The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/decline-of-family-loneliness-epidemic <comment><USER3> I felt loneliness acutely this week. I live alone, spend most evenings alone, and on top, work's coding and research has been slow for 2 weeks. Collaborators are at conferences and on vacation, so I had much less work and much less face-to-face contact than usual. Given that I code on my own, distribute analyses via email, and occasionally meet if people are around, I barely talked to people some days this week.

Going home feels so meh... I can watch more Sherlock Holmes videos (Jeremy Brett!), rewatch Parks and Rec or The Office, or work on music or art, but there is no one to share with, no one to quip with, no one to engage with on my passions. I just kinda laze about without more contact and stimulus.

And I do have a better social circle now than I have since I left home at age 18...minus the daily familial, non-work interaction. I can't wait to hit the phase of life with a partner and/or family living with me.

If anyone in Providence, RI wants to hang, let me know!

<comment><USER4> I had a bout of this about 20 years ago, so I made a rule for myself: I wasn't allowed to decline an invitation. If somebody proposed doing something together and I was able, I had to do it. That made a _huge_ difference in my life. I did a lot of things that were... unexpected. (A few examples: I joined an ultimate frisbee league. I went skydiving. I joined a church group. I went to a strip club. I attended a wedding.) It wasn't all fun or even pleasant, but I wasn't lonely anymore.

The internet was just getting started then, so that experiment might work out differently now, but it's worth considering how much of our modern isolation is just a matter of choices.

<comment><USER5> I have a similar rule with my wife, that she doesn't know about.

If she wants to do something with me, then I say yes, as long as I don't have a prior commitment, or, you know, am not sick or physically unable. I started this rule with her from the moment we met. I think it is part of why we stayed together all these years, and why we worked out well when so many of my previous relationships didn't.

I love a lot of solitary activities, like reading, writing, single-player games, drawing and painting, learning new things, working on projects that she isn't interested in, etc. Without my self-imposed rule, I would likely decline to do a lot of other activities, especially outside my own interests.

But if she wants to do something or go somewhere or just sit and talk, then I say yes.

My kids are young enough that I don't quite have the same rule with them, and partly because they just want me to do stuff with them and be with them _literally all the time_ , so we are still in boundary-setting phase, but I assume that I will eventually adopt the "as you wish" rule with them as well.

<comment><USER6> >the "as you wish" rule

Beautiful.

<comment><USER7> > the "as you wish" rule

That's not what it's about. It's about doing things. Together. Marriage isn't just about signing your names on a piece of paper; it's a (supposedly) life- long commitment to a team of two people where you are one of the team members. My wife and I do the same thing (and yes, it goes both ways), and we both agree that's the one reason we're such an awesome team.

<comment><USER8> I don't think "as you wish" is meant to be in resignation but as a wholly committed and happy gesture of love. I'm assuming it's in reference to The Princess Bride, where the character Westley says it as an expression of love for a girl who first takes it as wry compliance.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. I can't say I've seen that movie. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whatever it is today, I fear the future will be much worse. The most devastating existential consequences of loneliness can take decades to manifest. You feel a little lonely in your day to day life now, but wake up twenty years from now and realize you're socially isolated with no meaningful relationships or community and it's "too late" to make up the lost time. Most dangerous of all may be that online social networks provide participants with the feeling of deep social and community engagement that turns out to be a surface-level mirage beneath which we were just each staring at ourselves in the mirror the entire time.

<comment><USER10> > Whatever it is today, I fear the future will be much worse.

This is an easy trap for humans to fall into. "The sky is falling" type stuff.

Humans have faced lots of problems over the millenia, but the reality is that our lives continue to _improve_ as a whole..not get worse.

<comment><USER11> > Humans have faced lots of problems over the millenia, but the reality is > that our lives continue to improve as a whole

That's untrue. Human civilizations tend to go through cycles. They rise, eventually stagnate, and then decline over the span of hundreds of years. The Akkadians, the Mycenaeans, the Romans, and the Maya all collapsed and the lives of people living in those empires got worse, often for a very long time.

It's reasonable to think that a similar type of decline is happening in the west today.

<comment><USER12> I think comparing modern day civilization to the rise and fall of the Roman empire is a mistake, particularly European civilization. We learned our lesson. We're not building empires, not waging expensive wars, not succumbing to armed revolution. People are for the time being mostly happy and prosperous.

That isn't to say we don't face challenges, but they're fundamentally different from those of the empires of old. Something changed with true global markets, and mutually assured destruction.

<comment><USER11> I'm using ancient empires as an example because pretty much everyone agrees on what happened in ancient history. It's not a controversial / political issue to talk about Rome falling because nobody who was involved in those empires is alive today.

> We learned our lesson. We're not building empires, not waging expensive wars

I don't know where you live, but here in America we've been at war with various Middle-Eastern nations for the last 2 decades. About 90% of the history of our nation has been spent involved in some kind of a war. Those are expensive wars too. We've spent trillions on Afghanistan alone. We have around 800 formal military bases in 80 foreign countries.

I think that we are far more imperialistic than the Romans, even though our culture doesn't acknowledge it.

> global markets, and mutually assured destruction

Yeah, we have better technology too and a very different financial system. However, this hasn't saved us from expressing many of the same symptoms that ancient collapsing empires had... Especially the social issues that this article talks about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Man, the older I get the more I realize that life is always a balancing act. I immigrated from a 3rd world country (probably a 2nd world now) 20 years ago with my parents. Both of my parents were engineers and both were paid about once a year by their employer because nobody had any money. So we were broke and poor my entire childhood. And yet we always had friends visiting us. There were always celebrations. Seemed like we managed to get by and stay happy despite the circumstances. Rewind a couple decades later and I barely see my parents living. Both come home exhausted from work. I spent most days stuck in the office and then toil away working on my own projects and ideas. And that's it. We have everything we ever wanted and absolutely no happiness. I recently came back from a trip to my home country and I see neighbors talking to each other and inviting each other for dinners and celebrations. People are eager to help each other out. You can strike up a conversation with a total stranger at a bus station and it doesn't feel weird and awkward. I was looking at all of this and thinking if i'd give up everything i have now to simply enjoy humanity for a change. You can't have everything in this world.

<comment><USER14> You, too, can strike up a conversation with a total stranger at a bus station and it doesn't have to feel weird. It is, however, likely to be short because people are so unused to it in the atomized west that, if you don't carry the whole conversation, they simply won't know what to say.

<comment><USER15> In much of "flyover country", Americans routinely greet, chat with, and interact with strangers in public. Ironically, it's one of the American traits often criticized by Europeans. "How rude, how intrusive, to invade my private bubble."

But then, the UK has a similar phenomenon, with sophisticated Londoners making the same complaints about England's own flyover country, "the North" [1]

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT0ay9u1gg4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT0ay9u1gg4)

<comment><USER16> My mom lives in a small town in Canada. When she visits the Bay area and we go for walks, she always says "hi" to the people we pass. It usually makes people do a double take.

But it was the same when I lived in a mid-sized town in the mid-west US. People were much more friendly and inviting. Randomly striking up a conversation (small talk) was usually quite well received.

<comment><USER17> I moved to the bay area and it is comical how closed off people are. I say hi to people on the walking trail and maybe one in five will respond. This place is lonely central. If I didn't have my SO I'd go insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My mother, dad, aunts, etc. all immigrated to the US in a period of about 5 years. They all settled in Brooklyn and a few even lived in the same apartment complex. Growing up the extended family was HUGE and someone new was over every Sunday.

The next generation has become geographically spread out, I moved to the West Coast, a few of my cousins are in college out of state.. about half of this generation is likely to build their family outside of the NYC metro area, my children's generation is likely to split off from wherever I settle as well.

This is an unfortunate cost of the "American dream", my parents, aunts and uncles didn't have great paying jobs but they were close to family.. for the cost of a higher salary many of us make decisions that make communication with those we love difficult. Yesterday was my brother's 30th birthday but because of the time difference and work schedules we did not speak on the phone, only through text.

<comment><USER19> I find myself an anomaly and doubt my life choices sometimes for deciding to stay near family rather than chasing the career dream. But perhaps it's because I saw the cost, in my parents' generation, of immigration and long distances. I saw the benefits too...

<comment><USER20> I moved away from family to a new city around 5 years ago for a job, and I'm in the midst of deciding if I should move back. Most of my immediate and extended family lives where I grew up, but job prospects aren't as good (I work remotely, so less important but still relevant), and culturally it's probably a step down from where I am. That said, I'm from a fairly large family, and having them around is something I miss despite visiting several times a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have been lucky enough to be able to work and live in several countries around the world. One thing in common I noticed in all these places is that guys and girls don't have time and don't want to commit to a stable long relation. They invest pretty much themselves and their time in their career, traveling , parties, dogs, cats and bitcoins :) !

The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40 years old! Travel the world and have fun.

By the time they are somewhat satisfied with theirs status they have reached ~35 years old. At that point is more difficult to find a person and accept to share your life and habits with them.

They are so used to live their own lives that they have extremely hard time compromising any part of it.

I think the society has (wrongly) evolved towards an individualist model at the expenses of families.

I have noticed that people have been more and more intolerant to family flying with kids. It is hard to find kids friendly restaurants, hotels and resorts. People invite you to parties and kids are always not welcome. Not to mention also the additional cost associated with having a family.

But you know what ? I am so happy every day when I come home and my kids run towards me and we play and have fun. I and my wife coudln't be happier!

A piece of advice, stop running, take time off and think about your life beyond work and money. Traveling is fun but is way more fun and interesting when you can share it with some one you care about, like your family!

<comment><USER22> I think having kids is scientifically proven to make you unhappy and greatly increase your stress levels. It's no wonder people just put off having kids until they can, or pass on having them altogether.

<comment><USER23> I have less than five kids, but more than one kid.

My kids cause me a lot of stress. The burden of knowing I have to deal with them and their energetic, ridiculous antics every day when I get home really drains me. I don't really have time to exercise anymore because from sun-up to sundown I am dealing with them, so I'm slightly overweight and out of shape in a way I was not before I had kids. My diet isn't as diverse as it was before I had kids either because I can't go to the same places I used to or take the time to prepare what I used to prepare. I've stayed in the job I have now for longer than I should just because I worry about keeping a steady salary, paying my bills, and caring for my kids more than I ever worried about those things before. I don't spend a lot of money on self-care or personal enjoyment anymore because I need to save it in case something goes wrong and I need to spend the money on them.

Am I less happy? YES. I am less happy than before.

But if I was given the choice to go back, I wouldn't. I wouldn't even consider it. Not even for a millisecond. I don't know why and I really don't need to know why, but having kids is just better than being happy. I don't want to be happy, I want to be a good dad. It's true that being a parent makes you less happy, but it also makes happiness irrelevant (for the most part). It probably has something to do with evolution.

<comment><USER24> Appears to be a personal choice.

My wife and I have two kids, we are both in the best shape of our lives, eat better than before, and our kids are quite healthy - participating in gymnastics, volleyball, and roller derby.

<comment><USER23> It's a choice, but also not a choice.

I could pay for a nanny or childcare of some sort for portions of the day and allow myself to focus on things like food quality, exercise, etc. I prefer to sacrifice those things to be with my kids whenever I am not working because I think it is important for me to invest that time now when they are most impressionable. But that preference isn't something I seem to have much control over. It's what I think is right, so I do it. I guess I could choose to do what I think is wrong, but that doesn't seem like a choice as much as a character failure.

Also, my kids are very young. As they get older, I expect to have more time. The early years are the absolute hardest in terms of time. It does get better as they get older and have activities to participate in outside the home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article is long and I skimmed a bit.

It appears to be one of these pieces that just covers so many topics and issues, I'm not sure which ones correlate to loneliness and which ones don't.

I'll tell you one thing, and this is a personal belief: the modern way of making a living and the modern relationship to my family is far preferable to me than "the old way."

For most of human history we've had to stick with our families and build a large set of children in order to perform labor and work around high mortality rates. Usually we were all subsistence farmers or perhaps running a family business.

In no way to I prefer that lifestyle to that of modern life. Old style families tie everyone into the extended family. For better or worse you're stuck with your blood relatives and you must continue the family farm, family business, or whatever it is. Your fate is determined from the day you are born, and you must stick with these people no matter how toxic they are.

Yes, it's possible to be lonely thanks to overwork, distance (physical or emotional) from family, or a number of other factors that have some kind of connection to modern life.

But also, I most definitely don't want to live with my parents, or with my children forever. I want them to have the luxury of living around whoever they choose, not who they're born into having a relationship with.

In the past, a lot of these choices were made for us because that's what our community and family expected from us. I would not trade that aspect of familial social pressure, lack of freedom, and predetermined expectations for some (rectifiable) modern day loneliness.

<comment><USER26> I think you're believing in a false dichotomy. You can have a full family experience without doing labor, or working a farm, or a family business. Look at immigrant families from certain parts of the world. When I lived in the Midwest, I interacted with them. Most of them were well educated, and not doing business or laborious work. They were spread apart in different cities, but mostly within driving distance. Culturally, they insisted on maintaining close social ties.

A coworker of mine who is in his 30's (PhD in engineering, doing tech work) is thinking he'll move back to the Midwest where his family is after 2-3 more years here (West coast). He loves it here (especially the weather), but all the niceties in culture and weather here don't compensate for the lack of having family and cousins nearby. His kids will grow up there, just as he did.

(Just in case anyone is wondering, he's not white, and so will be moving back to a much less diverse part of the country).

Having experienced both sides, there are definitely down sides to close family ties, but I view family as a wider spectrum. If your relatives are horrible (or way out of sync with your mindset), then it's much worse than the individualist mindset. But if you get along with them, it's way better than anything you can achieve as an individualist.

<comment><USER25> I see your point here.

On the other hand I wonder if we've prematurely jumped to this conclusion that non-immigrant Americans have this horribly individualist culture where we shun all our relatives once we have a professional job. Like, what actual evidence is pointing us to that? Is it just feelings, or is there some kind of metric we can look at?

I don't have an answer, just thinking about it.

<comment><USER26> My example of immigrants was not to imply anything about non-immigrants. I used them simply because they're easy to distinguish (yes, profiling, I guess).

I've definitely seen the same in non-immigrant families. Perhaps more likely from folks who do not come from major cities (I may be wrong). Definitely tend to see it more amongst LDS folks, but it's by no means limited to them.

<comment><USER25> I understand what you mean, I believe it was me who made that generalization first. It's hard to refrain from trying to make things follow a simple and explainable pattern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think is just another example where we got a short term benefit from breaking societal norms but may suffer long term. Strong family bonds can be very confining so it's often liberating to weaken them. But then you also lose that support system which has big cost long term.

I think the job market has similar trends. It used to be that jobs were more stable and you had a direct path to retirement. But this was also restricting for young people. Now we have the opposite. Young people are the stars of the job market, job hopping is the only way to get ahead and the people who aren't millionaires by age of 50 are looking into a very insecure future.

</comment><comment><USER28> Actually one of the things my wife and I often discuss is how with our current society even what we consider our "nuclear family" is at most just a part time family.

For most of humanity a family group stayed together for the majority of each day. Children played with siblings, cousins and were usually within earshot of one of their parents or relatives. Certainly they would have found their way back when hungry. As they got older, they worked right beside their parents on the various chores and tasks.

In modern western society, the spouses are separated for the majority of their waking hours. (Even if one spouse chose to stay at home, the issue would still remain as the other spouse would have to go to work). The children spend either a significant or a major portion of their time in day care or school, also separated from their siblings. Then throw in the after school activities, projects and homework needed to create a modern "well rounded" child. (Don't even get me started on how un-affordable it is to have kids)

They do get to have a rushed breakfast together and hopefully a good dinner as well, but that is about it. A significant portion of the weekend is spent doing chores. Add in the American working culture of taking very few vacation days.

The decline of the family is because our culture has created an environment where we are working .. working constantly.. (either chasing a higher standard of living or running as fast as we can just to maintain our current standard of living (housing, education, healthcare), working so you can afford to have kids) and we work in an environment where we are disconnected from our family and friends. Often, if you are lucky, you make friends at work.. but almost always these aren't like the friends you made at high school, they aren't as meaningful and strong. Then People change jobs and you "stay in touch"... If you are lucky, you find the person you love at work, but work places romances are tricky as well.. sometimes (usually?) frowned upon.

We just have much less TIME to build those sorts of deep bonds. Visit a village or a small town in the developing world and observe how much more TIME people seem to have. How much more time they spend with each other.

<comment><USER29> As someone from village in a developing world (I don't work there but visit at least once a year) I totally concur with all your sentiments. One of the things that takes some getting used when I am back home is how loosely scheduled days can be. There no such things as invites for lunch of dinner. People just pitch up and a plan is made. Wake in the morning and we supposed to go check on the cows. A cousin arrives as we eating breakfast, next thing it is 12 noon. Its too late now, cows are out grazing. Shrug, tomorrow is another day. No one stressed and it was good to see my cousin. I am not naive enough to think this is how life should be but it is nice break from my city life. We need a balance and of both sorts of lives and we don't have that balance in the city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I just skimmed the article and it all resonates with my experience as an immigrant in the US but I'm also going to point out that the way cities are built in the US plays a huge role in isolating people. In most american cities the spaces to aggregate without having to pay money (let's say a restaurant) are scarce or even absent. There's no benches on the side of the streets, because we fear that someone could sit on it and NOT SPEND MONEY at a nearby business (the horror!).

We build houses far, far away from stores and places of work, so everyone needs to drive to those places in their own motorized isolation box.

We built profoundly inhuman places to live, and the result is that nobody is happy and we're all dying of all kinds of preventable diseases.

I think this model of society has largely failed, and people in western countries are now struggling to figure out where do we go from here, a question we will probably not answer in my lifetime.

<comment><USER31> I'm not so sure about city planning being a large factor.

European cities are very different but we face similar problems. We have parks, you don't need to travel far (I grew up in a large city, now live in a small one right next to it, and have never had a car and never needed one) to get places, most people live in multi-family-homes and overly long commutes are the exception, not the rule.

I do agree with your last sentence though, and maybe it's the individualism that expresses itself more strongly in US cities because they are much younger, and more purpose built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If anyone lives in Seattle and is feeling lonely hit me up! I'll grab coffee with you any time. I'm 35 & a few years ago my loneliness spiraled out of control and almost killed me. I had a lot of crap from my late teens -> late 20's and it led me to a dark place. I know what it's like to be in that place. I got sober and turned things around. Now I work remote and have a flexible schedule. Life is good! I love the goodness of humanity & meeting new people, so hit me up anytime, cheers!

<comment><USER33> My friend made an app for this, and it's live in Seattle - [https://www.jointhaw.com/](https://www.jointhaw.com/)

<comment><USER34> Oh hi, I've seen your posters posted throughout Cap Hill.

I'm curious, with these kinds of apps, do you use it yourself? I've always wondered if dating as a Tinder/Grinder employee would be weird, and here I'm curious if it's weird in a more platonic world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My own concerns are different. I'm in my 50s now, happily married for over 25 years, with a terrific social life. I'm not at all lonely or isolated.

It's my children that I worry about.

They're boy/girl twins, now 25. My daughter is in the process of breaking up with the boyfriend she's lived with for the past two years, and moving back home to re-settle her life. She has a career, and wants to get married and start a family sometime soon. Her boyfriend is a great person to be around and she adores him, but... he doesn't want kids (and is actually freaked out by them). He doesn't want marriage. And he can't keep himself organized enough to uphold his financial/personal responsibilities in cohabitation. So where is she going to find a potential partner who shares her social values, and wants a life partnership and a co-parent, who can uphold their responsibilities? She doesn't even know where to look.

Her brother lives at home, and probably always will. He doesn't have a real career and can't adult well enough to live on his own, even if he had to. He has never been on a date, even, and lives for video games. What happens if he looks around one day and suddenly feels lonely for a family other than his aging parents? With no financial substance or adulting skills and no romantic experience, he's not much of a catch for partners his age. He'll have to take more family/household responsibility as he gets older, and that's fine, but what happens when his parents finally pass away and he's an old man?

As a parent, these situations worry me greatly.

<comment><USER36> Your daughter will be ok. She can go anywhere and immediately find social groups and have no issues finding dates — if she gets online she can literally have hundreds or thousands of men ready to take her out. It's completely opposite for most men — isolated and hard to find social circles.

<comment><USER37> It's easy for women to find dates. Much harder to find competent potential life partners who want to start a family.

<comment><USER38> Well yeah, but... it's hard for men to find dates to begin with, and that's just the starting line for finding a competent potential life partner who want to start a family. I'm a parent of both a boy and a girl like OP, as well as a former single man - I do believe women have some disadvantages in modern society, but dating/romance is not one of them.

<comment><USER39> You're making a fallacy here. You are saying "it's easier for women to get 100 dates, therefore it's easier for women to find what they want".

Your OP is saying, it's easy for women to get 100 dates but out of 100 dates only 1 will be a sensible life partner.

It may be harder for a man to get 10 dates than for a woman to get 100 but in those 10, half of them will be a sensible life partner.

It's a little like an advertising funnel: women have a source for getting lots of clicks, but few will be well qualified for a sale.

Men have a harder time getting clicks, but generally when they do they are generally well qualified.

You're just thinking about the clicks as if that's the only equation that matters but it's a multiplication of two conversion rates, not one.

<comment><USER40> That seems heavily female biased. It's more realistic that 1/100 men is right for a woman and 1/100 women is right for a man, but the woman will at least meet a 100 men whereas the man will only meet 10 women. It would explain the amount of sexless young men.

<comment><USER39> The OP (Rayiner?) wasn't making a claim about "rightness" they made a claim about readiness for a family.

So yes, that group is female biased. That was the whole point of his comment.

The kinds of things men are typically looking for are also in short supply in the median woman who will go on a date with them, but that's a separate point.

(I feel like a lot of people in this thread read some implied moralizing here, like single men are bad for not being family ready, that it's some sort of female supremacy argument, but no one said that. It just is what it is.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The Great Lakes have surpassed the 'high-water-level' record set 33 years ago. Therefore, High-Water levels in the Great Lakes cause loneliness.

Correlation != Causation

If you are looking for things "to blame" don't forget about:

-decline in religious-group (church) participation

-stagnate wage increases for 20 years while cost of living increases (result: less of an ability to afford "going out") Also related: more people needing 2+ jobs

-increased internet access/duration/interaction

All of these equate to less 'recreational' time available. Lack of recreation time = less chance to participate in social settings = more loneliness

</comment><comment><USER42> Strange, I always thought the epidemic of loneliness in post-industrial countries was attributable to alienation from culture and community, because we'd replaced self-sufficiently interesting forms of life with meaningless jobs in equally meaningless service stores built in meaningless communities by faceless multinational conglomerates, sold with lifestyle ads bundled with meaningless mass entertainment to people lacking a cultural immune response to the siren song of shallow mass culture.

The nuclear suburban household is a manifestation of the soulless, profit- driven mass culture that we've been actively fleeing from ever since we woke up to find ourselves isolated amongst our acquaintances. Every generation in the West since the 1950s has engaged in a desperate scramble to find meaning and connection, because, spoilers, there's something hauntingly awful about eating microwave dinners in front of the television with your family after working 10 hours doing supply chain managment for WhateverCo. with a spouse with whom you never learned to communicate with and children whose only job is to stay on the rails and not get any strange ideas about life.

I don't even think that loneliness is intrinsically a bad thing. Pain is a signal that forces you to adapt.

</comment><comment><USER43> I look at so many of my single friends who are achingly lonely (late 30s to early 40s) and they all have a particular trait in common: they obsess about the possibilities the future may hold yet don't acknowledge the hard work it would take to get there. There's also a sort of collective delusion that if you wait around long enough, your dream partner will show up and that if a relationship takes _any work at all_ that it should be scrapped because it interferes with "just being an individual".

The longer people put off pairing up, the harder it seems to accomplish.

I think mainstream media has really warped a couple of generations of people's priorities. Extended adolescence and chasing hedonism is now the norm.

My friends who eschewed that in favor of more traditional long term relationships, compromise and building family over Instagram followers are decidedly more content and less anxious.

I suspect as my generation ages these effect will amplify.

<comment><USER44> If these people are actually your friends, maybe you should show them more respect and stop assuming that the reason they are single is that they are less mature than you and chose to "chase hedonism" and "Instagram followers" over long term relationships. Despite what you might believe, it isn't easy for every person to find a long term partner, and not everyone wants to do it at the same point in their lives.

<comment><USER43> I'm not assuming anything, they're friends I've know for many years and I've been there with them as they've made these choices. I'd like for them to be happy but there's only so much you can do.

I think the problem I'm describing is pretty common amongst gen x and millennials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The number of people I know who advocate that "blood is thicker than water" and then spend most of our outings at a bar complaining about one or another of those blood relatives...

For years I've felt like I'm supposed to report in to my family (my mother in particular) because otherwise I'm assumed dead. It was never reasonable, I was always safe and happy (and not engaged in anything crazy like CIA wetwork, just traveling around the US by myself), but I finally had to do away with it and issue an ultimatum.

For me it was not family vs loneliness. It was family vs lonerness (and happiness). They were "stuck in the mud" and expected me to be the same... when I wasn't it was out of their comfort zone and they didn't know how to handle that.

Several months in now I'm happier than I've ever been... purely because I don't have to worry about anyone's happiness except my own and the people I actually _choose_ to be with.

<comment><USER46> I actually had a similar(ish) situation to yours. I read a book called "boundaries" and that's made my relationships with my family much better.

This all came about when I was getting married.

This was about 10 years ago now. Fast forward to wife + kids and I did something I never thought I'd do. I moved home to be close to family again.

I'm still fully self reliant but my kids get to grow up near gma and gpa which is amazing.

It wasn't until I entered into the group of my friends with kids that I realized there's a fair amount of isolation there.

Anyway, I followed a similar path. I moved across the country to get away from my family man, and now that I've learned to set boundaries I'm back and happy with our new relationship. Maybe that'll work for you and your family and maybe it wont.

We did have friends who were family where we used to live. The kind of friends you call when you're going into labor and they pick your kid up from daycare after driving for an hour. I miss them more than almost anyone else in the world. So, while you can make it work with family and it might be great, you can also make it work without them. That's just what I chose to do.

<comment><USER45> I suppose my problem is that I've tried to set limitations. The people I'm setting them upon don't agree.

So that leaves us at a crossroads. I either grit my teeth and continue to put up with what I see as unacceptable behavior, or I enforce the ultimatum and refuse to engage.

This is hardly the first time I have ever had this kind of argument with any of the people involved. It goes, as many family arguments tend to, along a predictable and repeatable pattern: argument, agreement, repetition.

Eventually I had to realize that this has happened dozens of times and if I don't change any variables we will just continue to repeat the cycle for the rest of my life.

All of that said, I don't have kids. I don't really want them, but I assume at some point it'll happen. I do realize that having grandma and grandpa there is valuable. You've got a free babysitter and the family roots. If it came down to compromising my ultimatum and not having that connection... I would absolutely, 100%, without any question, tell my mother to F off again.

The whole thing ends up being exactly what you said - sometimes family are a blessing and built in friends, but sometimes they aren't and you find other friends to fill in that gap.

I just can't stand it when people say that family is all that matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is it just the family, or is it also community institutions?

I'm thinking specifically about the decline in church attendance. Regardless of your beliefs, church congregations (not mega-churches, but small congregations of at most a few hundred) provided a built-in community that could provide support, companionship, activities, etc. So far I haven't seen anything that really replicates all those communities had to offer.

<comment><USER48> >I'm thinking specifically about the decline in church attendance.

This is an often repeated point but I don't see how it has any credence. Most people who attend churches may talk with each other for just a few hours -- and personally I've found most churches don't really foster a socially-healthy atmosphere. And that's fine, that's not the goals of churches, never has been and most likely never will be.

Churches if anything have never played a role in a healthy community -- and to this day if we map church attendance to social ills there's a pretty good correlation between the two: steady church attendance in areas tends to correlate with heavy drug problems, domestic abuse, and suicide.

However you want to dice that up, good or bad, it simply means one thing: church attendance and socially healthy communities probably aren't really related, and if they are, it probably doesn't have the effect you think it does given the available evidence.

<comment><USER49> Lots of sociological data disputing this...

<comment><USER48> No there isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Luis CK once said the choice between marriage and staying single is like the choice between being frustrated and being lonely.

As someone originally from a second-world country I can say that I feel people have it good these days in terms of their basic needs for survival. When you're not fighting for something, it's easy to feel like you're not fulfilled and it's hard to rally with others who are fighting for basic needs.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've been lonely for so long, I'm almost numb to it. I'm 28, and sometimes I don't even feel human. I can go weeks where the only words I utter to other humans are during the 10-20 minute catch-ups with my parents who live 2000 miles away. My only consistent communication is with a group of ~5 guys on Discord, where we mostly discuss the game we play together via text. I have never so much as cuddled with another person, much less kissed/held hands/etc. I'm so starved for physical human contact that it's almost painful.

Anyway, I recently went back to school to finish a CS bachelor's. I have zero friends, shitty grades, no internship experience, a criminal record (technically expunged), and a GitHub profile that's essentially empty; supposed to be graduating next week and finding a job.

I don't know why I'm writing this here. Despite the fact that I'm graduating next week, I'm somehow at an all-time-low in my life. And unbelievably lonely. Like I can't even express how lonely I am, it's just a pit. Basically been in this state for 10 years now. My 20's down the fucking drain.

<comment><USER52> Hey I feel for you stranger. I don't know what to say really because I don't have it figured out, but try not to worry about wasting time. I guess it's all sort of pointless in the end so might as well gamble with yourself? Do something unusual, try to meet people with similar interests. Maybe go to a bar or a park? You're not a failure for not having experienced those things you listed.

<comment><USER51> I appreciate the sympathy. I think you're right about everything being sort of pointless. When I think about the scale of the universe and my place within it, my insecurities are kinda humorous. But even with that realization, my stupid brain is still depressed. Humans just aren't mean to be solitary like I am, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I think the increase in ostracization, bullying, and shallow celebrity reality shows has caused people to feel like they can barely do anything without being shamed, criticized, or ridiculed for showing a bit of difference from the established TV/movie/politically-correct norm. The divisiveness in owner/worker rich/poor and politician/voter has only sprayed fuel on the fire. Nevermind stagnating wages causing young folks to hold out on having children giving them less incentive to marry.

I don't know how many times I've heard about people not even being able to have conversations at the dinner table because of some stupid hot-button political issue that people feel they have to go hard-line on or take to the extreme just to get a little bit of gloat over things that are trumped-up in the mainstream/YouTube media. If you're the head of the household or workplace or friend group and you don't lay down the law about this kind of divisiveness, then you're letting the people you love tear each other apart.

</comment><comment><USER54> I tend to be more the loner, harder now that i'm married with kids, but I've moved a few times to places where I knew absolutely no one. So, frankly if your in this boat don't do the studio apartment, and definitely don't got home and turn on the TV/computer.

Get a two bedroom, and advertise for a roommate, and be creative for joining organizations/activities where you will interact with the same group of people repeatedly, volunteering, team sports, workout groups, adult learning classes, church, etc. Something will stick as long as you smile at people and start random conversations. I might even suggest the bar, but again you need to find a more neighborhoody/dive bar and go there enough to see the same people. Then find out what there interests are and invite them to do something with you,

The point is get the fsck out of the house. Loner activities can even work if you strike up conversations with the people you meet while out running/etc and then invite them for a coffee/beer/etc.

Invite your coworkers to lunch, happy hour, etc.

Now at that said, a big part of this is making sure your friendly and positive, and act interested in people. Start acting negative, or self centered and people won't want to go hang out again.

</comment><comment><USER55> One thing to keep in mind is city-journal.org / manhattan institute is a conservative think-tank (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research) ).

The author makes a lot of fair points I agree with but doesn't go into the positive situations - the change where people may have more ability now to get out of toxic families (or at least distance themselves), questioning how we can move beyond just religious congregations of community (perhaps congregation more around bioregionalism?). Or if awareness of resource limitations in the future may be causing less developed-world birth than earlier.

Finally, to quote David Chapman - ""Just as there are mental states only possible in crowds, there are mental states only possible in privacy."

Loneliness epidemic—or a golden age of privacy?"

[https://mobile.twitter.com/Meaningness/status/97139760655443...](https://mobile.twitter.com/Meaningness/status/971397606554439681)

<comment><USER56> The author had a lot of interesting things to say, but I wish they were a lot more open about their biases. It's pretty clear that they are starting from the position that marriage and "traditional" family values are important, and therefore hard to tell whether or not they are glossing over or ignoring conflicting evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Decline of the family? How about decline of the entire Homo Sapien social structure ...

I'm looking out my window, and I see houses of neighbors I've never met, and the rest are owned by people with whom I have nothing in common. So, needless to say, I spend a lot of time at work. Work has sadly become my "new family". Yet, I trust none of them. So, no wonder my Homo Sapien brain is flipping out.

</comment><comment><USER58> As someone who is single and "kinless," reading this hit pretty hard. I have had a total of probably less than 12 hours of IRL human contact over the past year. I work 100% remotely, so I suppose this isn't surprising. Dating was incredibly frustrating, so I stopped. Moved to a new city, no friends, etc.

Lately I find myself dreaming of the incredibly mundane -- like sitting and having a conversation with a friend, holding hands with made-up humans, etc.

<comment><USER59> Have you thought about seeing a therapist? In any case, hang in there and I wish you good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Hypothesis: Up until recently, you only needed a so-so amount of interest in settling down and having children, in order to pass on your genes. Some people did, but others didn't, and while this was not entirely genes it wasn't entirely NOT genes either. But, since everyone got more or less pushed into marrying and starting a family anyway, by strong social pressures, there was no strong evolutionary advantage to a strong desire for family.

For about one generation now, the people who WANT kids, and are willing to be half of a committed couple in order to have more of them, are the ones having more kids. Others, either don't have any children, or only have one.

In a couple generations, they will look back at this time and wonder why people back then were so (relatively) uninterested in family.

Just a hypothesis. Could happen relatively quickly, though. Which would mean, in only a few generations.

</comment><comment><USER61> I hear a lot of people admit to depression, anxiety, OCD but rarely do I hear mention of loneliness. I don't have a close circle of friends and my primary social interaction comes from local meetups. I run two, one of which is focused on mental health topics. I've met a lot of people through it and never once heard mention of loneliness.

There's a subreddit, r/foreveralone, where I sometimes go seeking validation that others feel the same way. Are there others who received amazing information but have no one to share it with? I only find those stories on the internet. Do we need more celebrities coming out about their loneliness for it to become more socially acceptable to ask of someone: "I'm feeling really lonely, do you want to grab lunch?".

It's not so much that I'm not around people, I just don't have meaningful relationships with any of them. If I were to suddenly get married, aside from my mother, I don't know who else to invite to my wedding. The relationships feel superficial, career focused or just spur of the moment interactions.

I also fear that maybe I'm overly romanticising friendships and family. Is the image portrayed on tv the basis for what constitutes a meaningful relationship? Maybe it's ok to live life like this, with only passing interactions. Then I read something like this:

> Public-health researchers have known for a long time that unmarried men and > women are at higher risk of early death from a variety of diseases

And wonder.

</comment><comment><USER62> (my baseless rant with no scientific proof)I think people who move a lot are lonelier as opposed to those who never left the place they grew up. I have a few childhood friends in my home town that even if i meet after years still share a bond. I feel that it must be easier for women to make friends. It is very hard to make guy friends as most guys who are not in a relationship tend to focus on finding/hooking up. Also, we are a bit conditioned by pornography and also are a bit delusional. Everyone thinks too highly of themselves.. no one wants to settle. The women/men who can settle don't as their mischief(fucking around) catches on to them. Nothing wrong with that but there are consequences.

We half of us are lonely and don't want to be. Can't we all just get along and be nice to each other and build genuine relationships? No. For that first we need to accept that conditioning is messing up with our heads.. Change our habits and slow but surely we will meet like minded people

<comment><USER63> I moved around as a kid and had to change schools, it definitely made keeping in touch with people hard. I can't do "What's up" with people who aren't near as it gets tiring after a while and I prefer hanging out with people in person. So, most of the friends I have now are either from uni or people who I met in my first job.

Though moving around did help me in one thing. Despite being an introvert, it forced me to try to talk to new people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> > Cohabiting couples break up faster and more often than marrieds.

I find the distinction between cohabiting and married couples a bit weird. I mean, aren't most couples cohabiting before they marry? Which in turn would mean that married couples have, on average, a more mature relationship? No wonder that those relationships are more stable than the mixed group, from fresh couples to equally mature couples, which is called 'cohabiting couples'.

Feels a bit like apples and oranges and I wonder what the message behind those facts should be.

</comment><comment><USER65> For those that can spare some cash. Get yourself a vacation for a couple weeks to Greece or Turkey, meet some locals there. Even better, try living abroad there or other nations that are known for their social culture. Believe me you will change. You get to experience a new culture and learn a thing or two about yourself.

</comment><comment><USER66> There are other ways of solving the loneliness problem than economically castrating more than half the population in an attempt to return to an idealized past that never actually was. The world is different now than it was in the 1950s, and we're going to have to find different ways to get our necessary face-time, and luckily we have more tools to better take responsibility for our social health than we did even 10 years ago.

Are there anyone here outside the straight, white (or white-adjacent), male demographic who would like to return to having less economic opportunity?

<comment><USER67> I think that could be part of the problem: a necessary reliance on "tools" to take care of our social health. Whereas before a cohesive family or social group took care of the need for it's members' social well-being, now we have a toxic culture of individuality which impels a person to solve all their own problems, aided by a synthetic tool that first off incurs an altogether new cognitive fatigue while at the same time being tuned to turn a profit for someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I would argue that the decline of the family is directly linked to feminism, or better stated, the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. The two forces behind that are birth control and women entering the work force. These two are magnified by online dating and social media. I am not saying at all that these are bad things, just that we have yet to see the true effects of feminism on society. Again, I am not asserting that feminism is a bad thing, just that when modes and patterns of societal interaction break down after hundreds of years (or more) of existence, we should take a step back and think about what is really happening.

It's too early to tell how this will play out, but we as a society have underestimated the effects and consequences of rapid change. It may be another one hundred years before we can look back and understand what we are currently going through.

<comment><USER9> At the risk of wading into deeply controversal territory, I'll add some personal observations. One of the harsh realities I have seen is that it's very difficult for women to "have it all" meaning a fulfilling personal, family, and professional life, especially in the most competitive fields. Yet for many years this idea has persisted in a mythical sense as broadly achievable. I am now in my late 30s. I've watched my female friends and classmates have productive and inspiring careers, but often at the cost of their personal lives. The writing is on the wall that many of these women will likely never end up having biological children due to declining fertility. It makes me sad because while they are awesome entrepreneurs, physicians, lawyers and so on, they would have been awesome mothers as well. And at the societal level, from a selection standpoint, these are the type of genes we should want to pass on. I'm not sure what the answer is, but we should at least be honest about discussing the reality of what people wrestle with and why and how.

<comment><USER69> > It makes me sad because while they have awesome professional > accomplishments, they would have been awesome mothers and parents as well.

I just wanted to point out politely how strange this language reads to me. It's ultimately the decision of each person whether to have kids or not. This being "sad" for them is an overreach, morally, IMO--and part of the fight feminism led was to carve out a space for women in society _not_ to be mothers, if that is their choice.

<comment><USER70> I have many female friends in their mid-30s and early 40s, and the ones without kids are almost always sad/regretful about it themselves. Some won't admit it, but some will, especially in more intimate settings. I've had one cry on my shoulder - she is very successful professionally, but feels she missed out on the opportunity for motherhood.

Whether it was her "choice" is hard to say. Very few people get the chance to engineer their lives the way they want. Most people instead play the cards they are dealt. And now that there are many more different types of possible cards in the deck for women, they are coming to the understanding that it is possible to be dealt a bad hand, and not realize it until it is too late.

<comment><USER71> The issue is that there's no objectivity here. Are these women actually sad because they truly wanted to experience motherhood, or is it more because of pressure (even unconscious pressure) from family and friends to have kids? Or just the built-in feelings due to upbringing that having kids is "just what you're supposed to do".

I wonder, though, if these same women _did_ have kids, and sacrificed their career for it, would they look back and have regrets in _that_ regard, too.

So maybe it's just... given a multitude of options where we can't choose them all, perhaps humans will just naturally have _some_ regrets around the path(s) not taken?

As counterpoint, I know women in their 40s and older who are very pleased with their decision to not have kids.

<comment><USER72> Maybe there needs to be widespread childcare and maternity leave programs so these woman can have both fulfilling career and a family

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I've been feeling a pretty intense sort of depression and loneliness for the last month or so.

The feelings of "you're a _white male_ and you work in tech and you are wealthy you are a SATAN" is just becoming too much :(.

I volunteer a tremendous amount in education, where I'm the only male I generally even see in my field, and I _constantly_ have to listen to my coworkers gleefully talk about how excited they are at how few young boys show up to our events. I hear them blatantly express disdain when a couple do.

Its so, so sad. I try getting away from the news, but then it creeps into my life anyway.

I'm not some devil because of my genitals, my sexual orientation, or the color of my skin. I volunteer so much of my time specifically to the homeless and less fortunate, I give so much money to charity, I do so much stuff in my community...and yet I just have to hear almost constantly that I am everything wrong with the world because I am an evil, cis, white, monogamous, straight male. I tick every single box of bad guy it seems like there is, and I don't want to be the bad guy. I actually try really hard to be a nice guy.

It just makes me so so sad :(. And if I ever do even mention that, it just makes it even worse, hence the throwaway account.

<comment><USER74> Just a piece of advice: try to take a step back and listen more carefully to the complaints you're hearing. When people talk about dismantling the patriarchy, or about racial privilege, they are _not_ actually talking about any one particular person. You are fully able to be white, male, privileged, and still be an ally to those who do not benefit as much from the power structures in our society.

Instead of feeling personally attacked when you hear these issues discussed, try to remember we are all on the same team, fighting to tackle problems that are bigger than just one individual.

<comment><USER75> Take for example a comment from this very thread: _" Feminism has brought about a lot of changes, but I don't think we can lay this one at the feet of women trying to escape their compulsory reliance on unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate men."_

How should we take a step back and listen more carefully to this? How are we to interpret that other than as an attack on all men?

<comment><USER74> Pay attention to the syntax, it's not an attack on all men. It's quite specifically an attack on "unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate men."

These men do exist, and these men have historically used societal norms to trap women in marriages or work that was unfair. It's great that we are working toward a society which recognizes that this is harmful and allows these women to seek better opportunity for themselves!

<comment><USER76> But in this case the original author proposed that the liberation of women and feminism was contributing to loneliness and that was the reply. So i.e. feminism makes women less dependent on unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate men so that is not the cause of loneliness.

Let us say someone would say that the increased loneliness instead came from the rise of online gaming/porn/communities and that men in larger degree become less interested in meeting women and making an effort.

If someone then answered that "Men avoiding unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate women by online gaming is not a problem" you would probably see that statement as misogynistic. Even if that description does match some women.

(I fully agree with the liberation of women (and men) from many of the traditional gender roles.)

<comment><USER77> I can kind of understand people having such a knee-jerk reaction to the original article. The first part reads like someone like Jordan Peterson preaching the return to a family lifestyle according to "Judeo-Christian values" while ignoring all the reasons society changed. I nearly dropped the article there as well. The remaining part got a lot better, though it still feels like only describing problems and leaving the task of imagining solutions up to the reader, with an implied direction.

<comment><USER78> Agreed about the beginning of the article. It started to feel like the author's value judgements were slipped in there, but later when they acknowledged "some might not see this as all bad" I felt a little better about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> My biggest take away after reading this thread is that almost everyone seems to agree that there is a very significant problem, while at the same time there seems be a complete lack of universal agreement about cause(s) or cure(s). Sort of unsatisfying that way. :-|

<comment><USER67> The problem is, as far as the causes go, everyone is right and no one thinks they're wrong. My experience of the world has taught me that people shy away from complexity in favor of simple explanations. So if everyone mentioning a possible cause is, to a degree, correct, then we need to figure out what underlying systems are connecting and driving those causes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I have a fiance and a healthy family but even then I notice I didn't have quite as many friends outside my online social chats.

My fiance became friends with a couple that i became friends with, and the husband on the other side introduced me to Disc Golf. I loved the sport, but something I found there was a community, a pretty tight one.

Disc Golf communities are local, and they build clubs around their local courses. People go out regularly to play, weekly rounds that are rated to have a friendly leaderboard, $5 to be included in the leaderboard and to add to the Ace pot. If someone gets an ace thats part of it, wins the pot. People cheer and are excited for other's great shots, aces, and so on. Its the person against the course, and everyone is supporting each other through it.

At the same time, I found new friends. I now go outside regularly into parks, hiking areas, and golf courses to play with them and meet new people.

Disc golf might not be your jam, but the little story is to say that sports, clubs, hobbies can be a huge way to reduce loneliness.

Especially the more casual sports. Bowling, Disc Golf, tennis, ball golf, etc.

You can join a local sewing club if you are into that. Book club. Barnes & Noble now hosts some run by local employees and people in the community.

Look into your hobbies, and see if you can find like minded individuals to make friends over it.

If you are a coder and thats your passion and you want to be more social, go to meetups, dev events, etc. At least here in SF there is many daily, some are reoccuring with a usual crowd.

</comment><comment><USER81> Is the implication of this article that people should be having kids to avoid loneliness? Because that's a bit of a twisted reason to have kids IMHO.

"Low on friends? Have kids! They're pretty much required to be your friends." Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER82> I think what's helped me a lot are teachings by Ajahn Brahm on YouTube that touch on loneliness and how to be at peace with oneself. I've learned that I'm always with a friend - myself. Learning to be friends with oneself also helps one be friends with others for example by being generally happier and much less critical.

</comment><comment> trey-jones My life is currently more chaotic and exhausting than ever, with three young daughters and a wife in the house with me. There's not much time for doing things because I want to do them. I sometimes think about the man who was my favorite uncle growing up. He's nearly 80 now, never married, no kids. Did whatever he wanted in his 30s and 40s (and 50s and 60s for that matter) I'm sure. My mom and her sister go stay with him for a week every year.

Not saying that I couldn't end up alone at his age, but I'd like to think my kids will be around some. My mom told me once that when their mother died she (my grandmother) told my mom "Take care of your brother. He doesn't have anyone who loves him more than anyone else." Even without putting it that way, I've never regretted the chaotic, noisy, exhausting life (of sacrifice? Yeah I think so) that I've chosen.

</comment><comment> asdfk-12 I moved for a job that I found entirely agreeable, and after a year I still have no strong ties as a 28 y/o man. No prospects of friendship, not to mention a relationship. Participating in local boards, playing fiddle music weekly with a community group, and actively participating in my workplace's social scene.

Beginning to come to terms with the fact that the only option I have is to move to a place where I can grow emotionally and find people that I belong with, since that's obviously not happening here. This is a shame, since my work aligns with prime ESG metrics and although it doesn't pay well, I have a five minute commute and access to trails, nature, camping, hunting etc. which I thoroughly take advantage of..

This is an enormous public health crisis. I feel it from the center of my being.

</comment><comment><USER83> What's wrong with being alone? The only problem I see is for people who can't handle a certain burden (X) _being_ alone.

Perhaps a right balance can be struck, but often times it is better to be alone (X) than to be around people you have to make a certain amount of effort (Y) to be with.

<comment><USER84> Most worthwhile things require some amount of effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I had this problem a few years ago but I think all my friends reached the realization at the same time as me so now we hang out all the time.

That plus MDMA every now and then and going to shows with my friends has pretty much dealt with my last few issues with socialization.

</comment><comment><USER86> "The SDT began emerging in the West after World War II. As societies became richer and goods cheaper and more plentiful, people no longer had to rely on traditional families to afford basic needs like food and shelter. They could look up the Maslovian ladder toward "post-material" goods: self-fulfillment, exotic and erotic experiences, expressive work, education."

I think there's one more cause for the Second Demographic Transition: The majority of jobs are now in the service sector. After spending the day negotiating and putting up with others, people may want some solitude.

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't know that it's family alone, technology is helping. You can live vicariously through your palm today by holding on to a phone. We see it when people are out and about and peering deeply into their phone as if it's the end of the world. Most people spend more time looking into their phone than talking to others. In some ways it connects us to those far away but disconnects us from those closest to us. In Japan, the hikikomori sometimes have family and yet are lonely, and lock themselves up in their room and just live through black mirrors.

</comment><comment><USER88> Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell had an excellent research report as video summarizing loneliness, published earlier this year [0] with sources linking to the facts in the video [1].

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA)

[1]: [https://sites.google.com/view/sourcesloneliness/startseite](https://sites.google.com/view/sourcesloneliness/startseite)

</comment><comment><USER89> I'm only 22, and moving back into my mom's house has made my life a lot better, especially while living the startup life; it's better to have somebody around who loves you unconditionally, and it's okay to be at home when you're reeel young (as long as you know you don't have to be there).

I now know it'll important to organize and integrate my next local community when I move out, or I'll probably end up lonely.

Go meet your neighbours!

</comment><comment><USER90> If anybody wants to talk/tell jokes/bullshit, hit me up: firstname.lastname@example.com.

This is the only way we get out of this mess: take initiative as individuals to start connecting with others again. Even when (especially) we have differing opinions.

The old rules of "don't discuss religion and politics" need to be reintroduced to the social contract—step up to the plate and call others out for bringing up these topics (no matter how enticing).

</comment><comment><USER91> I think this has very little to do with some "decline of the family" whatever that means and more to do with the dilution of social norms.

In the past it was expected that people would attend the local church/sports club/dance/get together and everybody did it even if they didn't really want to, because it was expected and the default behaviour.

These days, there is more acceptance that the members of your community may not share your interests, so the expectation of conformance has diminished and with it the obligation to attend community events.

This is great for those of us who have a social group that they identify with, as these fill the gap. Unfortunately for those of use who's social group is online, distant or non existent then there is no option for physical world socialisation. I would expect that as each interest group becomes more focused, the tolerance for divergent attitudes within those groups is reduced.

This leaves those of us who's socialisation would have been through these default activities with the choice of doing nothing and potentially being lonely, or having to make an effort to find a group we can fit in with and who will accept us.

</comment><comment><USER92> Yeah. We can of course live our life in solitude. We have that choice. But the truth is that we are made so that we find someone, our SO, our life partner, so that we can grow together, love one another, help one another with the path of life, create a life together. It's not merely social conventions, it's deeply engrained in ourselves. Some will disagree of course, but to live alone is to miss on life imo.

</comment><comment><USER93> Guys, just start reading fiction. It's like having a conversation with someone super smart and super relatable. You'll get hooked once you find something that fits your subconscious, but don't settle until you do. (I've been really digging Richard Yates and Thomas Mann lately, so maybe start there if you need inspiration. Murakami is also a famously great read if you need a companion.)

</comment><comment><USER94> I think it's not uncommon for people to experience loneliness _because_ of the insularity of certain conventional styles of family (especially nuclear family, but even of extended family). Various forms of chosen family are too often taboo or devalued against more exclusive "proper" forms of family. In spite of this article's allusion, nuclear family has such strong privilege over alternative, less biologically immediate forms of kinship and community, and it's so easy for it to wipe them out altogether.

From my point of view, intensely idealized, exclusive biological family models are inherently lonely, as too often they marginalize and preclude opportunities for us to explore deeply our broader human kinship with one another.

My experience has been that various organic communities have given me some of the most wonderful joy. My own nuclear family wouldn't have survived, time and time again, if it weren't for each of our larger chosen families, and for our acceptance of each others' chosen families.

</comment><comment><USER95> > Lonely-death cleaning companies promise to be a good investment in Japan. > The culture's legendary filial piety has gone the way of the samurai; > children and grandchildren are often too busy or far away for regular > visiting

Me and my partner have to divide our time between visiting four different families since our parents were both single parents. We usually take a summer vacation and a winter vacation, so that means each family really only gets to be visited by us once every two years.

When it comes time to care for them as "old folks" I have no idea what we're going to do. We're basiclly the only people in our family with the financial capacity to support our parents and/or siblings... And I'm not alone in this, there's millions of Americans in the same position. I guess we better start removing systems that support traditional families (e.g. support for single family homes over apartments / co-living) and instead create "syntehtic" families that will be easier to subsidize.

</comment><comment><USER96> Maybe the decline of family is an effect, rather than a cause, of loneliness. It's the loss of community that's our real problem.

</comment><comment><USER97> The individualism of the Enlightenment and the sexual revolution has gutted the meaning-making institutions of Western society. We threw out the baby with the bathwater, and are by-&-large culturally programmed to pursue individual freedom & self-actualization, while abandoning the truth that humans are tribal creatures.

</comment><comment><USER98> This is one of the reason I married into a (liberal) middle eastern family: while we have enough room for our own when we need it, the traditional family ties are so strong that it is impossible to get sick from loneliness. I'd rather be stressed from too many people around me than being alone, western style.

</comment><comment><USER99> From what I've seen, there're 3 kind of people that deal with loneliness differently:

1) The average social people, they had grown up in social contexts, more or less, given as granted, so loneliness is more of a pain point.

2) The socially disconnected people by choice or experience, they had grown up like 1) people but after an event or experience they disconnected(implicitly or explicitly) their minds from the social/cultural/(and sometimes identity) contexts that they got used through their lifetime, so loneliness is, more or less, painless, because at this point your deeper existential self is on spot.

3) The socially disconnected people born with clinical syndromes that physically make their minds, really hard or impossible, achieve a basic perception task as connecting/learning from social clues, through a lifetime.

I'm from the 2nd kind.

</comment><comment><USER100> Yup, sounds about right, decry the death of the multi generational home then decry boomerang kids then decry people living alone.

<comment><USER101> Yeah the people pushing all these different ideologies basically engineered a culture to be like this. With various ideologies replacing religion (which are themselves really modern religions) that don't really work out the implications of their ideas in any sort of consistent system... instead down with this and down with that, and sure individually those things might be bad but they form some sort of coherent system and when you get rid of a part of that system the whole thing falls apart.

<comment><USER102> My experience was that established religions got hungry for tithing and thus optimized their messages with new ideas that ignore tolerance and abuse pluralism. Former adherents are more than excused to dissociate with groups that lack transparency, foster cultures of abuse, or otherwise require rigid in-/out-group splits.

The new world views you refer to that former religious adherents adopt aren't usually terribly radical, and it's a thought-terminating pitfall to call them religions or even spirituality. Much improvement over the new cults of the 1970s.

<comment><USER101> > My experience was that established religions got hungry for tithing and thus > optimized their messages with new ideas that ignore tolerance and abuse > pluralism.

Monotheism is against pluralism where polytheism was not. That was there from the monotheist revolution.

> it's a thought-terminating pitfall to call them religions

No it's not. Just go listen to what Harari says in his book Sapiens. Ideologies like Feminism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Humanism, etc, are all parts of a modern syncretic religion and their adherents are syncretic believers that mix and match different ideologies to fit their tastes. It's just a bald faced lie that these things are so much different from the stuff they replaced. Buddhism has no necessary Gods as don't some forms of Hinduism.

[https://www.ynharari.com/topic/science-and- religion/](https://www.ynharari.com/topic/science-and-religion/)

<comment><USER102> Respectfully, I disagree with Harari's broad classification(s). As one who has left a high-demand religion in adulthood, I'm keenly aware what the exercise of dogma as a worldview looks and feels like.

<comment><USER101> A high-demand religion I would guess would be some sort of fringe cult? If so within every one of the modern religions/ideologies there are similar fringe cults that are hate-filled with dogma for everyone else not in line with their ideology. Some feminists hate all men, some communists hate all Capitalists and everything must be done according to Communist dogma even when it's clear that it does not work... etc. The mainstream is usually not what the experience of a fringe cult within that ideology is.

<comment><USER102> > high-demand religion I would guess would be some sort of fringe cult?

Typically less fringe than you may think. Quoting "Visualizing the Transition Out of High-Demand Religions":

> Subjects include disaffiliated Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and > Fundamentalist Protestants

Typically these groups express many of the same characteristics as "mainstream" religions due to their age, and share the same elements driving religious decline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> This is why I've never lived alone. I always either lived with family, lived with roommates, or recently, lived with my girlfriend. I'm not the most proactively social person and if I didn't live with people then I know I'd definitely get too lonely.

</comment><comment><USER104> I'm moving to an entirely different city for the first time in my life, moving into an apartment for the first time in my life (not including student studios as I am incredible fortunate with my parents). I look at it both ways:

On the one hand, in my mind I have to take every possible opportunity that presents itself. You're not living when you say no to everything and I'm pretty easy to convince when my friends are going places. Last night I asked whether someone was up for getting something to eat, planning on returning and studying after again. Though I ended up staying and meeting a dozen new people. You're never going to discover life when you don't leave your comfort bubble.

Then on the other hand I am afraid. I barely know anyone where I'm going, those I do know are older than me so I'm not really inclined on "hanging" with them like I "hang" with my people of my age (early twenties). (I hate the verb to hang, but eh.) In my mind I'll figure it out and get some new friends. Ever since I moved to a student apartment/room I've changed significantly. I've made it a habit to cook for new people I know: at the start of the year I invite everyone over for dinner or I playfully mention to some new people I know that they should come over someday and I'll cook for them, most of them are very much inclined to say yes. It'll be harder in the big city where I'm going to be living as I'm currently living in a much smaller city where I bike everywhere and there is a huge amount of students. I'm in multiple student unions or clubs so I get to meet new people that way as well.

So in the end I feel like the best moments in life is when you're afraid. It means you're actually living, taking on what is to come. Most of my good memories are because I'm afraid and it turns out great. When I don't overcome that fear and don't go out for example, I almost always regret it and then I've missed out. So in the end, I'm very excited to move to an entirely new city as well :).

For those who are wondering, I'm moving to London.

</comment><comment><USER105> A contrarian opinion to this narrative of loneliness:

While the American dream has likely contributed to the epidemic of loneliness, it has also introduced many more options for reversing the trend: \- Large amount of wealth and high level of safety to make it easier to raise families \- High mobility and communication technology allows for individuals to easily group together, while more easily maintaining distant relationships \- Many foster care and adoption options for those who cannot or do not wish to have biological children

Additionally, all of our freedom allows us to solve the loneliness epidemic is a highly humanitarian manner, such as through foster care and adoption, and freedom to form families.

</comment><comment><USER106> Someone posted in another similar thread on loneliness that volunteering was a great cure. Build social connections, shift to 'other' focus, contribute to something outside of yourself. Seemed like a perfect solution.

</comment><comment><USER107> Going in the opposite direction, this means it's generally becoming more likely for the people you meet (even if you meet very briefly) to not have any real close friends, people to hang out with, etc. Therefore, if you're feeling lonely yourself, it sounds like a great idea to ask a bunch of people you meet to all hang out together. It might give everyone some relief.

I've been on the fence about trying to put together a friend group and see who fits at my new workplace, since I started with a bunch of other newbies that seemed relatively nervous. I think I'll ask them if they wanna hang out.

</comment><comment><USER108> I used to get a bit lonely. For 10 years I tried to get a girlfriend. It took forever, but eventually I finally succeeded. anyways, we eventually got married and even had a kid. Now, I never feel lonely.

</comment><comment><USER109> Question to the HN crowd: How do you feel about choosing one's own family, as is a common phenomenon among the LGBTQIA+ community (who are more at risk of family rejecting them?)

</comment><comment><USER110> True. But it's great for the economy.

When a family splits, that means 2x everything (e.g., sofa, dishes, TV, etc.) Same goes for the social "norm" that adults above 25 y/o (?) should live alone (if they're not married).

The issue is, not only is this counter to long-established human (emotional) needs, but it is resource intensive as well. Put another way, we're bringing Mother Nature to her knees, and we're too depressed about ourselves to care about her.

What could go wrong?

<comment><USER111> Also with both parents working the labor pool has essentially doubled over the last 50-60 years. And people wonder why their parents could raise a family on one income but they cannot. Obviously there are many factors at play of which this phenomenon is just one.

<comment><USER110> True. But I think a big factor is housing. The home I grew up in (only my father drew a salary) is small by today's standards. But again, get a bigger home today, and then fill it with more shit.

People (read: their egos) are their own worst enemy. If you resist the status quo and "the Jones" it's not as bad. Perhaps not the same as before, but not as bad who tend to live beyond their means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> I still just don't find the appeal of married family life yet. Maybe itll change but if it doesn't I dont care. My creative output and need to learn have so far been part of a journey I find near orgasmic in enjoyment when I look back on how far I've come. Yes I'm an introvert but not the shy kind just the kind that needs two hours alone for every hour with people.

</comment><comment><USER113> I live in a cabin in the woods. I rarely talk to my family, maybe once or twice a year. My kids have grown up and moved out. I only talk to coworkers when I have to, and until recently I worked remotely. I can go days without vocalizing except to the dog (who does talk back, just in dog). Life is great.

I think society is coming along nicely in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER114> As convert of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints I can attest to this.

'Mormon' families do everything together, I'm amazed weekly at this 14ish years in.

Take dinner. Dinner for me growing up, until my father died just before I turned 13, would be my mother in one room - me in another - my father in a third eating dinner while we did our own things.

In jr and sr high school most Fridays it was "here's pizza money, I'll be back Sunday afternoon" (I'm not faulting my mother here, she'd call and check and was 10-15 minutes away in traffic, I was fine with her being gone so my friends and I didn't have to censor ourselves not that we'd be home other than to sleep anyway once one of us had a license) yet even back then you'd have never seen something like that with an LDS family. You'd have them eating most or all of their meals together, studying scripture together, doing activities together.

Even when kids grow up and marry they still, unless they move quite far away, often do things with their parents and siblings and it isn't uncommon to see those that have moved a state or two away to regularly drive home for long weekends, holidays, vacations etc.

These types are generally extremely happy and pleasant and will bend over backwards to help even strangers. Sure there is depression in the community but if you take them as a whole it's Ned Flanders and a bunch of my generation that doesn't have a strong family bond are an army of Eeyores.

Even if you just look at social media, for most it is "look at me, look at what I did, look at how cool I want you to think I am, give me your approval, give me your likes, give me your commons, comment and click to subscribe!" but with most LDS it is "here are a few family photos, I'm so proud of my distant relation/friend for doing thing/everyone congratulate THEM, we got a new used couch would anyone like our old one, it'd be great for a young couple?, we will be at so and so park playing a pickup game if anyone would like to bring their families and come join us".

They stress family, and appear genuinely happy more oft than not.

For me and my friends, family were people you were related to my blood and had to tolerate until you could go out on your own. A lot of my friends have unhealthy relationships and regularly seek therapy, I and my friends carefully curate our online presences to try and show our best not our normal, we sit around staring at Netflix or Hulu thinking "man, this sucks, I'm lonely, is it time to die yet, ugh I want to go get food but I don't want to eat alone... forget it I'll just order in".

When a family invites me over for FHE or dinner or to an activity, I genuinely don't want to go because it feels so foreign and I'm afraid I'll seem like more of a freak than I am. I'm so lonely that I'm afraid of being in social settings because I simply don't know what normal family dynamic is like and it just feels so alien. People have inside jokes with family members, they have fun stories and memories, they talk to their family...

My father's father was in the hospital on life support and no one told us, I found out when a friend that worked there noticed I hadn't visited and violated law by even talking to me about it and without them I'd have not even known. After his funeral a few weeks later I asked his brother some genealogy questions... he didn't even know his mother's maiden name or either of his grandmothers first names despite having known them for decades until their deaths... a few years later he died and neither of his adult children told us, I tried calling him one day to catch up and the number was disconnected and I found his obit. He lived 3~ miles from me. After my father's death, his father would only come to visit at Christmas despite living about 15 BLOCKS away and one of my father's brothers lived even closer and never came at all, I've seen him exactly twice since my father's funeral 21 years ago... worse, he had a diabetic episode a few years ago and laid on his floor for several days until a co-worker went to his house concerned that he hadn't come to work and his daughter had no idea he was even flippin' diabetic! It is no surprise to me most of my family, on both sides, had substance abuse problems and varying levels of depression, now they're nearly all dead.

My mother's mother went on life support and my mother's sisters took her off and never even told my mom she went on. This happened over a couple of days. My mother started receiving facebook messages from cousins and second cousins "so sorry for your loss"... this is how she found out her mother was dead... AFTER the funeral. Then in the same calendar year they repeated it when her father passed! Can you imagine that, you're in your 60's and your parents die and your sisters try and hide it from you, two different times mom barely got out of bed for weeks each time. Crying, depressed, feeling wholly abandoned. All because her side of the family was as dysfunctional as my father's.

When I tell this to my fellow members of the Church the look at me in horror, like I'm an alien that just landed on their lawn and ate one of their children and asked for a coke to wash them down because they value family and while they also have bad moments in life they are on average far far happier than me and my non-member friends.

<comment><USER115> Good story, and good point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> I always find when I move to a new city (or perhaps become a bit despondent) a new bit of energy emerges from Meetups. Go to a few, find some interesting people, maybe learn a skill or two and enjoy the new diverse group of people. Cheers

</comment><comment><USER117> Formerly: The decline of being single has unleashed an epidemic of claustrophobia.

</comment><comment><USER118> I find the HN comments on an article like this fascinating. So many people that admit to not having kids who think they are experts on what it means or is like to have kids.

<comment><USER119> Prepare for a generation of desperate people when they figure out that they actually wanted to have kids but it's too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> Coming from India, one of the things I deeply cherish about our culture is the deep family bonds we have here. Ironically, it was when I came to the US that I realized the importance of it!

</comment><comment><USER121> JFC what do people want from life? They long for something they don't have. Ever seen a big family, full of back stabbing? Not all families are great. Be alone, enjoy the void, wtf.

</comment><comment><USER122> One of the most inclusive, satisfying social activities - which serves as a cure for so many of a technologist's ills - is one most likely to be dismissed out-of-hand.

This activity is:

* physical and active - you're required to 'get in' your body, which for HN head-types is very healthy

* extremely inclusive: your age, height, weight, athleticism, looks, coordination, social skills, background, race, gender, sexuality are all irrelevant to participation

* social, but not social: you have to interact to some degree, but it's not necessary to be a hyper-social extrovert at all. Participants can be introverted, suffer social anxiety, or fall somewhere on a spectrum and still be a part of this community

* global: once you master it to some degree, it's easy to drop-in to many cities and towns across the world and have an instant community to interact with

* intellectual, but in a different context: it's possible to 'switch off' from your day-job problem solving, but still explore and enjoy solving in a different, 3-dimensional space

Partner dancing is predictably dismissed by so many - particularly males - <USER2> they immediately self-identify as a non-dancer with 'two left feet.'

That's a shame because, in the case of the males, the gender ratios are often reversed compared to the tech sector: there's usually always women in classes and at socials standing out waiting for the next available lead to dance with.

Also, while 'meeting someone' is possible (as in any social activity involving multiple people) if that's part of your loneliness problem, it's not the primary focus for most dance scenes, and the requirement to continually learn a skill to a level of competence quickly filters out people who misunderstand the primary focus of the community.

Those that come with the right intentions and are single do often end up 'finding someone', but that's as a secondary side-effect (and remember the filter means they don't have to deal with a scene of predatory competitors)

It's really worth stressing the inclusivity bit too: is there a more inclusive group activity than partner dancing? Nothing comes to mind. Some of the most popular dancers in communities I've been involved in have been very heavy-set, or old, or not 'good looking'.

There are so many scenes to pick from depending on your musical tastes: Brazilian Zouk, Kizomba, West Coast Swing, Tango, Salsa, Bachata, Rock N Roll and many more.

As a non-dancer who dived in a few years ago, I wish I'd given it a go a decade or two ago.

Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER123> What if the invite is to something you really don't enjoy, and saying yes results in your sacrificing doing things that bring you joy? Is the yes rule reciprocated?

</comment><comment><USER124> The fixation on the nuclear family and its supposed decline, is transparently reactionary ideology. The term "nuclear family" was first used in 1947 and didn't even become the most common form of household until the 1960s or so.[1] Prior to that (and still today in many less-industrialized cultures), cohabitation with extended family and communal parenting arrangements were much more common.

You could just as easily blame capitalism for making people lonely by concentrating lucrative employment opportunities in just a few cities and encouraging young people to uproot their lives and relocate for work.

[1] [https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-nuclear- families/](https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-nuclear-families/)

</comment><comment><USER125> Was very lonely in my twenties, now desperate for alone time. Suppose that's comforting or the opposite. In any case, things change so give yourself a break.

</comment><comment><USER126> Probably the biggest draw for city life. I have an awesome huge social circle centered around performing artists (I'm a DJ on the side).

Get a social hobby and mean it!

</comment><comment><USER127> I legit created this app to cure all of this [http://foxie.cool](http://foxie.cool)

</comment><comment><USER128> The family has declined in no small part due to the increasing portion of living costs that housing has occupied for many people.

</comment><comment><USER129> i wonder how much work life balance plays a role in this. Since we're at a point of record low work life balance maybe people simply aren't making enough time to enjoy themselves in groups? Imagine if we live in a world where people only worked 6 hours a day and spent the other 2 socializing with peers? would it make a difference?

</comment><comment><USER130> 'By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.' (Jesus, John 13:35)

</comment><comment><USER131> Always happy to meet strangers from the internet in Seattle (particularly downtown).

Love nerding out with fellow nerds. :)

</comment><comment><USER132> To me this is just another symptom of our hyper-individualistic libertarian culture. (Yes, political party fortunes aside, modern culture is increasingly libertarian:

\- every person for herself

\- selfishness is a virtue

\- everything she does, good or bad, is all on her (meritocracy rules!, you have no one to blame but yourself)

\- whatever the market pays is what she earned, even if it is 100 or 1000 times what other hard workers get (government, keep your stinking hands off MY money)

\- life is transactional. (sure i can do that. what's in it for me?)

</comment><comment><USER133> Also rivalry is favored over collaboration in our not species-appropriate economy and society.

</comment><comment><USER134> Wow, that was a sobering piece.

</comment><comment><USER135> Better to be lonely sometimes than to be divorced ever IMO.

<comment><USER41> My first wife might agree with you, me? Not so much.

I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago, so why would I expect her to be the same women I fell in love with 10 years ago?

It's not a crime to change, grow, evolve; so why punish the person you are with?

<comment><USER135> See... But I agree with you.

Which is why I'm voting to not get married ever. So far.

<comment><USER41> I'm currently on wife #2 and unsure if I am going to continue it. I'm unhappy alone, I'm unhappy married. Do the benefits of being married (real food) outweigh the down-side?

I don't know. I don't know if this was the right choice, I don't know if I'm destined to be miserable forever. This really sucks.

<comment><USER136> The fact that the only mentioned benefit of being married that you decided to name was "real food" is a giant red flag to me, lol. Sounds like you're not interested in your second wife just a vessel who can provide you things you want.

<comment><USER135> _the observation_ I only mean to point out that, under some circumstances that comment probably is only a result of current sentiment... which is far kinder than what i've heard from other 'happily married' folks from time to time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> I like loneliness. You avoid to listen to bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER138> if you look at various surveys comparing countries outside of north america countries with no rapid colonization and urbanization like in the America, or East-Asia, people report feeling happier and less isolated. But difference between NA and EA is that NA had that European style "settling"\--move out, claim your land, start a family, or divorce, repeat.

Our social DNA built for human connection, sense of belonging and family, centered around agriculture was quickly snuffed out in the West with the oncoming of Industrial Revolution, and the countries that subscribed to this model. Basically genders ended up being divided into a binary class of workers with one clearly a 2nd citizen and subsequently their social status. It used to be that women were largely limited to taking care of home and kids but with WW2's end, this has increasingly been changing.

Women from 1920s vs 2020 have drastically different liberties in socio,sexual, and economic areas. The erosion of domestic manufacturing industries through implementation of "free market" ideals where the invisible hand that moves jobs is capital itself, the cheapest and the best producer retains the capital until it cannot maintain this low cost of production, mainly through political suppression and threat of paramilitary forces of dictator. Women are repeatedly underpaid compared to men according to statistical findings, its more so that they are undervalued unconsciously by society due to its period of rapid industralization and "splitting" of genders. (fun fact: FDR used to crossdress).

Yet the latter situation with countries that has reached rapid urbanization through industrialization, this is not unique thing to North America, people in Korea and Japan are killing themselves, people are isolating themselves in urban areas, very much like the North Americas.

This social void-via-capital (jobs, capital move to cheapest cost of operations) or void-via-automation (really the same thing since automation is dirt cheap labor that gets cheaper by several folds every few years) leads to the deviation from traditional family operated around agriculture and rapid urbanization that followed high-capital industries with overseas outsourcing of manufacture, has changed the roles of the Mother or Father. This can be found in most democratic capitalist of a major economy. So is the entrance of women the culprit? If that was the case then why is it that in the Philippines, ppl aren't reporting on surveys as being less miserable or isolated as say a Brit, where many husband takes the role of rearing children while the Filipino women contribute to being the world's highest remittance destinations? Clearly it was never to do with gender being fundamentally destined for specific roles, but rather the presence of one of the parent in a child's formative years, relatively compared to absence or non-biological substitute caretakers due to unavailability of both parents due to both working or not working, has produced an increasingly self-isolated, self- caring, self-obsessed, self-exhibitionist society distracting itself through material possessions and entries in a database somewhere with arbitrarily valued "digital scores" that creates the illusion of tribal hierarchy and belonging? Or how about that we are largely rewarded for creating/contributing to products to increase the pace of this isolation?

I don't know what the solution is. But people from small town are often spooked by people not saying hello when passing by in large cities. I can feel the difference being in downtown vs rural areas. People outside of North America seem tightly integrated with their families and communities. I'm talking the super taboo thing in north america, being an adult and living with parents. Yet, its practiced in many parts of the world. I know I've been trying to get my ass out the door but honestly my addiction issues and struggling with complex post traumatic stress disorder has been crippling. Writing this probably isn't good for my job prospects. I can only hope that my SaaS makes money when it launches on Monday, so I can move out, be alone. Life is fucked and I can only hope to unfuck it a little bit at a time.

</comment><comment><USER139> Move to another city. Leave your small-town life. Chase your dream. Live alone. Pay more per capita to landlords. Pay more per capita for basic services, for staple foods. Pay businesses to do the household chores that you can't handle alone when you're also working a full-time job, and don't have a family to spread them out among.

Buy more stuff to fill that emotional hole. Consume.

Live in an apartment. Never see your neighbors. Wonder why you can't make friends.

Fly home once or twice a year to watch your parents slowly die of loneliness in the small town you left. And to watch them slowly become strangers to you; what do you have in common? Their only friends now are the talking heads on Fox News and you're a big-city liberal.

Eventually, fly home to bury one of them. Probably the other one in anywhere from a few months to a year.

It's the American dream.

<comment><USER140> > Pay more per capita to landlords.

If you run the numbers, no one should want to be a landlord. Atrocious ROI. Homes are horrific investments if you live in them and still terrible even if you rent them out. I would encourage anyone who thinks otherwise to model this out for any major city/region to convince themselves.

Renting is a great deal. You pay less, get better ROI on what would have been the downpayment by investing it elsewhere, and there's someone contractually obligated to deal with most things that can go wrong. And if you're in California, chances are you benefit from a lot of regulations that protect tenants as well.

<comment><USER67> If you live as a renter in California, you are almost certainly not getting "a great deal", and the regulations that benefit you are probably only in the form of being protected from meaningless eviction and substandard living conditions. If you're an owner of property in California, OTOH, you're likely taking advantage of a tax rate that was calculated on your property's value 39 years ago.

<comment><USER140> I would strongly encourage you to look closely at the numbers. There are so many involved that nothing short of an actual model of all involved factors is enough to demonstrate the true return profile.

I might post mine here for reference when I get home later. It unequivocally demonstrates that it is far better to be a California renter than a California homeowner (at least for LA/SF). And yes I accounted for a locked in property tax rate. It's still not even a close contest.

I will note however that the Case-Schiller index is at historical highs atm and this is a substantial driving factor in the current calculation around homeownership. That may change with a correction in the real estate market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER141> for many it's too expensive to start families or to socialise

</comment><comment><USER142> I'd like to point out that this is a radically right-wing source, published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

Which is why they keep talking about traditional families as if they were the only thing standing between us and the collapse of civilization.

</comment><comment><USER143> > Do you know what loneliness means? Some of you may be unfamiliar with that > word, but you know the feeling very well. You try going out for a walk > alone, or being without a book, without someone to talk to, and you will see > how quickly you get bored. You know that feeling well enough, but you don't > know why you get bored, you have never inquired into it. If you inquire a > little into boredom you will find that the cause of it is loneliness. It is > in order to escape from loneliness that we want to be together, we want to > be entertained, to have distractions of every kind: gurus, religious > ceremonies, prayers, or the latest novels. Being inwardly lonely we become > mere spectators in life; and we can be the players only when we understand > loneliness and go beyond it.

> After all, most people marry and seek other social relationships because > they don't know how to live alone. Not that one must live alone; but, if you > marry because you want to be loved, or if you are bored and use your job as > a means of forgetting yourself, then you will find that your whole life is > nothing but an endless search for distractions. Very few go beyond this > extraordinary fear of loneliness; but one must go beyond it, because beyond > it lies the real treasure.

> You know, there is a vast difference between loneliness and aloneness. Some > of the younger students may still be unaware of loneliness, but the older > people know it: the feeling of being utterly cut off, of suddenly being > afraid without apparent cause. The mind knows this fear when for a moment it > realizes that it can rely on nothing, that no distraction can take away the > sense of self-enclosing emptiness. That is loneliness. But aloneness is > something entirely different; it is a state of freedom which comes into > being when you have gone through loneliness and understand it. In that state > of aloneness you don't rely on anyone psychologically because you are no > longer seeking pleasure, comfort, gratification. It is only then that the > mind is completely alone, and only such a mind is creative.

> All this is part of education: to face the ache of loneliness, that > extraordinary feeling of emptiness which all of us know, and not be > frightened when it comes; not to turn on the radio, lose oneself in work, or > run to the cinema, but to look at it, go into it, understand it. There is no > human being who has not felt or will not feel that quivering anxiety. It is > because we try to run away from it through every form of distraction and > gratification - through sex, through God, through work, through drink, > through writing poems or repeating certain words which we have learnt by > heart - that we never understand that anxiety when it comes upon us.

> So, when the pain of loneliness comes upon you, confront it, look at it > without any thought of running away. If you run away you will never > understand it, and it will always be there waiting for you around the > corner. Whereas, if you can understand loneliness and go beyond it, then you > will find there is no need to escape, no urge to be gratified or > entertained, for your mind will know a richness that is incorruptible and > cannot be destroyed.

> All this is part of education. If at school you merely learn subjects in > order to pass examinations, then learning itself becomes a means of escape > from loneliness. Think about it a little and you will see. Talk it over with > your educators and you will soon find out how lonely they are, and how > lonely you are. But those who are inwardly alone, whose minds and hearts are > free from the ache of loneliness - they are real people, for they can > discover for themselves what reality is, they can receive that which is > timeless.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti, Think on These Things, Chapter 23. The Need to Be Alone

</comment><comment><USER144> I don't think the decline of the family is the primary issue today. My own perspective is that the "epidemic of loneliness" has more to do with the prevalance of, and addiction to, social media in its various forms.

It is easier than ever to form and maintain all your relationships, acquaintences, friends, and family, online via social media. You can see what people are up to, even "participate" to some degree via commentary/messaging, and it leaves people feeling like they've done their part in keeping the relationship alive. My observation is that because relationships kept this way are increasingly normalized, people are less interested in getting together in the physical world because it takes a lot more effort, and requires a much more significant investment in time.

On the plus side, it means you can keep relationships alive across great distances, and even during times where life is so busy that you have limited spare time.

But the problem is that forming meaningful relationships becomes an increasingly difficult task, to the point where you can begin to wonder if there is something wrong with you due to not being able to form those relationships. Further, you feel increasingly disconnected and isolated, when you have a lot of skin-deep relationships, but none which are truly meaningful.

I consider myself lucky to have a wonderful wife, and her company is more than enough to sustain me even when nobody else is around; but both of us still feel the isolation when we are unable to get together with friends for too long. We moved away from my home state, and she immigrated from another country, so both of us have left friendships behind, and been trying to form new relationships near where we live. It has been harder than expected, and I think it is in part due to people finding it really easy to blow off getting together in person when there is even the slightest inconvenience, especially knowing that they don't have to actually meet in person to keep the relationship alive.

As a result, my pet peeve these days is when people, when asked why they keep blowing off getting together, say "I've been so busy". For one, it is a meaningless statement, most people are busy, it is just the nature of having to work at least one full-time job and then fit in the other activities you want to do in the time left over. Most people still find time to get together with friends at least once in awhile. Thanks to the perpetual need to post everything on social media, it is usually evident that the "busy" person is not really actually busy, and instead what they really meant was "I've been too busy doing things I value more than our friendship, but am too uncomfortable to tell you that".

I don't know if it is related or not, but in my experience, the detachment derived from social media seems to go hand in hand with avoiding anything that is perceived as unpleasant, such as being honest with someone when it is a hard truth, e.g. "hey, my life is full, I'd like to keep in touch, but I'm not in a position to add new friendships right now".

This probably comes off as a rant against social media, but I'm not really anti-social media, I just think the way we find ourselves using it has real, detrimental effects on human relationships, in a way that we don't really understand and are only really starting to see the impact of.

</comment><comment><USER145> Recipe for solving loneliness and increasing the odds of "successful marriages" (which is really what this article seems focused on conveying as a problem).

Build a successful community:

        * Enough housing, at reasonable cost
        * Enough jobs to "employ" all adults
        * Good jobs, fitting the skills of workers
        * Stable jobs, that aren't a gig or contract
        * Career jobs, with a future in the area
        * Good transit mesh
        * More diverse third places / third spaces

Right now transit sucks, zoning sucks, housing options suck, and decades of trying to manage things from the consumption side have lead the supply side to be crazy in all sorts of aspects. Since markets aren't free (zoning laws, all sorts of other regulations) active maintenance is not just desirable from a ripple smoothing standpoint, it's actually required from a systemic viewpoint. There are also too many areas of uncertainty on the supply side; cases where things fail because of those who already got their happiness.

Japan's "nuisance" based zoning is better (#1), if a project fits within an area's limits and passes environmental/other planning review it can be done. Their transit structure is also partly funded by the "taxes" involved with the rail companies also owning the land around the stations (which ends up falling in to the higher end of the nuisance classes and gets the shopping centers, hotels, and denser apartments built on it); but that could happen here too if we actually had civic planning, taxes, and open book accountability that could tie taxes to spending and involved politicians/companies in people's minds.

I'm also in favor of a //long term// plan for establishing an expanding zone of high quality (Japanese subway/rail style) transit that has frequent, on time, predictable service. This would spread out from city centers over time and would involve interface and storage silos (for cars, and big stuff). Critically this should start with first improving transit, then adding the interface silos that adapt legacy infrastructure to the city-core infrastructure, and only then getting the cars out of the city; entirely. Aside from maybe an underground network for deliveries and emergency transport.

Finally, because the market is so screwed up with respect to available housing in the areas that need it, emergency remediation should be instituted and reviewed until the crisis is resolved. That would probably start with a short- table evaluation of rezoning, and even loans if at least 70% of the units were intended for median in the state's population income and at least 10% for those making "minimum wage" (the lesser of state and city values).

A land-value based tax should also be instituted to encourage the evolution of a zone over time rather than keeping historic single dwelling housing just because it made sense 50-100 years ago.

#1 [http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese- zoning.html](http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html) #1 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845)

</comment><comment><USER146> Great explanation on why we should simply treat loneliness like a symptom of being hungry. As you form healthier habits in general around socializing, the person becomes more whole and in doing so you grant yourself additional opportunities to meet people, engage in conversation, and increase the probability of friendships and relationships.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA)

The other thought process I've been subscribing to lately is the idea that you have to actually become the kind of person that "can socialize" or that "can be friendly" before you suddenly find yourself in: a friendship, a relationship, a marriage, a solid social network. None of these things come over night and they certainly don't come easy for people who are stricken with the habit of isolation. Once you make decisions and form _actual habits_ around trying to be friendly to other people:

\- put yourself in a situation where you have the opportunity at all to socialize (a store, a coffeeshop, a restaurant, a club, a meetup). Socializing doesn't mean you have to be friends with the person, it seems to be about just being the kind of person who is even able at all to be friendly

\- make an observation (the weather, the environment around you, the place you're at, something someone is wearing, a pin, a shoe, an outfit, a drink, a dog... whatever - just make any observation at all and comment on it)

\- listen (observe how the other person make the same or differing observations; listen to any other observation other people make, internalize and actually listen - don't be thinking of the next thing to say after they are done talking. Listen so you can understand them in some way and what they are actually saying)

\- ask questions (if you discovered something work asking, or maybe the observation involved a question like "where did you get those cool shoes?" "what do you recommend here?" "what is your favorite item?" "can you help explain something to me?"). It's great to ask questions that involve help because it invites the other person into a social situation where you can trust them to give you advice or knowledge. People try this with neighbors for instance, such as borrowing a tool or something like this.

\- receive feedback, or give feedback based on the questions

\- it is usually the case that questions lead to other questions, you can develop a conversation from here most of the time

\- repeat observation, listen, ask questions, feedback, communicate something you enjoy/relevant to conversation

Once you've internalize a process for being friendly and you take action to actually make it a habit, you become the kind of person that _can_ be friendly. It doesn't actually matter if you don't necessarily know whether you will want to be friends with a person, it's that you are showing yourself that you can be friendly. Most importantly, you are practicing and making it a habit.

Once it is a habit, it becomes natural. Being friendly turns into developing actual friendships and opening yourself up to the world to trying new experiences. Some of those experiences may lead to forming friendships and those friendships may end up being relationships.

It also seems to me that you must understand that social networks are precisely that. you don't know whether one person might invite you to something where you meet another person. The same is true the other way around, inviting a neighbor, or other people over creates the possibility that you might extend, reinforce or cause you to re-evaluate your social network. By allowing yourself the time to be uncomfortable with this sort of unpredictability you can avoid remaining stagnant.

</comment><comment><USER147> I relocated out of the bay area in 2016-2017 and it was the happiest year of my adult life. I think Silicon Valley has a zero sum culture and having returned here for personal reasons but otherwise against my best judgment, I cannot wait to GTFO for keeps.

I am really really good (perhaps top 10 or so worldwide) at one thing, and pretty good at a couple other things. If I didn't have that, I think I would feel utterly worthless in 2019. If I extrapolate to most of America, wow, I get why they elected who they elected.

Something has gone very wrong here. And I am stymied as to how to fix it because neither political party, which gets to set the agenda every 4 years, seems to grasp what has gone wrong.

But when I travel abroad, I am happy. I see can-do cultures that have far less than western nations, but are so inspiringly optimistic to do more, that I don't want to come back to America. I want to set down roots and help them knock it out of the park. And I am getting close to doing exactly that. Doing so would shatter my personal life, but I suspect if 2020 continues what we started in 2016, I will follow through on what my inner voice is telling me to do.

<comment><USER148> I'm not a fan of "who they elected" myself, but I don't really see what politics has to do with any of this

<comment><USER149> yeah, the solution comes from individuals, not from politicians

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> The term "third world" does not mean something like "third rate." The first world is the Western bloc, under the influence of the USA. The second world is the Eastern bloc, under the influence of the USSR. The third world is everyone else.

I think we should stop using these terms.

<comment><USER151> I agree those terms are antiquated, and I suggest "developed" and "developing" instead.

<comment><USER152> I think developed and developing is also strange. It implies an universal direction countries have to follow where reality is way more complex. We should instead stop trying to simplify countries and segregating them into categories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER153> > Especially now that Uber has a STFU option

I never understood why people are so against talking to the people that give them a ride. I once was in a very rough spot in my life and talking with taxi- drivers almost daily about the most trivial stuff (weather, politics, traffic) used to give me a very healthy reprieve from the black thoughts I used to have.

<comment><USER154> As a woman, there are definitely times I don't want to deal with a driver hitting on me. It happens annoyingly frequently, and it's this delicate social situation that requires more mental effort to negotiate than I want to give it.

Friendly conversation (with men and women both) is fine and I've engaged in plenty. But if a driver is too busy telling me just how beautiful I am and as a result drives me to the cargo part of the airport rather than the passenger terminal and makes me late... and I have to sort of humor him and not just say wtf because that's the social contract? Or if I have to for some reason convince him I'm an engineer and not a dancer in spite of my long legs? Yeah, I'll pass on that.

In other situations I can thank them for the compliment and go somewhere else, but with a driver I'm stuck for quite a while. And sometimes I'm really not in the mood. I've complained before there really needs to be a "please don't hit on me" option, and STFU is a decent alternative.

<comment><USER155> > and it's this delicate social situation that requires more mental effort to > negotiate than I want to give it

I understand what you're saying, and I recognize the blessing/curse that comes with attracting people.

However, as I've become an adult with a career and have left essentially all my friends behind, I've realized that making new friends is incredibly difficult. Even worse is trying to find dating partners. Lately I've been resorting to just talking to strangers and seeing if I can start a conversation.

Not to excuse the behavior of your drivers, but you should understand that men are having a difficult time with approaching women these days. We feel really inadequate and sort of aimless. The dating world is seriously dangerous right now and to be honest, there isn't a lot of guidance from women.

I've experienced a range of rejections and the least painful are always honest and upfront. Maybe you could try that?

<comment><USER156> I don't think anyone should accept that someone who's paid to provide a service is entitled to expect their client to be available for dating.

<comment><USER157> I think a bigger statement here is that nobody is _entitled_ to anything.

We have an informal agreement that you shouldn't hit on service workers because essentially they can't escape the situation gracefully, but that agreement is not bilateral because as a customer you generally do have the freedom to be up front or let it pass.

Obviously there are shades of grey to everything, and by no means am I excusing all behaviour, but the power dynamic is in favour of the client not the worker, and if you're respectful of the individual then I don't see why it should be stigmatic to approach someone.

For context I've had waitresses give me their number, and that was just nice, no expectation that I have to reply and no repercussions if I didn't (as-in, they didn't have a means to berate me for not replying). But, yeah, shades of grey.

<comment><USER158> Even though I was a professional software engineer at the time, I was also a part time fitness instructor for over a decade. I even taught at women's only gyms. I was really careful about not approaching anyone in my class - for the most part, women do not want to be approached at the gym - especially a women's only gym, they go there specifically not to be bothered.

On a slightly tangential note women only gyms are the only place where some observant Muslim women could work out in comfortable clothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER159> My suggestion is to keep a few close friends for these times. I don't find it hard, but I genuinely enjoy my friends.

<comment><USER160> Similarly, if you don't have bread, my suggestion is to eat cake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER161> [https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/bc/content/shared/conten...](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/bc/content/shared/content/english/pdf/36035_000_24_family.pdf)

Key take away:

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.

<comment><USER162> This view was a major building block of civilization for thousands of years. Weird how willingly people throw it away these days and then wonder why family is collapsing and mental illness is widespread and increasing

<comment><USER163> One could argue that any period of change, be it personal or societal, involves a period of anxiety and tumult, which is often an unavoidable part of growth/progress. Could we not be in exactly such a period?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER164> Dude, you're their parents! Take some responsibility!

<comment><USER165> Yes, I'd like to read a "I must have messed up somewhere". That would be a good starting point to "what can I do about it".

<comment><USER166> that's a bad attitude to take and leads to a lot of unnecessary guilt about something you have little control over. parents cannot do much to shape the personality and ability of their children in adulthood.

<comment><USER165> Guilt is unnecessary, agreed. And so is blame. Taking responsibility is. Without, you can't fix your mistakes.

And yes, personality and ability of children are definitely shaped by the parents. Of course, now that the kid is an adult, things are much harder to fix. But that doesn't mean the parents have no role in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER167> * edited for good reason

<comment><USER168> Personal attacks aren't ok here.

I'm sure your intention is good, but the gruff tough-love approach which just maybe, _if_ you have a good connection, can work sometimes in person—and even then is probably too harsh to do anything but cause pain—doesn't come across at all well in an internet comment. The genre is much too low-information and distant.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118297) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER169> lol the hacker news relationship advice this spawned

</comment><comment><USER170> I'm going to propose a critical point of view, but stay with me.

I feel that the only people that are lonely choose loneliness up on them selves. In this day and age You can do so many things. Why only job, home, whine, repeat?

You can join a dance class, go to meetups, do volunteering, try yoga (acro Yoga my favourite), go to group gym classes, organize treks, events, hikes, meetups, go hitchhiking or go to Asia.

It's up to You to either spend Your days alone or with other people. Just say "hi, how are You doing?" to people in events. Everybody is looking for someone to bond with.

Unless You are really shy or only care about Your job and making money.

</comment><comment><USER171> City Journal is such conservative bullshit I can't even.

There is a lot of loneliness- as there has always been for humans, who have unique capabilities in migration and adaptation. Humans can survive loneliness.

There is a higher measure of divorce, which of course is often painful at the time, but it increasingly leads to improved "family" dynamics down the road.

Levels of acceptance for kids who are "different", while still suboptimal, are so much greater now than ever before. To be a gay kid in the City Journal's golden age for families- no thank you.

Opportunities to facilitate human connection through digital means have never been greater.

City Journal is garbage. Doesn't deserve HN attention.

</comment><comment><USER172> Opinion vs opinion driven by marketing. At the end of the day, the mom who chose to breast feed her baby using formula will argue that breast milk lack essential nutrients as opposed to scientifically researched formula and and the cross-fit practitioner will tell you their regime is safe and sound for the human body. Who wins at the end of the day? Me. The one selling you the dream with frequently purchased items such as products and services to improve your chosen lifestyle.

Solution? Build a family that consists of blood relation and friends that are not fickle like your aunt Judy. People who can show genuine support and encouragement when you talk to them about life. If the "family" doesn't show goodwill, boot them. You want absolute loyalty. Fuck high school drama.

Otherwise, you will grow old, grumpy and lonely like your uncle Jerry. Mom and dad are dead; best friend settled down with a family; old Henry broke off with you; and a trip to the Land of Smiles isn't so happy anymore when no one visits you, but elementary kids during their field trips to your retirement home.

Jokes aside, have a family or don't. People like me are the real winners...you're just a by-product of our secret marketing. With that said, how do you feel about our latest product we know can improve your lifestyle immediately without any side effects in less than 7 days for as little as $0.25 a day (ps: your friend probably uses it too, no wonder he's always better than you).</comment>