to the suburbs now
braj0 9 hours ago [-]
Suburbs are good for families, it gives the kids plenty of space to play. Though, with people no longer having kids, they are kinda pointlesss.
scottious 8 hours ago [-]
Space to play, but nowhere to go. Everybody has their own private space which isn't great for social interaction. Kids have to be driven everywhere which isn't great for families
Cities have shared parks. I don't have any yard. But I have wonderful parks within short walking distance. There are far more amenities and so much more to offer at public parks than private yards. It's a shared backyard
In the suburbs, everybody has their own play structure in their back yard. In cities, we have bigger, better play structures that more kids can use simultaneously which encourages more social interaction.
somerandomqaguy 7 hours ago [-]
Kind of disagree, suburbs I see most of the kids literally played in the streets or alleyways. Usually it only stops in winter and mostly because it gets dark shortly after school and the extreme cold.
Plus the actual article itself is commenting on a decline of socializing that's occurred in the last 30 years. But suburbs have been predominant the US for around 60 years. And there's similar declines occurring in more dense cities like NYC and Washington. If it was strictly a suburb problem then someone living in Manhattan shouldn't have been affected but last I heard even those cities are affected.
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
I'd say there are upsides and downsides. The kids have room to play, but do you have to drive them to see their friends? Or are they close enough to walk or ride their bikes over there? It depends on the neighborhood.
criddell 8 hours ago [-]
In my suburb, the kids drive themselves. Electric bicycles and scooters are everywhere and they are crazy fast.
hasbot 10 hours ago [-]
So many of my neighbors never go out side except to get in their car.
lr4444lr 8 hours ago [-]
Are you kidding? Suburbs used to have thriving social circles around churches, golf clubs, schools, etc. Trust can be easier too because of greater cultural uniformity.
This hating on suburbs has got to stop. It's fine if you don't like it, but I have way more friends in suburbia than I ever had in the faceless city where people just walked right on past out of fear.
nonameiguess 9 hours ago [-]
It's common of Internet discourse to reduce an extremely wide range of experiences down to either the one you personally had or a stereotype. Suburbs are kind of like that. You can see it in the existing responses, with some people saying they experienced tremendous community in a suburb but not in a city and some saying the opposite.
The truth is there is no archetype of an "American suburb." They can be wildly different from each other. I grew up in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, famous for car culture. You can find videos today all over the place of lowriders on hydraulics cruising Whittier Blvd. It's referenced in rap songs from the 90s. But you could also walk or ride a bike. Whittier Blvd itself is two lanes each way for much of its length and is the biggest street in the city. I lived two blocks from this street and walked places all the time. I knew all my neighbors. Kids played in the streets. We walked to parks and played there, too. Whittier even has a really nice wilderness park thanks to Turnbull Canyon, where you're not really remote but you can feel that way. In high school when we were assigned to read Walden Pond and produce similar journals, I found isolated creekbeds where you couldn't hear or see anything except the woods and kept a paper journal I wrote in.
On the other hand, my sisters have moved out to Murrieta, CA and are raising their children there. It's a radically different experience. My wife asked if we could walk to a convenience store when we first visited and my sister was almost laughing at us. It's miles away, some streets have no sidewalks, the streets are a hundred feet wide with 50 mph+ speed limits. It's also hot as hell because it's out in the desert.
Both suburbs, even both in Southern California, but very different experiences with very different communities.
Hacker News talks past each other a lot by not acknowledging this and reducing everything down to "suburbs" or "American" and assuming that kind of shorthand has a clear, universal meaning.
Even television and media consumption in general are not the automatic atomizers they're being characterized as. Aside from the old watercooler monoculture of having something to talk about when everyone watched the same five primetime shows, for sports fans and especially when pay-per-view first took off, gathering at one person's house to collectively watch together was almost ubiqitous. That's not even considering cinema in theaters, which were always a group event. I grew up with that. We almost never watched anything alone in the 80s. If people are now primarily watching video media on their phones from their beds while alone, that is a lot different than how we grew up 40 years ago. Reading was more characteristic of alone-time media consumption.
phoenixy1 5 hours ago [-]
My whole life, my mom would talk about how much she hated the suburbs, how she lived in a Chicago suburb and it was a miserable experience, she would never do it again, etc., all the while praising the time that she lived in Tiburon.
I finally went and visited the house where she had rented in Tiburon (it was just a block from the Paradise Loop path, a pleasant bike ride from SF), and I was like, "Mom, Tiburon is totally a suburb." And her response was "Oh, well your sisters could walk to school and I could walk to the grocery store, so it didn't feel like a suburb to me."
0conclusive-dem 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t think being unbothered is unchallenging/stagnating? You can have solo hobbies that push you.
I hate suburbs and car-based societies as much as the next person, but being left alone doesn’t feel like the underlying problem.
mrtesthah 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, its the suburbs, but it's because of the car-dependency -- not as much the single family detached homes.
gchamonlive 10 hours ago [-]
The urban lifestyle is also to blame when it demands a lot of time for work and commute, leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
These however are all effects of a larger mentality of hyper-individualism and hyper-productivity, symptoms of late-stage capitalism.
flanz_10 7 hours ago [-]
> The urban lifestyle is also to blame when it demands a lot of time for work and commute,
ironically, urban commutes are substantially shorter on average
> leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
what? there's so many urban third places.
tdeck 22 hours ago [-]
My cultural anthropology professor used to study remote villages in Nepal. Once he told the class a story about this one village where a group of people used to socialize each night, with each family taking turns hosting dinner at their home.
Then one family got a TV, and they stopped rotating because everyone wanted to spend the evening watching TV at that one family's house.
Then the other families got TVs, and they stopped the socializing tradition altogether, preferring to watch TV at home.
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
Media in general is probably the real answer. We lack boredom at home. Earlier you were bored, so you signed up for sports, went on cheap trips, camping, pretty much anything to get out. Talking to older people 60 - 70+, some of them spent three or four days at the clubhouse of their chosen sport, they where constantly out of the house, because that's were you weren't bored.
chneu 1 days ago [-]
Communal boredom is where a lot of our creativity comes from.
dpe82 19 hours ago [-]
"playdates" is in itself a tell. That didn't used to be a thing. Kids would just... go out and find their friends and play. No parental scheduling or coordination required.
LUmBULtERA 13 hours ago [-]
We use this term when little kids aren't old enough to just go out and find their friends and play. E.g., 2-5 year olds definitely aren't going to be let to go wander around the street.
ryanjshaw 12 hours ago [-]
When families had 3+ kids on average the younger kids would go with the older kids. Now you’re looking at <2 kids on average that doesn’t work.
dayofthedaleks 1 days ago [-]
Yes the post's title calls to mind that 'Bowling Alone' was already detailing loss of cohesion nearly 30 years ago.
People are alienated, y'all.
Fricken 1 days ago [-]
People form communities when they have shared stressors that they work together to manage, but what remnants of that lifestyle remain today is little more than a skeuomorphic throwback to more vulnerable times.
Everything about modern life is designed so you do not have to directly depend on anyone for anything. You can instead be entirely dependent on a series of distant and unaccountable corporations to get through the day.
boogieknite 1 days ago [-]
my 94 yo gpa is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG. ill see my best friends between once a week to once a month and texting comes and goes. if i got a phone call i assume its an emergency
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
edit: grammar (still bad but better)
dw_arthur 1 days ago [-]
Older people grew up socializing constantly so they can just start talking to strangers like they've known each other for years, especially if they are from the same town.
conductr 1 days ago [-]
I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. They just chit chat about everything and silence is never awkward, they could talk about anything from the weather to big social/political issues with an open mind. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge/ridicule you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
kldavis4 1 days ago [-]
tbf part of the reason boomers are assholes is directly a result of the parenting of the greatest generation.
conductr 1 days ago [-]
Maybe. I think they had good intentions though, but it just turned out they spoiled the generation. I don’t think this was obvious until way past when the damage was done. The fact they provided so much for them and they ladder pull from their own kids is when it became apparent.
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
I wonder... The boomers were the first generation born to "the nuclear family". Before that raising kids was a much bigger affair, there were always extended family or neighbors around to help with child care. Is this what made my generation (boomers) so fucked up?
1 days ago [-]
jmbwell 1 days ago [-]
When my dad does this it’s mortifying
When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!
Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak
Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing
RugnirViking 15 hours ago [-]
> try to order in languages I don’t speak
why not? I guarantee it's less offensive than you think to be bad at a language but try anyway. I get the desire to avoid embarrassment - it's something I find really difficult to push through, but you've gotta do a whole lot of speaking badly to speak well, and people are generally very appreciative of someone earnestly trying.
If you met someone in person struggling to speak english, would you be offended? or would you be collaborative like "lets figure this out together"
jmbwell 10 hours ago [-]
You’re absolutely right about learning languages. Perhaps I should have clarified, don’t speak and aren’t trying to learn.
TFNA 12 hours ago [-]
Talking to younger Europeans today (or nearly any Dutch or Scandinavian-speaker under 60) and they may find it tiresome when foreigners try to practice their language, because just using English is more respectful of their time. No, they don't give the foreigner any credit for "earnestly trying".
But if the OP is talking about the US, there's that whole other dynamic mentioned in the sibling comment.
RugnirViking 11 hours ago [-]
for both you and the sibling comment, I think these are hypotheticals. I hestate to call you guys out but on some level I think its rationalisation for being afraid of embarassment - I literally live in denmark as a foreigner and am learning the language. You can just say you want to practise a little, its not that hard.
You: hej må jeg have... et varm chokolade?
Them: of course, will there be anything else?
You: hvis det er okay jeg ville gerne øve mig på dansk *smile* åbenbart har jeg virkelig brug for det
Them: selvfølgelig! det kommer til... fem-og-halvfems kroner. Sidder i ind, eller ude?
If you don't explicitly say that you are trying to practise then yeah, they are going to default to whatever makes the interaction go smoother. Everyone does that, all the time! But people are generally pretty supportive of another person trying to learn. And of course, people aren't going to assume you think they can't speak english if you say you're practicing (it's not hard to smile and say how lovely you think the language is or whatever.
In general waitstaff and service workers deal with people being indecisive, slow, speaking with confusing dialects, speech impediments all day long. It is not an imposition to work through an imperfect language - and its pretty much the only way anyone ever gets good at a language.
I also get the impulse to be a little jealous of those natural born sunny extroverts who find it easy to do this. For me it does require pushing through a little discomfort, and often I wouldn't if I were busy doing something else. But it's 100% my own discomfort, not the other person. Being asked to hold a conversation in your own native language is not a chore
TFNA 11 hours ago [-]
These aren't hypotheticals for me at all. I am a foreigner who long lived and worked in the Nordics as an linguist, and I have spent a significant portion of my adult life traveling the world mostly for language practice. I have seen firsthand shifting attitudes as more and more younger Europeans use so much English (sometimes even leading to domain loss in their native language) that this is by far their preferred way to interact with foreigners.
You may tell the Danish cafe staff that you need Danish and you want to practice, but that poor person is an employee and hardly in a position to tell you what they really think.
RugnirViking 10 hours ago [-]
"poor person" it's literally their job. We're talking about such a minor inconvenience, on par with someone asking to pay with cash instead of card, or taking a moment to think about what they want to order. Again, you're asking them to speak their own native language in the country where it is spoken. They serve people in that language all day. Including old farmers that come in with difficult to understand accents, who speak slowly. They are free and welcome to say so if theyre that desparate to speak in english...
I also know Danish people who prefer to speak in english. If I were speaking to them for hours at a party, and they voiced that request, I would oblige. But avoiding trying to speak danish in denmark because of the fear some danish people would be annoyed or even offended without ever asking them is utter insanity.
You say you have travelled the world for language practise, but how did you manage that if you refused to speak the language for fear of somehow offending or inconveniencing people by speaking in their language. Why was it any different from just staying home and reading websites in your target language?
TFNA 10 hours ago [-]
Of course you need Danish in Denmark and it is reasonable to speak Danish in Denmark. But the expectation nowadays is generally that one will practice the language e.g. in a course or with a patient partner and their patient family until at least the B1 level (and ideally B2) level, and only then impose one's imperfect language skills on the general public. At that point, one is no longer quite "practicing" or trying to use a language that one cannot claim to speak yet.
I travel the world for language practice and don't feel too embarassed because 1) I try to get to a B1 level before talking, and 2) I travel in a way that brings me into contact with a lot of elderly people happy for any social contact and novelty. But I am definitely aware of the need to avoid inconveniencing younger people.
RugnirViking 10 hours ago [-]
> the expectation
Your expectation, imposed upon yourself. I get it, I was embarassed too. It's really not that serious, you can be bad at stuff publicly. Nobody is advocating following people around forcing them to teach you something, but you can still have a great time with people with whom share no language in common. Speaking anything at all just makes things more fun, and people are way more willing to help than you think.
It's just not rude to go to a foreign country armed only with a1 duolingo and a prayer. It's a lot less rude than going there and only speaking english to everyone you meet... Yes even in denmark, even to young people.
As I have gotten better at danish I have had many more young people (the majority of my friend group and social experienced given I went to university here) express that they would prefer to speak to me in danish than the other way around. They were, by default, always making themselves a little uncomfortable, feel a little slower, seem less educated for the sake of communicating with me, because I gave them no other option. Now that I give them the option of switching to a context where I seem like a fool and they are the master, they are happy to take it.
TFNA 10 hours ago [-]
Again, I am not embarassed. And as for the expectation, it is not my own. Have you ever actually spoken to young Europeans about this, or seen the Reddit threads about how customer-facing staff are not there to be your language helper?
Younger Europeans do not necessarily see it as rude for a foreign visitor to come and speak only English. Many local younger people spend a significant portion of their lives in an English-language environment on social media, and mixed European marriages now often use English as the home language. English is no longer seen as an outside thing by which foreigners speaking it are being rude and unappreciative.
And again, domain loss is already ongoing for European languages (and for the Nordic languages this has been observed for like decades now), so it isn't necessarily the case that locals feel more proficient about certain things in their native language and less proficient in English. I have colleagues who would prefer to speak English about technical matters for their own sake, not mine.
RugnirViking 10 hours ago [-]
> Have you ever actually spoken to young Europeans about this
I can't emphasise enough that I am not only literally a young european, living with a young european partner, with a young european social circle, but I also exist in the real world and not in reddit. I have lived here in denmark for coming up on 10 years.
Yes, I know some extremely online people who have learned better english than danish and talk about noticing a decline in their danish skills. Those few who spend all their time online, on reddit and the like. It's definitely a type, one that by my estimation skews male, autistic, and introverted. Prime hacker news demographic type thing :)
I get it, for you as a linguist its remarkable that this could happen, that people could exist that lose their native tongue or learn another to a higher proficiency of that of the country they live in. We do live in unprecedented times.
However I do not think it is universal, or a majority of young people - I also know many more people who have better knowledge in Danish than in english. It is explicitly on issues of politics, business, science, law, etc that people prefer to speak in danish with me because they do not know the words in english, including at meetup groups dedicated to those things.
TFNA 10 hours ago [-]
I feel like if you are a young European keen on local languages, you should realize other people are choosing differently. I'll just point to three developments I have thought about a lot:
1) For some years now, restaurant wait staff in several large European cities, including my former hometown, often only speak English; you simply can't order in the local language. I am basically the only person who complains about this; my peers who are locals don't bat an eye, they don't see it as offensive at all because English is so normal for them.
2) I have a longtime asssociation with one of those Southeastern European countries known as an emigrant factory. My friends who left to Northern or Central Europe or the Baltics have relatively little interest in using the local language except where (like in Germany) required for interacting with bureaucracy. They feel fine living in English. Back in that country, it has not been unusual for the last decade-plus to hear younger people speaking to each other a mixture of English and the local language, and foreigners moving there now complain they get little opportunity to immerse in the local language as I once did.
3) Themes of anti-globalization and protection of European cultural and linguistic diversity have increasingly become associated with the far-right (a quarter-century ago, this was a passion of the left in some countries!). As is known, the far-right is a vocal force but a minority everywhere.
RugnirViking 9 hours ago [-]
I have simply not experienced 1) here in denmark. I don't know what to say, I live in a city that's not copenhagen, but if it exists it seems to me it must be rare.
as for 2, yes young people sometimes speak to each other in a mix of english and danish. It's using danish grammar, and critically, not english. You couldn't follow at all if you only spoke english (and with significant difficulty if you only spoke danish for that matter). I consider this similar to the process that creates slang
the other part of 2 regarding people that don't rush to learn the local language. Yes I know people who do this. After living here long enough, especially if they plan to stay, they tend to change their tune. I think there is a lot of motivated reasoning on this topic in particular, including stuff I have said to people myself in the past that friends like to remind me of - Whne I first came here I literally used to talk about how its so hard to practise language because locals won't help while being surrounded by locals who are happy to help. I won't speculate as to why people change after staying somewhere long, its just a tendency I have seen.
regarding 3, it is seemingly often associated with the far right yes, especially when bound with nationalism and themes of invasion/protection, but not unique to those contexts. I have experienced this in leftist political spaces personally, up to the point of votes being held and passing, restricting language in spoken meetings to danish only, explicitly for the comfort of those attending. And of course, I have also experienced this in entirely unpolitical spaces like hobby clubs, discussions at parties, and at work.
boogieknite 14 hours ago [-]
theres
> someone earnestly trying
and then there are occasions where someone orders in a language they dont speak because they assume the person taking their order cant understand english. being associated with someone performing that level of bad faith in public makes me wish restaurants had eject seats
1 days ago [-]
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
The Trader Joe's people aren't flirting. It's their idiotic managers forcing them to do that. Angela Collier just did a video about it.
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
> my 94 yo GPA is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG
Our modern day equivalent is being on HN or Reddit all day long
elcritch 1 days ago [-]
It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
speff 20 hours ago [-]
Incredibly pedantic, but I think that's describing a positive feedback loop where the previous result amplifies the next result further.
svachalek 1 days ago [-]
And when you do find people out, they're wearing headphones and/or their nose is in a screen, and if you try to talk to them they look startled and annoyed like how dare you speak to me in a public place. The culture is just gone.
dyauspitr 21 hours ago [-]
Everything happened so quickly too. All it took was a couple of decades.
curun1r 2 hours ago [-]
> The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
And, as is often the case, the simple answer is incomplete/oversimplified. Because there are cultures which have absorbed those technologies while remaining much more social than Western cultures. And they are ones that are less individualistic and stress more of a group, family or clan mentality.
The issue with fertility rates is similar/correlated. Most of the developed world is seeing rates far below replacement, but some cultures are far more resistant to the influences of technology than others. Many developed countries have tried to address their low birth rates from a policy standpoint, essentially paying people a small percentage of what it costs to raise a child to incentivize parenthood. But I’d argue it’s far more important to address their low birth rate as a cultural issue, which is basically a semi-narcissistic focus on maximizing our own lives rather than doing what’s best for our (for lack of a better word) tribe. Because the less individualistic a society is, the less it’s struggling with these problems.
I’d posit that a lot of this has to do with the decline of religiosity in Western cultures. Religion was where a lot of people got their group cohesion and sense of an importance of something greater than self. And while I’m no fan of religion, we’ve removed it without replacing it with something else that serves the same function. We’re going to have to find that something or these sorts of trends will only continue.
ma2kx 18 hours ago [-]
It’s not quite that simple, though. Various studies show that people are feeling increasingly lonely. It is not so much that media replace social activities, but rather that they tend to simply inhibit them.
throwaway85825 23 hours ago [-]
Putnam did followup work investigating the causes.
It's not just smartphones - it's any connected device. Before the pandemic, I'd arrange Peloton rides with my friends and colleagues with bikes, and we'd ride "together" from our houses, high-fiving as we went. I'd meet up with college friends in other cities on Xbox or PlayStation from the luxury of my couch. Social moved, but made us sedentary at the same time.
agumonkey 7 hours ago [-]
For some time every new form of isolation had limits causing people to keep finding friends. Early on, one family or shop had a TV set, so people flocked there. Video games were made to play 2 or 4 in the same room. Near free tech and networking was an inflection point.
hisfraudulency 11 hours ago [-]
It feels strange to assign all the blame to media, like theoretically it should be a number of factors, but that's what I got from reading Bowling Alone (fwiw I read the 1995 essay and not the 2000 book).
Even on the TFR point, the birth rate in 1976 in USA was 1.74, 2025 it was 1.6. So it's not like a China situation where it went from over 3 to less than 1 in 50 years.
paimapi 1 days ago [-]
I think Bowling Alone did a great job of describing the phenomena. I don't think it did a great job of explaining why it was happening.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
> It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
ma2kx 18 hours ago [-]
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.
I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.
Telemakhos 22 hours ago [-]
Nobody's commented on your most important point: "city" does not equate to "community involvement." Suburban people statistically volunteer more and join groups more than rural or urban people, and rural people are more likely to meet in person with their groups than suburban or urban people [0].
I'm not sure how much that is age correlation. Suburbs are older and usually have more parents, so they're more likely to volunteer in clubs and organizations. Even in my urban area the most frequently volunteered at organization is the PTA and most of the soup kitchens and senior centers have volunteers in their late 30s to early-50s.
Community engagement isn't also quite the same thing as friend groups. This is making me interested in doing a similar analysis.
watwut 16 hours ago [-]
I thought that groups and clubs are where you go when you do not have personal friends, to find them.
watwut 16 hours ago [-]
> The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people.
When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.
> Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
This is what I found: "the social interactions of those from lower-income households tend to revolve around family members and neighbors" and "richer people spend more with their self-selected friends".
This would confirm exactly what OP wrote - people who do socialize do it with people nearby.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle.
They are referring to what they see as they do their community organizing. You dismiss it all, because none of that should theoretically matter.
everdrive 8 hours ago [-]
>When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.
I have a similar experience but I don't think this disagrees with the parent. My mental exhaustion makes me seek out low-friction "junk food" behaviors. But much like drinking after work because you had a long day, the phone exhausts you in another way. The cure and disease are one in the same here.
paimapi 1 days ago [-]
>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
DeluluDon 50 minutes ago [-]
Text on a screen does not make a friend. Seeing someones familiar face can be.
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
You don't connect with your friends on these platforms, mostly. You connect with amorphous anonymous mobs of people. Like on HN, you aren't my friend, just someone posting, and your username is interchangeable with the one attached to any other reply.
1 hours ago [-]
orangedog 1 days ago [-]
Was the flight out of the cities to "preserve apartheid" or did many people simply want the suburban lifestyle with a yard and bigger house?
I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.
Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is another good source on the topic, covering how racist governmental polices played a role.
paimapi 1 days ago [-]
That's been on my to-read list for a long time. I've read in brief about red-lining and loosely regulated mortgage providers but it'd be good to dive in much deeper. It's almost always so much uglier and much more deeply dystopian if and when you choose to dig past any surface layer of popular history towards more rigorous historiography.
garciansmith 1 days ago [-]
In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
Racism might be part of the reason, but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period.
Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!
paimapi 1 days ago [-]
You don't think the racial make-up of Portland had anything to do with racism?
That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.
> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."
> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.
> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.
I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
> but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period
Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.
This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".
No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
I'm wondering how much of it was racism, and how much was people simply being aware that the "worse" areas of town had lots of crime (which they associated with the color of the people living there, not knowing any better) and they didn't want that crime to come to their area.
If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.
kettlecorn 1 days ago [-]
What they're describing is well documented, but my understanding is that the reality is a blend of what you're describing and what they're describing.
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
cucumber3732842 13 hours ago [-]
I think it's important to remember that the 1950s and 1960s were the time when western society really started to swing the government around for each and every thing in a way what we think is normal now but was fairly unprecedented at the time. When the government is seemingly capriciously regulating your life, pulling strings to get neighborhoods redeveloped in accordance with some new vision, bulldozing other neighborhoods for highways, that's not someplace you want to put down roots, raise your family or be in it for the long haul.
sophacles 4 hours ago [-]
Hate to break it to you but that wasn't new in the 50s and 60s. The mechanisms by which it was done were changing away frome the machine politics of earlier eras - but ways to regulate what can and can't be done by neighborhood have been around since the birth of the country. Use of eminent domain for public works private ventures is at least as old as the railroads. Planned suburbs, company towns, bedroom communities and the like are all 19th century "new" things in the US.
cucumber3732842 4 minutes ago [-]
The "new" part was who it was happening to. Instead of just stealing some poor hicks town for a dam and reservoir (after circling the plan for years to depress land values of course) they were interfering with substantially more established communities.
All those centrally planned things you mentioned were green(ish) field developments
nkrisc 13 hours ago [-]
In many American cities it definitely was about race. If you look at cities like Chicago you can still see today the effects of decades of overtly racist policies that have shaped the demographic layout of the city today.
sien 24 hours ago [-]
People also moved to suburbs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.
Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.
cindyllm 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
sublinear 1 days ago [-]
I think the media influence went far beyond just pacifying or entertaining.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
YinglingHeavy 23 hours ago [-]
No longer take anything too seriously anymore?
That was a very 90s 'thing'. Today people, especially young people, are exceedingly lacking in levity. Everything is serious.
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
I've heard that everything is nihilistic. Things are funny when you're life's good. Things are serious when your life's not good but following them will to make it good. Things are nihilistic when your life's not good but gambling has a chance of making it good and that's the best option you see.
Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.
GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.
sublinear 22 hours ago [-]
> comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking
That actually was my whole point. How do you think they're saying what you're thinking? Where did you get those thoughts from? Comedy has been a tastemaking machine for a very long time.
People used to snap out of it around middle age, but I think that point is only getting younger. The illusion has been broken with recent politics. You can't satirize the already absurd while still being funny. The game has changed, but I still see a lot of defensive humor anyway. It's just sad really.
epolanski 15 hours ago [-]
I've read a study that stated that the average US adult socializes 90 minutes per week, down from 4+ hours in the 90s, and 16+ in the 60s.
johnnyanmac 24 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I don't think the age disparity is talked about enough. Admitedly I'm in this weird "youngest millenial" bracket where, growing up, I was always much older than my parent's friend's kids. But even in general with young adult life: once you leave college, everyone around you feels "older".
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.
dominotw 1 days ago [-]
> Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them.
Thats why we plan to move to the burbs. Lots of ethnic enclaves where kids go around the neighborhood on their own and play.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
My controversial idea for urban planning: age and demographic based zoning.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
dieselgate 1 days ago [-]
I don’t have a direct response to your zoning idea but have observed in European cities there seems to be less age segregation.
imp0cat 15 hours ago [-]
One could say that, yes.
One could also say that there are old people everywhere now.
gnz11 14 hours ago [-]
Why not just make the new neighborhoods walkable with green space too?
johnnyanmac 23 hours ago [-]
People are cynical about your idea, but it's not like it has never been done in society. There are in fact apartment complexes that focus on elderly demographics. Retirement homes are just that. What's a school but a bastion for a bunch of kids of similar age to socialize together (and should a random adult wander onto it, there'd be a lockdown).
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
dyauspitr 19 hours ago [-]
People stay in the same house their whole lives though. Your young family zone is going to be a retiree zone in 30 years and that’s where the schools and parks will be then. Can’t realistically ask people to uproot and move 3 or 4 times in their life, that’s a very expensive proposition.
calvinmorrison 23 hours ago [-]
we already have it, it's called the Villages.
ndkdkdkdd 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
debo_ 1 days ago [-]
You should read actual studies on what you're suggesting rather than investing in "controversial takes" that are categorically wrong.
jml7c5 1 days ago [-]
Ethnic enclaves?
dominotw 10 hours ago [-]
Yes like a suburban housing unit dominated by a particular ethic group.
CooCooCaCha 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Is life today bleaker or harder than it was during the Great Depression? People still made time for each other.
What if it is the media that is making people exhausted and disillusioned? Not the other way around.
dyauspitr 19 hours ago [-]
It’s bleaker because everyone knows a lot more. People back in the day were for lack of a better word- naive. They had no idea what others were doing outside of their neighborhood and what was in the newspapers. There are incredible, chronic hidden pressures in the world now even if you individually disengage from social media and the like.
CooCooCaCha 1 days ago [-]
I’m not arguing that today is the worst time to ever exist in the history of humanity.
I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.
legitster 1 days ago [-]
No one's saying there aren't legitimate reasons to be disillusioned with the world - but that's not mutually exclusive from people socializing or having community. If anything, it's one reasons people are so exhausted and defeated to begin with.
There's a reason people call it "doomscrolling", and it's not because it's healthy escapism. Bad news and defeatism is psychologically addictive, and platforms have financial incentive to pump your brain full of negativity. Regardless of how bad it is outside, the internet is not a protective bubble - it's an opium den.
CooCooCaCha 24 hours ago [-]
Yes they are. People are blaming it almost entirely on scrolling social media.
Arainach 1 days ago [-]
In the Great Depression there was community and hope. People could band together, form unions or political movements.
Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.
There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
This might be controversial, and I'm not saying it has to be the case, but I believe at least part of it is due to lack of sunlight / outside movement (vs all day in office, car, train, home with stuffy air and sometimes not even openable windows) and nutrition (too much processed and fortified food, not enough protein for many people).
I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.
chneu 1 days ago [-]
>seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
distances 16 hours ago [-]
20-30 years ago was 1996-2006. Granted, I was younger back then, but in my mind this post Cold War, young Internet, pre-smartphone age was the best of times. Since then life got easier in some ways, harder in others. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about today, but how do you think we're so much better off now?
phainopepla2 1 days ago [-]
I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.
CooCooCaCha 24 hours ago [-]
Real housing prices are the most expensive they've been in recent history, but sure it's almost entirely doomscrolling.
One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.
johnnyanmac 23 hours ago [-]
I don't need people to tell me. My rent and paycheck are a very convincing argument in and of themselves.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
CooCooCaCha 1 days ago [-]
Life has become increasingly expensive. Safety nets that used to be there, aren’t anymore. We’re surrounded by enshittification. Social divides, and antagonism between social groups are high.
Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.
justinator 1 days ago [-]
I remember when the iPhone first came out. I was at a bar, at a table with a few people I didn't really know. This was a pretty common occurrence.
You usually got a drank, talked. This was a kind of gothic-theme bar, all done up with spooky decorations, a good dj, interesting drinks. We'd host arts/culture slide show jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together.
Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
I knew right then and there that this was the beginning of the end.
FractalParadigm 1 days ago [-]
Even before the iPhone it started happening with the Blackberry, Palm, et. al. I distinctly remember the early-mid '00's when my aunt got her first BB, a 7250(?) and it quickly became more important than anything else. Family get-togethers started to consist of her sitting by herself on her phone while the rest of us enjoyed each other's company.
justinator 1 days ago [-]
My memory is that my phone was always on me, and I texted a lot on the go, but most of the texts were about meeting up, getting directions, or coordinating. After that, if a phone was brought out it was to do more of that in the group setting "Hey Sally is going to be here in 15 brining Jake"), then put back.
Now we're all dopamine seeking doom scrollers.
I've been out with a group of friends -- some I just met -- once this year. It also doesn't help that meals and drinks seem hard to justify for the price. I'm waxing nostalgia, but $30 of tacos used to be maybe $8; my $10 beer today was $3.
bluefirebrand 21 hours ago [-]
The costs of a night out have definitely increased way faster than our salaries have.
Cthulhu_ 11 hours ago [-]
In secondary school, the first kids got phones and some of them were already spending a ton of time and money texting others. Wasn't for me because every text message had a fixed cost, but I followed not long after through ICQ, MSN and the like. But that wasn't on phones yet at the time, so at least it wasn't a constant possible activity.
My online social activity has declined a lot since then though, there was just so much unnecessary drama, oversharing, and vying for attention, emotional support, etc and the people that gave it burned out and left, leaving just emotionally needy people yelling into the void while the others moved on with their lives.
lasky 17 hours ago [-]
crackberry we called it
m463 17 hours ago [-]
it happened with books, and before that papyrus. :)
pavon 7 hours ago [-]
It is much more common with smartphones. I was never very social and before smartphones when I went to see a show or have dinner, I would always have a paperback in my back pocket and read it between sets or while waiting for food. But I was the exception - usually the only person in the bar reading rather than socializing, and one of a few at a restaurant. Now it isn't uncommon for most people to be on their phones in public.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
You had to be literate to use those, which wasn't that common in ye olden days.
HPsquared 1 days ago [-]
Thinking back to when I got my first smartphone 15 years ago, it occupied just so much of my attention and I figured it was some kind of honeymoon phase with a new gadget. But it never got less, if anything it's increased since then.
chneu 1 days ago [-]
Now it's not just phones. It's video games, it's that new TV show people watch in the background, it's X and Y.
The baseline keeps dropping.
Cthulhu_ 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not convinced. I (and I'm sure many others) quit trying to keep up (I think Game of Thrones burned a generation of TV viewers, lol). Video games are cool but the most popular / played ones are 10 years old now, more comfort than trying to keep up.
lotsofpulp 21 hours ago [-]
I was out in NYC when the iphone 2007 came out, without an app store and without 3G broadband, and I don’t think it was that entertaining to the people I saw with it. It was still mostly just for text communications.
It wasn’t until iphone 3G in 2008 that you had a full fledged browser with unlimited broadband capable of streaming audio, maps, and visiting websites with graphics. And, of course, new apps coming out everyday.
The battery was also not good enough to use long for a long time.
mihaaly 16 hours ago [-]
> Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
Sounds like the real gothic-guy in the place. ; )
Also a similar story: This was a kind of normal bar, all done up with fine photos for decorations, good music, good drinks. We'd host performances and jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together. Then one day a guy got bored and went home alone early. I knew then and there, that place was finished!
bcardarella 1 days ago [-]
Every single social event is a financial consideration now. Want to go out with the wife for the evening? It's going to cost $150+ for a baby sitter at $25/hour. The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city. You could take public transportation but then you're loooking at that cost shifting back to the babysitter. Before you know it you're in for $300 - $500 just for a night off.
Aurornis 1 days ago [-]
> The dinner + tip is going to cost $200. Parking is going to cost $50 - $100 if you go into a city.
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
matwood 6 hours ago [-]
> restaurant that costs $100 per person
I had a burger, fries and 2 beers last night at one of these small local restaurants. It was $47 with tip. I had a bbq plate the other day at a local restaurant. 2 meats, 2 sides was $26 dollars before a drink or tip was added.
Going out in the US is so expensive now, even the low end, that you might as well do something nicer.
lp92 11 hours ago [-]
You haven't seen "event pricing" parking in cities have you? I was in Atlanta a while back and I was unfortunate enough to need to go in to the city during some big concert. Every garage had event parking prices that were $80+.
pirates 1 days ago [-]
Plus there is no way parking is $100. SpotHero is like $22.
micromacrofoot 10 hours ago [-]
If it's a sporting event or concert and you need to drive $50 is pretty easy to hit. Major downtowns are solidly $40 on a regular night out if you can't find a meter (which is capped at 2 hours and a parking ticket costs you $50). If you have two cars because not everyone is coming from the same place you're completely hosed.
Going to the movies costs my family $100 without concessions. The zoo $80, the aquarium $100, art museum $80. There's a decent public park system but we're often the only ones there. McDonalds doesn't have playplaces anymore, sleepovers barely exist. The nearest bowling alley is 30 minutes away and runs us about $60 an hour without food.
Add food to anything (which most places don't allow from outside) and you're sometimes doubling the price for complete trash.
uproarchat 1 days ago [-]
I assume this is attributed to valet and tipping.
dividefuel 1 days ago [-]
Neither of which are required for traveling into a city
Gigachad 19 hours ago [-]
Some people live on a different planet.. The last social event I did (last night) I took the train to their house which cost me $5 return, and we went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant where I got a Chicken Katsu for $17AUD. This social event cost me not much more than if I had sat at home and ate dinner normally.
poorpeople 14 hours ago [-]
As others have mentioned, wealth inequality, even comparing the top 10% to the 30% paints a very different picture.
palijer 1 days ago [-]
When I'm visiting developing countries, I'm often in awe of the increased social activity and wondering why we don't have that in the western world anymore. One thing I think about is the cost increase like this.
Baumol's cost disease often comes to mind - in my (might be wrong) application of it - western society simply has had too much productivity and efficiency improvements. You can make more money as a software developer or as an investment banker because those jobs have gotten more efficient and have higher payouts to employers who want the best employees.
There can't be efficiency improvements in efficiency for child care, so the only way to have people want to become child care workers is to pay a competitive salary, so the efficiency increases in the other unrelated fields directly increase the cost of child care.
Developing countries don't have this problem and domestic labor and child care are still cheap.
TFNA 1 days ago [-]
I spend about half of every year cycling the developing world. Whatever the continent, I'm seeing more and more young people on their phones watching short-length video. I don't think they are far behind the West in the decline of socializing.
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
Babysitting is cheap if there are enough aunts and uncles (or trustworthy teenage neighbor girls) around, but in Western countries many of us don't have siblings or moved too far away.
Cthulhu_ 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah definitely not something to ignore; growing up we'd have grandma and a neighbourhood friend baysit us. Now, I moved far away from where I grew up because the jobs are better, but I'm left without much of an (unpaid) support network. But that's a bigger story than a random internet comment.
onlyrealcuzzo 22 hours ago [-]
> I'm often in awe of the increased social activity and wondering why we don't have that in the western world anymore.
Is Southern Europe not part of The West?
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
Whatever it is, it's nowhere near as rich as Silicon Valley.
dave78 1 days ago [-]
I have often thought about how many movies and TV shows in my childhood (1980s) focused on plot lines of people regularly gathering at a bar after work. Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place? Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
Aurornis 1 days ago [-]
I think the answer to your question is right there in your post:
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
dave78 1 days ago [-]
I guess my point was that the socializing depicted in media was older people, not just young singles.
If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.
Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.
pvab3 21 hours ago [-]
I'm afraid to have friends at work because I get attached and I feel bad when I leave after 2-5 years. I have to make career moves to get raises and progress, and it's easiest if I'm not too fond of the people around me.
This is also the same reason that companies push "culture" and try to emphasize how we're a team or a family.
jyunwai 19 hours ago [-]
In university, I made a few friends who went to different international schools growing up. Their parents were diplomats or executives who moved cities/countries every couple of years, and they'd switch schools to go with them. They were charismatic and personable, and quick to make friends.
But at the same time, after our natural relationship ran its course (due to graduations or leaving a student team), it felt like they disappeared. My relationship with them wouldn't linger like with other friends (even if weakened).
Another friend of mine directly described this view that "friendships have a time and place" in life. I thought about that perspective and didn't fully agree, but it still taught me that it's perfectly possible and even healthy to make friends quickly even if circumstances are temporary.
My view is that even if you become good friends with someone (at work or elsewhere) and they leave, you still end up with a network of friends across the country in different workplaces. Even when the nature of the friendship changes, you can still catch up with many of your old friends on occasion (like around the holidays).
And even if relationships completely fade, I believe that genuine relationships will always be a nice experience.
Mashimo 14 hours ago [-]
> it's easiest if I'm not too fond of the people around me
I get your logic, but I so don't want to live that life. Screw money, I spend ~8h per day at work, I want to hang out with people I like.
matwood 6 hours ago [-]
You can always stay friends with people after you leave a job.
pvab3 6 hours ago [-]
I can, but it probably won't work out, and I don't want to dump my old projects off on them and make them suffer, and I don't want to disappoint them, etc.
tayo42 1 days ago [-]
> Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway
You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.
structural 1 days ago [-]
People really did that regularly. It does seem to be economically related, for a lot of reasons.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
forshaper 1 days ago [-]
It used to be fairly common in smaller but densely populated areas in the United States, not so long ago (pre-2020). A lot of breweries were setup so that there were even outdoor areas that kids could be in. Usually one of the drafts was priced drastically lower than the others, and there were many unspoken relationship-based discounts or "try this" from the bartender or owner.
forshaper 1 days ago [-]
The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.
jghn 1 days ago [-]
I live in an urban area. Most bars in the area have a decent crowd after work into the night. The demographics of the crowd varies based on the bar. Based on your description we're roughly the same age, as a data point I wind up out after work usually 2-3x a week.
There's one bar I go to regularly where there's a couple of guys who I've literally never seen absent over the years.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
It was mostly a fiction to advance the plot. Going to bars after work has always been a thing for young singles or old alcoholics, but pretty rare for parents/married people to do routinely.
jppope 8 hours ago [-]
In my experience this is not true. People of all ages would pop off for a pint after work or cut out a little early at many places I've worked. It was never hanging out for hours. It would be like an hour and you would usually just talk about the stuff at work that you're frustrated about. Not everyone would go, but high performers were usually well represented.
I think the demographics of HN would explain why this seems like hollywood fiction when it is/was very normal behavior.
phoenixy1 17 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, "went to a bar in the past year" is one of the few questions in the survey whose answer basically didn't budge (52% in 1995 vs. 49% in 2026).
postingawayonhn 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, often once a week only team up until COVID.
mlhpdx 1 days ago [-]
Most people did not go to bars. As with many things, an unrealistic image portrayed in media. Perhaps more did, but far from most.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
> Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place
People really did that.
Maybe not every single night, but weekly for sure
geodel 1 days ago [-]
Agree.
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
That's the thing, the Internet really spoiled us. Suddenly you can hang out with complete outliers interested in whatever niche interests you share.
throwaway27727 1 days ago [-]
Babysitting is the big one for me. I can eat cheaper, but I can't really get a cheaper babysitter. My wife used to babysit for 5 bucks an hour just 10 years ago, and high school aged girls now want 20 an hour minimum. We're not talking "professionals" and my cost of going out is now at least 60-80 bucks without acting else.
djaro 11 hours ago [-]
This is also caused by the decline in social activity and community. People in the past didnt have this problem as much because they had tons of trusted family members, friends, neighbors, who also had children and could thus look after theirs for an evening.
mlhpdx 1 days ago [-]
A picnic is basically free, for those near enough to open spaces. Likewise for hikes, which I’ll happily pay to drive an hour or more to enjoy.
I don’t think money is a barrier to getting out.
Gigachad 19 hours ago [-]
I think the friction is a much bigger issue than the cost. People are stuck in a trap of scrolling short form video because it provides no friction. While organizing a picnic is extremely high friction relative to social media scrolling.
I think to solve this we are going to have to blow up social media and make going out in public more convenient and friendly. Otherwise we are going to end up in a WALL-E society where people spend all day with their meta glasses streaming AI generated micro dramas.
cowlevel 22 hours ago [-]
What's the motivation though?
newsclues 17 hours ago [-]
Finding a nice spot in nature to take a photo and flex on instagram
MadrasTh0rn 1 days ago [-]
So true. Society has been captured by banks and telecoms/internet/TV.
Feels like a guinea pig society with all of the rapid changes happening
1 days ago [-]
spencerflem 1 days ago [-]
Dinner + tip is not $200, parking is not $50, I live in a city lol
Uncle_Brumpus 1 days ago [-]
See that's the problem, you live IN the city, and you're not afraid of the city, so you know how it really is.
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
chneu 1 days ago [-]
Your friends just don't want to hangout.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
phainopepla2 1 days ago [-]
Dinner + tip can easily reach $200 if you're talking about a fancy restaurant for date night, even with just a single drink each. $50 for parking is crazy, that's like a music festival price or something.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
You don't have to go to fancy restaurants for a date you know. Maybe for your anniversary. People who insist on fancy everything are probably not worth the trouble.
montyanne 1 days ago [-]
50 is steep for parking, but between dinner/drinks/rideshare, you can pretty quickly hit $250 on a nice-but-not-crazy date night in my HCOL city.
spencerflem 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, if you’re getting three drinks each and an uber sure. I don’t think it’s an insane amount to spend.
It was framed as ‘Every Activity’ costs that much though which is just not true.
PyWoody 1 days ago [-]
I live in the boonies and dinner + tip (and drinks) for two can easily be $200. Parking is free here because, ya know, boonies and whatnot.
orangedog 1 days ago [-]
That's eating at an expensive place. I paid $60 for two at a local restaurant last week, that's including an appetizer.
PyWoody 1 days ago [-]
At what, Applebees?
spencerflem 1 days ago [-]
The nice Indian place next to me in Seattle is 24 for a curry & 8 for a side.
cute_boi 8 hours ago [-]
The nice Indian place you are talking is probably hiring some students/illegal immigrants and paying them peanuts.... They do similar with motels.
And, no food isn't that cheap in the city.
Klonoar 24 hours ago [-]
I live in Seattle and think you are using outlier places to prove an incorrect point. You are also not favoring in alcohol prices.
It is legitimately expensive to go out to places here. I just pay it because I can, but to act otherwise is burying your head in the sand.
spencerflem 20 hours ago [-]
Hey no totally I agree, 15/sandwich is so much more than I remember and 12/drink is nuts. With inflation and cost of living here it’s like double what I remember from 2018 ‘burbs. I’m not trying to say it’s necessarily cheap.
But as someone lucky enough to be able to eat out almost every day at a variety of restaurants I have no trouble staying under 35/person without drinks. That place is not an outlier.
And like, fancy cocktails are nice but I don’t think you can say that it’s impossible to go out and do anything without spending $500 like OP claimed.
cleaning 23 hours ago [-]
I'm in the bay area and dinner for two is absolutely nowhere close to $200 unless you are going somewhere fancy or ordering many drinks. Looking at my transaction history, it's closer to about $40 per person.
wahnfrieden 1 days ago [-]
It's not hard to spend $200. But OP suggested that it was the standard going rate and that it's unaffordable to them.
wahnfrieden 1 days ago [-]
Prices have risen faster than wages but $200 is a choice. They simply have high standards and treat it like poverty.
mlhpdx 1 days ago [-]
The change in lifestyle expectations should be as well documented as the changes in social contact.
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
Depends on the city. Here you can have a really nice time out for two people for $250.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
Which city? Downtown Austin? Seattle?
spencerflem 1 days ago [-]
Those are the exact two I’ve lived in actually
shimman 1 days ago [-]
This is very sad to read, every social thing I do cost me zero dollars because they're in my community with my neighbors.
Why do you feel the need to spend money to socialize?
0x1ch 1 days ago [-]
I'm 25. I go to work and then I go home. Same schedule since I got out of university. I do networking / IT. I usually buy a six pack of beer and then go to bed when I'm off, sometimes I'll stay up on my lab but I usually regret it because lack of sleep.
No bars, no dinners with anyone. I think the only blessing this lifestyle has given me is minimized impact from the failing economy we're in, at the cost of not seeing anyone or doing anything. I still have outside hobbies, but it's all too expensive to keep up with now, or being heavily regulated.
jahnu 1 days ago [-]
Do you want to socialise more but can’t or are you satisfied with how things are?
0x1ch 1 days ago [-]
Not really satisfied, but the alternatives seem like an uphill battle for myself. Most of my friends have moved on to their marriages, kids, etc. Certainly entering childless uncle phase of my life.
phainopepla2 1 days ago [-]
You don't have to live this way. To begin with, drinking a six pack at night on a regular basis is absolutely terrible for your health. It disrupts your sleep and so you will always be operating well below what you could be. The social problems are harder to solve because they are society-wide and not individual, but at your age a lot can change, and I think it's really important that you don't start to give up and think of your situation as inevitable, lest you ossify.
Uphill battles are often worth fighting.
rrr_oh_man 18 hours ago [-]
> Uphill battles are often worth fighting.
A number of military historians would beg to differ.
satellites 1 days ago [-]
I'm 32 now and met some of my current best friends when I was 26. My parents are 60 and just moved to a new country and within a year they met a dozen new people they now hang out with all the time.
It sounds cliche but it's literally true that there's always time to meet new people no matter what phase of life you're in.
Related: when I was 25 I had a depressive existential crisis and felt like my life was basically over. It's common, and therapy was a lifesaver. If you feel like you might be depressed then talking to someone can really help. Take care of yourself as best you can!
stefr- 16 hours ago [-]
I feel like I'm in the exact situation now as you were back then. It helps to read it can get better, thank you.
22 hours ago [-]
jahnu 16 hours ago [-]
Friend, I'm in my 50s now and I can tell you that you really are only just getting started. I highly recommend finding a new activity or social group and without making massive changes, as those can feel daunting, just make a small change to involve yourself with that. Even just once a month being part of a park run club, or getting to know people in your local art scene, or doing a cooking course, can start you down a path that will enrich your life.
techgnosis 1 days ago [-]
You're talking like you're old. You are --25-- my friend, young. No reason to resign yourself to the idea that your friends are all too old.
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
The flip side is that you have time for hobbies, regular workouts instead of beer belly dad bod, you can play sports, bike or skateboard (including socializing), play chess, whatever you like, go to concerts, walk around town photographing.
Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.
Broken_Hippo 10 hours ago [-]
I am the childless aunt. I'm in my late 40s, never desired children, so that won't change.
That said, I met my spouse in my early 30s. Was worth switching countries for and that was 13 years ago. We met playing the same silly text-based MMORPG some years ago. I have never been very social, but not being social doesn't mean that you won't meet people in non-traditional ways.
NoPicklez 21 hours ago [-]
Mate you are only 25, those people getting married and having kids are doing it early. You have another 10+ years before you could even think about the childless uncle phase as a construct.
mihaaly 16 hours ago [-]
Relationships don't fall in your lap, you need to work on it. Fail, repeat, maintain. Yes, it is an uphill battle in many cases, for few it never ends well, but many reaches the hilltop. Those not 'fighting' uphill will not get up there, ever.
"Nothing in this world worth having comes easy"
And we always can try finding the gentle slopes, going around on the longer track, less crowded. The journey is what counts not the destination here.
esikich 24 hours ago [-]
Bro you're 25. You are in the most social point of your life. Go out and do things instead of making excuses.
weird-eye-issue 23 hours ago [-]
Eh, any time of your life can be the most social point. It just depends on what you want and your lifestyle
1270018080 19 hours ago [-]
I love not socializing. I've never enjoyed a party in my life, I hate dating, I don't want to lose any time in the day to hanging out with anyone. But what I wonder is if am I fundamentally an antisocial person, or am I a product of my cursed environment and trapped in the momentum of the antisocial tidal wave that has been happening since before I was born?
preg_match 18 hours ago [-]
I think it’s also a comfort or maybe risk/reward analysis thing.
I think staying at home basically rotting is more comfortable, sure. No judgment here, I’ve done that for months at a time. But the payoff is also… underwhelming. I mean you get basically nothing, just monotony and silence.
The more risky things, like dating or going to a party, are much more uncomfortable. But the potential payoff is a lot more. I mean you can really strike it up with someone, find someone on your wavelength. It can be exciting, exhilarating.
But it lacks the certainty. The reward is higher, but so is the drawback. If I stay inside and do nothing, at least I know the outcome. It’s more enticing in that way. But I also know I won’t make any memories that way. There won’t be some moment or some person I’ll look back on fondly.
itake 18 hours ago [-]
I have an abundance of positive social experiences that remind me that the highs are high and the low are low and I just need to push through it to find that next great experience.
I can definitely see how someone who doesn't have many positive reference experiences would prefer to just be alone and avoid the lows all together.
Not that you asked, but I'd encourage you to not define yourself as antisocial. You just haven't found your kin yet, and if you keep looking you can find it.
dkdbejwi383 9 hours ago [-]
Parties and dates aren't the only ways to socialise. What about sports clubs, art or language classes, board games, a beer or wine tasting club?
18 hours ago [-]
15 hours ago [-]
geodel 1 days ago [-]
At this point I think your experience can be multiplied by millions and still be quite accurate.
carlosjobim 20 hours ago [-]
Work as much overtime as you possibly can for a few months or even a year and save as much as you can. Then get rid of any material possessions bogging you down and go travel and find life.
VCFundedGenYer 1 days ago [-]
So it's basically Rush's "Working Man" - "So I get home at five o'clock and I take myself out an ice-cold beer. Always seem to be wond'rin' Why there's nothin' goin' down here. It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am. I guess that's why they call me...They call me the workin' man"
(and this goes back farther than 30 years. Closer to 50 now)
yolp5 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
Uncle_Brumpus 1 days ago [-]
Just some personal anecdotes: I've come into the orbit of a local "no phones" meetup group in my city. I discovered it by seeing a black and white printed scan of a hand-drawn flyer on a pole by my apartment. Currently it's just organized by one guy who sends out random Signal pings for stuff to do like a potluck picnic, group trip to some free instructed yoga at a park, craft night at a local bar/bookstore, etc., and usually there's ~4-15 people that show up. I organized a World Postcard Day postcard writing party last week, found a venue that would host for free, donated some of my own dollars to provide free official WPD postcards to attendees, and had 7 people come write postcards with me, I convinced 4 of them to sign up for Postcrossing, it was a great time.
If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.
I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.
chneu 1 days ago [-]
The meetup app still exists.
margalabargala 1 days ago [-]
Meetup sucks.
The reason for the decline in social activity is not that it was insufficiently commercialized. Meetup should be a nonprofit.
shartshooter 23 hours ago [-]
I re-started using meetup just a couple of weeks ago after feeling the same way. And, honestly, my interactions were great. Meetup was scheduled, people showed up, we had a good time. I live in a smaller city and found two to go to in one night(ping pong and board games)
tdeck 20 hours ago [-]
Meetup was fine 10+ years ago, but it's my go-to example of enshittification today. It feels like they're actively trying to kill it with every new change to the app / web experience. But despite that there are some good groups.
margalabargala 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the good groups exist despite meetup, not because of them.
jghn 10 hours ago [-]
Meetups existed before meetup.com just fine. The site was there to provide a place for meetups to coordinate. Meetups aren't an artifact of the site.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
I looked recently for my area. Almost all the listed meetups are online now, not in person. Bad juju.
slyall 17 hours ago [-]
The meetup app costs money for organisers except for the smallest meetings (10 people or less)
invalidOrTaken 20 hours ago [-]
aaaaand it's been bought by BendingSpoons
MetroWind 19 minutes ago [-]
I don't know. I like it better this way.
arjie 1 days ago [-]
I can't square this with the fact that I have a perfect storm situation that should point me there. I am a foreigner of minority ethnicity to the United States living in a high-rise building of 600 people that has no Schelling point common-space to spend time in that's located in a city that is expensive and I have all the social contact I desire: family, close friends, more distant friends, neighbours, strangers in the building, familiar strangers in the area.
I talked about how relatively easy it is to have social contact here at all levels and so I must conclude that most people simply have better uses for their time (by their own judgment) than this. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
chneu 1 days ago [-]
A lot of people are convinced of things without ever trying, which they then use to justify not trying.
"I mildly attempted doing this once and it didn't work, so I won't bother trying again" describes a shocking amount of people's experiences.
I sometimes think people fail on purpose to justify apathy or giving up.
Then if anyone says anything they scream about how their experience is valid and nobody can tell them otherwise. It's wild.
There's something important about being outside our comfort zones. We need entropy in our lives and the best way to accomplish that is being in new environments with different people/creatures. What I've found is over time my comfort zone expands as I become familiar with more stuff.
ragequittah 23 hours ago [-]
The flip side to this is thinking everyone is on equal footing and that your trying is the same as their trying. They're just doing it wrong.
Most people in this post's comments that are "not trying" seem to also be depressed in some way. If you've never experienced it, depression can make trying impossible not just a minor inconvenience. Going to therapy can help, or not. Taking anti-depressants can help, or not.
Also a "mild attempt at doing this once" that ends very poorly can cause a depressed or anxious person to spiral into a self-hatred looping hellscape. It's not a rational decision they're making it just happens. After you've experienced that you're very cautious and try to never feel it again.
And then the kicker is when you're paralyzed like this everyone just thinks you're lazy or unmotivated and pretty much tells you "don't be depressed stupid" which further sends you into having a poor outlook of yourself and it spirals from there. I've been in and out of this several times in my life, it's not pleasant. I've also tried every single remedy known to man and sometimes nothing works.
To put it simply: their experience is probably valid and nobody should tell them otherwise.
itake 18 hours ago [-]
I'm a white foreigner in Asia and feel the exact same as you. But I also realize, because I'm different than everyone else, there is more interest in getting to know me.
Also, people that are different than everyone else (but same background as me) seek me out to be friends.
For example, there is a HUGE difference between a Seattle Tech event where I am literally the same as the other 60 people in the room vs Vietnamese Tech event where I am one of 3 people that speak english. Those other 2 English speakers are going to walk over and chat with me.
monideas 18 hours ago [-]
This is precisely because you are a foreigner of minority ethnicity (the minority ethnicity points towards hailing from a more traditional culture compared to if you were white and therefore you would be from Europe which does not have a traditional culture, it has a modern culture).
To clarify the idea: you have a healthy social matrix but if you marry and settle in the US, your grandchildren won't.
__MatrixMan__ 21 hours ago [-]
All of the foreigners I know seem so healthy about this kind of thing. I don't know what's wrong with the rest of us.
smcg 1 days ago [-]
About 70-75% of Americans live in single family homes. Your experience is not universal.
arjie 1 days ago [-]
Right, and perhaps that indicates that the decline in social activity is a conscious trade-off made as Americans (a relatively wealthy group) prefer to live in detached land properties. That points to the social activity decline as not being something to be bemoaned but something to be celebrated because people have the opportunity to choose otherwise and they have done so in droves.
lappet 17 hours ago [-]
Fellow desi here, and I am happy for you, but I haven't had the same experience at all in the Bay. Imo, there is something in American culture which makes people very incurious about other cultures...because there are so many immigrants from all over the world, Americans find it hard to relate to anyone not American. My favorite example to illustrate this is how "where are you from" is everyone's favorite question in South Asia and often asked with good intentions, but it can be considered rude in the States.
GrinningFool 10 hours ago [-]
Asking in the US seems to risk a faux pas these days. "Why do you assume I'm 'from' somewhere else?"
arjie 4 hours ago [-]
Haha, the only time someone has done that to me they were doing it tongue-in-cheek. I’ve never encountered an actual problem here but also recently I’ve found the “Did you grow up here?” or “How long have you been living here?” questions much more fun. They have more conversation forks in them and I like that style of conversation where each interaction increases the conversation cone.
FWIW here in San Francisco I have found many people it’s fun to be around.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
I guess some people are just looking for something to be offended about. People move around so much pretty much everybody is from somewhere else.
northernsausage 15 hours ago [-]
From Europe something I notice when I spend time in the USA is that you guys have to drive to everything. Felt very isolating to me to drive 20mins to go grab a pre-planned beer or a coffee with friends. Our neighbourhood as 3 pubs/bars in 15min walk of each other as well as shops, community spaces and parks, the 3rd places where people and communities are made.
Also yes media, phones, TV etc.
TFNA 12 hours ago [-]
GCC countries are car-heavy, including a lot of drivethrus where no one gets out of their car, and yet I got the impression that social activity was remarkably healthy compared to Europe or North America. Men meeting in cafes in Oman were talking normally and not taking out their phones. There was an openness to talking to me, a foreigner, that has disappeared elsewhere. Not sure what to credit that with -- a combination of Islam and a generous welfare state?
withinboredom 14 hours ago [-]
As someone who grew up in the US and then moved to the EU; I came here to say exactly this. You leave your private house, get in your private car, then go somewhere. You could live 10 years beside someone and never know their name.
Here in the EU, I know most of the people on my street because I walk by them every day on my way to the store. In the US, even though I lived less than 1 mile/500ish meters from the store, I couldn't walk there if I wanted to.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
Urban design makes a huge difference. The post war culdesac boom was a terrible idea. It does tend to keep unwanted strangers and poor people out of your neighborhood though, which was probably the point.
northernsausage 8 hours ago [-]
Looks like they don't like the truth - down-vote-aggeddon
sophacles 4 hours ago [-]
I live in an area of the US that pre-pandemic, it wasn't the case of "everything scheduled and planned". I'd wake up, wander down to the cafe and chat with people I knew around town... just whoever I'd see. After work I'd go to the downtown area and just stop at pubs and patio cafes and whatever and sit until someone I knew came by or I saw someone doing the same and stop and chat with them.
After the pandemic it's like everyone forgot this. The coffee shops are all students studying or people rushing in and out, the pubs and cafes are all ghost towns or groups of people being very insular. Even at events like the farmer's market there's less socializing and more "go get the things and go move on, don't look around, don't talk to people", the vendors even mention how boring it is these days without anyone just chatting anymore.
"Go out and be in the world" seems to have just died.
jleyank 1 days ago [-]
This is more complex than you might thing. First, there's far more places to meet people - rather than having them over for coffee, we meet in a coffeeshop. Networks have provided a "together in time" alternative to "together in place", so people can game, talk, ... via voice and video rather than traveling to a common location. There's far more 2-working-member families than previously, so the ability to organize household events is reduced. Finally, there's far more organized sports activities that consume both child and parent time. These pull everybody out of the house.
Waterluvian 1 days ago [-]
I’ll never forget a conversation I overheard on a plane years back: a caricature of a man in his 20s failing repeatedly to explain to an older lady what a “gastropub” was. Each time, he rephrased his description, and each time she responded, “that sounds like a pub.”
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
s_dev 1 days ago [-]
A pub must serve drink. It doesn't need to serve food.
In Ireland that distinction matters. It generally will affect other things, like what time and how loud music will be played, how the tables and chairs will be organised and what type. It will often affect opening hours and the price of a pint. Gastro pubs also tend to be much larger.
In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs, possibly why that lady couldn't see the difference. I personally love micropubs and they never serve food other than crisps and maybe a toastie.
I feel like a pedant but I get that dude in his 20s and had to speak up.
jghn 1 days ago [-]
> In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs
To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
In my state you can't get a license to serve alcohol without also serving food.
BigTTYGothGF 1 days ago [-]
I can assure you we had "coffeeshop"s in the ancient times.
jleyank 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, but they weren't as common as they are today. There were pubs and eateries before also, but again, not so common. My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere. Some, of course, aren't done and I'm not sure they're quite so popular.
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
BigTTYGothGF 1 days ago [-]
> they weren't as common as they are today
We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.
> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere
Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.
21 hours ago [-]
justinator 1 days ago [-]
Wait until they find out "coffee shops" preceded "coffee at home"
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
For the last century (and still today) we called them cafés (in Germany). Coffee shop was the term we used for joints in Amsterdam where you could buy ... well, joints.
justinator 1 days ago [-]
Works for me. If you are in America are you said "Let's go to the café", you'd go get some coffee.
Weed here you get at a "dispensary", which is a very unsexy term but apparently we also need to protect the ears of the innocent.
Out east you'd go get beer and wine at the "package store" or just, "packy"
selimthegrim 24 hours ago [-]
smart shop?
pessimizer 1 days ago [-]
Wait until they find out that commodities markets started off as coffee shops.
HPsquared 1 days ago [-]
And Lloyd's of London. Formerly Lloyd's coffee shop.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
Decline in religion + third spaces combined with socioeconomic system expectations of a 40 hour work week + two incomes needed to live comfortably. Places and time for community and social activities has declined, and so social activity has as well.
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
Is there a citation for the decline in third spaces? I read such a claim often. But in my part of the US (Brooklyn NY) the number of third spaces like coffee shops and pottery studios is booming.
dansquizsoft 23 hours ago [-]
Brooklyn isn't very representative of the majority of middle America
Barrin92 19 hours ago [-]
there's diners and bars in every corner of middle America. What's changed, I think, is the level of striverism among young people.
In this thread you have multiple people saying they can't go out without paying 200$ or ordering 8$ beers. If you're in your 20s or 30s just go bar hopping in whatever the rundown part of your town is like people used to instead of going fine dining.
A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades. Normal people just took it for granted that they had to smuggle some beers into the cinema rather than turning the whole evening into some hundreds of dollars spending spree.
gs17 4 hours ago [-]
> A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades.
Maybe so, but it doesn't feel like that to people. A lot of things are actually way cheaper than they used to be inflation adjusted (we complain about an $80 video game, but inflation adjusted they used to be well over $100, cheaper now even with all the microtransactions, we just remember a sticker that said $50). When I know that a decade ago I could see a $5 matinee and for $20 have drinks and popcorn too, knowing that $40 (albeit for a smaller drink/popcorn) isn't really twice the price doesn't stop the sticker shock, especially for people whose income didn't go up at the same rate as inflation.
hobo123 1 days ago [-]
Part of it may be high rents. I read that rents increased a lot because of fashion stores. They make so much revenue per hour that more traditional stores (like the laundry, the washing machine store, the sewing store, the tabletop games store, and maybe cheaper cafes and restaurants just can't compete.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?
Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist
returningfory2 1 days ago [-]
> Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?
Yes, third spaces/places include places you need to pay for.
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
You were downvoted but you are correct. Some classic examples of third spaces are English pubs and Dutch coffee houses.
That third spaces include commercial spaces does not imply that “free” (tax or donation funded) third spaces should not exist. Parks and museums are also great third spaces.
TFNA 1 days ago [-]
While in many countries cafes and pubs served as real third places in the past, rising rents (and other costs) have led many establishments to discourage people from lingering. At my old haunts, loud music is now played to get customers moving on, and the very second you're done with your drink the wait staff will swoop down and ask if you want to place another order (i.e. a hint to pay more or get out).
Compare this to earlier times when it might have been common and socially acceptable to sit for hours on a single purchase and just shoot the shit with fellow townspeople.
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
This is also true, especially in busy areas, but sometimes going to a different neighborhood changes things (depending on the city).
ryanchants 22 hours ago [-]
Home is the first place, work/school is the second place, the third place is everything else.
astura 1 days ago [-]
When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
returningfory2 1 days ago [-]
Thank you! I skimmed these citations and I remain unconvinced. But I think really answering the question would be a real research project, not a HN back and forth :)
The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...
The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).
The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.
pvab3 20 hours ago [-]
An enormous portion of my social life is through my church. Bible studies, committee, small groups, Sunday schools are the main structures things, and then you make friends through it and start having other people over and hanging out with them. I don't know what my social life would look like without it.
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
At least in the US, people are leaving the church (at least the more conservative ones) in droves. I saw recent numbers that over 40% of people who were raised LDS are no longer in adulthood, for example.
Tying religion to politics was probably a bad idea for both religion and politics.
10 hours ago [-]
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
The 40 hour work week is most assuredly not new in the past 30 years.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
geodel 1 days ago [-]
This 40 hr/week need to be combined with
1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
I don't know about the sports. It's probably more serious now. Youth soccer is a whole thing that didn't exist at all when I was a kid. But lots of kids played Little League or basketball or football back then (1970s). "Travel" teams were probably not as common, but I was not a sports kid so I don't have a lot of direct experience. There were also swimming lessons, music lessons, Cub Scouts, a lot of other kids activities. It wasn't all just hanging out at home.
treis 20 hours ago [-]
Youth sports are pants on your head crazy these days. Like most things you don't have to go nuts but so many families do.
Yeah I think there's this fictional idea that families in the past didn't struggle with money and need both parents to work. My father worked full time and my mother worked about 30 hours a week when I was a child (1970s).
astura 11 hours ago [-]
We have a lot of fiction about the past. I'm one of those assholes that points out fictional narrative are actually just fictional any chance I get
regarding the 40 hour work week, I wonder what "always on" is doing to impact social activities. Meaning, you work 40 hours in the office, then you go home and get online and work a few more hours each night.
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
The constant aggregate dopamine demand and chasing activities is certainly not helping, imho. "Work, home, doomscroll, repeat."
jit_tech 11 hours ago [-]
I think this is not America specific and decline could be even steeper when today's kids are gonna grow up.
I see most of the kids are constantly on mobile and when they are not, they feel a void. It was almost similar to not having friends in pre social media age.
I see people getting more and more absorbed in screen so much so to forget greeting people. This happens to me all the time , someone known coming out of elevator, I am ready to greet, but they simply did not notice or noticed too late and vice versa
FinnLobsien 14 hours ago [-]
I feel that beyond the proper social events (e.g. dinner parties, hangouts etc.), another important part that has declined is the little social stuff.
Having a chat with the butcher, barista, etc. or just bumping into people you know and talking for a few minutes is pretty uplifting when it happens regularly.
I feel like the containerization of life erodes this.
poemxo 6 hours ago [-]
"Meetups" are glorified pickup activities, hookup culture is too prevalent, and people are kind of gross when they're getting drunk. I don't drink, I don't smoke. Why would I want to do any of that when I could talk online to my friends about actual nerdy stuff, instead of having to listen to someone using nerdy stuff as a "common ground" but whose interests are far more singular than that? The article says internet usage is up 90%, much of that is probably socially motivated, especially if your interests are any degree above extremely ordinary.
Ancalagon 4 hours ago [-]
you can go to a meetup and not drink, nor smoke, nor hit on people?
If you're hit on yourself, politely decline, and strike up a different topic of conversation.
Most of the meetups I attend are not "glorified pickup activities".
There are also plenty of nerdy meetups. Some of the biggest nerds I know I've met through board game and trivia meetups.
Fun dumbbell plot. I like how the bottom "Used the internet" is graphically and metaphorically the foundation for the entire presentation of change. The change is so total that you might miss it, as if it is the baseline or the water we are all swimming in.
aqme28 14 hours ago [-]
I don't know if "read a book" is a "social activity," meanwhile "play video games" often is a social activity. Not to mention there are gains in attending concerts, exercise classes, airtravel, and using the internet-- all of which are social activities.
It's kind of an outdated survey if the goal is to track social activity. Each individual question is interesting on its own though.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
Playing online video games can be a social activity but more often than not it is a parasocial activity.
jibalt 6 hours ago [-]
This is very one-sided. How about Zoom meetings and other virtual activities? And "staying at work late" is not a social activity, nor is reading a book, and the decline in church attendance obviously has other causal factors.
jibalt 6 hours ago [-]
This is very one-sided. How about Zoom meetings and other virtual activities? And "staying at work late" is not a social activity, and the decline in church attendance obviously has other causal factors.
ericmay 8 hours ago [-]
Cars, + social media and you have most of your answer right there. It’s difficult to be “social” when the activities requiring at a minimum driving 10-15 minutes. Insert a surrogate activity (social media) and there isn’t any real reason to leave your couch.
seabombs 22 hours ago [-]
Semi-related, this story stuck with me about the university experience now vs in the 90s.
By the end I felt so sorry for the young man they profiled, what an enormous life experience he largely misses out on.
janalsncm 1 days ago [-]
It would be useful to know whether the same trends have happened in other places. If iPhones are causing people to be less social, we should see similar trends in France and Japan.
If we didn’t see the same trends, it points to reasons more specific to the US.
Klonoar 24 hours ago [-]
Japan is not necessarily applicable 1:1; homes are smaller and space is at a premium so people are far more likely to just go sit somewhere… and nowadays they are usually on their phone.
dzonga 1 days ago [-]
because suburbs and housing models like it designed around a closed loop even some apartment building which have high population density encourage social isolation.
compare a 'luxury' Florida apartment vs the old New York apartments built in the 1800s. the NY apartments have narrow stairs, one way in.
likewise dense / small cities / villages in either africa/europe etc force more natural social interaction.
even for friends - easier to host friends when they can easily walk to your home & they don't have to drink & drive.
so blaming tv, social media, video games etc doesn't get to the root of the matter.
1 days ago [-]
pulpconversatio 9 hours ago [-]
The home price to wage ratio from 1995 to present increased 40% so maybe a nation of renters has less incentive to host dinner parties. Source: BLS: https://www.bls.gov/cps/wlftable16.htm
odyssey7 11 hours ago [-]
It feels like it costs like $40+ to do anything.
cute_boi 7 hours ago [-]
in NYC it takes more than $50 to do anything and minimum wage is $17.00...And it takes like 1 hour commute with stupid city tax/ state tax/ federal tax/ school tax...
And they keep saying why people aren't socializing or making babies and blame it on phone.
chrsw 12 hours ago [-]
There are bills to pay. Who has time for friends?
Havoc 13 hours ago [-]
Zuck got rich though
elchief 20 hours ago [-]
I started volunteering at my local bike kitchen co-op, mostly just to meet like-minded people
jmaw 7 hours ago [-]
I think this is a great one that a lot of people overlook. Also, doesn't cost $40+ like a lot of people are saying in different comments. Plus, it actually does some good in the world.
morelandjs 21 hours ago [-]
I made an app for iOS for creating a social roster and setting specific catchup cadences for each friend. It's free, is purely local and has no backend, and was co-created by my wife and I. We've gotten a lot of value out of it, and it has measurably improved our lives. Try it out if you're interested!
This sounds like a news article from 2020-2021 if you remove "30 years" :D
But on the serious side - it all make sense because we have more ways to socialize without going out (via chats, games, etc.). Although it would be interesting to see the same stats for Gen Z and Gen Alpha
1 days ago [-]
econ 19 hours ago [-]
All that screen time has to be sourced from some place.
Research on this has been done and the cause is known. There is just no desire to improve the conditions of social activity on the part of civil society or the government.
atniomn 8 hours ago [-]
This doesn't really account for new ways in which we are social. After my kid goes to bed, I typically get an hour or two to spend online with my friends on Discord. We mostly talk about work, fatherhood, etc...
I think it's way more healthy for me to be able to talk about life every day for an hour online, than meeting up once per week for two hours over beer. I still see them in person on a monthly basis.
Lagoon3384_SWE 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
toppa33 14 hours ago [-]
Was having this conversation the other day. I’m wondering whether with the advent of technology we’re now “over organising” social activities to the point where that organisation has become too much of a task to perform consistently.
galkk 18 hours ago [-]
I also see that people generally like to be invited but rarely initiate things on their own.
mihaaly 15 hours ago [-]
Same in the 90s.
foolfoolz 1 days ago [-]
this data doesn’t have things like “talked in a group chat with my friends”
dawnerd 1 days ago [-]
As an introvert I’d say my social activity has stayed about the same the last 30+ years. Being out with people just drains me.
stuaxo 14 hours ago [-]
Inequality has increased the middle class have been hollowed out and young people have no money so hardly surprising.
legerdemain 23 hours ago [-]
Do folks have social nerd meetup suggestions in the Bay Area? I'm pulling my hair out here in Mountain View. Aside from trying to run my own, with limited success, it's veeery slim pickings.
kijiki 22 hours ago [-]
Oh, I almost forgot the Mountain View Reverse Engineering meetup. Very nerdy crowd.
legerdemain 22 hours ago [-]
I want to build more than I want to disassemble, but maybe I should check out the BBQ people's meetup.
kijiki 20 hours ago [-]
The primary focus is on RE, of course, but the folks there are generally curious, and a large minority of the talks are about forward engineering.
I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.
bhelkey 21 hours ago [-]
Have you looked into a local makerspace (e.g. Maker Nexus)?
legerdemain 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, a lot. Does Maker Nexus run meetups other than their board game night?
The now-defunct maker space I used to visit inherited a former general manager from Maker Nexus, he was very... apathetic about tech in general.
bhelkey 3 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that they run quite a few meetups [1].
I am not sure what you mean by "apathetic about tech in general" but my experience has been that folks who go to makerspaces are excited about making things in the physical world. That tends to carry over to tech that empowers them to do so (e.g. 3d printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, ...).
Red Rock Coffee hosts recurring events. Not explicitly nerdy events, but the local demographics here mean that the crowd skews nerdy.
legerdemain 22 hours ago [-]
You mean their Monday open mics, their monthly book club, and their... motorcycle enthusiasts meetup, if that's still going on? I've been at that open mic for years, most weeks. I've tried the book club, and I don't have enough interest in motorcycles.
zeroonetwothree 9 hours ago [-]
How much of this is preference though? I don’t particularly like going to parties or especially hosting them in my home so the fact that there is less of this is actually positive for me.
jl6 9 hours ago [-]
It could be that doing things you don’t like is sometimes good for you, and maybe there is a collective preference shift towards avoiding short-term pain at the expense of long-term gain.
shimman 9 hours ago [-]
Are these your actual preferences or have you been nudged and pushed to pursuit consumerism to replace human socialization?
Feels anti-human to purposely deny yourself what makes humans human.
bburnett44 9 hours ago [-]
I mean that’s the point right? Preferences have shifted.
Frone125 8 hours ago [-]
Not surprising but depressing nonetheless!
nwmcsween 6 hours ago [-]
I blame this on two things, technology and the financialization of everything.
Long ago places had large parks, outdoor swimming pools, cities became less of a place to live and more of an efficient use of space/money and thus the human aspect was removed.
Technology in the sense of games, twitter, chat, etc removes the superfical need for human contact but ruins real bonds with people
tsunamifury 20 hours ago [-]
Gonna be real honest here. I live across classes and and observe quite a few
The entirety of the socialization decline I see is with the poor and middle class. The poor seem to have to work a ton more and struggle to make ends meet while still living in a highly individualistic world without the shared community of previous poorer cultures of the past.
And from my observations the middle class are amusing themselves to death while simply becoming sloths at home doing very little other than their children’s sports. No hosting, not social manners and little get together than gets in the way of television or video games.
The upper class and wealthy socialize a great deal. I mean a ton. Shared vacations, constant social occasions hosting fund raisers galas sports hobbies etc. practically non stop.
ungovernableCat 9 hours ago [-]
>The upper class and wealthy socialize a great deal. I mean a ton. Shared vacations, constant social occasions hosting fund raisers galas sports hobbies etc. practically non stop.
I wonder how many of them would count this as work time, since so much of value add at high level positions is precisely through activities like that.
mrcatmann 9 hours ago [-]
The only advantage of social media is that it showed how many assholes surround us, and maybe there's no reason to socialise that much
MadrasTh0rn 1 days ago [-]
Digital captupture of society
james_marks 1 days ago [-]
Last night I found a post-it note in my copy of _The Organized Mind_ by Daniel J. Levitin.
It says "Connect with Others. Learn. Be Active".
Strikes me as good advice 10 years ago when I wrote it, and just as good now.
ojbyrne 17 hours ago [-]
Drunk driving laws (plus the way cities are built obviously).
MissAnnThrope 6 hours ago [-]
I'm an American who dislikes socializing with humans in general. Toxic masculinity, toxic femininity, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, classism, increasing wealth inequality, the global economy being unsustainable, the internet's golden era being over, children being infantilized rather than treated like full human beings, and other things are why I dislike socializing with humans. Unlike humans, I like being with my dogs. My dogs are far more trustworthy and loyal. They don't lie to me. They're not ruining this planet.
olelele 15 hours ago [-]
Anyone else think Covid exacerbated this problem?
17 hours ago [-]
noonething 17 hours ago [-]
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
Arthur Schopenhauer
chris_money202 22 hours ago [-]
And meanwhile I feel like I can never find time for myself on the weekend
jmyeet 24 hours ago [-]
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm going to call out housing as a huge factor here for four reasons:
1. Every third space represents an ever-larger opportunity cost of being turned into housing. If you can close a pub and turn it into million dollar condos, that commercial rent is going up;
2. More expensive rents are an input into everything done at a business or third space;
3. This decreases spending ability in real terms. 20 years ago, you could get a pint in London for 2-3 pounds. Now it's 6-7. Have wages doubled? No. And pubs were (and are) part of the UK social fabric; and
4. People need to work more to pay for their ever-larger mortgages and other debt. This gives people less time.
Expensive housing is literally destroying society.
drnick1 16 hours ago [-]
> Expensive housing is literally destroying society.
You can blame immigration for that, among other things (more people living alone for example).
amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago [-]
Immigration doesn't cause expensive housing. Making it hard and/or expensive to build more causes expensive housing.
drnick1 6 hours ago [-]
Immigration clearly does too. Land in desirable areas is limited, especially for single family homes, which is the kind of housing people usually want and aspire to. Building more is an option sometimes, but it takes time and does not address the root issue of available land, saturation of roads and public transit, etc.
20 hours ago [-]
freebsd_lovefes 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, like, go hang out with someone fresh off the boat whose only idea of cosine is you cosigning his or her immigration application.
amelius 1 days ago [-]
Staying late at work is seen as social activity? (8th line in the graph)
legerdemain 23 hours ago [-]
Presumably for a social occasion at work, not to get more work done.
catigula 7 hours ago [-]
There's a study for this, Bowling Alone.
Hint: it's diversity.
17 hours ago [-]
AIorNot 1 days ago [-]
So here's the question:
in America we have had 20 years of "Tech Disruption"., making the world a better place and relentless technical innovation, combined with the 'corporization' of America
Has our day to day lives improved?
Do we work less, live healthier, have less stress?
Seems like this (the younger generation) is far worse off then pre-internet connected, smartphone generation
mrweasel 1 days ago [-]
As long as technology keeps being visible I don't think society will be improved by it. The development in the past few years have let me to the conclusion that having technology insisting on being in your face, it will not benefit society. It has to blend into the background and be something you pull out when you need it. Almost anything "big tech" has produced in the past 25 year have pushed technology into the foreground.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
I'm Canadian not American but I feel this keenly
I had a pretty busy social life in university, 20 years ago
The first city I landed in afterwards, I was able to make some connections and was lucky enough some of my uni friends were around too
But I moved for work to a much further away city and my social life has dropped to zero since then. The pandemic and lockdowns didn't help of course, but that was years ago. I don't have a single friend in this city and I've lived here almost 10 years now
Admittedly I'm kind of socially awkward and quite afraid of new groups, which has only gotten worse over the years. I also haven't had any luck making lasting connections through work or anything like that.
I tend to blame myself for this but it's not too surprising to hear many others are struggling too
bethekidyouwant 1 days ago [-]
- in university 20 years ago.
My brother in Christ you’re just an old fart now.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
Early to mid forties is middle aged in G20 countries, my own university days were 40 years past.
bluefirebrand 23 hours ago [-]
Are you trying to say that someone who is 40 is just supposed to not have a social life anymore?
bethekidyouwant 9 hours ago [-]
“Aging population is becoming less social overall” is not a surprising statement.
ungovernableCat 9 hours ago [-]
The 55+ crowd where I'm from have the most active social life. Constantly at each others houses for a chat, activities (gossip parties) after Sunday mass etc.
1 days ago [-]
whoamii 1 days ago [-]
The solution: open play pickleball
legerdemain 23 hours ago [-]
I've spent about $1000 on equipment and classes so far, and about a year of my time. My problem is that I still kind of suck, and I have no friends who also play pickleball. So at open play, people just beat me so they can finally get to play with their own friends. This is really demoralizing!
21 hours ago [-]
xyzal 14 hours ago [-]
Two years ago I moved to a smallish (think 3,5k people) town (in Europe, ie you get everywhere by foot) and it has done wonders to my mental health. All the daily social micro-interactions with people who are aware of you seem truly healing.
zombocomvibes 8 hours ago [-]
Americans are wasting their precious dopamine on stupid shit.
logicchains 1 days ago [-]
That should be "In-Person Social Activity Has Steeply Declined". While online social activity has increased significantly.
Terr_ 1 days ago [-]
It saddens me that soon we'll need to split this out between actual human-to-human activity and parasocial bot-stuff. (Worse, covertly-bot stuff.)
mihaaly 15 hours ago [-]
I sign up for things like entertaining people, church, dinner parties, but reading, breakfast, movie, stayed late at work, come on! Concerts I also sign up for but the pop and rock element I find very restricting. We shouldn't forget that focus/subject of common activities shift. Like we don't go out that much with friends to a public execution any more, which was very popular in the past, peak social event. Possibly we can find closer examples disappeared too. Times change, old things like clubs disappear, new ways emerge, things shift elsewhere. How about group chats/calls, open-source projects, commenting articles? Not only with people in 1 hour distance max but with people from around the planet? Gamer events, e-sport (despite my dislike)? Communicate with someone on the bus (regardless of being on the same bus or elsewhere)?
In person socialising is definitely down, likely the overall too, but I would not base a social activity judgement on a questionnaire like this here alone, I miss important elements.
locallost 17 hours ago [-]
I think social interactions are very tiring, especially today. The reason being, most people want to be impressed by someone somehow, but the comparison is no longer the person down the street, but some really really funny person that lives on a social media feed. Another reason is, people are getting less and less accustomed to any pushback, since they are not used to it anymore, any discussion above smalltalk is difficult.
It's probably true that some form of a satisfying social interaction is missing today, but I would say it's a trope any will do to make us happy. In general any type of party I've been to recently, I've enjoyed leaving as soon as possible.
> One of the steepest declines in the survey is for "entertaining people in my home." While in 1995, 88% of Americans reported entertaining others at home at least once in the past year, this number has declined to 67% in 2026.
That really jumped out at me. I don't doubt it, but it's just weird because my partner and I constantly watch home improvement shows on HGTV where folks are constantly talking about improving their kitchen or other space "to entertain guests". And my partner is always nagging at me about the same thing - upgrading the kitchen or backyard so we can have guests. But our house is fine and we never have guests over. I get this sense from a lot of people. I think people love the fantasy of having guests to entertain, but no one ever wants to actually do it.
matthest 23 hours ago [-]
Probably true regarding everywhere, not just America.
Go to Asia and you'll see people glued to their phones everywhere while out in public.
bethekidyouwant 1 days ago [-]
Doesn’t control for age?
thefz 1 days ago [-]
I can not think of a society that hates itself more, so yeah.
zarmin 1 days ago [-]
together we are alone
keybored 18 hours ago [-]
Socializing with people who are not friends is too shallow and unsatisfying. How are you? I’m good. But you’re not good and nothing is good. Okay but that is just pleasantries and not even a literal question. Still it bothers. What’s better? Putting on a fake smile so that you can have idle, useless chatter with near-strangers because you happen to be proximate due to eating habits? Or not.
Satisfying would be to bond over common problems and share common joys. But again too surface-level if not even taboo. I swear it’s gotten to the point where AI or whatever the next doom is could take 5% of all jobs. And there would be talk like, oh poor Joe he lost his job and has no marketable skill. Yup. Yup. Any solutions? Any venting? No, just frustrating reminders of impotence.
The absurdity of going to work every day as a wage commodity, another line item for the bougies to increase profits, then go “consume” your wages so that your “disposable income” can go towards the impossible goal of increasing profits into eterntiy, then see advertizements about how consumers are ruining the planet by buying food that they have no skill, land, or means to grow. But why talk about that? You can’t, not even in a fabled “social democratic” society.
We could be talking about real problems. Just venting, or maybe educating each other, or maybe even doing something about it. Even strangers since we all obviously, as plain as fucking day, go through these bullshit motions every day. We see each other. But we can’t talk about it.
AndrewKemendo 1 days ago [-]
In my experience it’s not because there’s lack of attempts to get people together
When given the option between: socializing with people in a shared space and being at home and entertaining yourself people are consciously choosing the latter.
When I ask why, this is what I hear from other people the most:
-I don’t have time
-I don’t have transportation
-Who else is going to be there
Etc…
There seems to be a genuine lack of desire whatsoever to simply get yourself to a place where there is a free event.
And to be clear this is not just talking about one particular type of event
I just went to a Democratic socialist of America event this weekend in support of Gaza, and the amount of people who showed up compared to the number of people who are on the list (even the organizing list) is some vanishingly small group.
If the plurality of individuals don’t want to join groups in person because they feel satisfied by themselves, then that’s a signal of some kind.
throwaway85825 23 hours ago [-]
I accidentally went to a DSA meeting once. Was entertaining, they spent much of the time attacking eachother.
ember_writes 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
MadrasThorn 8 hours ago [-]
NPCs dont need a social life /s
shevy-java 14 hours ago [-]
Well - they also voted for Trump. Twice.
So the social cohesion in the USA is absolutely broken.
What is more tragic, though, is how they try to export
their insanity onto other countries, be it Canada or the
EU. Trump also supporting war criminal and genocidal man
Putin, is such a clear fact for the agent Krasnov theory.
Evil in joint operation here.
The population in the USA really need to begin to think
about their political system. That two-party system does
not really work; and the transition to a de-facto one-party
system led by an authoritarian clique is even worse. The
system is totally broken here.
scottndecker 1 days ago [-]
This was foreseeable. We all know it. We all know why. Yet we fail to do anything about it.
bluecalm 1 days ago [-]
It's happening in other countries as well.
Any suggestions what could be done about it?
scottndecker 1 days ago [-]
Turn off all social media and organize around shared beliefs/interests
astura 1 days ago [-]
It's not just social media, it's all solo entertainment - streaming, cable, 24 hour news, video games, everything.
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
They’ll have to turn off our “offline” solo hobbies too—whether it’s gardening, making art, reading, puzzles, crafts, or whatever else.
bluecalm 1 days ago [-]
I think turning off all social media would help if others do that as well but as an individual action it's likely to cut you off even more.
HoldOnAMinute 1 days ago [-]
Easy. Reduce our use of technology and stop consuming so much. It will require you to lower your standard of living.
Is your partner willing to do this with you? Probably not.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Social media, smart phones, and all of that are heavily responsible for this, but at the same time I think the main crux of the issue, in my opinion, is that we don’t have a common culture anymore. As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
We absolutely do have a common culture. The fact so many people think we do not is derivative of social media and smartphones.
All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives.
braj0 4 hours ago [-]
"All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives."
Can I get a source for this? Or is this just something you are pulling out of nowhere to argue against someone else's lived experience because it conflicts with yours?
HoldOnAMinute 1 days ago [-]
For a long time the number 1 song in the USA was "Choosin Texas" by Ella Langley.
I have no idea who that is and I've never heard the song.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?
> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
Doesn't seem so to me.
bluefirebrand 1 days ago [-]
> Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?
Shared music is absolutely part of common culture
estearum 1 days ago [-]
That wasn't the question.
HoldOnAMinute 6 hours ago [-]
"common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on"
I would have thought that storming the Capitol, beating and killing police officers was Not Acceptable, but apparently I was wrong.
There are many such examples. We do not agree on the basic rules any more.
HoldOnAMinute 6 hours ago [-]
"common understanding of the basic rules"
Vaccines are good.
See, not everyone agrees.
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think the “agreeing middle” is 95% anymore. Maybe this is a Chronically Online POV but it seems the extremes are growing quickly, the center is shrinking, and society is going bimodal.
structural 1 days ago [-]
The center is mostly offline, thinks both extremes are very small portions of the population, and doesn't post on social media. So they seem small but really there are a lot of people like this who aren't shouting into the internet 24/7, so you just remember that what you hear is all the extremists shouting, not the people you saw during the course of a week who weren't.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Society is going bimodal on the 1% of issues that bisect people. Those 1% of issues are consuming 99% of our mass-media airtime.
Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.
pessimizer 1 days ago [-]
The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
braj0 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks for your reply, I found it to reflect my lived experience far more then the other replies, having moved from very liberal to very conservative places and vice-versa. People are so caught in their little bubbles they don't realize there is an entire world of people out there who think differently then they do.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
That 95% number is so far from the truth. Gen Z males are significantly (though not majority) right wing and Gen Z females are the exact opposite. Based on data, 67% of the time, Gen Z males and females do not agree on the same political issues.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
You are missing the point.
"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."
But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
I disagree. These are fundamental viewpoints that affect every aspect of everyday life. The biggest disagreements are in fundamental things like whether to have children, childrearing gender roles, household responsibilities between genders, education about gender issues/LGBTQ etc. These are not some far away issues that don’t affect everyday life. The overall fundamental issue seems to be in regards to gender roles, and that affects every married couple.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
The fragmentation of culture is also the fault of social media (and all media to a lesser extent). It's far easier to get sucked in to echo chambers where other opinions are mocked or shut out.
In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.
logicchains 1 days ago [-]
The homogenization of culture was the fault of traditional centralized media. If you go back before the printing press, there was actually a much greater diversity of cultures and languages. Decentralized (social) media is bringing us back to how traditionally tribal humanity used to be.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
I may be incorrectly inferring that you think this is a good thing, but "traditionally tribal humanity" were constantly at war with one another. I'm not sure that's something we want to go back to.
crtified 24 hours ago [-]
Yes, it was (and some places, sadly continues to be) the ultimate horror that people can visit upon each-other.
Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.
It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
I’ll take more of that homogenization of culture please.
ragall 1 days ago [-]
Americans are very intolerant of others, whether it's political convictions or food preferences; the few that have kids threat the little ones like fragile glassware that can't be moved or otherwise inconvenienced, so it doesn't surprise me that they meet others less. My wife and I meet with a varying group of friends every week, or even more, but we're all immigrants. We've tried to invite local acquaintances, but they always find a reason to say no and just stay home.
eitally 1 days ago [-]
Totally off-base projection based on your very small sample size.
_nobody 16 hours ago [-]
What a dumb take. That person is not the president of US to go shake hands with every one. They just said what they experienced. How is that invalid. It just proves that persons point, Americans are close minded, your comments itself proves that.
bediger4000 1 days ago [-]
They're right about the intolerance, though. One tribe literally calls the other "Demon-crats", and has worked to reduce participation based on gender, sexuality and skin color.
ragall 1 days ago [-]
Both sides are at fault. Here in the Midwest many a supporter of the Democratic party are legitimately afraid of being fired if their support became public knowledge, while on the other hand in California (or other "Blue" states) it's the exact opposite. It's astonishing to see how much Americans relish oppressing their fellow citizens.
marcusverus 1 days ago [-]
The internet is awash with seething tribal hatred. It's impossible to honestly believe this is only an issue with the right. The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack (nazis, after all, are the secular-progressive equivalent of demons, with Adolf Hitler being their Satan), and the latter attack is infinitely more common than the former, even on HN.
watwut 13 hours ago [-]
It is an assymetric issue - the right radicalized far far more then left. And spend years demonozing anyone left of center, demonizing groups and now is actually sending thugs to be violent.
There is no left equivalent of that.
> The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack
Abaolutely not. One is a name of political ideology. Calling them nazi is an attempt to describe their believes and behavior. It is a name consistent with reality. (Hey, some high profile ones even throw Hitler salute in public and we have enough of Hitler praise coming from lower profile ones).
Trying to pretend it is the same is absurd.
HoldOnAMinute 1 days ago [-]
"There are only two things I can't stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch."
-- Nigel Powers in "Goldmember"
ajkjk 1 days ago [-]
Cause our culture is f'ed, lol. Everyone I know is unhappy. It's impossible to be happy when things are this messed up.
AznHisoka 1 days ago [-]
I think unhappiness is the default of human state. Or rather discontent. Its probably wired into us bc if we were ever content we wouldnt procreate, try to attain financial success, etc
ajkjk 1 days ago [-]
I don't think so. Everyone was a lot happier 10-15 years ago when the culture felt less fucked. I think people can't feel happy if they don't feel basically safe, and the world's problems are so incomprehensible, and solutions to them see so impossible to imagine, that there is a background unsafety overlaid on everything, even if one's immediate conditions are pretty good.
HoldOnAMinute 1 days ago [-]
I guess we are different then. A non-stop state of panic/fear does not make me feel like procreating.
AznHisoka 9 hours ago [-]
I guess it's not really procreating - more like the need to get a mate. You're right: fear wouldn't wanna make me want to procreate
wil421 1 days ago [-]
You must live in a terrible place. That’s not my experience at all in a suburban neighborhood.
I’d imagine you don’t have any family around so the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate.
ragall 1 days ago [-]
> You must live in a terrible place.
Dipends how you see it. For North American standards, it's a lovely suburban neighbourhood in the Midwest; for us it's suburban hell because we love cities.
> the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate
What do you mean by "assimilate" ?
stuxnet79 1 days ago [-]
You are getting a lot of downvotes but I 100% agree with you. These are the types of conversations where someone's cultural background / bias is evident and its obvious to me most of your responders have never spent time outside the US.
_nobody 16 hours ago [-]
Americans are happy online cheering for people getting killed, maimed, tortured or otherwise suffering in other countries. Heck, even within their own neighbourhood. They come together online in droves posting memes and pimping themselves to advertisers. This article is using an old fashioned notion of what was social. Their social activity has not declined, atleast on Reddit. Or youtube. Or twitter. Or TikTok. Or bluesky. Or instagram. Or……
lisp2240 12 hours ago [-]
Who wants to hang out with illiterate, intolerant goblins? Not even their fellow goblins apparently. You ever see an American on fentanyl walking around with a hunched back? Goblin.
Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with, it made things a lot easier. Went from making up all kinds of stories in my head about myself and others to thinking about each interaction as practice and realized lot more people were like me, thinking I'll be invited somewhere or talked to if I was liked or was interesting enough; waiting for someone else to do the inviting or talking first. I just remind myself that a lot of others also want to be invited or talked to, and that reminder greatly reduced my fear of rejection.
I think thats the crux of it, most people respond positively when others are interested in them. As long as its genuine, asking about, or be interested in, others goes a really long way.
Take for instance someone telling you about their career. "I'm a software developer".
You can express interest with a response like "Oh, thats cool, what made you go into that line of work?" but thats a very generic, shallow response.
If you know a thing or two about software, for example, you can ask more interesting questions that show your interest in them, and your knowledge of the space. "Woh cool, how is AI coding impacting your life?"
Suddenly, it seems like you're much more interesting yourself, AND you're interested in them.
The tricky part nowadays is everyone has very niche interests. It's harder than ever to really have a breadth of knowledge that is broadly applicable. This was easier before the internet, before travel, before telecommunication. When your community was your community and news traveled slowly, it was a lot easier to learn about what impacted others.
Some people act so shocked when you tell them you did something because it would make you richer and not because an angel came to you in a dream and whispered in your ear to save the disenfranchised underclass (and all the cats) by writing code, or whatever's the current faux na pas reason to pursue a vocation these days.
Answering why you picked this particular path to high income is more interesting of an answer to the person asking and carries the conversation. Did your parents do it, did you have a professor that captured your attention, did you just google “easiest job to make a lot of money?” and pick the first one?
Someone asking wants to understand how and why you make decisions. What motives you. Etc. It’s the XY problem and from the other person’s perspective, you’re answering the wrong one.
This is too simplistic. Someone might ask that for a million reasons. Also, you will be judged not only by your answer. Being so direct might show you are not on autopilot in the conversation, your humour or that you only care about money, depending on a lot of other factors. It might make one more memorable as well. I personally would read it as light humour, unless it is accompanied by a dead eyes stare.
As another person for whom relation stuff does not come naturally, this was incredibly helpful because little pieces of advise really do work, because they really are nice things to do/say.
A favorite example of mine, when starting to talk to someone who probably already doesn't care for you is to find something -- anything -- that it's clear they like or chose, which you also happen to like, and pay it a genuine positive complement. And perhaps talk about it a little bit.
Some folks take this over the top and do a weird, false-feeling thing like sprinkle the person's name into conversation over and over, or at the start/middle/end. And it makes the conversation feel stilted, fake, and like a situation is being forced. And that casts a negative light on the overarching idea that people like being remembered, and their own name is a big part of that.
But let's put that aside, the negativity really comes from the fact that every time I have seen it brought up in real life, it is being wielded like a cudgel by a person not practicing what is in the book. It is effectively corporate short hand for "you need to learn how to be a better servant".
To be fair, most people are uninteresting.
Maybe the goal should be to be okay with being ordinary.
TRYING to be interesting (or interested) is just tiresome.
If you meet someone who is completely and utterly uninteresting, that in itself is interesting.
What do you mean by that? What's the difference between a person and their story?
How do we even define interesting ? Like interesting opinions/hobbies? Good storyteller ? Who cares about that. I do need to like you and you need to be an agreeable person imo, but no having a real unique life or opinions is really not that necessary imo. Having a sense of humor is a big plus to me though.
This is why you can not "interview" innovative or creative people- and only get a flat "imposter" image of the creative person. The observation hinders the process and all you get is basically the "house keeping" routines- weaving together some plausible stories, on how a "idea" came to be.
The true process is a walk in the mountains. Some scribbled notes. Glued together during some conversation on a similar topic with friends. I always found it fascinating, how the "iterrators" can dismiss something/someone that clearly works- just because they can not dissect and reproduce it.
And yet everybody cares precisely nothing about almost all natural numbers.
And it doesn't have to be anything special; you could find joy together in the mundane:
Petting cats, watching the rain, taking a walk through the woods without saying anything..
I agree that it is a skill, but like any skill it helps immensely to start learning it as a child. It took me until my 30s to realize that my parents were essentially... antisocial. And that most of the social skill lessons I took from them, if any, were probably wrong and unproductive. I spent a lot of time (and money) trying to learn to overcome that, but never made any progress.
Agreed, but I'm not so sure this was previously true. Or at least not _as_ true. There used to be a lot of more socializing by default. People who were poor in this skill set still had relatively regular social opportunities.
This seems to be gone today, and now it's purely manual.
Another lost art is keeping a contacts list and contacting them regularly. People used to have these lists on paper and then send cards at least once per year on birthdays/christmas/independence. With this being relegated to social media, your contacts often fall in the cracks of the quirks of tech companies.
It’s not as tangible as a paper card but by being an email, people can just hit reply and answer. Every year a few dozen people write back to our card (out of maybe 350 recipients), and a lot of people have said that this is one of their favorite messages to get all year.
I think people can tell when you actually put time into something instead of just making a quick conventional card with platitudes. It’s helped us keep in touch with people from all over the place, across different continents, etc, who we might not stay in touch with so much otherwise.
But this also created a group of its own that I was coining together for regular Thursday craft beer night or occasionally having wine and beef together.
I stopped though, many years ago as when I started my own family, family and work consumed me too much to have regular night life and meetup exercising and my home was always my sanctum, I rarely invite people to my home. this is where i rest and only some inner circle has entrance there.
that inner circle was developed during last 20+ years and I don't find much space to expand this circle unless somebody new spends with me 20+ years having random access to my limited time.
And that's ok. having up to 5 close friends who you see and talk to regularly if you're 45+ is already enough. Random folk... can stay online. like here to share ideas and then bring them back home.
I actually stopped looking for new friends based on the interests.. I have enough in that gang to cover already. sharing interest related insights is where I use internet mostly.
one of the reasons why place like HN started becoming attractive again as after ditching FB, Discord and many other places with just noise instead of valuable insight and content only HN, lobsters and telnet/ssh BBSes become legitimate sources of idea sharing and tech progress.
other topics are covered fine for decades and when I'm randomly at bar sometimes (usually work delegations outside my own town) then I'm open for one evening conversation about any nonsense just to stay connected with the city folk, but no huge expectactions about phone sharing or another meeting.
I never share my social accounts connection with strangers. I stopped doing that.. it's just spam after all and like collecting f* pokemon cards instead of having meaningful relationship. One can't maintain relationship with 1000+ people so I dropped all that and keep online activities either socially anonymous or narrowed to under 100 people whom I at least remember I had a drink with, once.
Sometimes, it may be just the knowledge that you're contributing positively to other peoples lives that makes it worth sacrificing some of your own comfort.
Meeting others through those activities and then gradually building upon the relationships via other social outings, dinner parties, weekend trips etc.
I'm also introverted but learned early on in life that it often just takes one person instigating things to rally a whole group.
I enjoy meetups, but those have been pretty much nonexistent here since covid.
As soon as I stopped it all stopped.
And like really all stopped; via digital comms everyone from the social group has said they realized after the plans I pulled together was their extent of their social life.
American culture fuckin' sucks. And it's Americans propping it up. It isn't Russia or the other usual boogeymen.
We’re going through the aftermath of the old social paradigm collapsing, while dealing with the hangover from the COVID response (including massive inflation), and the robber barons are feasting on the corpse while manipulating the public because of course they are.
We’ll find a new one eventually, and people will adapt (eventually) and they won’t feel the suck in the same way everyone used to the old way does right now.
It will just be normal to them.
Of course it’s going to suck in the meantime.
You could ask anyone who grew up in the USSR, India (who wasn’t top .001% anyway), China would lived through the Great Leap Forward, etc.
Not OP, but wanted add for myself it did.
I took the CBT approach. First to change how I thought about things (as a skill to practice) and then that allowed me to do a form of exposure therapy. Mostly finding something small to start with, a single relevant question or comment that is genuine. Saying something nice to someone, like a stressed out cashier at the grocery store goes a long way, or commenting on something like someone reading the packaging of a item and you know it and can give a brief review.
I didn't start trying to have deep conversations or expectations of ever seeing that person again. Only simple interaction for social skill improvement and over time this small talk started to come more naturally. Then that snowball into this lighter feeling around people (so anything would have been perceived as rejection before became not personal and moved on) and that, in gaming terms, was a level-up to more meaningful interaction, then another level-up and another etc. This is a decades long practice that is still going. Like many skills some pick up faster than others.
It did wonders for me.
Small side project, if you know of a nice club in you area please submit it: https://clubs.fyi
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49892789
A friend to me is someone with whom you can drop the mask of social propriety near-completely - share unpopular opinions, make racist jokes (directed at them or others), talk about the opposite sex (assuming hetero), gossip about other people, talk about your own relationships, give honest feedback, do borderline illegal stuff like smoke weed etc. Because this is what intimacy means.
If I meet my friend after a bad haircut and he doesn't immediately go "what the fuck is wrong with your hair?", he's not a true friend, just someone I hang out with.
I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university. I suspect some people have never had a friendship like this.
Forming friendships after schooling isn't hard, but it takes work. That said, I've had a good number of small social interactions that usually don't even lead to an acquaintance over the last decade, and even those feel good just to get out of my shell. Then there's the people I'd recognize if I saw them again and maybe remember their names. And a small but close group of about 12 and counting have become incredibly close friends that have recently begun mingling with my prior set of really close friends (different states, so we have a couple yearly gatherings).
No one's just going to become a lifelong friend of radical candor bumping in to you waiting in line for coffee for the same reason that you're not going to become someone else's lifelong friend of radical candor when you bump in to them waiting for coffee.
The schoolyard friends you mentioned didn't just automagically happen either. You were thrust in to an environment with lots of variables. You remained in that environment for a significant period of time. There were some you vibed with on perhaps just the first day, and some of those continued to vibe with you in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Some of them went different ways over the years, and perhaps you stuck with one or two for the entire time, but that cohesion is effort whether it feels that way or not. It requires the right initial conditions and for the conditions to continue to be correct over time.
The bestest greatest friends of all time can fall to simple geographical distance if one or both of the participants isn't fulfilled by the new long-distance nature of the relationship. The conditions must remain sufficient for the relationship to endure.
The only way to see if the conditions are sufficient is to meet people and cultivate relationships with them. You as you are will naturally filter many or most just as many or most would filter you, but where's the harm in that? No one's friends with everyone, and not every friend need be some platonic soul mate.
Beyond that, the second half of my first paragraph was about how some of those people probably become more than just acquaintances.
Why can't the big group of acquaintances not lead to real friendship?
I would haver guesst that's the way you find friends. Stranger -> acquaintances -> friends -> close friends?
There are more people LARPing as friends than are actually friends these days. Then I can see why many people reject "friendships" completely. Just dressing up and doing stuff with a few people is tedious unless it's mainly just about the thing you're doing (such as sports).
But then he invites them to his potluck and I think the friendship dies there. That potluck is like a graveyard of all his potential friendships. It just becomes a "hangout group" i.e. fake friends. Also, every other month is too infrequent.
Personally I think the best way to make friends is at places where you might meet them in a context that gives you sufficient and regular 1:1 time. This is almost always school or work.
They don't say that they don't then go on to develop deeper friendships outside of the potluck, only that the potluck is a step in the road. It provides a low-stress low-stakes scene of congenially likely like-minded people in which people who are relative strangers can pair and group off if they choose to.
Approaching someone at a potluck like this, or chatting to your dinner neighbors, is way easier and likely more fruitful than chatting up strangers at a bar.
It is far easier to develop a friendship with someone who you can see interacting positively with your other friends. Easier to see more facets of an individual as they interact with people of slightly differing opinion.
I really genuinely cannot conceive how you're seeing it as a graveyard rather than a garden. Like...throwing a potluck is so vastly much more effort than showing up to someone else's event. They are putting genuine effort in to regularly surrounding themselves with people they enjoy. There's just no way that any of those people are "fake friends". They may be but mere acquantances, but even then these are people that are chosen to be invited. Everyone there is there because they were wanted and wanted to be there. If the host feelt they were fake friends, they wouldn't be invited, would they?
Compare this to a monthly coworker dinner where the only reason everyone's there is because the boss said so. Where everyone agrees Janice from accounting is always trying way to hard to laugh at everyone's jokes and Bob from QA just didn't quite grok the message behind "How to Make Friends and Influence People" and so uses everyone's name in every sentence because he figures that's important.
> I think most people stop having friendships like this after grade school or university.
When I was younger, I was never open with people who would be insulting to me or found it important to make racist jokes. I would simply not tell them what I think to avoid conflict or insult. They were assymetrically open, I was not.
But I genuinely did not cared about their haircuts either.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think it is general social meetups, or hobby meetups, or religions of the lax and casual type (someone posted on a previous HN thread that the Haredim and a comparable Muslim sect seem to be doing alright).
But personally I cannot afford to worry if they think it's cringe. For a long time I was lonely, even in a healthy marriage, but having friends that I see regularly is something that I have found to be a vital aspect of having good mental health and avoiding stagnation. So I continually take the risk and put myself out there when I meet an interesting and kind person.
And I remember once hearing my mum ask my dad - why do you keep inviting them over, they never invite us in return. And I remember what my dad said - yeah they don't, but I'm doing it because I want to be close to them and I enjoy spending time with them - even if they never invite us over it's still worth it.
EDIT: The only "cringe" meetups I've attended were "singles meetups" in my city. Mild desperation and no common interests aren't exactly a social lubricant. Hobby meetups are great because if you're truly interested in the subject matter it's an easy/exciting conversation starter.
You mention tabletop gaming. This is exactly the stereotype among friends and colleagues of unfulfilling meetups in a city I recently moved from: multiple games meetups sprung up around the university and public library as a way to get people meeting and talking, but most casual attendees didn't find the natural socializing they hoped for ("people just seem too desperate"), while players keen on the games and not looking for socializing per se complained about the casuals not being commited enough.
For tabletop gaming, it definitely depends on the game. There certainly are salty regulars who have been playing their specific game for decades and who lack social grace with newcomers. But there are also nicer folks who enjoy teaching newcomers and building a community. It all comes down to having good event organizers. Sounds like the ones you heard about didn't manage expectations or toxic personalities well, which is a bummer.
To be clear I've absolutely experienced salty cringe behavior from stereotypical neckbeard gamer types at these events. But I've also met really nice people that I ended up hanging out with independently. Each meetup seems to attract a different crowd so I had to try a few before finding a group that was the right vibe for me.
Note: this wasn't a church activity by any means, even though 3 of us were in ministry together. We didn't evangelize, although sometimes we discussed our common faith. This was strictly personal, social time for everyone.
The years we met in that coffeehouse were very successful. We often enjoyed at least 10 people around the table, all sorts of kids, although my church friends were elderly, retirement-age, but very sensitive to the needs of the poor and the street people who often joined us. That coffeehouse eventually closed, so we moved on to a Starbucks, and the stable group became smaller, but more tightly-knit. Eventually, I found a really awesome teahouse that was just a few blocks off the beaten path, and our group moved there. We no longer found ourselves yelling/screaming over the noise of crowds and steamed milk machines.
Eventually our group lost nearly everyone except us three. Sometimes we had a guest, but they didn't stay. I don't know why people drifted away. Perhaps we weren't welcoming, or fun, or young enough. But we did diversify our activities into board games, such as Clue, Rummikub, Boggle, trivia, Scrabble, you name it. And the teas and snacks were delicious there.
Now one key feature of the group is that one guy was there for the games. He was hardcore, heads-down, "we're playing these games!" with intense concentration. The other lady, she was there for socializing and chatting, but her garage-sale habit had garnered a closet full of games to bring. I was there for both, I suppose, but mainly I liked the social aspect, getting out of the house, having some good boba tea and stuff. The board games were definitely a means to an end. So we all had varying reasons for being there.
Sadly, the pandemic lockdowns killed our group for good. Not even the teahouse was able to weather that storm, and they closed their doors permanently, too. I haven't seen my friends in that long a time. We tried doing some online gaming together, coordinated, but it wasn't the same at all! I really miss them, and I really miss the excuse to get out of the house, and socialize, and I wish there was a stable activity that had that sort of impetus in 2026, but all my friends were made through those gaming activities, and as a result, I no longer have any friends.
I don't think that's a post-COVID dynamic as much as a pre-COVID one that got accelerated. When I moved to a new city in 2018, I spent a lot of time at meetups and had exactly that issue. No one would want to meetup outside the group (to be fair, most of it was that some people seemed to be willing to travel really far for a meetup group but not for other things), and you wouldn't see the same people often enough to really be friends within the group.
Yes it can feel cringe but I would argue we need to just accept it as prosocial and not cringe. We are cringe for thinking normal social things are cringe.
Like, I would probably have thought OP was after my money like 5 years ago. But now I would just assume good faith.
It's like "Well, sure, they can be gay, but ~holding hands in public~? We've got to have some sense of morality around here or we're no better than animals!"
Living with your parents in your 20s isn't cringe, it's a powerfule economic decision. Having or not having kids isn't cringe it's a personal decision. Carrying a dog in a purse is cringe, it's practical. Being an impoverished drug addict isn't cringe. Crying out for help with mental illness isn't cringe. Telling loved ones you love them in public isn't cringe.
Inviting people to continue sociallizing with you at a later date isn't cringe, that's just fucking friendship.
People are using the word to label entirely regular perfectly acceptable behavior as if it is genuinely bad simply because they don't like it. Sure, okay, you personally don't like it when people express interest in you beyond your 30 second attention span, but who the fuck gave you the right to decide that society can't make friends in public? Damn, okay, OP said it was cringe to ask people if they want to hang out, guess I'll just die a hermit.
There is a need for the word 'cringe' for wannabe, fake, dishonest, superficial etc. expressions that are embarrassing. But it is way over used and should not be used on people who are trying to mock them. It is way too easy to be a critique.
What COVID broke is that there was no one to take over from the previous club leaders so they mostly just died with nothing to replace them and now the new generation doesn't really know how to rebuild it because they never experienced it.
I was recently watching a video mentioning a study that it takes ~200 hours of constant contact on average to make a "close friend" and some 40-60 hours to get go from acquaintance to "casual friend", then 80-100 to be a what you'd simply call "friend".
Meeting up for 2-4 hours a month would take years upon years to make anything out if you don't supplement it yourself.
Hall, J. A. (2019). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278-1296. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225
It depends on the personality. Some people are very open. Some are not. I find social open-ness much harder than closed-ness. The open-ness approach, though, is most likely the better strategy indeed. It just helps little when people are naturally closed off mentally already.
Ironically, the potluck style events strike me as the most introverted way to socialize. Not to denigrate the initiative at all, I have two Canadian friendsgivings this month, and they're fun, but I really wouldn't see the hosts frequently otherwise, because they're the ones packing their schedules in advance, moving to the distant suburbs, or just don't get out much. I don't feel like I can hit them up for something more casual, whether it's always true or not, it's more of a calendar event style relationship I have with them.
The reason I don't take it upon myself to host these myself is primarily because the substance of my social life comes largely from common interests outside the house that I invest deeply into, some of which are non-event hangouts just to watch movies at theirs, hiking, climbing, billiards bar, coffee and a walk etc... I don't try to find like-minded people as much as I do people that I have enough chemistry with, and build on that.
That said, in general it is important to try to take any kind of initiative you can. Friendships don't build themselves, and everyone's scared to stick their neck out.
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
It turns out, being completely unbothered is also unchallenging, and challenge drives us. And being alone and bored is enabled by television and scrolling.
Honestly, I view the suburbs as the worst of both worlds (urban and rural), with few benefits.
BTW: As an aside, this is why i think the suburbs-class loves tesla self driving so much. The one downside is the long monotony of transitting to the place where people gather to do your work. I'm not against self driving cars, but they enable suburban self-imposed isolation.
It's much more appealing to get to the street and walk when you have 4 cafes, a theater, two libraries and a gym in a 10 minute radius than when you just get to walk next to lawns for an hour.
And there's a point to be made for the added friction of a small home. The more self sufficient your house is the harder it is to convince yourself to get out.
Sometimes I don't want to have a conversation with my neighbor who I really don't have anything in common with except they live next door.
In a big city you can find people that are exactly your tribe or explore a new one.
The suburbs were soul sucking to me, the people were largely insufferable. I knew my neighbors, but hated them because 90% of our conversations were some form of “I noticed your grass wasn’t cut this week” or “your cans sat on the curb until the morning”. There were some good ones, but like me they mostly hid in their back yard to avoid the Karen’s.
I feel like some people are just making assumptions or are extremely introverted.
It's not just about neighbors.
It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.
In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.
This stands in stark contrast to my car-free life. Every time I go out of the house to travel somewhere, I run into people I know. I say hi to strangers. I nod to pedestrians crossing the street. I have a brief conversation with somebody on the bus. I didn't expect that traveling by transit or bike would have such a positive impact on my well-being.
Knowing what I know now, it's not possible for me to go back to a suburban car-dependent life. It would be a major step backwards
when you're in a car, the possibility for a positive social interaction is nearly 0. I don't know about you but I've never been happier after driving my car
when you're not in a car, there's just more opportunities for small social interactions. You can choose to take those opportunities or not, but they're there. There's just something different about being eye-to-eye with people and not separated by a sound proof metal and glass cage
Everyone had a part of their house that was essentially a bar and they would have house parties all the time.
So I don't think it's sub-urbanization per se.
People don't throw parties with them nearly as much any more because throwing a party with an at-home bar in a suburban house essentially requires drunk driving. We've gotten much more strict about since 1980 for very good reason.
Happy hours are still relatively common in cities because you can get home without driving.
It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.
Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.
It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone
What are you talking man? Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family. Kids running around in droves, BBQ with neighbors, helping around with a house, etc. Good luck having that in New York rat cages.
I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood
One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?
I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it
Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.
The reality is that prewar housing in cities in the US was still frequently single family housing. The Chicago Bungalow is an obvious example.
The difference was in how close they were to each other and how much of the infrastructure was given to cars.
I’m not sure I buy that there is some tidy explanation about suburbanization leading to the decline in social interaction but if you think everyone describing city living is describing midtown manhattan you’ve got to myopic view of what urban housing means.
This is true of suburbs as well fwiw. There are lots of walkable suburbs with common community space and not a McMansion or big box shop to be seen.
Where did that "utopia" ideal come from?
> Good luck having that in New York rat cages
Yeah, that isn't good either. That's poverty. Do you think poverty doesn't exist in the suburbs?
It can't possibly be something in the middle! All or nothing.
Once I moved to the city I didn’t know my neighbors. People kept to themselves or the turnover was high.
Cities have shared parks. I don't have any yard. But I have wonderful parks within short walking distance. There are far more amenities and so much more to offer at public parks than private yards. It's a shared backyard
In the suburbs, everybody has their own play structure in their back yard. In cities, we have bigger, better play structures that more kids can use simultaneously which encourages more social interaction.
Plus the actual article itself is commenting on a decline of socializing that's occurred in the last 30 years. But suburbs have been predominant the US for around 60 years. And there's similar declines occurring in more dense cities like NYC and Washington. If it was strictly a suburb problem then someone living in Manhattan shouldn't have been affected but last I heard even those cities are affected.
This hating on suburbs has got to stop. It's fine if you don't like it, but I have way more friends in suburbia than I ever had in the faceless city where people just walked right on past out of fear.
The truth is there is no archetype of an "American suburb." They can be wildly different from each other. I grew up in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, famous for car culture. You can find videos today all over the place of lowriders on hydraulics cruising Whittier Blvd. It's referenced in rap songs from the 90s. But you could also walk or ride a bike. Whittier Blvd itself is two lanes each way for much of its length and is the biggest street in the city. I lived two blocks from this street and walked places all the time. I knew all my neighbors. Kids played in the streets. We walked to parks and played there, too. Whittier even has a really nice wilderness park thanks to Turnbull Canyon, where you're not really remote but you can feel that way. In high school when we were assigned to read Walden Pond and produce similar journals, I found isolated creekbeds where you couldn't hear or see anything except the woods and kept a paper journal I wrote in.
On the other hand, my sisters have moved out to Murrieta, CA and are raising their children there. It's a radically different experience. My wife asked if we could walk to a convenience store when we first visited and my sister was almost laughing at us. It's miles away, some streets have no sidewalks, the streets are a hundred feet wide with 50 mph+ speed limits. It's also hot as hell because it's out in the desert.
Both suburbs, even both in Southern California, but very different experiences with very different communities.
Hacker News talks past each other a lot by not acknowledging this and reducing everything down to "suburbs" or "American" and assuming that kind of shorthand has a clear, universal meaning.
Even television and media consumption in general are not the automatic atomizers they're being characterized as. Aside from the old watercooler monoculture of having something to talk about when everyone watched the same five primetime shows, for sports fans and especially when pay-per-view first took off, gathering at one person's house to collectively watch together was almost ubiqitous. That's not even considering cinema in theaters, which were always a group event. I grew up with that. We almost never watched anything alone in the 80s. If people are now primarily watching video media on their phones from their beds while alone, that is a lot different than how we grew up 40 years ago. Reading was more characteristic of alone-time media consumption.
I finally went and visited the house where she had rented in Tiburon (it was just a block from the Paradise Loop path, a pleasant bike ride from SF), and I was like, "Mom, Tiburon is totally a suburb." And her response was "Oh, well your sisters could walk to school and I could walk to the grocery store, so it didn't feel like a suburb to me."
These however are all effects of a larger mentality of hyper-individualism and hyper-productivity, symptoms of late-stage capitalism.
ironically, urban commutes are substantially shorter on average
> leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
what? there's so many urban third places.
Then one family got a TV, and they stopped rotating because everyone wanted to spend the evening watching TV at that one family's house.
Then the other families got TVs, and they stopped the socializing tradition altogether, preferring to watch TV at home.
People are alienated, y'all.
Everything about modern life is designed so you do not have to directly depend on anyone for anything. You can instead be entirely dependent on a series of distant and unaccountable corporations to get through the day.
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
edit: grammar (still bad but better)
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!
Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak
Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing
why not? I guarantee it's less offensive than you think to be bad at a language but try anyway. I get the desire to avoid embarrassment - it's something I find really difficult to push through, but you've gotta do a whole lot of speaking badly to speak well, and people are generally very appreciative of someone earnestly trying.
If you met someone in person struggling to speak english, would you be offended? or would you be collaborative like "lets figure this out together"
But if the OP is talking about the US, there's that whole other dynamic mentioned in the sibling comment.
You: hej må jeg have... et varm chokolade?
Them: of course, will there be anything else?
You: hvis det er okay jeg ville gerne øve mig på dansk *smile* åbenbart har jeg virkelig brug for det
Them: selvfølgelig! det kommer til... fem-og-halvfems kroner. Sidder i ind, eller ude?
If you don't explicitly say that you are trying to practise then yeah, they are going to default to whatever makes the interaction go smoother. Everyone does that, all the time! But people are generally pretty supportive of another person trying to learn. And of course, people aren't going to assume you think they can't speak english if you say you're practicing (it's not hard to smile and say how lovely you think the language is or whatever.
In general waitstaff and service workers deal with people being indecisive, slow, speaking with confusing dialects, speech impediments all day long. It is not an imposition to work through an imperfect language - and its pretty much the only way anyone ever gets good at a language.
I also get the impulse to be a little jealous of those natural born sunny extroverts who find it easy to do this. For me it does require pushing through a little discomfort, and often I wouldn't if I were busy doing something else. But it's 100% my own discomfort, not the other person. Being asked to hold a conversation in your own native language is not a chore
You may tell the Danish cafe staff that you need Danish and you want to practice, but that poor person is an employee and hardly in a position to tell you what they really think.
I also know Danish people who prefer to speak in english. If I were speaking to them for hours at a party, and they voiced that request, I would oblige. But avoiding trying to speak danish in denmark because of the fear some danish people would be annoyed or even offended without ever asking them is utter insanity.
You say you have travelled the world for language practise, but how did you manage that if you refused to speak the language for fear of somehow offending or inconveniencing people by speaking in their language. Why was it any different from just staying home and reading websites in your target language?
I travel the world for language practice and don't feel too embarassed because 1) I try to get to a B1 level before talking, and 2) I travel in a way that brings me into contact with a lot of elderly people happy for any social contact and novelty. But I am definitely aware of the need to avoid inconveniencing younger people.
Your expectation, imposed upon yourself. I get it, I was embarassed too. It's really not that serious, you can be bad at stuff publicly. Nobody is advocating following people around forcing them to teach you something, but you can still have a great time with people with whom share no language in common. Speaking anything at all just makes things more fun, and people are way more willing to help than you think.
It's just not rude to go to a foreign country armed only with a1 duolingo and a prayer. It's a lot less rude than going there and only speaking english to everyone you meet... Yes even in denmark, even to young people.
As I have gotten better at danish I have had many more young people (the majority of my friend group and social experienced given I went to university here) express that they would prefer to speak to me in danish than the other way around. They were, by default, always making themselves a little uncomfortable, feel a little slower, seem less educated for the sake of communicating with me, because I gave them no other option. Now that I give them the option of switching to a context where I seem like a fool and they are the master, they are happy to take it.
Younger Europeans do not necessarily see it as rude for a foreign visitor to come and speak only English. Many local younger people spend a significant portion of their lives in an English-language environment on social media, and mixed European marriages now often use English as the home language. English is no longer seen as an outside thing by which foreigners speaking it are being rude and unappreciative.
And again, domain loss is already ongoing for European languages (and for the Nordic languages this has been observed for like decades now), so it isn't necessarily the case that locals feel more proficient about certain things in their native language and less proficient in English. I have colleagues who would prefer to speak English about technical matters for their own sake, not mine.
I can't emphasise enough that I am not only literally a young european, living with a young european partner, with a young european social circle, but I also exist in the real world and not in reddit. I have lived here in denmark for coming up on 10 years.
Yes, I know some extremely online people who have learned better english than danish and talk about noticing a decline in their danish skills. Those few who spend all their time online, on reddit and the like. It's definitely a type, one that by my estimation skews male, autistic, and introverted. Prime hacker news demographic type thing :)
I get it, for you as a linguist its remarkable that this could happen, that people could exist that lose their native tongue or learn another to a higher proficiency of that of the country they live in. We do live in unprecedented times.
However I do not think it is universal, or a majority of young people - I also know many more people who have better knowledge in Danish than in english. It is explicitly on issues of politics, business, science, law, etc that people prefer to speak in danish with me because they do not know the words in english, including at meetup groups dedicated to those things.
1) For some years now, restaurant wait staff in several large European cities, including my former hometown, often only speak English; you simply can't order in the local language. I am basically the only person who complains about this; my peers who are locals don't bat an eye, they don't see it as offensive at all because English is so normal for them.
2) I have a longtime asssociation with one of those Southeastern European countries known as an emigrant factory. My friends who left to Northern or Central Europe or the Baltics have relatively little interest in using the local language except where (like in Germany) required for interacting with bureaucracy. They feel fine living in English. Back in that country, it has not been unusual for the last decade-plus to hear younger people speaking to each other a mixture of English and the local language, and foreigners moving there now complain they get little opportunity to immerse in the local language as I once did.
3) Themes of anti-globalization and protection of European cultural and linguistic diversity have increasingly become associated with the far-right (a quarter-century ago, this was a passion of the left in some countries!). As is known, the far-right is a vocal force but a minority everywhere.
as for 2, yes young people sometimes speak to each other in a mix of english and danish. It's using danish grammar, and critically, not english. You couldn't follow at all if you only spoke english (and with significant difficulty if you only spoke danish for that matter). I consider this similar to the process that creates slang
the other part of 2 regarding people that don't rush to learn the local language. Yes I know people who do this. After living here long enough, especially if they plan to stay, they tend to change their tune. I think there is a lot of motivated reasoning on this topic in particular, including stuff I have said to people myself in the past that friends like to remind me of - Whne I first came here I literally used to talk about how its so hard to practise language because locals won't help while being surrounded by locals who are happy to help. I won't speculate as to why people change after staying somewhere long, its just a tendency I have seen.
regarding 3, it is seemingly often associated with the far right yes, especially when bound with nationalism and themes of invasion/protection, but not unique to those contexts. I have experienced this in leftist political spaces personally, up to the point of votes being held and passing, restricting language in spoken meetings to danish only, explicitly for the comfort of those attending. And of course, I have also experienced this in entirely unpolitical spaces like hobby clubs, discussions at parties, and at work.
> someone earnestly trying
and then there are occasions where someone orders in a language they dont speak because they assume the person taking their order cant understand english. being associated with someone performing that level of bad faith in public makes me wish restaurants had eject seats
Our modern day equivalent is being on HN or Reddit all day long
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
And, as is often the case, the simple answer is incomplete/oversimplified. Because there are cultures which have absorbed those technologies while remaining much more social than Western cultures. And they are ones that are less individualistic and stress more of a group, family or clan mentality.
The issue with fertility rates is similar/correlated. Most of the developed world is seeing rates far below replacement, but some cultures are far more resistant to the influences of technology than others. Many developed countries have tried to address their low birth rates from a policy standpoint, essentially paying people a small percentage of what it costs to raise a child to incentivize parenthood. But I’d argue it’s far more important to address their low birth rate as a cultural issue, which is basically a semi-narcissistic focus on maximizing our own lives rather than doing what’s best for our (for lack of a better word) tribe. Because the less individualistic a society is, the less it’s struggling with these problems.
I’d posit that a lot of this has to do with the decline of religiosity in Western cultures. Religion was where a lot of people got their group cohesion and sense of an importance of something greater than self. And while I’m no fan of religion, we’ve removed it without replacing it with something else that serves the same function. We’re going to have to find that something or these sorts of trends will only continue.
https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....
Even on the TFR point, the birth rate in 1976 in USA was 1.74, 2025 it was 1.6. So it's not like a China situation where it went from over 3 to less than 1 in 50 years.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.
I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...
Community engagement isn't also quite the same thing as friend groups. This is making me interested in doing a similar analysis.
When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.
> Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
This is what I found: "the social interactions of those from lower-income households tend to revolve around family members and neighbors" and "richer people spend more with their self-selected friends".
This would confirm exactly what OP wrote - people who do socialize do it with people nearby.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle.
They are referring to what they see as they do their community organizing. You dismiss it all, because none of that should theoretically matter.
I have a similar experience but I don't think this disagrees with the parent. My mental exhaustion makes me seek out low-friction "junk food" behaviors. But much like drinking after work because you had a long day, the phone exhausts you in another way. The cure and disease are one in the same here.
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.
Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.
Some other links:
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...
https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...
I won't quote it here but it's very telling.
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!
That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.
One, the Portland municipal government explicitly admits to racism during white flight: https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...
Two, the state itself has passed multiple anti-Black exclusionary laws and was founded as a 'white utopia': https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#...
> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."
> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.
> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.
This, too, is covered extensively: https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-...
And more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53996159
I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.
Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.
This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".
No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.
If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
All those centrally planned things you mentioned were green(ish) field developments
Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.
Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
That was a very 90s 'thing'. Today people, especially young people, are exceedingly lacking in levity. Everything is serious.
Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.
GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.
That actually was my whole point. How do you think they're saying what you're thinking? Where did you get those thoughts from? Comedy has been a tastemaking machine for a very long time.
People used to snap out of it around middle age, but I think that point is only getting younger. The illusion has been broken with recent politics. You can't satirize the already absurd while still being funny. The game has changed, but I still see a lot of defensive humor anyway. It's just sad really.
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.
Thats why we plan to move to the burbs. Lots of ethnic enclaves where kids go around the neighborhood on their own and play.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
One could also say that there are old people everywhere now.
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
Is life today bleaker or harder than it was during the Great Depression? People still made time for each other.
What if it is the media that is making people exhausted and disillusioned? Not the other way around.
I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.
There's a reason people call it "doomscrolling", and it's not because it's healthy escapism. Bad news and defeatism is psychologically addictive, and platforms have financial incentive to pump your brain full of negativity. Regardless of how bad it is outside, the internet is not a protective bubble - it's an opium den.
Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.
There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.
You usually got a drank, talked. This was a kind of gothic-theme bar, all done up with spooky decorations, a good dj, interesting drinks. We'd host arts/culture slide show jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together.
Then this guy at the table whipped out his phone and just ignored us all sitting there.
I knew right then and there that this was the beginning of the end.
Now we're all dopamine seeking doom scrollers.
I've been out with a group of friends -- some I just met -- once this year. It also doesn't help that meals and drinks seem hard to justify for the price. I'm waxing nostalgia, but $30 of tacos used to be maybe $8; my $10 beer today was $3.
My online social activity has declined a lot since then though, there was just so much unnecessary drama, oversharing, and vying for attention, emotional support, etc and the people that gave it burned out and left, leaving just emotionally needy people yelling into the void while the others moved on with their lives.
The baseline keeps dropping.
It wasn’t until iphone 3G in 2008 that you had a full fledged browser with unlimited broadband capable of streaming audio, maps, and visiting websites with graphics. And, of course, new apps coming out everyday.
The battery was also not good enough to use long for a long time.
Sounds like the real gothic-guy in the place. ; )
Also a similar story: This was a kind of normal bar, all done up with fine photos for decorations, good music, good drinks. We'd host performances and jams before the place really would get going for the night. The art was curated and swapped out monthly. There was a lot going on! The place did a lot to charge the space with energy and excitement, bringing a lot of different people together. Then one day a guy got bored and went home alone early. I knew then and there, that place was finished!
Why are you driving into a city that costs $100 to park in and then to a restaurant that costs $100 per person if money is a consideration?
Go to a local restaurant. Go to one outside of that city. Do literally anything other than the scenario you described.
I guarantee that if you're near a city where you can find $100 parking, you can find 100 or 1000 amazing small restaurants that are affordable and interesting.
This is a type of defeatism where someone imagines the worst possible scenario, erases all other options, and then pretends it's a choice between the worst scenario or nothing at all.
I had a burger, fries and 2 beers last night at one of these small local restaurants. It was $47 with tip. I had a bbq plate the other day at a local restaurant. 2 meats, 2 sides was $26 dollars before a drink or tip was added.
Going out in the US is so expensive now, even the low end, that you might as well do something nicer.
Going to the movies costs my family $100 without concessions. The zoo $80, the aquarium $100, art museum $80. There's a decent public park system but we're often the only ones there. McDonalds doesn't have playplaces anymore, sleepovers barely exist. The nearest bowling alley is 30 minutes away and runs us about $60 an hour without food.
Add food to anything (which most places don't allow from outside) and you're sometimes doubling the price for complete trash.
Baumol's cost disease often comes to mind - in my (might be wrong) application of it - western society simply has had too much productivity and efficiency improvements. You can make more money as a software developer or as an investment banker because those jobs have gotten more efficient and have higher payouts to employers who want the best employees.
There can't be efficiency improvements in efficiency for child care, so the only way to have people want to become child care workers is to pay a competitive salary, so the efficiency increases in the other unrelated fields directly increase the cost of child care.
Developing countries don't have this problem and domestic labor and child care are still cheap.
Is Southern Europe not part of The West?
It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...
> Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.
> It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.
Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.
But at the same time, after our natural relationship ran its course (due to graduations or leaving a student team), it felt like they disappeared. My relationship with them wouldn't linger like with other friends (even if weakened).
Another friend of mine directly described this view that "friendships have a time and place" in life. I thought about that perspective and didn't fully agree, but it still taught me that it's perfectly possible and even healthy to make friends quickly even if circumstances are temporary.
My view is that even if you become good friends with someone (at work or elsewhere) and they leave, you still end up with a network of friends across the country in different workplaces. Even when the nature of the friendship changes, you can still catch up with many of your old friends on occasion (like around the holidays).
And even if relationships completely fade, I believe that genuine relationships will always be a nice experience.
I get your logic, but I so don't want to live that life. Screw money, I spend ~8h per day at work, I want to hang out with people I like.
You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
There's one bar I go to regularly where there's a couple of guys who I've literally never seen absent over the years.
I think the demographics of HN would explain why this seems like hollywood fiction when it is/was very normal behavior.
People really did that.
Maybe not every single night, but weekly for sure
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
I don’t think money is a barrier to getting out.
I think to solve this we are going to have to blow up social media and make going out in public more convenient and friendly. Otherwise we are going to end up in a WALL-E society where people spend all day with their meta glasses streaming AI generated micro dramas.
Feels like a guinea pig society with all of the rapid changes happening
I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.
There are different ways of approaching doing something:
"To do X requires me to do this and that. So heres how I'll do this and that to get to X. "
"I can't do X because it requires me to do this and that. "
There's a big difference between the 2. The latter is a lie, they just don't want to do what is required to do that. Its a way of phrasing things so people don't feel bad and they don't have to admit they don't want to do something.
Start looking for it and you'll see it in a lot of exchanges.
Of course, if you live in the kind of city where the above is true, then a very delicious dinner + tip can usually be had for $50-75, it just won't be as fancy.
It was framed as ‘Every Activity’ costs that much though which is just not true.
And, no food isn't that cheap in the city.
It is legitimately expensive to go out to places here. I just pay it because I can, but to act otherwise is burying your head in the sand.
But as someone lucky enough to be able to eat out almost every day at a variety of restaurants I have no trouble staying under 35/person without drinks. That place is not an outlier.
And like, fancy cocktails are nice but I don’t think you can say that it’s impossible to go out and do anything without spending $500 like OP claimed.
Why do you feel the need to spend money to socialize?
No bars, no dinners with anyone. I think the only blessing this lifestyle has given me is minimized impact from the failing economy we're in, at the cost of not seeing anyone or doing anything. I still have outside hobbies, but it's all too expensive to keep up with now, or being heavily regulated.
Uphill battles are often worth fighting.
A number of military historians would beg to differ.
It sounds cliche but it's literally true that there's always time to meet new people no matter what phase of life you're in.
Related: when I was 25 I had a depressive existential crisis and felt like my life was basically over. It's common, and therapy was a lifesaver. If you feel like you might be depressed then talking to someone can really help. Take care of yourself as best you can!
Everything young parents don't have time for or are too tired for.
That said, I met my spouse in my early 30s. Was worth switching countries for and that was 13 years ago. We met playing the same silly text-based MMORPG some years ago. I have never been very social, but not being social doesn't mean that you won't meet people in non-traditional ways.
"Nothing in this world worth having comes easy"
And we always can try finding the gentle slopes, going around on the longer track, less crowded. The journey is what counts not the destination here.
I think staying at home basically rotting is more comfortable, sure. No judgment here, I’ve done that for months at a time. But the payoff is also… underwhelming. I mean you get basically nothing, just monotony and silence.
The more risky things, like dating or going to a party, are much more uncomfortable. But the potential payoff is a lot more. I mean you can really strike it up with someone, find someone on your wavelength. It can be exciting, exhilarating.
But it lacks the certainty. The reward is higher, but so is the drawback. If I stay inside and do nothing, at least I know the outcome. It’s more enticing in that way. But I also know I won’t make any memories that way. There won’t be some moment or some person I’ll look back on fondly.
I can definitely see how someone who doesn't have many positive reference experiences would prefer to just be alone and avoid the lows all together.
Not that you asked, but I'd encourage you to not define yourself as antisocial. You just haven't found your kin yet, and if you keep looking you can find it.
(and this goes back farther than 30 years. Closer to 50 now)
If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.
I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.
The reason for the decline in social activity is not that it was insufficiently commercialized. Meetup should be a nonprofit.
I talked about how relatively easy it is to have social contact here at all levels and so I must conclude that most people simply have better uses for their time (by their own judgment) than this. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
"I mildly attempted doing this once and it didn't work, so I won't bother trying again" describes a shocking amount of people's experiences.
I sometimes think people fail on purpose to justify apathy or giving up.
Then if anyone says anything they scream about how their experience is valid and nobody can tell them otherwise. It's wild.
There's something important about being outside our comfort zones. We need entropy in our lives and the best way to accomplish that is being in new environments with different people/creatures. What I've found is over time my comfort zone expands as I become familiar with more stuff.
Most people in this post's comments that are "not trying" seem to also be depressed in some way. If you've never experienced it, depression can make trying impossible not just a minor inconvenience. Going to therapy can help, or not. Taking anti-depressants can help, or not.
Also a "mild attempt at doing this once" that ends very poorly can cause a depressed or anxious person to spiral into a self-hatred looping hellscape. It's not a rational decision they're making it just happens. After you've experienced that you're very cautious and try to never feel it again.
And then the kicker is when you're paralyzed like this everyone just thinks you're lazy or unmotivated and pretty much tells you "don't be depressed stupid" which further sends you into having a poor outlook of yourself and it spirals from there. I've been in and out of this several times in my life, it's not pleasant. I've also tried every single remedy known to man and sometimes nothing works.
To put it simply: their experience is probably valid and nobody should tell them otherwise.
Also, people that are different than everyone else (but same background as me) seek me out to be friends.
For example, there is a HUGE difference between a Seattle Tech event where I am literally the same as the other 60 people in the room vs Vietnamese Tech event where I am one of 3 people that speak english. Those other 2 English speakers are going to walk over and chat with me.
To clarify the idea: you have a healthy social matrix but if you marry and settle in the US, your grandchildren won't.
FWIW here in San Francisco I have found many people it’s fun to be around.
Also yes media, phones, TV etc.
Here in the EU, I know most of the people on my street because I walk by them every day on my way to the store. In the US, even though I lived less than 1 mile/500ish meters from the store, I couldn't walk there if I wanted to.
After the pandemic it's like everyone forgot this. The coffee shops are all students studying or people rushing in and out, the pubs and cafes are all ghost towns or groups of people being very insular. Even at events like the farmer's market there's less socializing and more "go get the things and go move on, don't look around, don't talk to people", the vendors even mention how boring it is these days without anyone just chatting anymore.
"Go out and be in the world" seems to have just died.
“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”
He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.
In Ireland that distinction matters. It generally will affect other things, like what time and how loud music will be played, how the tables and chairs will be organised and what type. It will often affect opening hours and the price of a pint. Gastro pubs also tend to be much larger.
In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs, possibly why that lady couldn't see the difference. I personally love micropubs and they never serve food other than crisps and maybe a toastie.
I feel like a pedant but I get that dude in his 20s and had to speak up.
To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.
And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.
We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.
> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere
Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.
Weed here you get at a "dispensary", which is a very unsexy term but apparently we also need to protect the ears of the innocent.
Out east you'd go get beer and wine at the "package store" or just, "packy"
If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.
Citations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644650
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644302
In this thread you have multiple people saying they can't go out without paying 200$ or ordering 8$ beers. If you're in your 20s or 30s just go bar hopping in whatever the rundown part of your town is like people used to instead of going fine dining.
A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades. Normal people just took it for granted that they had to smuggle some beers into the cinema rather than turning the whole evening into some hundreds of dollars spending spree.
Maybe so, but it doesn't feel like that to people. A lot of things are actually way cheaper than they used to be inflation adjusted (we complain about an $80 video game, but inflation adjusted they used to be well over $100, cheaper now even with all the microtransactions, we just remember a sticker that said $50). When I know that a decade ago I could see a $5 matinee and for $20 have drinks and popcorn too, knowing that $40 (albeit for a smaller drink/popcorn) isn't really twice the price doesn't stop the sticker shock, especially for people whose income didn't go up at the same rate as inflation.
Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist
Yes, third spaces/places include places you need to pay for.
That third spaces include commercial spaces does not imply that “free” (tax or donation funded) third spaces should not exist. Parks and museums are also great third spaces.
Compare this to earlier times when it might have been common and socially acceptable to sit for hours on a single purchase and just shoot the shit with fellow townspeople.
Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.
Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Additional citations:
https://ibs.colorado.edu/new-research-on-disappearing-third-...
https://www.aei.org/domestic-policy/americas-third-places-ar...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13538...
https://esl.uchicago.edu/2023/11/01/third-places-what-are-th...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...
NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.
The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...
The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).
The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.
Tying religion to politics was probably a bad idea for both religion and politics.
The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.
1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.
2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.
3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs
4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".
Example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973149
I see most of the kids are constantly on mobile and when they are not, they feel a void. It was almost similar to not having friends in pre social media age.
I see people getting more and more absorbed in screen so much so to forget greeting people. This happens to me all the time , someone known coming out of elevator, I am ready to greet, but they simply did not notice or noticed too late and vice versa
Having a chat with the butcher, barista, etc. or just bumping into people you know and talking for a few minutes is pretty uplifting when it happens regularly.
I feel like the containerization of life erodes this.
If you're hit on yourself, politely decline, and strike up a different topic of conversation.
Most of the meetups I attend are not "glorified pickup activities".
There are also plenty of nerdy meetups. Some of the biggest nerds I know I've met through board game and trivia meetups.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-01/how-uni-life-has-chan...
By the end I felt so sorry for the young man they profiled, what an enormous life experience he largely misses out on.
If we didn’t see the same trends, it points to reasons more specific to the US.
compare a 'luxury' Florida apartment vs the old New York apartments built in the 1800s. the NY apartments have narrow stairs, one way in.
likewise dense / small cities / villages in either africa/europe etc force more natural social interaction.
even for friends - easier to host friends when they can easily walk to your home & they don't have to drink & drive.
so blaming tv, social media, video games etc doesn't get to the root of the matter.
And they keep saying why people aren't socializing or making babies and blame it on phone.
https://morelandjs.github.io/chumlord-site/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chumlord/id6767711584
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891295
But on the serious side - it all make sense because we have more ways to socialize without going out (via chats, games, etc.). Although it would be interesting to see the same stats for Gen Z and Gen Alpha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Research on this has been done and the cause is known. There is just no desire to improve the conditions of social activity on the part of civil society or the government.
I think it's way more healthy for me to be able to talk about life every day for an hour online, than meeting up once per week for two hours over beer. I still see them in person on a monthly basis.
I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.
The now-defunct maker space I used to visit inherited a former general manager from Maker Nexus, he was very... apathetic about tech in general.
I am not sure what you mean by "apathetic about tech in general" but my experience has been that folks who go to makerspaces are excited about making things in the physical world. That tends to carry over to tech that empowers them to do so (e.g. 3d printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, ...).
Your mileage may vary.
[1] https://www.makernexus.org/community-events
Feels anti-human to purposely deny yourself what makes humans human.
Long ago places had large parks, outdoor swimming pools, cities became less of a place to live and more of an efficient use of space/money and thus the human aspect was removed.
Technology in the sense of games, twitter, chat, etc removes the superfical need for human contact but ruins real bonds with people
The entirety of the socialization decline I see is with the poor and middle class. The poor seem to have to work a ton more and struggle to make ends meet while still living in a highly individualistic world without the shared community of previous poorer cultures of the past.
And from my observations the middle class are amusing themselves to death while simply becoming sloths at home doing very little other than their children’s sports. No hosting, not social manners and little get together than gets in the way of television or video games.
The upper class and wealthy socialize a great deal. I mean a ton. Shared vacations, constant social occasions hosting fund raisers galas sports hobbies etc. practically non stop.
I wonder how many of them would count this as work time, since so much of value add at high level positions is precisely through activities like that.
It says "Connect with Others. Learn. Be Active".
Strikes me as good advice 10 years ago when I wrote it, and just as good now.
Arthur Schopenhauer
1. Every third space represents an ever-larger opportunity cost of being turned into housing. If you can close a pub and turn it into million dollar condos, that commercial rent is going up;
2. More expensive rents are an input into everything done at a business or third space;
3. This decreases spending ability in real terms. 20 years ago, you could get a pint in London for 2-3 pounds. Now it's 6-7. Have wages doubled? No. And pubs were (and are) part of the UK social fabric; and
4. People need to work more to pay for their ever-larger mortgages and other debt. This gives people less time.
Expensive housing is literally destroying society.
You can blame immigration for that, among other things (more people living alone for example).
Hint: it's diversity.
in America we have had 20 years of "Tech Disruption"., making the world a better place and relentless technical innovation, combined with the 'corporization' of America
Has our day to day lives improved?
Do we work less, live healthier, have less stress?
Seems like this (the younger generation) is far worse off then pre-internet connected, smartphone generation
I had a pretty busy social life in university, 20 years ago
The first city I landed in afterwards, I was able to make some connections and was lucky enough some of my uni friends were around too
But I moved for work to a much further away city and my social life has dropped to zero since then. The pandemic and lockdowns didn't help of course, but that was years ago. I don't have a single friend in this city and I've lived here almost 10 years now
Admittedly I'm kind of socially awkward and quite afraid of new groups, which has only gotten worse over the years. I also haven't had any luck making lasting connections through work or anything like that.
I tend to blame myself for this but it's not too surprising to hear many others are struggling too
In person socialising is definitely down, likely the overall too, but I would not base a social activity judgement on a questionnaire like this here alone, I miss important elements.
It's probably true that some form of a satisfying social interaction is missing today, but I would say it's a trope any will do to make us happy. In general any type of party I've been to recently, I've enjoyed leaving as soon as possible.
Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49891295
That really jumped out at me. I don't doubt it, but it's just weird because my partner and I constantly watch home improvement shows on HGTV where folks are constantly talking about improving their kitchen or other space "to entertain guests". And my partner is always nagging at me about the same thing - upgrading the kitchen or backyard so we can have guests. But our house is fine and we never have guests over. I get this sense from a lot of people. I think people love the fantasy of having guests to entertain, but no one ever wants to actually do it.
Go to Asia and you'll see people glued to their phones everywhere while out in public.
Satisfying would be to bond over common problems and share common joys. But again too surface-level if not even taboo. I swear it’s gotten to the point where AI or whatever the next doom is could take 5% of all jobs. And there would be talk like, oh poor Joe he lost his job and has no marketable skill. Yup. Yup. Any solutions? Any venting? No, just frustrating reminders of impotence.
The absurdity of going to work every day as a wage commodity, another line item for the bougies to increase profits, then go “consume” your wages so that your “disposable income” can go towards the impossible goal of increasing profits into eterntiy, then see advertizements about how consumers are ruining the planet by buying food that they have no skill, land, or means to grow. But why talk about that? You can’t, not even in a fabled “social democratic” society.
We could be talking about real problems. Just venting, or maybe educating each other, or maybe even doing something about it. Even strangers since we all obviously, as plain as fucking day, go through these bullshit motions every day. We see each other. But we can’t talk about it.
When given the option between: socializing with people in a shared space and being at home and entertaining yourself people are consciously choosing the latter.
When I ask why, this is what I hear from other people the most:
-I don’t have time
-I don’t have transportation
-Who else is going to be there
Etc…
There seems to be a genuine lack of desire whatsoever to simply get yourself to a place where there is a free event.
And to be clear this is not just talking about one particular type of event
I just went to a Democratic socialist of America event this weekend in support of Gaza, and the amount of people who showed up compared to the number of people who are on the list (even the organizing list) is some vanishingly small group.
If the plurality of individuals don’t want to join groups in person because they feel satisfied by themselves, then that’s a signal of some kind.
So the social cohesion in the USA is absolutely broken.
What is more tragic, though, is how they try to export their insanity onto other countries, be it Canada or the EU. Trump also supporting war criminal and genocidal man Putin, is such a clear fact for the agent Krasnov theory.
Evil in joint operation here.
The population in the USA really need to begin to think about their political system. That two-party system does not really work; and the transition to a de-facto one-party system led by an authoritarian clique is even worse. The system is totally broken here.
Is your partner willing to do this with you? Probably not.
All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives.
Can I get a source for this? Or is this just something you are pulling out of nowhere to argue against someone else's lived experience because it conflicts with yours?
I have no idea who that is and I've never heard the song.
> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.
Doesn't seem so to me.
Shared music is absolutely part of common culture
I would have thought that storming the Capitol, beating and killing police officers was Not Acceptable, but apparently I was wrong.
There are many such examples. We do not agree on the basic rules any more.
Vaccines are good.
See, not everyone agrees.
Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.
They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.
If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.
I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.
"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."
But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."
In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.
Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.
It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.
There is no left equivalent of that.
> The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack
Abaolutely not. One is a name of political ideology. Calling them nazi is an attempt to describe their believes and behavior. It is a name consistent with reality. (Hey, some high profile ones even throw Hitler salute in public and we have enough of Hitler praise coming from lower profile ones).
Trying to pretend it is the same is absurd.
-- Nigel Powers in "Goldmember"
I’d imagine you don’t have any family around so the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate.
Dipends how you see it. For North American standards, it's a lovely suburban neighbourhood in the Midwest; for us it's suburban hell because we love cities.
> the expats are sending time together instead of trying to assimilate
What do you mean by "assimilate" ?