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You have to be the one who creates things to do.

Really, that’s it.

You want to play D&D together, you host and DM.

You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing.

You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with.

Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little alarms in your head that go off when you haven’t seen someone in a while, you can use automated reminders.

I have observed my spouse (who is not on social media) do this and she maintains friendships for decades this way. Nowadays she has regular zoom check ins, book clubs, and more, even with people who moved to the other coast. You do now have the tools for this. I have adopted it into my own life with good results.

Note: you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake. It may always feel painful (and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive). You have to feel your feelings, accept it, and move on.

You are struggling against many aspects of the way we in the developed world/nerd world live. We have a wealth of passive entertainment, often we have all consuming jobs or have more time-consuming relationship with our families than our parents ever did. We move to different cities for jobs, and even as suburban sprawl has grown, you’re on average probably further away from people who even live in the same city! You get from place to place in a private box on wheels, or alternatively in a really big box on wheels with a random assortment of people. You don’t see people at church, or market day, or whatever other rituals our ancestors had. On the positive side, you have more tools and leisure than ever before to arrange more voluntary meetings.

I love this but I think you'll be surprised at your success rate. Everyone is struggling with this, not just you. Right on the heels of covid we were debating whether to have a NYE party or just go to a friend's house for a low key thing. We were paralyzed a bit feeling like, why we weren't invited to other parties ourselves? Won't everyone already be busy doing other stuff? In the end my wife took the leap and invited a ton of neighbors and friends. Guess what?? Almost everyone showed up! Which means all those people were going to be sitting at home feeling bad and wondering the same thing. You just need to believe and get over it, people want to hang out. We've all just gotten out of the habit.

In my experience, the problem is not a low success rate, but the burnout from being the only person that invites people to do things. At a certain point you want to see some reciprocation to create community. It can definitely happen, but a lot of folks still fall back on the habits. You have to invite and then also start asking people who's gonna host the next one and get them on the hook, and then not burnout from being a constant organizer :)

There's a few problems, at least in the US:

1. Hyper-perfect social media / television setting "the best" expectations for an event.

2. Decreased knowledge of how to host a gathering. It's not rocket science, but throwing one the first time can seem daunting. And throwing one well does take skill. E.g. icebreakers, identifying and facilitating the right introductions by highlighting mutual interests, making sure wallflowers have a good time, defusing tensions, food, etc.

3. Decreased American tolerance for and ability to handle awkwardness, and there's always going to be some awkwardness in social interactions.

4. Decreased public/accessible American meeting places. There used to (< 2000) be a plethora of low-cost, broadly-accessible spaces that could serve as training wheels for events (handling food, furnishings, cleaning, etc). They've essentially all been privatized, commercialized, and optimized to turn seats -- think real coffee shops disappearing in favor of Starbucks.

I believe this. My recipe for not burning out is:

- lower expectations (my own and everyone else's). I work out the bare minimum that would work for the event and do that. People need food. They don't need music.

- tell people how to contribute: "bring snacks and drinks", ask one specific person to bring ice. when people arrive I often give specific tasks: "can you find someone to help move the table and chairs into the other room", "can you sort out music"

- do it the same way every time so it's less mentally taxing

- get a friend to help with setup

Ah, success through lowered expectations! This has been my mantra for the last 40 years, and it has worked surprisingly well. I started out with a New Year’s resolution to not intentionally consume significant quantities of human flesh, and have worked my way up from there.

It may seem ridiculous, but it’s a form of stoicism adjacent philosophy that presumes nominally more control over one’s circumstances, and it has had excellent outcomes for me. Ratchet forward but expect modest clicks and be delighted when something goes right or someone comes through.

> I started out with a New Year’s resolution to not intentionally consume significant quantities of human flesh

ծ_Ô

Well you know, probably everyone is constantly swallowing some of their own dead skin cells. Nobody's perfect. So I'm not going to feel too guilty when I cheat and buy a human-balogna sandwich every now and then, especially if they're free range.

This thread sounds like a very modest proposal.

An easily achievable resolution for the vast majority of people.

Yeah, the phrase "significant quantities of" is really throwing the whole comment for an unfortunate loop. Maybe "I choose not to steal any vehicles" or "I choose not to commit fraud" and work up from _there_ instead of somehow trying to faux-normalize cannibalism. Very strange indeed.

That's why it's funny sourpuss.

When a stranger posts online joking about cannibalism, you never really know…

It’s surprisingly difficult to not eat a little human flesh. People nibble on loose skin and the insides of thier mouth a little, you end up swallowing blood, and there is often a tiny bit of human biomass in processed food.

Ergo the “significant” qualifier. Imagine the sense of defeat to fail in your New Year’s resolution to not resort to cannibalism by years end… so you have to be careful how you define your test case.

If I were a cannibal, it would have been an ambitious resolution, but the whole point was success through low expectations.

But fair enough, people tend to be touchy about people eating people, and rightly so. No way that ends well as a mainstream practice.

Well, I added that after realizing that it wasn’t uncommon to accidentally eat small parts of your mouth, fingertips, things like that in the course of a year, and I was not about to fail in my quest to reject cannibalism for the year. I mean, for me, that would have been a new low.

problem is you slip up once and you've blown the entire goal. The OP's resolution feels much more AA-style, it's about not stealing cars any more

I'm assuming this is referencing "taking a pound of flesh" generally meaning to being cruel in demanding what you're owed (from Shakespeare Merchant of Venice). Presumably they're tired of unloading on people for not following thru or contributing. Doesn't seem like the best use here, particularly so indirectly.

Nope, I meant literally not consuming human flesh as food. After years of unsuccessful New Year’s resolutions, I decided to pick one I was sure I could stick to. Success through lowered expectations.

A man who commits to the bit. I respect it.

You'd probably like the signs I do in Chicago.

"Terrible advice, only $3"

"Awkward smalltalk, only $2"

"Premium snowballs, only $1"

Will be doing one of these tomorrow in fact. Probably in my usual spot.

I mean, it is kind of a bit, in a way, but I really did announce to my social group my resolution, about 40 years ago, and I’ve been ratcheting it up gradually ever since. I have kept my public and official New Year’s resolutions for 37 years running. I’m up to “intentional and senseless acts of violence that end in the injury of innocents“.

You may scoff, but senselessness is highly contextually dependent and can easily apply to something that seemed rational under the fog of circumstance. Thats actually not that easy to promise without forsaking the option of violence altogether, which I am not at liberty to do, since I have a family to protect.

It’s a slow, intentional process. I don’t want to risk overreaching. Still, they are worthwhile goals. Low-hanging fruit is still fruit.

The useful thing to me has been to expect little from people and life in general, but a lot of myself. Then be delighted when things go as they should, or when people come through. It’s a contagious positivity masquerading as cynicism, or maybe the other way around, I’m not sure… but it allows me to focus on my role in things, my choices, my actions, and reactions to the external world. It is stoicism adjacent.

The New Year’s resolutions are mostly an advertising campaign for the overall philosophy, really, by promising people easy success in something that is often a struggle, and illuminating the fact that we choose our successes and failures by how we view external circumstances, not so much by the circumstances themselves.

Lower expectations is a great tip.

I find that the more a group does things, the more everyone chills out. It's like the expectations come from a fear of being judged and from uncertainty. When everyone has information from the last ten events then you don't need to stress anymore, because everyone knows how this one will go and they've all judged one another already.

It helps to remember that you are competing with: no event.

If there are other parties happening and you're trying to make a better one, by all means, go all out. But mostly people in their 40s aren't going to many house events, so they're just happy to be somewhere with people. They don't care that you didn't decorate or sweep the floor or prepare an elaborate meal. You made soup and they're thrilled.

I'd also add that first-event nerves (on host and attendee sides) can be an uncertainty problem. No one wants to misunderstand the dress code, social code, etc. Once people have been together, there are now group norms that assuage that (aka "I know what's acceptable to wear and talk about").

Absolutely. I throw “open houses” with open hours. There will be some food and company and some booze. Probably music. But in the end everyone brings what they can and it rules.

Granted it’s still a lot of effort but it’s low key and I find people prefer that unless it gets enough momentum to become a “thing” haha

Agree with this approach. I've hosted a lot of "work adjacent" events over the years, with no real idea what I'm doing. I've always focused on the intent (why do I want to attend?) and a few crux details; everything else tends to work out or is just not that important. It seems to be one of the areas where "fake it until you make it" not only works but might be superior to ultra-planning.

Once you've got the gist down, try and find one thing that you can go a little overboard on; it makes it very memorable. Examples: I made a big pot of home-made chili once, and another time we did (what looked like) an extravagant nacho bar. It was both better and way cheaper than typical event food.

Definitely enlist an accomplice, but be aware you likely need to (appear to) be the mastermind.

> I've always focused on the intent (why do I want to attend?) and a few crux details; everything else tends to work out or is just not that important

This was my primary takeaway from some time spent doing higher-end catering front of house. You'd be amazed what absolute fuckups can occur on non-critical stuff... and no one even notices.

(Possibly the bride, but that's why we had dedicated bride handlers to appropriately message that kind of stuff)

I’m going to add a strange note here:

I recently moved into a very upper class neighborhood (pacific heights) and enrolled my child in the neighborhood private school.

The social hosting skill I’ve observed and and able to do as well is extraordinarily high. People throw parties, know how to act, are cordial and polite and seem to reasonably enjoy each others company while also teaching their children the same.

This is how I remember mere middle class parents acting in the late 90s and early 2000s but my fellow millennials and z seem to be completely incapable of.

One huge aspect I’ve noticed is that it’s wildly expensive in time and money to host. An open cocktail night cost me nearly 3000 dollars to host. I can imagine this would not be common for Gen Z these days.

That seems to be a very narrow definition of a party. I have friends over for pizza and board games. We've had ice cream making parties. Cheese dinners.

This is fine too. Seems like most can’t even attempt that though.

Can't or won't?

I am a millennial and my parents did no events, since they both worked and had long commutes. I wonder when the middle class entertainment slowed down—I want to guess it’s when you have more two income households, that don’t earn enough to hire home help.

Minimum wages have not increased in decades. Cost of living has increased a lot meanwhile, and the rich vs poor divide has increased. So lower class and middle class are suffering, while upper class have become richer from their labors. In earlier generations, the middle class could work for some years and afford to buy a house (on mortgage). But these days, middle class cannot afford a house, they live in rented apartments. Hosting parties is the least of their priorities, when they are struggling with the monthly bills.

Housing availability and leisure time (afforded by excess income) are probably the biggest components.

And in answer to "When that changed?" from parent, my guess would be mid-90s.

In that generations coming of party-hosting age after that were increasingly less likely to host.

I don't think it's that, my parents weren't two income and never had friends or did events or social things and barely left the house.

My mom would constantly complain she used to be a social butterfly but having kids "ruined" that for her. Which never made sense to me, it's not like she ever interacted with us much.

How the heck do you manage to host a $3K cocktail party?

You can run an open bar with two bartenders for 50 people for that price? (Unless everybody is a complete lush, I guess ;)

I can easily imagine a high end catered party costing that much.

I don't think there is an upper limit on how much hosting a party costs. You can always go fancier if you have money to burn.

Christmas dinner for my immediate family almost $500. That was pretty much dinner and our favorite appetizers but does not count the liquor and wine. This was just me, my ex, five kids, a daughter in law and grandchild. I can see getting to 3k pretty fast.

How did you spend $500 on dinner for 9 people? I hosted Christmas dinner for my family with about 10 adults and 10 kids, and it cost at most $200 divided between 5 families, alcohol included.

Dinner for twenty people at $200 is farcical in the US unless your family owns a farm or something. Going to need more details because I'm inclined to say that's bullshit.

Beer and liquor alone would blow past that figure.

No farm is needed. It's not that hard. I spent about: $25 on a chicken dish (chicken from Costco + ingredients), $15 for baked mac & cheese (ingredients from Meijer), $20 on ciders, $40 on 2 bottles of Cherry Republic wine. The other family members: $20 on raw vegetables and cheese platter; $20 on fruit; $10 potato dish; $10 vegetable dish; $15 on dessert; $15 on salad. Oh and $2 on juice boxes for the little kids (~4 from a juice box 40 pack from Costco). I'm estimating what the others spent, but that's what it would cost me to make the same dishes. That totals to $192.

"host" implies in your home, not in a restaurant.

If your version of hosting is "let's outsource it and just open the wallet", then, yes, sure, you can spend a lot of money. It ain't hosting, though. You failed the "what if I just replaced you with a bank account" test.

Yes, I know what hosting is and $200 for that many people is still farcical.

Well 50 people attended. So. Yea? Two parents for 21 students or so plus a few extras.

GP said 'open bar with 2 bartenders'. I.e. commercially priced drinks, and staff. Did you have those? If so, pro tip, next time just get a few cases of various drinks, plonk them on a table with a bunch of glasses (rented, if need be) and call it good. People can't drink soft drink for more than, say, 3 USD worth in an afternoon; and even if you served 12 years Glenfiddich to everyone including the children, enough of it to knock them all out, you still wouldn't have spend more than $1000.

So yeah still wondering what sort of party you threw. I mean, yeah it's easily possible to spend that much, but it's also possible to do it for much less and you don't even need to really try.

> If so, pro tip, next time just get a few cases of various drinks, plonk them on a table

That's not a cocktail party, that's a tailgate.

> GP said 'open bar with 2 bartenders'. I.e. commercially priced drinks, and staff.

GP here, and no, that doesn't mean that.

It means you hire 2 bartenders to make the drinks, and you buy the supplies they use.

And, no, if you want a cocktail party, you don't "plonk a few cases of drinks on the table". That's also a fun party, but a different kind.

This is not a 'pro tip' this is a clueless tip.

That honestly seems quite cheap for 'very upper class' where I imagine everyone's suited and booted, dressed up for the evening, possibly some live music, etc.

Correct. I did not spring for live music or help.

People surprised by Mr. $3000-cocktail party's expenses are forgetting about class and wealth differences.

Up to a point, expenses are elastic and proportionate to income. Across different incomes, things like "dinner" or "cocktail" mean (and cost) very different things, to the point that someone on either end of the scale doesn't even know what is on the other end. A very wealthy individual might not know about the $1.50 Costco dog, and a less wealthy individual won't know about the $10,000 bottle of cab sauv (okay I'm making that up, I don't know either, but you get the point).

If you have $100k you'll make do with that, if you have 10x more, most people will find ways to scale the expenses accordingly. If you have 1,000x more, that's just wasted cash that does nothing for society, but that's another discussion...

Also bog standard middle shelf cocktail liquor, wine, glassware, food, and additional (forks, knives, small plates, food prep) for 50 people is gonna cost 3k almost anywhere.

I was highlighting partially how it's just generally expensive to host the first time a large group.

What planet are you on? $60/head for a simple party with middle shelf drinks and basic food is necessary "anywhere" for passing acquaintances?

> glassware, and additional (forks, knives, small plates)

Do you guys break all the plates like at traditional Greek weddings?

No you have to buy it for the first time though.

It’s amazing to me how classically foolish so many HN comments are.

I know the US is ludicrously expensive, but 3000 dollars for a cocktail party? Did you have a couple of hundred guests? The kind of party where you can lock in friendships, have meaningful conversations and personally play host tops out around 30 people. At those kind of numbers, you really don't need to hire a staff - you can provide canapés and make cocktails and or have a friend so at very reasonable cost. Source - I had hundreds of (often fairly raucous parties) at my old apartment. Alas I no longer live in a basement so my entertaining options are much more limited.

One is reminded of this - https://x.com/dril/status/384408932061417472?lang=en

I was not looking to 'lock in life long friendships.' I was hosting a cocktail party as a favor for our school at my home and was obligated to ensure the overall experience was somewhat nicer than 'a wild party at an apartment' as fun as that is as well. These are somewhat normal things as part of a knit-community adult life. You have distant people come as well as close friends and open your home. That is ... hosting.

Partly what I was trying to point out is how 'adult life' gets complicated and expensive and most people are understandably just opting out. But at the same time, whats going out with it is just basic manners and social habits -- which is unfortunate.

My point stands - if anything a cocktail party is potentially less expensive to host since you know in advance numbers and preferences.

> These are somewhat normal things as part of a knit-community adult life.

As something of an adult myself (I'm 46), I'm well aware of how community functions. I'm also aware of the 'keeping up with the jones' nature of wealth and how corrosive that is to community - being entirely founded on the selective and exclusive nature of spending.

My contention stands, there is no need whatsoever to spend thousands on a cocktail party. One doesn't need to 'opt out' of social life. It's perfectly possible to serve cocktails yourself, to buy 'off the shelf' brands rather than expensive whiskey etc. It's perfectly possible to prepare your own food, or work with a chef who organises 'super club' style catering, which does not cost thousands.

It's a choice to live this way, not a fate. And doubtless it affords status among other high worth individuals - just as it dooms you to a life of fruitless comparison and ostentatiousness.

This can be said of literally anyone living in the first World.

I find it deeply laughable anyone would stand on a soap box who lives in a modern first world environment and lecture like this while not seeing the irony that they do it themselves at their level as well.

Please. Stop. Look around. And maybe visit a place where you see how the other half of the planet lives. Likely your world is wildly ostentatious and unnecessary comparatively.

The plank in your eye before your neighbor and all that.

for $3000 you can cover a decent 100 people wedding in my country.

California, and San Francisco specifically has become "Hyper-Monoaco without the fun"

Three grand! For a cocktail night?

I mean I've spent a couple hundo at Costco buying booze and food and paper supplies for a party I hosted and THAT was flabbergasting. How the fuck do spend three grand on cocktails? Is it like all top shelf liquor or something?

Hosted cocktail parties are generally not “paper plates and red cups”.

It’s interesting that you’re proving my point. General manners and expectations have been lost

It's a level of excess whose loss is probably a net positive for society. I would argue that there are very, very few cases where such a level is justified.

>> I recently moved into a very upper class neighborhood (pacific heights)

A neighborhood which is sometimes referred to as "Specific Whites" (but only tongue-in-cheek, right?)

> 3. Decreased American tolerance for and ability to handle awkwardness, and there's always going to be some awkwardness in social interactions.

I wonder how much of this is due to our ever increasing sense of obligation to be "performing" all the time. Maybe increased by the perpetual presence of social media and the habits and mindset that both creating and consuming for it creates.

I thought that originally, but I actually think it's more experiential/exposure-side.

Hypothesis: modern society (especially apps) has decreased the amount of realtime, face-to-face social interactions at all stages of life, which has eventually manifested into a decreased average (there are still some social people!) capability to deal with social awkwardness. And consequently less comfort/appetite for putting oneself in situations where it might happen.

I don’t think it’s this. I’ve lived in NYC recently and people there don’t have tolerance for shit behaviors either and you’re surrounded by people all the time.

It’s due to people having higher standards than before and being bifurcated on every issue. There is deep polarization and tribalism within American culture.

Everyone consumes different content and there’s very little homogeneity within our culture. Like… Americans are more diverse than ever in terms of their thoughts and behaviors. They genuinely have little in common compared to many other cultures.

I'll buy that, especially in NYC-like urban environments where frequency of exposure is definitely not the issue. Suburbs and rural may be different.

Part of the increased diversity is unavoidable due to technological changes eroding previous touchpoints. E.g. limited broadcast TV becoming cable becoming streaming.

But there does seem to be an increasing dearth of the logical tonic: discussion-facilitating diverse spaces. Places where people of different opinions can mingle, there are strong social norms around mutually productive conversation (and enforcement to discourage / weed out poison apples?), and that are open to new people.

> Hyper-perfect social media / television setting "the best" expectations for an event.

My approach around this is suggesting the idea to people up front and then throwing everyone into a WhatsApp chat and laying down the plan. Anyone who can't join gets removed/leaves. No one expects a whatsapp group to be a refined VIP experience. It's just people getting together and sharing an experience.

Having moved countries and needing to start up a new friend group, things like Meetup or Facebook groups help a lot. There are _many_ people out there who are looking to meet people.

For throwing a party, my general rule of thumb is expect 50% of people to turn up.

It used to be predominantly women who did it. It was part of being a housewife. Joy of Cooking even has an entire chapter dedicated to hosting a dinner party. But now women work for billionaires too. Nobody has time to work for themselves.

1000%, but I didn't want to make my post too long.

If you want a kick, read through the 1957 edition of Air Force Social Customs [0].

It makes you realize how the art of entertaining has atrophied over the decades.

[0] https://archive.org/details/answerbookonairf00wier/mode/1up

>Decreased knowledge of how to host a gathering.

I have my own saying for this. “Swimming is how you learn to swim”

This. My wife and I built our social life when we moved countries, and we had a group of friends that we'd meet every week or two. But only when we invited them. No-one else in the group ever organised anything. It got really tiring. We could not get anyone else to organise a meet, they always had reasons why they couldn't organise one (but could turn up to it fine). We tried a bunch of things, but nothing worked - if we didn't organise it, it didn't happen. We ended up moving away and the whole social group collapsed and stopped meeting.

I think some people are just the center of gravity, and that particular friend circle revolves around them. Before COVID, we had a friend group that would hang out fairly regularly. Once I left (for a job, not fleeing the city), none of them hung out without me. Everyone was friendly with each other, but everyone also had their own lives going on with their own friends and other circles. While I was the glue for that circle, it wasn't like everyone just stayed at home having pity parties when I wasn't around.

My anecdote might have limited relevance here, but I think it's something worth considering.

Do any of those friends organise anything for any of their other friend groups?

I get the feeling that some people organise, while most people don't. I haven't seen the situation where a person organises stuff for one group, but not for another group. It always tends to be the same people doing the organising for all their friends. At least that's what I've observed, I'd welcome any other observations.

edit: poor choice of words

That attitude, the some people are leeches, to me is part of the problem. If you go in with the expectation that others owe you something or they're bad people, you're only going to be going down the path of not doing it.

yeah probably a poor choice of words, thanks for the correction

"Most people have less than the average number of friends", or The Friendship Paradox:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

Out of curiosity which country was this?

This was Berlin, but the friend group were all immigrants.

You'll need to get over the idea of this being a shared load.

Every community has one or two people that are "the engine" and constantly keep people reconnecting. Has nothing to do with social media, or Covid - it's always been the case as far as I can think back (and that's the early 80's)

Yes, you can push and prod people to occasionally host, but that's also a ton of work.

Exactly why my parents stopped hosting dinner and cocktail parties. Nobody ever reciprocated, it was a lot of work, and eventually they just stopped.

We've noticed this in our neighborhood. Once a year we host a few families before going out trick or treating with our kids. We buy a bunch of pizza so everyone can eat and don't ask for the other families to kick in.

We were hoping the other families would reciprocate, and maybe invite us to some of their gatherings (especially two families who hang out together quite a bit.) So far it hasn't happened at all, they just receive our graciousness and move on immediately.

> they just receive our graciousness

Or think they’re doing you a favor by not rejecting your invite

Potluck parties help. Then they, generally, at least partly participated. Some people will just bring soda or chips or beer but that's still better than 0.

So you set something up to weasel your way into other "families" friendships by doing a specific thing and then judging their response/non-response? Like A/B testing humans.

Perhaps some people can sense this stuff subconsciously. Relationships should build naturally.

As somebody who does host and doesn’t get a ton of reciprocity, the problem isn’t burn out (because I love doing it). The problem is second guessing whether this is something the group enjoys and whether they are just humoring me.

I also love hosting - but what I’m really trying to do is have particles collide and form bonds outside the larger events. Even smaller scale gatherings, game nights, or hell even a couples dinner invite would be a nice change of pace.

1000x this. Hosts are a minority. The vast majority of guests not only don't host, they are not good at showing appreciation.

Low key this feels why so much of our social life gets productized/monetized.

The lack of reciprocation is a tough one. I think it also helps sometimes to understand that not everyone is good at being the mother goose or the facilitator, especially if someone else is already good at doing it, and it's not because they lack interest or don't care.

I have some friends who very easily lose themselves in their work and the stress around it and if I wasn't the one checking in and basically pulling them away, I'd miss out on what are easily my favourite days out and it has no impact on how much we enjoy each other's company. Maybe one day it changes but until then I'm there for them.

That said, there are of course times where it's better to just let go. But those people were probably never that important to you in the first place.

>In my experience, the problem is not a low success rate, but the burnout from being the only person that invites people to do things.

This is what mostly happened with me, I just got burned out from always having to be the one to organise everything or nothing would happen, which is what ended up happening after I stopped, we just stopped meeting up and eventually grew completely apart.

Now, I'm in a completely different country and I don't even have anyone's contacts anymore. But that's been life for me, people come and people go, never to stay.

I've accepted it by now, it can still hurt from time to time, but it is what it is, one should not force their will onto others, I believe.

It’s easy to find reasons to talk yourself out of action. Maybe you’ll get burned out, maybe you won’t. But if you never try you’ll never know. And you’ll definitely miss out on something special

try and build "the community" outside of the effort of one or a few people. This is hard. My example: we've built some quality dirt jumps for bike riders, and while there's a core group of ~10 people, you don't need all - or any - of them to come out for success. The location is the host and either a regularly scheduled or casual event keeps the community going. If people stop, the community will die and we'll move on.

I sometimes wonder about this, I have a friend who does most of the organizing for parties or whatever. My sense is that there are a few different kinds of people, among those are people who, if they didn't organize parties, there wouldn't really be much of a platform for hanging out for them and others like them, while others are completely isolated, don't organize and don't have any other third space, and others yet have many smaller interactions from many other parts of life that don't necessitate a larger meetup necessarily. If you're an "organizer" type, my guess is that the people you'd hope reciprocate fall into the latter camp; they're happy to show up and have a good time, but they probably have a bunch of other things to explore that for some reason they haven't felt you'd be into... or a bunch of other possible reasons. Asking them to host a party is asking them to fabricate a social setting from thin air, but maybe they just organically don't find that to be something they need to do.

For me, I'll host something for a small group if I get some inspiration, but on a week to week basis I'm often in extremely social third-spaces, supplemented by larger parties (probably bi-weekly). My effort is often best spent meeting people for deliberate, intimate, outdoor sports adventures or coffee hangouts, but the same person I know who tends to organize larger parties doesn't really feel like someone who'd be into these; they can't really hold a conversation 1 on 1 for very long, and they're not super curious or vulnerable or athletic in the way that's necessary to engage in those as much. He's a regimented, scheduled, impatient, person. They often need a sort of fabricated social vehicle (also likes to decorate and host), whereas I get nearly all of my socializing from incidentally being in social space.

I think it's fine to be either of course. It's ok that my organizer friend doesn't like heights, and so I won't invite him to climb mountains, he likes hosting parties, so I try to attend as many as I can.

Note that I don't mean the non-organizer (me) is just passively socializing, it's just that they have different catalysts built into the things they do that extend into socializing easily. I'm DMing 1 or 2 friends, multiple times a week, to do something we both enjoy or just chat while walking around the city. While parties and hosted things are neat, they're just not very good platforms for depth.

Just as well, I do try and be inviting to everyone who'd like to come out and do other things, in general it's important to reciprocate, but I'm not hosting a party just because someone else did.

> burnout from being the only person that invites people to do things

If you get burned out from being the nexus of your social circle, that sounds like a problem stemming from your success

Some people thrive at being the center of their social circle. To me it sounds awful. Different strokes...

Not fun part is that the longer you stay at your home comfort zone the bigger social anxiety grows.

Other annoying parts are if you fight off anxiety and do go out you most likely will run into minor inconvenience like some Karen honking on you or making a fuss in front of you when you’re waiting in line. Minor inconvenience like that refuels social anxiety.

> Everyone is struggling with this, not just you.

Eh, I don't think EVERYONE is struggling with this. I am an introvert, and have no desire to go out and do more things with friends. I get enough socialization with my wife and kids, and don't really have the desire to do more things.

I used to think that way. Then, divorce, custody battle and the dark abyss. No home, nobody to talk to; just silence, loneliness, general apathy of the world around you. It's the trap of the middle-aged man: to focus on work, invest in family, and hope these things will be a constant because you are doing the right thing. We don't have enough emotional bonds, don't know how to create them, and if the wife leaves and takes the kids, there's nothing left.

Sorry to hear that.

I'd use this as an opportunity to do something exciting with your life (if finances permit). Go live in Asia and do the nomad thing, if you're lonely there are a ton of Filipinas who want nothing more than to be a good wife and provide for their family. Try to start a business, take up some kind of art and make an honest effort to get GOOD at it, etc.

Not only that, but you also want to teach the kids how to socialize outside of the family.

> socialization with my wife and kids

So you aren't one of the people that are lonely, because you have wife and kids

I’m also an introvert, I think, but I do feel I would be better off with more socialization than I’m getting.

Though, I’m also single, so, maybe I wouldn’t feel such a need if I were married? Idk.

Same lack of desire to go out and I don't even have wife and kids, or even friends for that matter; just one friend I see once a week. Whatever the appeal/reward of socialization is for most people, I don't get it.

Sure, but this only works as advice for people who you can talk to, such as me. I'm not trying to solve my loneliness, my own personal goal is to find ways to reach out to people who sit alone all day, and are dying from loneliness, and the only way to reach them is to catch them as they walk on the way to the grocery store, and hold up a sign that they can read. The question in my mind is, what next? So far, I've only been doing surveys[1], but I'm looking for the next step.

Piggybacking off your suggestion, I like the idea of holding up a sign advertising a free activity that anyone can join, located in a very public space, with zero committment, so they can both show up and walk away at the drop of a hat. Whether it's an ad hoc organized chess tournament, or D&D game, or "one word story" or literally anything. That will have to wait until nicer weather, though, to avoid having to rent a place.

[1] https://chicagosignguy.com

This isn’t quite true. I’m in the last stages of organizing a record club (basically a book club with a much lower commitment) and I started by talking to a small handful of close friends who I knew were music nerds because I am picky and shy by nature and the most annoying thing is how many people got wind of it and wanted in. People are starving for these sorts of things. Try. Fail. It’s ok, it’s just going to take a couple of us to make a few hits and we can start to sew some of the fabric of society back together.

You can reach people you otherwise might not have by inviting your neighbours around for coffee and cake one weekend morning? Even if you have nothing in common it starts building a community of people who live in proximity to one another.

You have a very interesting website. Do you feel lonely? Your website portraits you as a sad person who has suffered a lot. I wouldn't say you are insignificant at all :) You do certain seem to be quite significant probably to more people than you realize even if it isn't to all the people you wish to be significant to.

I feel the best way to do what you seem to want to do is by meeting people where they are. No matter what you do, the last part of your mission relies on the lonely person. They have to choose to connect to others and then they have to do it. Arguably, that's the hardest part.

I think what you're doing is really cool.

Your instructions to comment on your blog are incredible, come talk to you face to face. If I didn't live on the other side of the country it would be meaningful to tell you what it meant to me in person.

Unfortunately a lot of these require either an existing network or high stakes interaction (sending invites, accepting invites etc). They're good advise, but can be hard to execute on for most people.

If we want to solve this at the society or community level, there needs to be more opportunities for low stakes interaction. Places that people can passively gather around a communal activity. I'm reminded of the ladies dancing together in public squares / parks in China. They're usually a group, but mostly anyone can join in. You can just follow along and interact as much as you'd like. If you want to leave, leave. If you want to stay and chat, stay and chat.

Downtown San Mateo for example has the potential for this. It's already a closed off street where people go. But today there aren't group activities there that encourages passive interaction, people are still in silos. Perhaps if there were some games / puzzles, chalk boards, townhall type of table setup, that'll encourage passive interaction.

They're good advise, but can be hard to execute on for most people.

OP gave the thread a very good and valid suggestion. Treating this as a societal problem - for "society" to solve - is lazy thinking.

If you want something you've never had, you have to do something you've never done.

"you just have to put yourself out there" is lazy thinking, you are ignoring all the underlying psychological and physilogical factors preventing people from doing it.

Making the society more welcoming works. It worked wonders for me. I moved from a country where things like meetup events are not common and groups are less welcoming to strangers. Having moved to UK, meetup events allowed me to go out and socialise because I could sign up without speaking to anyone, and go there and participate in the activity, without the pressure to socialise, it was an optional benefit. These settings allowed me to socialise with strangers that I could never do before.

I know in the US we value individualism responsibility. But the reality is many things are encouraged / discouraged, made easier / harder collectively.

Of course if you never go out of your house, you're not going to have many social interactions. But your environment and the culture you live in makes a difference too. You can quit smoking yourself clearly, but the collective push to discourage smoking has done a lot to reduce the overall use of cigarettes.

When I was young, I solved loneliness very well by volunteering for political campaigns. Until the last one (I'm too old to care now), I worked every campaign in my life and at various times had a lot of good friends as a result.

My town does an annual party. I heard about it and showed up to volunteer. I did that for a few years. It wasn't as productive in producing friends (I'm in a different location than before that is more insular) but even so, it got me out of the house and, for the few months before the event, was pretty much fun.

These kinds of things are often available if you just look around. It doesn't require knowing people ahead of time and is low stakes. If nobody is friendly, it doesn't matter.

"Be the organizer" assumes a certain baseline of energy, confidence, and emotional resilience. For people who are already lonely, depressed, neurodivergent, burned out, or socially anxious, that constant reaching out + rejection tax can be genuinely exhausting, not just uncomfortable

As someone that fits some of the above categories, I think you really have to step back and repeatedly tell yourself "get over it". Its the same mentality to "I dont want to go to the gym today". You immediately feel better as soon as youve finished it and wonder why you always drag your feet before.

> You immediately feel better as soon as youve finished it and wonder why you always drag your feet before.

When this doesn't happen what do you do?

Try something else until it does.

The only other option is to go on being miserable.

I'm guessing your issues were not so severe if "keep trying things forever and telling yourself to get over it" is the epiphany which helped you, clinical depression doesn't go away that easily.

Late reply but in case you come back to this, the thing that helped me out of clinical depression was 150mg of bupropion twice a day for a few years, then I was able to get out of bed reliably enough take up cycling.

If you feel you're clinically depressed get diagnosed and treated in a clinical setting ASAP. Diseases need treatment.

Not trying to be glib, but whats the alternative other than suicide? Keep trying things you know havent worked?

My winning alternative is not to go online and be the mental health equivalent of that survivorship bias fighter plane image. "Just tell yourself to get over it" is advice that can only possibly work because you didn't actually need it.

We eventually believe the words we speak about ourselves.

These two are not really the same.

You generally do not go to the gym and fail, exercising works more or less the same for almost everyone, you get good hormones, you feel good.

Socialising, on the other hand, is entirely different. Some people thrive in it, some people feel much more dread afterwards.

>, I think you really have to step back and repeatedly tell yourself "get over it". Its the same mentality to "I dont want to go to the gym today". You immediately feel better as soon as youve finished it

No, no, no, it's absolutely not the same, OMG, nothing alike. "I dont want to go to the gym today" isn't the kind of profound, all encompassing, and existential dread that attempting to organize a social event is. Especially when you push yourself to organize and it doesn't work out, which has happened to me before. Those feelings are legitimately nothing alike, the fact someone is comparing the two is wild to me.

I do still need to try to overcome it and get over it, but it's not even as remotely as simple as you claim.

This becomes an unlimited excuse.

Even if there were state programs that established and ran these sorts of events and created low-friction ways of interacting with people, people could still say "well that assumes a certain baseline of energy."

It is true that somebody who is in the midst of extreme depression and can't get out of bed is probably not going to be able to set up a local dnd game. It is also the case that the large majority of people are absolutely capable of doing this sort of thing.

If I may suggest to start small, it doesn't have to be a group of people playing football. I personally like to just meet 1 or 2 people to which I can have interaction with all of them.

If I may I made an attempt to crack at this very problem with Tatapp (tatapp.astekita.com). Any feedback is very much appreciated.

I agree. I also don't think forcing yourself to be an organizer is necessarily a solution to fixing the loneliness, as it also just requires a certain passion. In my experience, some people love organizing things, others just really hate it. I am in that last camp, after having organized quite a lot. For me, simply participating with things that are organized by others has done me much more good. Of course, that still requires being in a state of mind where you are able to take initiative with signing up for such group activities.

> You have to be the one who creates things to do.

> You have to do it on a regular cadence.

I've posted about this before, but my wife and I sort of accidentally started a trivia team that's been going strong for like four years. Nearly every single week for four years, we get together with some subset of about 15 people. Most the regulars are there most days.

I also started cold plunging and have been doing it with the same regularity as trivia -- nearly every single week. It's a much smaller group, but it is absolutely part of our routine. Rain or shine.

Both these things have given several of us some really great friend time that makes that loneliness fade away.

> I've posted about this before, but my wife and I sort of accidentally started a trivia team that's been going strong for like four years.

I looked through your history and can't find it. (And you say "trivial" and "trivially" disproportionately often.) Can you link to it?

Sorry, but that’s hilarious. You’re searching for a keyword I assume?

Sounds trivial.

Personal solutions to systemic problems are not solutions. Yours is great advice for the few people able to take it to heart, find the motivation, and succeed, but you cannot solve societal problems at any kind of scale this way.

Just like you aren’t in traffic, you are traffic, you aren’t part of the society, you are society.

Every idea like “let’s have icecream socials at..” started as one person’s pipe dream which they then acted on and executed. No one is coming to rescue us. There’s no secret hand guiding humankind.

You definitely can’t solve loneliness for society but you can solve loneliness for your immediate circle by organising activities and that’s already a huge improvement.

In contrast, sitting back and saying this needs to be solved at a higher level does nothing at all.

the parent's comment was what I have been thinking about though... The advice to not be the traffic is kind of just like saying "just try harder"...

I am thinking of a chain of causality like:

People do not plan things, or they flake on events because they're tired. Theyre tired because theyre working too many hours and are obese. They work/obese because because they consume too much. They consume too much because we're a spiritually empty society. (Just to put up an initial draft hypothesis).

I'm thinking if we can solve some of the nodes closer to the root we can have a higher impact than just burning ourselves out trying to deal with the leaf nodes.

Is it true that people are working harder because they consume more?

For me, the chain of events was like this.

I had disposable income > i had no social network or things to do > so i went out and joined a running group and made friends like that.

Others probably choose gaming or something else they can do alone in the third stage.

I doubt there are many people who spent on gaming without first going through the “I don’t have things to do” stage.

I was thinking consume more like conspicuous consumption for clout. There's been lifestyle inflation, i believe due to social media, compared to times when society was more social. I'm running of general feelings here though, not specific datasets.

Somethings that come to mind: Expensive smart phones, fast fashion clothing spend, travel, tattoos, car feature creep leading to price increases and more loans taken, sq foot per person in housing, Food as an identity statement (more foreign/imported/, more protein are two trends I believe are true).

>Personal solutions to systemic problems are not solutions.

That idea is a social problem. I hope a sufficient number of individuals reject that reasoning.

Agree but the flaking culture is too normalized right now, at least in the west. Nothing is more demotivating than majority of people just not coming and doing it in such a non-chalant manner. It's really not fun to put all that work and people don't take the invitation seriously to the point where they jusut ghost the event.

This annoys me: at least say you're not going to make it. I don't expect you always to be free or even want to attend, but how hard is it to say 'Thanks but I can't come.'?

I've been trying to do this. One thing I've observed is trying to arrange people to play board games is quite difficult because you can't predict how many people will show up. People get sick, misread the times, etc. And a lot of games are very sensitive to player count, so having 2 people too few or too many has the ability to make the game somewhat unplayable or risk people sitting out watching.

Easier to just host a party or meetup where you can over invite and if some people don't show up it's no issue.

A friend of mine has this problem with their D&D campaigns. He makes huge efforts and there’s always one or two people who flake or don’t have the same commitment level. He’s gotten quite angry and sad about it.

He is trying something different now, to make a hybrid campaign where there’s a lot of one-shots in a broader story arc. It’s structured like missions in an ongoing struggle.

Maybe if you want to do board games, we need more games that scale up and down easily. I’m not a board game person, IDK.

Tell your friend to look up the Western Reaches style of play. One of the core ideas is that you begin and end each session in a safe zone so that you can have a rotating pool of adventurers. You can tuck in some rules for having mercenaries for when you have fewer than the encounters are balanced for and you’re off to the races.

It does reduce the possibility of highly on rails campaigns and instead requires more of a sandbox plan with one page dungeons and stuff. Even so, it seems made to solve this exact problem.

5-room dungeons: https://www.roleplayingtips.com/5-room-dungeons/

I don't do tabletop, but I do write, and making these is helpful for worldbuilding.

> Tell your friend to look up the Western Reaches style of play.

The playstyle is called West Marches.

IMHO, the important bit of this style isn't so much the player pool flexibility (tho it does help that case), but the inversion of who's driving the story. The DM prepares the world, but it's up to the players to organize their excursions outside of the safe zone, for their own reasons. This forces more involvement of the players in the story, instead of the more passive campaign on rails you mentioned.

So in the GP's case of flaky low-effort players, West Marches style may not help because it puts more burden on the players in addition to just showing up and having everything presented to them.

That said, if the group can manage to do it, player engagement should be higher, and the DM suffers less disappointment because they're only prepping a session of content based on the players' plans for that session, not a long storyline that requires more alignment and adherence.

Oh lordy, on the fly DMing is hard. Like a 4 hour session of improv with dice.

West Marches doesn't have to be totally on the fly for the DM. The players organize and define their agenda prior to the play session, so the DM should have a little time to prepare. The excursion is planned to visit a specific area of the map, so the DM only needs flesh out a bit of the world at a time.

D&D has too many rules. I invented a really light weight set of rules so that we can engage in more "role play" as opposed to RTS. It's more fun for the casual game and you don't waste so much time between turns.

Try anything that's described as "Powered by the Apocalypse". It's an excellent foundation for rules-light role-playing games.

Urban Shadows was my intro into this style of play. Monster of the Week is also very good. But there a huge number of great games out there that are not D&D (which is really a bit clunky and overly complex, IMO).

You just have to make up your own - unless you want to!

Tell us more about about your custom rule set?

Our D&D group meets once to twice a month and is about seven or eight people. That's large enough that at most two of us can not show up and we're still enough to play and enjoy ourselves. The DM writes session recaps and posts them the day before the next session. The overhead here is minimized by his taking notes during the session. This has kept our group going for something like three or four years now!

The one thing about D&D is that I know almost everyone there exclusively through the campaign, and 90% of my interactions with them have been in character, which means I actually know very little about their personal lives. We're getting better with this with non-D&D hangs though.

lol I also have had this experience. I played DnD to get to know people and after two years I realized I only knew their characters. Challenging.

Could you be more flexible about what game you are playing depending on how many show up?

This is the way. You have to have some amount of flexibility in your plans.

Yes, but it's frustrating that it's on the organizer to give everyone both something fun to do and the flexibility to flake. It feels like such thankless work to work so hard and get so little commitment back.

I have a fairly reliable friend group, but sometimes stuff just happens. One game we had someone get sick, and another person's car broke down. That's just life and it happens, but the game was very disrupted. Would be easier to pick activities that are more flexible to the number of people participating.

It is possible I would assume. I just don't have that many games or enough table space to be super flexible. I'm thinking board games work easiest when the people are already in the same space and need something to do, rather than trying to arrange them to come just for the game.

Space base works well for this for up to eight people with the expansion. I have a friend with a very tiny apartment we have done that in, and while others are buying cards you can enjoy conversation. I used to host a lot when I was able to keep a dedicated hosting area at the one house, but recently not as much unless it's outdoors mainly. If you have a grill you can let people know to bring what they want to grill, and popcorn and some seasoning makes an affordable snack, and if you project a movie somewhere people can disconnect if needed. But yes, I usually use my social energy with family in the area now.

Just in case you need some recommendations:

Party games: Scale well with more people, easy to explain

- Werewolf

- Werewords

- Codenames (favorite)

Beginner Games: Accept a decent amount, somewhat easy to explain

- Camel Up

- Flip 7

- Dungeon Fighter

- Ticket to Ride

Games that have nothing to do with your problem, but I just wanna mention:

- Everdell: Cute critters prepare for winter

- Root: Cute critters prepare for war

- Azul: Place fancy tiles that look and feel delicious

- Bohnanza: The best part of Catan without the bad parts

I'd like to add a very simple one: Uno.

With the rules variant that you can play out-of-order if you add an identical card to the one that's on top of the stack, it disrupts the otherwise pretty linear play, and easily scales up to 10ish persons and still be fun.

I host a lot of board game days and...yes.

One thing I do that helps is get people to RSVP with a specific arrival time, and do my best to have a game about to start around that time.

If you show up unexpectedly, then I'm not going to feel bad about you sitting out for an hour or more.

People unexpectedly bringing a partner/friend who is not really that into board games is the absolute worst thoguh.

> One thing I've observed is trying to arrange people to play board games is quite difficult because you can't predict how many people will show up. People get sick, misread the times, etc. And a lot of games are very sensitive to player count, so having 2 people too few or too many has the ability to make the game somewhat unplayable

You're trying to arrange the wrong type of event. A board game group plays a variable number of games simultaneously to accommodate the number of players each game can support. A board game group does not try to fit everyone into the same game as a matter of principle.

Probably. Problem is I only have so much space on my table.

I have a group of people who play boardgames in a turned based fashion over at boardgamearena. This solves the flakiness issue. The lack of direct social interaction is then made slightly better by having a chat channel where we chat about ongoing games.

We've been having ongoing games (around 2 going at every one time) since about a year now I think.

Still do in person games as well, but this at least keeps that group going through in-perwon drought periods.

As someone who has tried to host events for specific board games, I completely agree. Most games I play are best with 3 to 4, and I will flat out refuse to play them with more than 5.

Now, I host meetups which typically get 8-15 people and multiple games, so an unpredictable player count is not an issue.

I've had success with this! It required a little bit of an existing network. I always wanted to be in a band but never could, I was never invited. But I went to an open mic for a couple months, and just decided to .. start one. Invited people over to jam sometimes. Turned into a regular event, then turned into a band.

I've repeated this a couple times. Yeah, usually I have to do the bulk of the inviting and organizing. And yeah, it's uncomfortable being the "leader". But I know everyone enjoyed the time together. Those that didn't just never came and that's fine too.

You really can just do things!

You don't have to do it all yourself.

Join an organization. For example every city has Toastmasters, most have several. Easy to find, and it is an excellent place to meet people. And you'll learn how to convert social anxiety into social adrenaline.

Do you have a faith? Actually go to church instead of just believing. Are you non-religious? Several strands of Buddhism can be followed as philosophy and practice without adopting any mystical beliefs. Vipassanā (also called Insight) and Zen are a couple of examples.

And how do you turn random people that you met into life-long friends? You can reduce the time investment by a lot. If you call someone on a spaced repetition schedule, you can make them internalize that the door is always open. Without requiring a large commitment on either side. And a spaced repetition schedule is easy to achieve - just think Fibonacci. I'll call you back in 3 days. Then 5. Then 8 (round down to a week). And so on. It feels like a lot of calls at the start. But it slows down fast. Over a lifetime, it is only around 20 calls.

Play around with it. If it was someone you met and hung out with on a cruise, maybe start at a week for that first call. Either way, you're reinforcing the idea that we like to talk, and the door is always open.

You can use a similar idea to keep people who move on from your workplace in your life. People always mean to stay in contact. Then don't. But with structured reinforcement, you can actually make it work.

A spaced repetition schedule for speedrunning the friend-making process?

If it works, it works, I guess. And in a thread about loneliness, that’s all that matters. But it seems a bit calculated rather than organic, which is what we think of as the platonic ideal of friendmaking.

Think of it as an intentional way to turn a spark of connection into long-lasting coals. It can't work without that initial desire on both sides to make it work.

But if you really want calculated...try https://amorebeautifulquestion.com/36-questions/ on for size.

Wow. This is so true. My social life has improved hugely in the last couple of years and it's almost all because of this.

I host board game days.

I organise a pub trivia team.

I organise singalong nights.

I host occasional parties. Soup nights. Zucchini parties.

I set up a lot of group chats and keep them alive.

I organise to visit my family.

For a lot of events, I get a 5-10% attendance rate compared to the number of people I invite. People are busy. It just means I need to keep expanding the circles of people to invite. If people don't want to come it eventually becomes clear and I quietly remove them from the lists. But mostly I hear the opposite - they really want to keep being invited, even if they don't make it often.

What’s a zucchini party

It's when you accidentally grow giant zucchinis so you need help eating them.

So what you're saying is you basically have to give. This is what I find real life is like. Unless I'm giving something, like a ride to some interesting place, people are not interested in me at all. They just want to get something from me, that's it.

It helps to not look at this as zero sum.

A lot of people are more comfortable with a shared experience objective. This provides a means to do something and a reason behind meeting.

If you are always in the mindset that you are giving and everyone else is taking that can really impact how you perceive everyone. And 9/10 most people over estimate how much they give and under-estimate how much they take.

There is also something powerful with "I _get_ to take my new friend to a place I find cool" rather than "My new friend is using me to go to my cool place". Changing the way you internally frame things drastically helps.

I know it sounds absolutely stupid hogwash but it helps.

https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/gratitude-bed-every-morning...

I hope this helps!

It's not a "mindset" to notice that people only reach out to you when they want something. You notice that they reach out to others who aren't you and don't include you, They reserve you for favors only. If you find out about something and ask to be included they'll say "sure," but it doesn't feel great to feel like you have to beg.

That's not a "mindset," dude.

It's really hard to try to make that relationship more reciprocal and it really sours you on trying to create other relationships. You wonder if there's something inherently wrong with you. If your lot in life is always to be an outsider.

There's also the second type of person one can get caught up with, the narcissist. They think that the world owes them everything and they will take, take, take and never give anything. This one is a typically bit easier to deal with and do a little less damage to your mental health. Though they can sometimes be charismatic, so difficult to spot early if you aren't used to dealing with that type of person. The charismatic ones don't demand anything, especially not right off the bad. They make you feel like it's your choice to do them favors.

It's easier to notice if you have exceptionally "wanty" people in your life. But can happen regardless.

Some relationships are dysfunctional. Some people are toxic. That's not a "mindset" problem. It's clear you're not familiar with dysfunctional relationships, which is great, so don't accuse others of having the wrong "mindset" when you don't know.

I've felt this way for a while, that the give/take in my relationships is imbalanced, and that I'm not receiving what I need.

But then I tried to imagine receiving what I thought I wanted, and whether it would truly make me happy. The answer is almost always no.

The few times the answer was yes, I traced down why within myself, and found that, honestly, I just wanted people to care about me.

Then I realized that they have already shown ways that they care about me, just not the ways I was wanting or expecting, or found as meaningful.

Or I realized that I was not believing that they cared about me, and that it was merely a performance, but that I had no good reason for doubting it, and was just being overly demanding of a sign. (Not always, though. With some people, there were clear signs they were faking it.)

Or I realized that there was no context in which those things could come up, so the genuine love from the other person might actually be present, it's just that there's no opportunity for them to express it, until a scenario is created where it makes sense for them to do so in some way.

And other similar thought experiments within myself. This has led to me (a) realizing that a good number of people do actually care about me to a significant and meaningful degree, and (b) I need to take the initiative more often to create situations where they can express it, even if it's something as simple as asking them to have coffee with me.

I think of this all the time. What is the relationship between value and relationships? And what is the value of such a relationship?

It seems to me that every relationship is value oriented, even ones we consider absolutely perfect and pure.

Take for instance a mother's undying love for her newborn. She values that newborn for a few reasons. She sees herself in it. She sees pure innocence in it that needs to be protected and nourished. She sees all the potential good (i.e. value) this little child may one day bring to society. She sees her own personal fulfillment in the act of bringing this to fruition, which brings her joy, even amidst all the sacrifices she may have to make for it.

Is any of this selfish or bad? Does it in any way devalue her relationship to the child?

Extrapolate this to other relationships. A perfect friendship, where two people meet together regularly to find out about each other's recent activities, and encourage each other in life's difficulties, and foster one another's growth and good. They each care about the other, ask how the other is doing and what they're thinking and feeling, offer each other consolation, comfort, and help in times of distress or difficulty. Each gets this from the other, mutually beneficial. One may offer it exclusively at one time, the other reciprocates later, not out of obligation, but gratitude and personal desire.

Is this wrong? Is this selfish? Is this bad?

Many years ago I read the classic 'How to win friends and influence people' and I was just hit with, according to that book, how little people actually care about other people and how fundamentally lonely our existence is.

I don't think that was the message the book was trying to give, but that's what I got out of it.

So yes, people will wonder, subconsciously or not, what's in it for them. If you can give status or if you are naturally entertaining, this might all seem a little less obvious.

You have to provide value.

Unless you are pretty and young, nobody will automatically want to be around you unless you’re providing value.

> You have to be the one who reaches out.

But that's the whole issue. Who am I supposed to reach out to? The 2 people at work I occasionally talk to because they happen to sit in the same office as me?

I'm late for this comment, but finding a recreational team sport club in your area is what I could recommend. You have immediately something in common with everyone and it's a healthy exercise.

Those two people might be a start, and it's a low barrier to their participation to say you want to try a nearby cafe for lunch tomorrow if they're interested.

Longer term: make opportunities to occasionally talk to other people. Join a club, join a fitness group of some kind, take a class at your local library. It's got be something in person with enough repetition with the same people that everyone involved can overcome inertia enough to talk.

Try to say 'yes' should an occasional contact invite you to something, because it's pretty common that you won't get asked a second time if you pass on the first - I assume that's because we're all scared stiff that no-one likes us.

I need to take a heaping spoonful of my own advice here, but: yeah, kind of yes. You don't have to think of them as the people you've been searching all your life for, but to meet people, you need a source of people to draw from. Those two people you talk to on a semi-regular basis are entry nodes into the social network.

I've seen people organize for boardgames on facebook neighbourhood groups.

>Accept that most people flake

This is a thing that's always surprised me when I've been in the US. How common it is to enthusiastically arrange to do some activity together, get a meal, play a game, have a drink, whatever, and then for people to just call it off at the last minute. It seems much more socially acceptable to do so than either the UK (where I live) or France (where I have lived and still visit regularly).

The loneliness thing seems common across Europe too though so I'm not suggesting this is the root of the problem. But I do think that whilst this is a global problem the solutions are likely to be local, working with and leveraging different cultural norms.

I think that most of us Europeans think the Americans are over enthusiastic, which can give us the impression that they want to do something more than they actually do.

I think your comment about social acceptance in the UK is slightly off. It's person dependent. I would say my experience aligns closer with the 50% mark. It's a massive variant from person to person. I have friends that will turn up to anything, rain or shine, sickness or in health. Equally, I know people that would flake on a wedding because they stubbed their toe or the latest season of [insert meaningless reality show] came out.

> enthusiastically arrange

Anything but a purely positive or enthusiastic response is not allowed in US culture.

On the other hand, you also can't have an attachment to what you want the outcomes to be. You can't expect the same in return from everyone else. Until you let go of this transactional mindset, you will grow resentful when a lot of them start canceling on you, and believe me, at your 30s and above, with all these things that compete for our time, they will.

> Note: you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake. It may always feel painful (and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive). You have to feel your feelings, accept it, and move on.

Most importantly, you have to hear “I can’t” and be really cool about it or folks will half commit out of guilt and bail. They probably have a good reason, especially if they have kids. Or maybe they’re just exhausted! That is valid - you will sometimes feel that way too, and you should clearly (but politely) communicate it when you need.

If you consistently say yes/no and adhere to it, people will return the favor and you’ll all be better for it. My social life vastly improved post COVID when I adhered to that. My friends and I are incredibly honest so now folks rarely bail (always for good reason) and we all can reliably plan to hang out without guessing if someone actually means “no” when they say maybe and all that nonsense.

I think I saw this quote somewhere else on HN about a post lamenting how difficult it can be to make new friends after age 30 or so:

Finding new friends as an adult can be exceedingly difficult, but becoming a friend to someone is surprisingly easy.

Lots of people (and if I'm being honest I'm one of them, so no judgement) just sort of expect friendships to come to them. But if you actually do the hard (and somewhat socially risky) work of inviting people to do things, offering to help unsolicited, organizing gatherings, etc. new friendships are much easier to come by.

I was writing a reply, but then saw your comment. It's basically what I was going to say as well.

I moved to a new area. Searched for chess clubs. Couldn't find one.

So I created one. We now have ~10 people showing up to each meeting. From young kids, to older retired people. Facebook is a blessing for finding groups of people who are looking for things to do. It's really that simple. Just do things.

Would say that changing mind i.e. cancelling is probably also parts of our nerds traits, I feel that the closer to the time I starts getting cold feet for no reason. The irony is that probably that the most time-consuming part is probably scrolling social media.

I've been working on a solution that makes it easier to meet people. When you're out for coffee or something and feeling social, you can signal you're available. Since you and your potential friend already nearby, it should reduce cancellations. I built an app for this, check it out if you have time: https://tatapp.astekita.com/

That is excellent advice. How do we amplify this advice to more areas? I practice that by being intentional about my work: I think about all the opportunities I have to meet people and how I can give back to them. I call that slow multicast. I have a startup in my incubator that I call .find . I am a looking for a founder. I love how you explained it simply, clearly. I would love to have you in my "combat loneliness" team My ingredients: - walk the walk - Multicast - Seed - Tie to your bucket lists as growth engine (virtuous cycle)

I would love to further the combat, please reach out to me Joseph de Castelnau on IG and X.

I agree with this so much! I've found that going to people and initiating is the only thing you can do. How people respond varies a lot and you have to be resilient to rejection.

There was a post[1] sometime back about just having coffee in the afternoon outisdes and how that brought in more people.

I also write about it here [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618

[2]: https://blog.papermatch.me/html/Wheres_the_human_touch

> Note: you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake. It may always feel painful (and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive). You have to feel your feelings, accept it, and move on.

This is an incredibly good point. Like all things of this nature, I liken the process to panning for gold. In truth, you may not want to invest in people that aren't all that invested in you or the activity at hand. It stinks that the success rate is lower than chance, but it's probably better this way.

Yeah, I realized recently you have to be more intentional for things you want. You don’t necessarily have to host it but you need to reach out and find things going on where there are people.

> You have to be the one who creates things to do.

Problem is it gets fucking exhausting to organize and reach out after a while. Especially with DnD.

You can minimize that though - just give the event a regular schedule or have some way to easily inform all participants of the next date. If people stop showing up without individual nagging then maybe they weren't all that interested in that activity and that's OK too.

Great point and many of the responses are very interesting too.

I wonder whether part of this is a habitualization of intolerance for just being with oneself - to be ok with feeling bored, for instance. Most suggestions are about "doing". Just being with oneself without a doing is painful for many from what I've seen.

I think it's what that intolerance leads to which is a big part of the problem. It's natural that we don't like being bored, but these days we have infinite means to keep boredom away that don't involve connecting with others. Why go through the risks and awkwardness of opening yourself up to others when you have a device of infinite rabbit holes and time sinks in your pocket at all times? 40 years ago it was very possible to run out of entertainment, which is quite different today.

This! I agree 100%. How do you deal with the feeling of tiredness that comes after doing this for a while? You know, when you reach a ratio of 20:1 invitations sent versus received? When you inevitably start wanting reciprocity, or for someone else to take the initiative for a change?

If it's truly down to 20:1 I think you need to start looking at what other variables in your life are keeping that number down and maybe have a conversation about it. Poor circle of friends match, poor scheduling, some personality flaw that you can work on etc.

people are so fucked up by consumerism that they expect to be just consumers also in their sociality... like they expect that social relations to be like commodities.

in consumer societies people flee real freedom's anxiety by conforming to market ways, treating connections as consumption not production. lasting bonds need effort patience vulnerability, all anti-consumer virtues.

Fromm said that in market societies love and relations follow the commodity and labor market exchange pattern. they want low-effort replaceable humans. So they became low-effort replaceable humans.

I'm just going to be a "me too" but I think you nailed it. It's just hard for some people to do. It's sort of like losing weight: the formula is easy, but the doing is hard.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453114

I would like to mention this link from HN

While you are not wrong, I think in many cases this advice is as effective as telling someone to "just stop being depressed".

I think this advice works in practice, but it misidentifies the problem. It treats friendship as something that has always required deliberate effort and personal initiative, when historically the opposite was true. For most of human history, social bonds were not maintained through planning or follow-ups. They emerged automatically from structure. Humans evolved in small, stable groups with repeated contact, shared labor, shared risk, and strong norms against withdrawal. You did not “reach out” to maintain relationships; you saw the same people every day because survival required it. Social connection was not a lifestyle choice but an unavoidable condition of being alive.

Anthropologically, this matters because our social brains are tuned for inevitability, not optionality. We are adapted to environments where interaction is frequent, predictable, and constrained. Dunbar-scale groups, reciprocal dependence, and ritualized coordination did the work that calendars and reminders now attempt to approximate. When those constraints exist, friendship is an emergent property. When they are removed, it becomes a management problem.

Modern life systematically dismantled those constraints. Mobility replaced permanence, private space replaced shared space, and passive entertainment replaced collective activity. Flaking became costless. Absence became invisible. Optionality exploded. None of this happened accidentally; it was a deliberate trade in exchange for autonomy, flexibility, and economic efficiency. But the biological machinery did not change with the environment. We are still running hunter-gatherer social hardware in a world optimized for individual choice.

Seen through that lens, the advice to host, schedule, follow up, and accept rejection is not wrong, but it is compensatory. It asks individuals to manually recreate what used to be automatic. One person becomes the forcing function that the environment no longer provides. That can work, but it is fragile, asymmetric, and emotionally expensive, especially for people who are sensitive to imbalance or rejection. Framing this as “how friendship works” subtly turns a systems failure into a personal obligation.

If the goal is to reduce effort rather than heroically absorb it, the real lever is not better social skills or more persistence but reintroducing constraint. Social bonds form most reliably where interaction is inevitable rather than intentional: fixed schedules, shared physical spaces, repeated exposure to the same people, and light obligations that make absence noticeable. This is why gyms, religious communities, teams, classes, and other ritualized environments still produce friendships with relatively little effort. They partially restore the conditions under which our social instincts evolved.

There is no free lunch here. Effortless social life was never free; it was paid for with reduced choice, reduced mobility, and reduced privacy. You cannot fully recover that world without giving something up. But you can recover much of its function by selectively sacrificing optionality in exchange for repetition and proximity. The modern workaround of turning individuals into social project managers is effective but unnatural. Rebuilding environments that do the work for us is closer to our biology, closer to our history, and probably the only scalable way to make social connection feel less like a second job again.

> you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake

This is true, but as long as the success rate is >= 1 other person, it's okay.

I started a running club for my apartment block (about 200 flats with maybe 300 residents). I posted flyers out once advertising it as a friendly social running club. Of the 300, the group has about 15 people, of which 5 are regulars (every other week at least), and just 2 of us are super regulars (multiple times per week). It's a terrible success rate, but those are 4/5 good friends.

At first it bothered me how flaky people were. Some people joined the group but have yet to show up in person. And some joined the group and are yet to even converse in the group chat, but hey, they'll come along when they're ready.

Not only do you need to create the things to do, but you need to pick up the phone and CALL them (on the telephone! not voicemail, not whatsapp/facetime) and have a conversation with them. Sometime in 2006-2008 we started sending people online invites to parties and the habit of calling people died out.

If you call 12 people, on the telephone, and invite them for a dinner party next weekend, and 12 people say yes, I give 90% odds that 12 people show up to your party

I see young people facetiming each other all the time, maybe a little too much. It definitely fills the same role as audio calls used to. But I just text. I remember when texting started to become a thing, and I was very much looking forward to the absolute convenience of being able to read and respond whatever I had time, and not have to deal with a phone call. I wonder if that was common in my generation (millenials), and I wonder if we call/facetime significantly less and text more than other generations.

Texting is for sure more convenient but you lose the "watercooler" effect, you're not going to text them "how's your mom doing?" when inviting them over for D&D via text

Saying yes to a text invite seems less of a commitment to me. Maybe that's generational.

huh, as a 50something saying yes to a text message is absolutely a firm commitment. if anything, is firmer than doing it over voice, because now you have both put something in writing.

IDK. Low effort invite to me implies less commitment in the reply.

It's weird that no one else plans things?

I always feel like I organize things to much. It's one sided

> and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive As opposed to non-nerds of course, who are famously fine with rejection.

In all seriousness, there is no evidence to suggest that being a nerd (read: having nerdy interests) is related to being more emotionally stunted than the average person. You're just perpetuating a bad stereotype.

You might be working with a different definition of "nerd" compared to OP. From wikipedia:

> A nerd is a person seen as over-intellectual, obsessive, introverted, or lacking social skills.

It's not a stereotype that nerds are socially awkward but rather "nerd" is the name for the stereotype.

I was not aware of this definition, thank you.

Finland happiness study revealed the concept of "go first".

Peer to peer networks' rules apply to real life - give more than take and be happy.

D&D is extraordinarily difficult to bootstrap. You ened 4-8 people to commit to being at a certain place at a certain time. If you play online instead, just the coordinated time alone is a monumental effort.

There are a ton of reasons for this. Work, school, coordinating plans with their partner, other commitments , other friends and family and honestly people just being flaky. For D&D this can be particularly bad if you're missing a couple of people who just flaked. Other activities don't have that problem and it can still be an issue.

There was a time when going out and doing things was necessary for social interaction. That's not true anymore. Online is sorta social. It's kinda close enough to scratch that itch for many, particularly because it has none of the coordination and/or travel issues.

But also people just have less free time. Because we have to work so much.

Hobbies in general have becom ea luxury. By that I mean you're spending your time doing something that doesn't earn an income. That's good but an increasingly large number of people don't have that as an option, hence "luxury".

Put another way, the ultimate goal of capitalism is to have all the worker bees constantly creating wealth so Bezos can have $210 billion instead of $215 billion.

The advice “create things to do” is a huge leap for someone with atrophied social skills. Even just attending an event is a terrifying prospect to someone with debilitating social anxiety or low self-esteem.

Instead, a better goal is to become comfortable talking to strangers. If you could do that confidently, anything is possible socially.

Here’s a framework to do that:

1. Adopt a useful attitude.

Before any social situation, consciously choose an attitude that serves you socially: calm, relaxed, enthusiastic, curious, friendly, or simply open. This replaces the useless defaults that keep you stuck: reticent, scared, angry, confused.

Assume people will like you.

2. Set an intention for the interaction.

Decide on one small goal for the interaction. Not “be charming” or “make friends,” rather something achievable.

Example intentions, ranked from easier to more difficult: - To appear friendly (smile, make eye contact) - To greet people - To find out what’s going on around town - To enjoy talking with people - To meet people - To make someone smile - To enjoy getting to know someone - To make someone laugh - To get someone’s contact info - To flirt - To talk to the most attractive person in the room

3. Find comfort in your body.

When you arrive at a social space, take a deep breath. Know that you’re safe inhabiting your body, no matter what anyone thinks of you or says.

4. Set your expectations.

Paralyzed about what to say? Set the bar low. Say your words and expect nothing in return. Confidence in delivering your words will grow. Confidence in social acceptance will follow as you see people respond neutrally and positively.

You might be talking to a grumpy person. It’s okay if you don’t get the response you’d hoped for.

5. Start impossibly small.

If you’re severely out of practice (nervous, anxious, uncertain), set out to initiate an interaction with someone where you accomplish just one objective. Then stop and celebrate that win. Don’t try to combine all of these into one interaction—you will get overwhelmed. Then initiate another interaction on another day and accomplish another objective.

Objective: Say “hello.” If you tend to be quiet, focus on being heard. Find confidence in your voice.

Objective: Say the first thing that comes to mind and see what happens.

Objective: Notice something about a person and comment on it. “Nice shoes!”

Objective: Notice something about the environment and comment on it to someone nearby.

Objective: Ask someone a question for information.

Objective: Ask someone their opinion.

Objective: Ask a question that invites an emotional response rather than a factual one. “What do you love about living here?”

Objective: Join a circle of people in conversation.

6. Make it a habit.

Start today: say one thing to one person. Repeat tomorrow. Then the next day. Within about a week, it becomes second nature. The scariness diminishes. Soon, you’ll actually want to talk to people.

When you learn to talk to strangers, you’re more than halfway to making a friend. Friends will help keep you out of loneliness.

I'm terrible at this because I just can't handle extended lulls in conversations with anyone who isn't a close friend. As a result, I talk too much and that's the end of building a friendship. Sigh...

Hey, but you are aware of it. It's a matter of working on it.

this!

when i am in this mood my mantra becomes, "be an instigator".

> nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive

This "hypersensitivity" and even paralytic fear must be understood as a narcissistic trait (people fail to recognize this, in part, because they have a limited view of what is narcissistic, as something necessarily bombastic, and of course, narcissism tends toward a blindness of one's own narcissism). By recognizing this to be the case, the subtle temptation toward self-pity, or normalization or even valorization of such qualities, can be prevented. Narcissistic traits are antisocial, and so it stands to reason that narcissistic traits impede one's ability to form healthy relationships.

> You are struggling against many aspects of the way we in the developed world/nerd world live.

The liberal consumerist hyperindividualism of our age is an anthropological position that conceives of human beings as atomized units that merely enter into transactional relations with other human beings. "Society" is merely something contractual and utilitarian, and in practice has the flavor of mutual exploitation. In effect, society is reduced to something like a marketplace. This is, of course, totally bogus and destructive. We are intrinsically social animals. Society is a common good, a superordinate good, toward which we have certain general, non-consensual moral obligations and something we need to flourish as human beings.

Because of the bad anthropology the contemporary world is rooted in, we often feel its practices and aims to be meaningless and hollow. We also find ourselves oscillating between the twin errors of collectivism and hyperindividualism. These two extremes are forced onto us by the paradigm of this false anthropology. One looming danger today is that, as the liberal order collapses, we do not know what will replace it. The loudest contenders are undesirable.

> more time-consuming relationship with our families than our parents ever did

That depends. On the one hand, family life was much more robust and lively in many ways than it is today. Parents weren't as careerist then in general. Families were larger, so the abundance of siblings meant you didn't have a lonely childhood at home, and a large pool of potential friends outside of it. Older siblings would assist with younger siblings, and children would participate in domestic duties, so in that sense, parents would not need to be as involved in all aspects of the daily life of the children and the functioning of the household. And in the past, families tended to concentrate more in the local area, so grandparents were typically near children and grandchildren and so on. In other words, a robust family life enables a robust society in general. Social life becomes "thicker" and mutually reinforcing.

The time-consuming element you have in mind is therefore related. All of the responsibility for taking care of aging parents falls on the few children they have or who live nearby. Without siblings or friends, parents step in socially more than they would with their children (or else consign them to the cesspool of social media and internet garbage). There are also cultural factors: parents can become overinvolved or inappropriately involved in some respects, like the proverbial helicopter parent, which itself can be spurred by the collapse of society around them, if not careerist ambitions for one's children.

Which brings us to your main point...

> You have to be the one who creates things to do.

Today, communities often need to be more intentional. If there isn't a community around you'd like to join, you have to be the one who initiates it. It's not guaranteed to function or last, but what's the alternative?

This doesn't "solve" the so-called loneliness epidemic, of course. The proposal here is more modest, namely, if you want people in your life, you have to look for them. Every community or social group needs a reason for its existence. The weakest form is rooted in utility, the second weakest in fun and pleasure. They are transient. The best and more robust kind are to be found in the common pursuit of virtue. In these and through these, we could begin to witness the birth of a healthy society.

> So they sit on social media all day when they're not at work or school. How can we solve this?

The naive solution is to place blame on the people who are influenced by the most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans. Kinda like how the plastic producers will push recycling, knowing they can shift blame for the pollution away from their production of the pollution, because people love blaming. You'll see commenters here telling us that the answer is for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get out, get involved in their communities under their own willpower. These ideas are doomed from the outset.

The real solution is already being enacted in a number of US states and countries[1]: legally restricting access to the poison, rather than blaming the people who are at the mercy of finely honed instruments of behavior modification when they're unable to stop drinking it under their own willpower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...

I don't see how the control and enforcement of "social media age verification" solves for the "people who are unable to stop... under their own willpower." My grandparents are more addicted to the phone than I am. Taking the superlative stance of social media being the "most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans" wouldn't the correct regulation be some sort of threshold of consumption (screen time limits per application), or rehabilitation for those that have crossed a line into psychological addiction? I imagine the easiest, assuming you see "the algorithm" as the problem, would be to ban selective algorithms and force timeline-based feeds or the like.

Laws and regulations are also ”advanced behaviour modification”. That is how they work. Tobacco is clear example of this, almost everybody used to smoke back in the 90’s and 00’s (including me) whereas after years of laws regulatios, taxation, public education, and providing healthcare for addiction, we are at the point where smokin makes you a loser rather than some cool Marlboro dude/dudette. There is very little society can do for grandparents addicted to fb, but we can prevent the same happening to the future elderly.

Limiting at which age you can use the product is just one part of the puzzle. You could also hit a big tax on ad revenue gained via social media to veer people off from ruining their brains. There is a host of others tools as well and I think we will see them implemented more and more. The tech billionaires fight back and rather fund a fascist dictator to power than lose a single cent, but there you go. But I think the Musk’s and the like have constantly stepped over boundaries to the extent that the tide has changed.

The problems occurred when online interaction got mediated by corporations with profit motives that use dark patterns, automated systems and algorithms to extract more revenue from its users.

Most of my real-life friends are people I've first met online, or as a consequence of having met someone online. Those online sites have mostly been run by enthusiasts, driven by some hobby, fandom or other interest. A couple of them have risen highly in popularity and attracted many thousands of users, and also served news and allowed vendors to use their site for interactions with customers.

Those communities that have thrived have made sure that discourse does not get poisoned. They have had active, strong but fair moderators. Many have strict rules against discussing politics or religion, but people have a need to discuss that too sometimes — and being identifiable e.g. between subreddits could put people off from doing that.

Also, where do you draw the line to what is an online community and what is "social media"? I've avoided Facebook and X-twitter, but I know genuine communities exist there too.

This rings untrue. Hacker News is about the most "social media" type of site I use, and I still feel the shift towards isolation others described.

Also, the naive view is to place all the blame for a broad cultural shift on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/TikTok and pretend people can't choose to limit their use. Someone pretending there can only be a single factor to blame for a problem is usually a biased person with a bone to pick. The rhetoric supports your cause, but the US is not going to ban social media for adults any time soon and telling people they're helpless until the government bans social media is unhelpful at best.

Shouldn't we rather just regulate social media instead of forcefully de-anonymizing online communication and restricting access to online community?

I agree this is a collective action problem.

But making children (and adults, because how else can you tell without checking) give their biometrics to companies (and by extension the highest bidder (palantir, paramilitaries, and police)) that helped create and then exacerbated this crisis is like asking the drug dealer association to help folks quit by giving them new exotic chemicals heretofore undiscovered.

You 'win' the war on pollution by making companies actually pay for their externalities, repeat offenders cease to exist, their assets seized, and their executives are jailed, rather than just 'paying fines' for the thousand of corpses they leave in their wake.

Likewise, if social media companies produce informational or social 'pollution' so defined, we can do likewise and insist they defray the cost of the damage. If they are no longer profitable when the cost is not paid by society, then they'll have to learn to innovate again.

the “real solution” wouldn’t involve isolating children in already marginalised minorities, making them lose one of the only sources of community they feel safe in.

But that's the problem: they're NOT safe in those communities.

We've created these unhealthy gardens where young people feel safe, removing any reason for them to engage in the real world. They don't thrive in these places, they slowly withdraw.

If you parents are your abusers, then their 'real world' will be unyieldingly bad no matter what social controls the internet employs.

You have said that 'feeling safe' is 'unhealthy' because it's not 'real'. But constantly feeling and being unsafe, even if it is warranted by circumstance, is worse in every way.

We, as a society, do not support the agency to children to escape horrific circumstances. These online communities are a stop-gap against this active failure.

Ideally, they wouldn't need to escape at all, but that's not the conversation we're having.

No, I have the feeling that “feeling safe” is “unhealthy” because these online communities children get access to are full of predators who wish them harm.

The online communities in question do more damage than good. They encourage isolation and spread social contagion.

We should do more as a society, absolutely! But these places are not “stop gaps” because they’re NOT helping.

Giving over the agency to corporations is no beneficial over all.

Taking something away by force is not the way to encourage someone to do something else. This is carrot or stick mentality. The city added benches and chairs in all the parks to improve the quality of our third spaces, as an example of social infrastructure.

Social infrastructure is great! However, if you have a crack epidemic adding some benches isn't going to change anything.

Are you talking about homeless people or that TikTok is crack?

I've been a remote engineer for about 10 years now, just over 50, enjoy programming but most of my friends have dropped off or gone crazy (trumpers) in recent years, and I never got married.

I recently took a local wheel throwing (pottery class), which was daunting at first, among a class of almost all females, younger, etc, but im 6 months in and literally just interacting with humans is one of the best parts of my week. Hobby is pretty cool too, so completely different than banging code all day.

Sometimes I don't feel like going after days of being alone and literally talking to no one, it puts you in a "zone" for sure, but then I go to the class, and you realize, at least imho, humans are social creatures. It's like food, we need that interaction or we whither and die.

The inability of your friends to have non-political conversations can be a big part of isolation. I follow the “no politics, no religion” rule when I go out and it’s served me well.

You can have political/religious conversations with people who disagree but often it feels like walking in a mine field.

On one hand, I always want to keep an open mind about religion and politics, and I'm always interested in hearing what others are passionate about, even if it's in those topics. That's how I've learned so much of what I have.

If everyone followed the rule of avoiding these topics, I wonder how many people would never hear an opposing opinion, maybe even a more beneficial one, to the one they've grown up with. I think these topics should be encouraged.

That said, the moment you disagree with someone on one of these topics, some people will definitely fly into a small rage, or instantly cut off contact with you, or even slander you to others, or some mix of these.

Ultimately, I think that's fine. For one thing, you have just learned that this is someone you probably don't want in your life anyway, because they can't handle disagreement in a civil way.

And you learned it fairly quickly and at a small cost. Even if they slander you, people whose opinions you'd actually care about will generously take their word with a large dose of salt, especially based on their character, since such a character usually has other tells too.

So my current stance is to just be open to these topics.

Just yesterday, while I was sitting here at the library, someone approached me and asked me to watch his phone while he used the restroom, in case ICE came in and took it. He was joking, but we went into a slight conversation about politics in general, in which we found out that we disagree on certain topics, and he almost took offense at me disagreeing. I was friendly and open to him the whole time, and he was friendly when he left to use the restroom. But when he came back and sat back down, and later left the whole library, he left without even so much as a goodbye or wave. It seems like he just didn't like me anymore because of my disagreement. And that's fine with me. Both would have been fine.

> That said, the moment you disagree with someone on one of these topics, some people will definitely fly into a small rage, or instantly cut off contact with you, or even slander you to others, or some mix of these.

I think this is what changed. I remember being a kid in the 80s, and when my parents had friends over, someone would inevitably bring up Reagan or something, but the discussion would always be polite and graceful, and then people would move on to something else. So many people seem to be incapable of this today. Politics comes up and suddenly the friend group is cut in half and daughters don't talk to fathers anymore. It's wild.

Huh, that's neat. I've suspected that our political fervor is one of those things that we take to be uniquely NOW, of the present moment, but has actually been a staple. (Like how every generation believes its successors to be dumber, less respectful, ...) But, maybe that's not so!

Don’t you care that you made them mad?

Not at all.

First, I didn't express an evil or hateful opinion, or any which could reasonably incite indignation or justified anger.

Second, I was willing to dive into a discussion, he wasn't. He seemed more closed minded, which to me seems to be a sign of emotional immaturity.

Third, we did (implicitly) agree to disagree, which I think is the right, peaceful, mature, and civil course of action when at an impasse.

Fourth, we weren't even at a genuine impasse, but an artificial one he created by simply ending the conversation after finding out that I didn't agree with him. Maybe if he heard my reasons, he might find something he agrees with, or something that tempers his emotinonal reaction?

Why would he ever hear out your reasons? He just wanted to go to the bathroom and you tried to start a debate.

I must have explained it wrong. He was the one who brought up politics, and also asked for my opinion about it during that interaction. He was clearly not in a rush, having come over to my table to ask the favor, and lingered here while mainly sustaining the conversation by himself, while I merely gave short answers to everything he said, partly to let him exit at any time to use the restroom, and partly because I neither expected or particularly desired a conversation, though I was okay with it as long as he wanted to have it.

> follow the “no politics, no religion” rule

These two are a strict no go for me too.

Another thing that worked well for me is to keep discussions very low and quick on topics like personal relationships, work, career and hot button topics like AI, weather, traffic, climate change, house prices, etc. Basically avoid anything that a newspaper would think is worthwhile for frontpage or editorial column.

I go heavy on food, travel, culture, rumors, art, movies, music, design, festivals, holidays, games. You could talk hours on stuff here, just pick an artsy cultural magazine or subreddit and keep up.

Side note, inviting views from both sexes makes for some very interesting short conversations. Both have very very different takes on the same things and therefore won't talk too long. Both being interested in very different things (think dress belts, hair supplements, birth control vs fishing, bourbon and soccer) brings some newness into the conversation.

Seems like everything is a hot button topic these days. Even things like movies get connected to a hot button in one way or another.

> mine field

This is an element of cancel culture, or a culture which indoctrinates to tattle/report one another.

Cutting people off because you disagree politically is new. I remember having friends in different political parties when I was younger. (20 years ago)

The red scare famously effected social groups from the very wealthy to the poorest immigrant. Civil rights before it. Social-political exclusion is not new in the U.S, but how big the “I ignore politics and politics ignores me” group is, is highly variable. In good times, when people are generally happy, political representatives have a fewer differences and the “happily apolitical” group is very large. This aligns with the Clinton-Bush JR era.

The problem is, those eras are uncommon even in the U.S in the broader view of history, and depend entirely on being the right demographic. Such as being a Muslim American in the decade following 9/11. I can assure you, they did not experience the “friends of a different political party” effect at that time.

I had the same experience, but the difference these days seems to be that so many people can't NOT talk about politics. There are certain folk who just find a way to shoehorn it into any conversation. It is really draining.

This is anecdotal, of course.

Yea, it's possible to be very politically enthusiastic and active, but also NOT bring up your favorite (or hated) politician in every damn discussion. We all have that uncle that can't let everyone else enjoy Thanksgiving dinner anymore because he has to make it about Trump or something.

I agree. It got really intense roughly 10 years ago.

This feels like a uniquely American advice. I have had pretty heated, but not damaging, discussions with people on the completely different side of the political spectrum here in Norway. I can't remember a single time I have cut someone out for having a different political opinion.

Maybe the loneliness problem is partly connected to the American political system at this point in time?

Half this country voted for and supports a vile lunatic president hell bent on destroying the U.S. to enrich his personal wealth and power. It's not surprising that over here we Democrats view Republicans as a cancer we want nothing to do with.

It wasn't always this way. In the past Republicans actually had some decency. That went out the window after they elected Trump twice.

I'm the same age as you and most of my friends are remote, on the other side of the country or in different countries, etc, and I maintain contact all the time, for decades. I still have friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, university, and from most of my jobs going back 30 years. I can pick up my phone and call some of my coworkers from 25 years ago without hesitation and we will go for lunch at the next opportune time.

> most of my friends have dropped off or gone crazy

If you find yourself to be the one who is isolated, then I think you need to look inward. My best friends and I share completely polar opposite politics. We have known each other for almost 50 years now. We have had yelling matches over politics, especially during the Pandemic. We have now stopped talking... about politics. We still chat every single day throughout the day. I laugh heartily at least once a day over some extremely offensive joke that one of us sends, usually at each other's expense. But we never, ever talk about politics anymore and we are happier for it.

Maybe you need to rekindle those friendships and see if you can avoid politics. If you can't then I think it's more on you than them and you should reflect on that.

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I‘m a cofounder of a German loneliness startup. My core insight is that loneliness often stems from a badly adjusted internal social threat function ( f(social event)=perceived threat ).

This function runs subconsciously all day long. From talking to strangers to reaching out to a friend, the lonely mind is much more aware of negative outcomes, so your mind protects you by telling you things like „I don’t talk to strangers because I would annoy them“ or „I don’t reach out to that friend because he’s probably busy“. And that makes it much much harder for lonely people to maintain a healthy social life.

As for the fix, you can try to set the social event up in a way that has less room for perceived threat. Think of third places, regularly scheduled meetings, etc. Or you can work on the function itself (=your thinking patterns). If you look at research on loneliness interventions, working on this function is the most effective way to help individuals overcome persistent loneliness.

Now the sad thing is that people don’t like to hear that the most effective way to combat loneliness is to work on their own perceptions, which makes the sales pitch rather challenging.

You're probably far ahead of me on this topic, but as an immigrant to Germany for some years now, living with a German partner, I'm convinced that Germany (at least, Bavaria) has its own specific cultural norms that makes socialising far more challenging than is my experience in other countries. I can't explain why, but I observe a more insular (i.e. family- and existing-close-circle-focused) attitude, and also a significant level of difficulty/inflexibility regarding scheduling social events.

For example, I often find it quicker and easier to agree the timing and details of weekend trips to meet up with friends in other countries, involving one or both sides traveling significantly to meet, than arranging a single evening to meet for dinner with a single existing German colleague or friend living nearby. Of course these people have lives and arrangements I must fit in with, but I'm convinced that the examples I'm thinking of do not have such overwhelmingly busy schedules as to explain the observation.

This might sound like a trivial observation, but I suspect that the overall effect, if you scale even a small fraction of this behaviour across a whole country, could be huge.

As a German, I very much share those observations, and it seems to be underdiscussed and not that apparent to most people here.

The German social scheduling culture can definitely be a viscous circle, where everyone having to plan their calendar in advance forces everyone else to plan even further in advance if they want to have a chance to meet up.

I do think it's probably felt the strongest for adults between ~18-35, where your circle of friends spreads out across the country/surrounding cities/world, and any get together necessitates travel. After that, when people settle down (potentially have children) they usually form new circles of friends that are more local again with more opportunities for spontaneous meetings.

So far, the only solution I know is to set a date and stick with it. Trying to find a solution that meets everybody's calendar is rarely worth the effort. First, nobody has time; later, they have other appointments, so in the end it seems to be a matter of priority.

Set your date and stick to it. If people deem your topic relevant, they will arrange to participate.

I'm extremely skeptical of financial solutions to this problem.

One of the most fundamental reasons for my own personal loneliness is that, in many of the connections I've made, they simply do not feel sincere, genuine, authentic, and simply because the other person clearly has a different motivation for "caring" about me than actually caring about me.

For example, the churchgoers I've met have always felt like they were only spending time with me to get me to become a member of their church. They were eager to throw money at me if I lost my job, or offer to help me move, but never wanted to get coffee outside church hours.

Therapists are another example, obviously financially incentivized to talk to me. There are definitely some who care simply because it's part of their personality, but that still says nothing about me and any connection they have with me.

And I shared a story elsewhere here of a priest who I had literally just met minutes before, and who actually went in for a hug the moment I mentioned having a hard time with something, as if this random hug from a complete stranger meant anything other than him following a virtue signalling script.

No, I am convinced that the solution must be free, it must be volunteers doing it without anyone knowing about it, without the belief that they're earning brownie points from God or gaining a potential member of some organization, and without getting paid or rewarded for it, except for the reward of having a new and worthwhile friendship with the lonely person.

I say this with the best of intentions: that cynicism of yours will keep you lonely

Not at all. In fact, once I learned to raise my standards for friendship, I now have significantly higher quality ones.

I have a small handful of people who I talk to regularly, who I genuinely listen to, and who genuinely listen to me, who genuinely enjoy my company, and whose company I genuinely enjoy, whether in small talk or deep conversations, serious topics or lighthearted fun.

These people give me by far the most joy in my life out of any relationships I've ever had before. And it's because we worked toward it the right way, and built our way up to it, finding common interests and building a real, organic connection from them.

It's a little like being invited to things out of pity, by people who know that you don't have any friends and struggle socially: It's nice, and I do feel their kindness from the gesture. But in the end, I only feel more isolated. I want people to hang out because they enjoy it, not out of charity. The social connection just isn't there, there's no sense of belonging, quite the opposite.

> I want people to hang out because they enjoy it, not out of charity

Maybe think about how you can behave so they can enjoy hanging out with you? Make it easy for them, that way you'll believe it :)

That's the next part of the problem: Masking. If I'm only performing so that other people like me, again I am not actually connecting with them. If I don't care about football but everyone else does, we are not actually sharing anything if I force myself to talk about football. I feel just as rejected and distant as before. And if I was on the other end, I would also not want that, for people to just twist themselves into a shape that suits me, right?

What I'm looking for, what I desire is mutuality. A space where I'm not in debt for just being there, don't have to force myself to "pay back" other's presence.

Exactly. We want to be our authentic selves, be appreciated for it, find people who find value in what we offer, and find reciprocation. Which excludes people spending time with you out of pity, and excludes people faking enjoyment or you faking it either.

Sounds like a difficult situation, and I think I can relate - I hope for you that you can find some people who you actually enjoy hanging out with and who appreciate you for who you are. We all have our little quirks, and part of a good relationship is to graciously "overlook" them. That is not twisting yourself, it's accommodating your counterpart. For personal stuff, it often helps me to get out of my head to redirect the thoughts from "what do I want" to "what do they want and how can I give it to them". Once I started considering others wants more, i also noticed more when they were gracious towards me, which, I think, made me a bit less of an ungrateful dipshit and generally easier to be around. Wish you all the best!

Either I am misunderstanding or you replied to the exact opposite of my post.

The skew of your reply seems to be "Don't be so demanding of other people, be more accomodating, give them a break and realize how much they're doing for you".

My whole point was that I do not expect people to put on an act, a show or anything for me, that I want them to be at ease and natural around me without forcing themselves. I do not want them to do anything for me. And I myself wish only to be taken as I am, without having to "pay", to extend, to do something for them, in the same way.

Perhaps I'm projecting the ghost of past conversations onto this one, but it feels like you're telling me I'm acting entitled by not wanting to pay a return for what I'm being offered. I do not value people forcing themselves to entertain me, and neither do I wish to force myself to entertain them in return. I simply do not *want* to participate in such transactional relationships. But people like you come around and "perform for me" without my asking or consent and then call me entitled for rejecting the trade. Does your kind not like being at ease? Do you give gifts only because you expect that they'll be returned? That's not the life for me.

Im curious if you ever genuinely show care for anyone else expecting nothing in return? Why do they have to do it first?

This seems like an important insight. The other top comments are about what individuals can do to improve their situation. That's absolutely valuable advice, but is at its core a solution of the form of "this wouldn't be a problem if only everyone would just...", which is never actually a solution.

What you're describing here is an answer to the question "why aren't people 'just' being more social".

Certainly too, social media has played a big hand in this, but for many people, myself included, these activities feel high-risk, with a low probability of reward. Regardless of the correctness of the perceptions that have led to this feeling, the feeling exists and it is becoming more and more pervasive across society. And, like most problems centered on feelings, "have you tried not feeling that way?" is rarely, though not never, effective.

I actually have an interesting story here. For a couple of years I found a third place for myself in VRChat. It was great, I made friends, I spent time socializing for its own sake on a daily basis for hours. But something changed over time. I'll hop on now, look at each person on my friends list, look at private and public rooms I can join, and instead of being able to just jump in, the same feelings of "this is high-risk" that hold me back IRL result in me closing the game after ten minutes or so.

So what exactly happened? My theory is that, being a completely new "kind" of space, my brain didn't see the choices as "social" in the same way as IRL. But over time it relearned the same lessons in this new context, driving me away from social interaction.

Why? What are the unconscious lessons I learned, and why did I learn them? What have I unintentionally internalized that turned an enjoyable, effective, low-stakes virtual third place into an emotional slog that incentivizes self isolation in the same way IRL socializing does?

Isn't it cheating if you have a cofounder in a loneliness startup? :)

It's excellent that you're working on loneliness! Somehow. What is it your startup actually does?

as a fellow german, is there somewhere we can find your company / product? i'd be interested in checking that out.

I wouldn't want to post it unless GP wants that, but it's discoverable via their digital footprint for those willing to put in the effort.

Props to the detective work! Might need to be more careful about reusing usernames haha

Sure! It’s a mobile app called platoniq. You can learn more about it here https://platoniq.health

We have a free scholarship option if you can’t afford the course. Our short term plan is to cooperate with (German) health insurance companies so there will be no costs on your part.

Do you have any references on loneliness interventions? Very interested.

Here’s a highly relevant, recently published paper:

Lasgaard M, Qualter P, Løvschall C, et al. Are loneliness interventions effective for reducing loneliness? A meta-analytic review of 280 studies. Am Psychol. Published online October 23, 2025. doi:10.1037/amp0001578

If you know German, you might be interested in the two books on loneliness published by Noëmi Seewer and Tobias Krieger.

Thanks!

Intentionally choose community and the effort it takes to build and cultivate it [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. People are work, but you cannot live without community [6].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250212233145/https://www.hhs.g...

[1] https://thepeoplescommunity.substack.com/

[3] https://www.tiktok.com/@amandalitman/video/75927501854034854...

[4] https://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/a-survivalist-on-why-you-s...

[5] https://boingboing.net/2008/07/13/postapocalypse-witho.html

[6] How A Decline In Churchgoing Led To A Rise In ‘Deaths Of Despair’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408406 - December 2025 (2 comments)

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I wish you peace, warmth, and that you find your people. It was, and continues to be, hard work, but I found mine.

Why, you ask? Because your comment seemed like you had read only the title and nothing else I wrote here, and wanted to contribute off the cuff links you had stored up. And you barely even bothered to summarize any of what they contain. I've been reading this book by Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy ever since you linked it, and it's definitely got some great insights into it, that mirror my own thoughts and struggles with this. But in your comment, it felt like a mere afterthought. And maybe that's fine, maybe that's fair, you're a busy guy and have your own stuff to do. It's not against the rules or general moral code to write a drive by comment. But it just feels like a low effort comment. Which is why I wanted to downvote it. And now that it's surfaced higher than mine, it just feels like pouring lemon juice on a papercut.

Are you serious right now? I don't mean this in an insulting way at all, but I can see why you're dealing with loneliness. Take some time to self reflect and figure out why you lashed out here(seriously, really think about it or show some friends this dialogue without context and ask what they think, in person). Like the commenter, I hope you find you find your community, but you are far from the path. Your attitude is fixable, nobody is playing down the problems here and instead people who were in your shoes empathetically showed you a way out, but you need some serious self reflection.

In case it's not clear, original replier's comment here is absolutely correct and it doesn't necessarily have to be in a religious pretext (re: the church article), that's just a palpable example for most people. Neighbors, community centers, hobbies, etc-- these all require work on everybody's end and you must commit to these relationships to create a semblance of something to revolve your life around in lieu of drowning in loneliness.

For sure, my church citation wasn't about religion specifically, but that the decline in third spaces in general and a lack of community can be directly connected to early deaths and deaths of despair.

That's right.

Church does not have to be a church of faith, it can well be a church of reason.

What matters is that people with shared values get to spend time together on a regular basis without getting into status games that might eventually show up no matter what the church.

I've tried a few types of churches of reason and they are pretty sad, honestly. Hard core, dedicated, non-religious person here, so I'm not saying that people should go to Church, but I've never seen anything approximating a Church of Reason that would have satisfied my (admittedly minimal) social desires.

I hear you. For me things that have worked are those that are built around a hobby -- travelling to the wooded hills, astronomy, music recitals, caring for strays / abandoned pets.

Try https://www.sundayassembly.org/

Interesting suggestion! Thanks!

I agree!

I wrote that comment back when he had only one or two links, and this post had 4 comments anod 2 points. I stand by what I said: I wish I could have downvoted it for being a low effort drive by comment.

To be blunt: what you said was completely out of line. You were mad that he wasn't responding to your other comment (why wasn't it in the OP if you wanted people to read that stuff before responding?). You then got mad that his comment was voted higher than yours (again, putting all that in the OP would've fixed that, not to mention complaining about vote counts is straight up childish).

Just take the L man. You lashed out for no good reason, the person you responded had a hell of a lot more grace and tact than you showed this entire exchange, just learn from it and move on.

Agree to disagree. And as soon as I get to 500, I'm going to downvote his comment on principle alone, even if it happens next week. I'm not mad, and it's not about anything other than acting on what I believe to be right.

Argh! I can finally downvote, but not that comment, since it's a direct reply to me.

Alas, irony emerges victorious.

You asked how to solve the loneliness epidemic. I provided citations and recommendations. Are you asking me how to be the person you need to be to make bids for friendship and connectivity to establish community? And where to find people you can have an opportunity to make connections with? I can do that too.

> I'm trying to reach those people who feel the way I feel have no way of connecting with anyone, or at least feel that they don't. Do you have any new ideas of how to achieve this?

Go out and find people looking for other people. Volunteer and find events and gatherings scoped to building connections between people. Third spaces are in decline [1] [2], or in some places, non existent. This will be work. It will not be easy. You will need to work on managing the feelings of rejection and shallow people not genuinely interested in you or building a friendship (boundaries are important in this regard; have them, communicate them, and enforce them). Success is not assured. But your only choices are to try or not.

From your comment:

> I also had it hammered into me as a kid that nobody wants me around, nobody could ever love me, I'm a failure, a burden, a creep, a weirdo, and nothing but a bothersome nuisance that nobody would ever want to spend 30 seconds alone with. I'm trying to reject these thoughts, but it's difficult when you have nobody to talk to. It's like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I wonder how many people have the same issue. I've made a few friends in person, but I rarely get to see them.

In regards to this you commented, I highly recommend therapy if you can access it. It will help. This is an unnecessary burden to be carrying through adult life, and a professional might help unburden you of these feelings. The healthier you are emotionally, the easier it will be to create and maintain interpersonal relationships.

Does all of this suck? Oh yes, certainly. But we play the hand we're dealt to the best of our ability. Good luck, in as genuine terms as I can communicate in text. If you feel like I can provide more value with more questions you might have, I will do my best to help.

[1] Closure of ‘Third Places’? Exploring Potential Consequences for Collective Health and Wellbeing - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6934089/

[2] Vox: If you want to belong, find a third place - https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24119312/how-to-find-a-thi... | https://archive.today/TYDCG - May 7th, 2024

(tangentially, I recommend replacing "idiot who doesn't understand anything" with something more like "I am early in my journey to understand, but I look forward to the experience"; love yourself first, we are all learning and sharing for the portion of the timeline we share, and it is okay to not know if we continue to want and try to learn)

I agree you (OP) must work on developing a positive view of yourself. Maybe therapy. Don't overlook clergy even if you're not religious. Religion is as much about fellowship and how to live a fulfilling life as it is about worship. Some churches (e.g. unitarian) are quite inclusive and are much more spiritual than dogmatic.

But you will find it much harder to attract friendships if you come across as needy or wanting to unburden a lifetime of problems on your new prospective friend. Not to say a longtime friend can't eventually handle some of this, but it's not a good way to start off.

I would say avoid groups that are focused on personal success or networking. These tend to be full of people who are looking for an angle or benefit for themselves, not people genuinely trying to develop friendships and connections with a community.

I'm a highly secular person and I see people constantly say things like "spiritual but not religious/dogmatic" and I cannot figure out what that is supposed to mean. What does it mean?

>In regards to this you commented, I highly recommend therapy if you can access it. It will help. This is an unnecessary burden to be carrying through adult life, and a professional might help unburden you of these feelings.

I'm not the GP, but I have the same experience to them. I have been in therapy and on psychotropic medication my entire adult life, that's 2.5 decades. I'd love to know when exactly the "unburdening of these feelings" happens.

It might never happen for some, and that is terribly unfortunate (but not a reason to not make the attempt). I have no solution for that part of the human condition besides sympathy for bad luck.

I'd like to assert here that "community" can exist online as well. It's not just people staying indoors; it's about how they interact with what others write and whether they even care that another person wrote it. It's about things like coming to recognize usernames and build trust.

Of course, LLM generated content threatens that, so things have gotten worse.

A poor facsimile of community perhaps, at best

Technologists are not going to solve this with a startup, it requires organized political and social movements, then the legislation and re-allocation of public funds for the public's good.

Quoting from elsewhere in this thread: "I have made big inroads solving my old-age isolation with AI. Personally, I prefer Claude."

The people who most exacerbated this epidemic were forged here in this culture and were rewarded with trillions in investment to step between every social interaction, to monetize our connections, to maximize our 'engagement' and capitalize on the damage they caused. They will not stop until there are laws and enforcement mechanisms that address these perverse incentives.

Building American cities around the whims of car manufacturers is, to my mind, as bad as any social media. We've foreclosed casual connection in so many ways, and social media stepped into that gap and wrenched as hard as it could. Lower real wage growth also matters, free time and funds are required for a full social calendar.

It's multifaceted, but none of these issues can be solved without real political power that counters the whims of capital, venture or otherwise.

> Building American cities around the whims of car manufacturers is, to my mind, as bad as any social media.

I think your framing of history is wrong. Trains, and later cars were extraordinarily convenient compared to former methods of travel. We adapted infrastructure to maximize this convenience, not to profit companies. In fact, it's the other way around: companies profited off the demand for convenience they provided.

The same could be said for social media. People wanted small, low-risk interactions with other people over the internet. Companies capitalized on this, and realized that increasing dopamine is the only way to increase capital.

> it requires organized political and social movements, then the legislation and re-allocation of public funds for the public's good

I would reverse the first two, or maybe even remove the "political movement" part. Why is it necessary? It always starts with (a) one person taking concrete action on some principle, then (b) one small group of people joining that person on principle, then (c) this turning into a movement on principle and snowballing momentum until the change is exponentially impactful on society. Later, when the public agrees it's a good thing, they may choose to publicly fund it. Only a-c are necessary for it to make a meaningful impact.

Car companies funded highway lobbies and conspired to dismantle public transportation options like street cars see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Personally, I liked Maya from Sesame for empathic conversations: https://app.sesame.com

However, I am not sure this is actually a solution to the (root) problem.

I don't have a full answer, but a couple thoughts:

1. Volunteer. Somewhere, anywhere, for a good cause, for a selfish cause. Somebody will be happy to see you.

2. Stop trolling ourselves. As far as I can tell, all of the mass social media is trending sharply towards being a 100% troll mill. The things people say on social media do not reflect genuine beliefs of any significant percentage of the population, but if we continue to use social media this way, it will.

Disengage from all of the trolls, including and especially the ones on your "own side".

> the mass social media is trending sharply towards being a 100% troll mill

I agree. It's one reason I still come to HN and it's one of the few places I bother to comment (and the only place with more than a few dozen users). The moderation and community culture against trolling makes it a generally positive experience. I do still need breaks sometimes, though, for a few months at a time.

I'd love an online community where everyone was having discussions only in good faith. Zero trolling. I can dream.

> I'd love an online community where everyone was having discussions only in good faith.

That's already readily available outside. The whole appeal of online 'communities' is that it is not that.

The appeal of an online community is having members who participate in bad faith? That's an angle I hadn't expected.

Sure. Outside already satisfies good faith discussion. There is nothing gained in duplicating the exact same thing online. Use the right tool for the job, as they say. Online discussion is a compelling in its own right because you can stop being you and take on someone else's persona to try and discuss from their vantage point. This gives opportunity to understand another side of the story in an environment that provides the necessary feedback to validate that you actually understand another side. Too often people think they understand other angles, but one will also want validation, which online discussion provides. More often than not you'll realize that you actually didn't understand it at all, so it is a valuable exercise.

Thank you for explaining your position. I don't know if I would have described that as bad faith, more like good-faith-in-disguise, but I understand what you are getting at.

> Thank you for explaining your position.

We're on the internet. Is it my position?

> I don't know if I would have described that as bad faith, more like good-faith-in-disguise

It is good faith from the author's perspective, but bad faith/trolling from the reader's perspective. It, as taken from an expectation of replication of what is found outside, is deceptive. There, of course, can be no such thing as bad faith/trolling if you remove trying to see it as a reflection of outside.

So, as the earlier comments are taken from the reader's perspective, it is what is labelled bad faith. But I too get what you're saying.

I would also argue that even people who I like a lot and have known for many years can be very different "people" online than in person. It's sometimes shocking the dichotomy. I try to remind myself and others to ignore some of the online weirdness and focus on the in person interaction.

And volunteering works not just because it's "good", but because it gives you a role where your presence matters immediately

> Stop trolling ourselves

This is so tough, though, because the things happening in the world really, genuinely, do matter and its very hard to realize that our passive emotional reaction to them is not meaningful, probably actively bad for us. If I could snap my fingers and do one thing, I'd obliterate social media from the face of the earth.

> The things people say on social media do not reflect genuine beliefs of any significant percentage of the population

The social media trolls are running the government. This can't be a serious take in 2026.

Two thoughts:

1. Almost every policy of the current US administration is deeply unpopular.

2. The vast majority of social media users do not comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

As far as the troll mills go everyone forgot the adage from the olden days "don't feed the trolls".

Now everyone feeds the trolls.

Forget it Jake, it's engagement bait. - Chinatown (1974)

Bad incentives will ruin anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m7hf5WUs8o

Whatever else you think of Bluesky, it's a place where trolling and doomerism are rejected. The nuclear block (and a culture of block, don't engage) does wonders for denying actual trolls an audience, and secondarily for permitting people to do the virtual equivalent of walking away from someone who's behaving badly. In particular, doomerism about Trump is minimized there the same way.

There's a fine line between "rejecting doomerism" and "putting your fingers in your ears and going 'lalala'" though, and it's important not to cross it.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if we're just shooting the messenger in placing the blame on social media.

Bluesky is full of people angry and screaming about Trump. In my feed, at least, though, the "it's all fascism, we're doomed" posters are getting blocked. It's an angry call to action that survives. They're consciously recognizing the pessimism is counterproductive and blocking.

I once shard a flat/apartment with a female social butterfly. She once gave me some great advice, which is to NEVER turn down an invitation.

Going out and trying to be comfortable in non-ideal situations (i.e. you know hardly anyone there) is a skill you can learn. I often think it's probably like sales cold calling. After a while you develop calluses.

I see this is still front-page news.

There’s really two main ingredients to loneliness:

1) We don’t meet others in a way that sparks relationships.

2) We have personal issues that interfere with our ability to have relationships.

#1 is fairly straightforward. We have the ability to make friends; but lack the opportunity. If we can meet and interact with others, we’ll make friends, and mitigate our isolation. We need to “get out more.” We can join organizations, go places, right-swipe on apps, and we’ll eventually break our isolation. I’ve found that a key is to get together with others, over shared interests or goals.

#2 is a different beast. We need to work on ourselves, first and foremost. We may often need help, like therapy or guided self-help. Usually, there’s a lot of pretty humbling work involved. If we don’t treat the root cause (our own issues), then we can meet as many people as possible, and we’ll still be lonely.

Lots of potential reasons for our problems. Could be trauma, neurodivergence, addiction, mental health problems, personal insecurity, or simply lack of experience. Often, a combination of these.

The good news is, is that if we get serious about treating our own issues, we will absolutely end the isolation. Almost every treatment involves a lot of interaction with others, and relationship-building.

For myself, I was definitely in the #2 category. I’m “on the spectrum,” and I had an addiction problem. Intervention was required, and I needed to stop running, turn around, and face my demons. I needed to learn to ask for, and, even more importantly, accept, help. I had to develop a taste for crow and humble pie. Doing this, changed everything.

That was 45 years ago, when I was 18. The road has been anything but smooth, but it’s always been onward and upward. Today, I have close relationships all over the world, with an enormous variety of people, and have done work that affects thousands of lives in a positive manner.

I’ve also found that helping others to deal with their own issues has been effective.

From my perspective and the people I'm trying to reach out to, they basically need someone to help them see that they are cared about and valued, someone to ask them how their day is over coffee with no strings attached, and not because they're trying to earn brownie points with God, or trying to increase their internal virtue signal, but because they genuinely care about the other person.

Your #1 is great for after this connection with another human being has been made. Your #2 is why it hasn't been made yet. I'm trying to find solutions for the middle, to solve #2 for random strangers on the street, in order to get them both able and motivated to do #1. Those strangers are people who sit alone at home, all day, every day, and you only see them on the way to the grocery store and back.

I'm glad you got the help you needed to bootstrap your ability to find and form meaningful relationships. If only there was a reproducible way to help countless others get past that initial hump, and begin the same process. I believe it must be possible somehow.

I've been trying my surveys in Chicago as a first step. I need to do more, though, somehow. Now that I'm known as the "sign guy" by many people who pass me by every time I'm there, I think I can get more creative than surveys, and try signs that are more interactive to reach out to those people. I've been brainstorming throughout this thread on a few different ways to do this. If you or anyone has concrete ideas, I'd be very glad to hear it.

The “#1.5,” is that we have often developed “loneliness-inducing habits,” that need to be broken. We don’t necessarily have any real “issues,” other than we’ve just gotten used to “hanging out with ourselves.”

Breaking habits isn’t easy. It’s nearly impossible, if we have a compulsive disorder, but, then, we’d be #2.

The key to anything is willingness. If we don’t actually want to do something, then it ain’t happening.

But there’s a hell of a lot more #2, than folks are willing to admit.

Not for everyone but if you can, get a dog. Dogs are icebreakers. People like to meet a cute dog. They won't know your name at first but you will be "Fido's Dad" or "Dave's Mom". Other dog owners will greet you and so long as your dogs don't hate each other you already have something in common.

A dog gives you a reason to be wherever you want to be - take a walk around the neighborhood or to the park. You're not a rando taking a walk for mysterious and possible nefarious purposes, you're walking the dog.

But for for goodness sake, pick up after the pooch. If you can wipe your own arse you can pick up a dog turd with a plastic bag.

Anecdotally, I've had a lot of people in my life recede after getting pets. They're an excellent excuse to say no to things that you might otherwise do, because you need to get home and take care of the pet or you can't find a sitter to go on a trip etc.

Not generalizing to all people, but I think for some a pet can reinforce anti-social tendencies.

Dogs are a bit like having kids, if you embrace it. They make it tougher to do extended trips (e.g. foreign countries), but you can develop an entire social network through them. Doing dog-related trips is a new world of opportunities. I did a three night stay across the state with a bunch of my dog park friends a few years ago. Hikes with the dogs during the day, beer and board games every evening.

I have an older neighbor who just absolutely loves dogs. He sits by his window all day long and runs outside every time a dog comes by to give them a treat. On hot days he has bowls filled with ice water and a kiddy pool for them to splash in.

I lived here almost 6 years before doing much more than a smile and nod to him, but my next door neighbors with a dog befriended him almost as soon as they moved in.

It wasn't until our son started walking and would stop and try and play in the dog water that we ever really talked to him.

> You're not a rando taking a walk for mysterious and possible nefarious purposes

Good god, where do you live where people think like that?

I take it you’ve never been on the NextDoor app or any neighborhood Facebook Groups…

The irony is they're the weirdos

But that's like befriending others through the kids. Those usually are very shallow relationships. If they suddenly stop seeing you they wouldn't even check if you are OK or what happened. I guess it's better than nothing but that's not for me.

Having many shallow relationships is the first (well, second) step towards having a few deeper ones. You can't befriend people you never meet, and people find it extremely offputting for someone they don't know to immediately try to be their best friend.

I've never, ever seen a shallow friendship turn into a deep friendship. OTOH you might meet someone to date.

Plenty of my former coworkers have evolved into lifelong substantial friendships.

What started with smalltalk evolved into conversations over lunch which then afforded after work socializing which then led to actively scheduling time for shared interests. All of those provided ample opportunity to learn almost everything about that person and open the door to a deep friendship when mutually desired.

Have you never made a deep friendship? How else would anybody make deep friendships? First you do things that let you meet people, then you make acquaintances, then you make setting-specific friends (work friends, gym buddies, etc), then you start inviting/being invited to do things that aren't based around that shared setting, and then you have friendships.

Either that or your definition of deep friendship is substantially off.

Most of my deep friendships were through friends and family. A handful at work/school. And it is the same way for most people I know. But I'm not American, so that's that.

Making friends through work and school are pretty much exactly what I described. You go to a place with people, you meet a lot of people, and some of the shallow acquaintances end up becoming long term friends.

>>>>>>> "Not for everyone but if you can, get a dog."

Your original comment.

The key is: have a conversation starter.

It can be any other activity that requires more than one person. For example I started going to dance classes with my partner in november and what was just awkward "hello there" interactions before the holidays when we had to swap dance partners is now a bit more comfortable and we exchange a bit much and even have a chit chat after class at the door. It is waaaaaay too early to know if it will create new long term friends but the dynamic is here and after just a few weeks I can already spot the people I have absolutely no wish to know more about and those that I feel natural chatting with.

You seem extremely judgemental and narrow in your view of the world. This is probably why you have difficulty forming deep friendships without the social proof of family.

As a counter example, I've made some of the best friends of my life through walking my dog at the local dog park over the last decade. Seeing how people are dedicated to and treat their dogs gives me a great insight into their personalities.

Really? Growing up almost all of my parents best friends were the parents of my best friends. This is a common story among my current group of friends.

> You're not a rando taking a walk for mysterious and possible nefarious purposes

It's a little counterintuitive, but I find walking around with a camera has this effect too (depending on where you're pointing it of course).

> get a dog

I briefly considered it but I don't want to be the asshole. I would put any pet in exact position I am myself trying to avoid - stuck in home, alone for long periods of time.

The older people get the more disposable they are viewed as by society.

When you are younger, you belong in school. When you get older, you belong at work.

If you fall out of any of these social structures its extremely difficult to find your way back in.

I was already pretty disconnected from society and people in general when my divorce hit and now I am completely untethered from any kind of community. Living is miserable I hate my life and I do not want to exist like this anymore.

None of the solutions people provide are easy or functional. "Go meet people" is the most vague, unhelpful bullshit ever.

I think the reality is some people, no matter how intelligent, caring or otherwise full of empathy they may be are just "too far gone" for anyone to have the initiative or concern to care about us. The world is so corroded and socially poisoned that any kind of meaningful effort in this kind of thing is pointless. Anybody with time or money is busy making money.

You can't solve the epidemic because it is a byproduct of multiple irreparably broken systems. People will continue to fall through the cracks and it will get worse. I don't know what happens after that but we'll probably all be dead.

I know a lot of very old people who do charity work, and will continue until they fall over or until they just physically can't anymore.

Younger people are at school, a very social institution. After school they do sports or hobby, usually a very social activity. When it's their birthday, a party is organized.

When you are older, you have plenty of social interaction at work.

One of our colleagues is in a divorce. She's often miserable but gets a lot of support from her colleagues, she's invited at every activity, gets emotional support etc.

I do understand what you are trying to say though!

I'm not sure what country you live in, maybe people there are not very social... is there a possibility to move? Sometimes such event gives a totally different perspective on the world.

This is something that I care deeply about and have put a lot of thought into. I can only speak to what I think needs to be done in America.

Public transportation.

Removing or heavily rolling back zoning laws.

Government investment in child care.

Nature takes the path of least resistance. If we want people to actually meet people and have the energy to make meaningful connections, the government has to set up the infrastructure to make it possible.

I’m going to gloss over Europe because I went there for the first time, and it blew my mind.

People were at the park at 4 pm! I live in a city and hardly see people outside at 4. They have the time to go to these 3rd places.

People were visiting friends with kids, which blew my mind because everyone I know who has had a child instantly has dropped off the grid socially. I understand why, but we need to make it easier for those children and parents to continue to have social interaction.

In my hometown, everything is so spread out that visiting a friend could be a 30-min drive. I was conditioned to believe that isn’t a lot, but at the end of a workday, who has the energy? Personally, I think public transportation would help that also create a lot more interactions with strangers to maybe create new friendships.

Also, zoning laws would help that. If everything there is to do is 40 min away, it adds so much resistance that it’s not worth it for most people. If every neighborhood had a pub or restaurant, it would add a lot of meeting points for your neighbors and will create a lot more spontaneous, “let’s invite this stranger to eat with us.”

Lastly, we have to work less. This is the toughest to chew. I’m fully in the office now, but when I was hybrid, it was so much easier to see friends because I had some ownership of my time. We need to have the energy to be social.

I have a lot of friends but don’t have the time or energy to see them so I have felt lonely for the past couple of years.

I think it’s true walkable communities like Europe kinda feels like college, everyone is busy and have their own life but hanging out is so accessible that it’s a matter of why not hang out compared to why hang out

A large number of these things did not exist when we had a lot less isolation, and a stronger social connection.

You dont need public transportation if you have a strong community proximal to you.

You dont need government childcare if You have teenagers (inexpensive babysitters) or family members to do it.

Nature takes the path of least resistance. I would suggestion this is reductionistic. People take the past of high certainty and higher rewards (albeit favoring the former)

If people _knew_ they would have a good time if they showed up at an event, they likely would do it.

Parents need reliable childcare. A teenager or aging parents can't fill this gap reliably. I need somebody to watch the kids most days from 8 until 4. A high schooler won't be able to do this. My in-laws who live 1.5 hours away and have mobility issues (plus their own lives) can't always do that.

I agree we need strong community in close proximity, but still people need to travel to destinations a few miles from their houses sometimes. Biking is a great (this is my primary form of transportation) but even I know biking and walking cannot fill every transportation need. We need the trifecta of biking/walking/transit to ween ourselves off of cars and develop denser communities with more people to interact with in our day-to-day lives.

> can't fill this gap reliably

Except they did... for centuries ?? How can we claim that relying on community and a network of people is unreliable when it was the defacto solution for as long as we've existed?

Historically, people wouldn't even move out of the village, never mind across the continent. So it was a bit easier to get the kids to the grannies.

Many answers address the question of "how to build community." I like those responses! I also want to contribute to the discussion with an emotional intelligence response. The theory is that "loneliness" can be a symptom of underlying internal factors.

While it is true that loneliness can arise from a lack of community, people, and related factors, for some people, the problem stems from not knowing how to be alone. At its core, the question becomes, "Am I externalizing my world, or internalizing my world?" When you externalize your world, you require something external. We are social creatures, and I do believe we need other people. I'm only suggesting that sometimes people need to look internally first.

Personal anecdote: No amount of community would have helped me feel like I wasn't alone, because I needed the world around me to provide some sense of my self-worth. It felt counterintuitive, but for me, I had to learn to be alone. Only then could I feel like I wasn't alone. It all came down to attachment theory and self-worth.

Could you give some pointers re: Internal sense of self-worth, especially as relating to attachment theory? How did you get better?

Thanks for asking! Until I learned to be alone without feeling abandoned by myself, no amount of connection could make me feel less lonely. Here is a rough outline of topics and how I feel they relate.

In attachment terms, loneliness can be a signal that we haven't yet internalized a stable sense of safety and worth. I wasn't missing others, I was missing an internal relationship with myself.

I was anxious even with others, because safety, worth, and regulation were outsourced to my relationships. I needed others to constantly help me feel those things. That was me externalizing my self worth.

I was avoidant with myself, because the connection with myself felt unsafe or unfamiliar. I leaned on things, status, money, in order to avoid looking deep within my heart. In the end, I had to do a lot of internal work. I had to learn that I matter even when no one is affirming me. Leaning on those <things> was self-abandonment in disguise. I would think, "If only I just had a little more knowledge I could solve this." We generally don't solve heart problems with our head.

Loneliness eased when I stopped trying to get my sense of self from the external world. I had to become someone that I could be with. Someone I didn't need to escape from.

How I accomplished it was not a short journey, but in summary it looked like:

1) Knowing my past, tolerating the discomfort, and sitting in it without judgement. I did this with a therapist.

2) Having a safe individual who always nurtured me, and taught me how to be OK with my big feelings. This was with an emotional intelligence coach. I felt the loneliness ease greatly once I could affirm myself.

3) Now that I had the knowledge to know my heart and my worth, I could then create connections outside of myself. I see this like, having the book knowledge, but now being able to learn how true it was experientially. This led to meeting my best friend and partner in this life. Having someone close to co-regulate, when I need support, and providing that in return, has been the final piece of the puzzle.

I firmly believe that most people need someone to co-regulate with. We can't white-knuckle our way to knowing ourselves better, but boy did I try!

Thanks again, and best of luck on your journey if you are on it :).

Thank you for giving such a comprehensive answer, this is very helpful.

I was addicted to weed from ages 15-23. I have clinical depression and anxiety/OCD (now medicated and stable). I basically isolated and got stuck in a loop of believing I was broken and a bad person. When I committed to quitting I joined addiction recovery groups and asked for help instead of trying to do it alone. I still rely on the wisdom I gained in AA/MA. Trust God, clean house, help others, go do something when you are in danger of wallowing in self pity. 4 years later, I have a few real friends and many acquaintances. I swing dance and volunteer. I work in a semi-social office. Life is good. I still get paranoid thoughts, but they don't own or define me. I wish the best to all the lonely programmers and alienated people out there.

Awesome and inspiring! Many blessings to you

I am in North Seattle, and I have a flock of nerds under me that would like to see real demonstrations of penetration testing via radio (Wifi and more). I have been proposing doing monthly meetups where we go up on a the rooftop of various buildings, bust out the tools, the antennas, and every other toy we have to scan and show how it's done. There are stories about others and me that the younger generation would love to see in action and then we teach what is going on, how we are doing it, and more importantly, when we find a vulnerable target, offer help to fix the hole. Kind of like white hat pen testing. So many of the younger generation wants to exploit things, but do not understand the ethics as to why and why not, and how to do good with having those sort of skills. I know this might be slightly off topic, but I think the real answer to the question here is who is willing to take the lead and step out of the normal club, party, con, meetup crap and get back to the old school groups like we had back in the 90s?

It seems a lot of you are in Seattle and I'm willing to try and host an event like this if any of you might be interested.

Please count me in if these ever gets going -- I'm a relatively recent transplant (moved here 2 years ago) but found it very easy to plug into the local security scene (Black Lodge Research, Harry's on Thursdays, HushCon, etc.) and while they're fun to hang out and meet other folks in the space, I've been looking for a more hands-on tinkering meetup with clearly defined goals (we are going to learn about XYZ today).

P.S. if you're a hardware nerd, you might like https://dma.space/ (just had their grand opening this weekend) over in Capitol Hill.

Seattle is a great city for stuff like this. You probably already know about the Seattle Robotics Society, but if not, check them out.

https://seattlerobotics.org/

They have monthly meeting and are active in all kinds of events around the city.

A social circle is like a garden, inasmuch as you have to put in work to tend and maintain it. You have to put yourself in a position of potential awkwardness or rejection, which isn't easy. Interacting with people (especially strangers) also takes practice - small talk is a skill like any other.

If you already have a friendship circle, start being the one to propose meetups (cafe, pub, picnic, hike, etc.) If you don't, it's harder - join a social sporting league, group fitness class, dance class, DnD group, anything where people have to talk with each other. When you arrive, turn your phone off for the interval. It might take a couple of goes to find something that sticks or the right environment.

I think that the real trick of "solving" the loneliness epidemic is that it isn't spread evenly. Everyone has their own individual level of opportunity for social interaction, so the solution is hyper-local and individualised. There's no one size fits all solution.

I doubt it's the solution, but a silly program I want to build is something like this:

- Give users a modern Tamagotchi

- Give the digital pet a need to socialize.

- Strap a basic LLM to it so users can talk to their pet.

- Have the pet imprint on its owner through repeated socialization.

- Owner goes to bed, pet still has social needs, goes out into the digital world to find other pets.

- Pet talks to other pets while you're asleep, evaluates interactions, befriend those with good interactions.

- Owner wakes up the next morning, checks their pet, learns it befriended other pets based on shared interests, and is given an opportunity to connect with their pet's friends' owners. Ideally these connections have a better-than-random chance of succeeding since you're matched via shared interests.

I'm sure there's a ton of unsexy technical reasons this is hard to make work well in practice... but dang, I think it would be so cool if it worked well.

I realize this exacerbates the issue in some ways - promoting online-first interactions. But, I dunno. I'll take what I can get these days, lol.

A thought-provoking vision. There seem many many underexplored opportunities for catalyzing social connections - match making.

When I'm doing "broad and shallow" at a meetup, there are invariably "oh, you'll want to talk with X over there, they <overlap on some intent interest>". It can feel tragic to look out at a room of nifty people, in largely desultory conversations, knowing that there are some highly-valued conversations latent there, which won't occur, because our social and cultural and technical collaborative infrastructure still sucks so badly at all this.

In lectures augmented by peer-instruction, addressing the "if you think your lectures are working, your assessment also isn't" problem, one version has students clicker-committing to a question answer, then turning to discuss it with a neighbor, then clickering again. One variant (which you now many not be able to use commercially, because of the failed-startup-to-bigco patent pipeline), has the system chose who everyone turns to (your phone tells you "discuss with the person behind left"), attempting to maximize discussion fruitfulness, using its insight into who is confused about what. So perhaps imagine Tamagotchis as part social liaison - "hey, did you know the gal at the optometry shop here also enjoys heavy bluewater sailing?"

So on the topic question: Want to incentivize greater social contact...? Increase the payoffs.

It kind of sounds like you want to automate small talk. I think we need to have less tech, not more, if we're trying to solve this problem.

I could see how it could be interpreted that way!

In my mind, it's more like meeting new acquaintances at the dog park. Dogs start playing with each other and getting along and you end up chatting with the other dog's owner while watching the dogs play together. Trying to recreate those vibes with digital pets.

LLMs are a scam and should not be used to address loneliness.

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. A person can feel lonely surrounded by others. Like being the only non-drinker in a family Christmas celebration.

Loneliness is when there is a gap between desire for companionship/connection and reality.

I've done both extended periods of home office and a period of co-working in an open plan space. I didn't feel lonely in the home office. I guess because I did it by choice and had the agency to opt into joining a co-working.

I think that loneliness could be a symptom of lack of connection. And this need for connection can in some cases be fulfilled online or even through reading books. Participating in forums like hackernews or effect-ts satisfies some of the handful facets of connection that I need. It gives me a feeling of not being totally alone with some of my ideas.

From personal experience, I know that interacting with people on social media barely helps with loneliness, especially with an increase in bots.

What I know would help me is to have genuine relationships, friendships where we both care about each other, even if it's something as small as having coffee with them every day, learning about the other person, asking how their day was, and having these things be reciprocated voluntarily.

Even something so small would mean the world to someone like me, as long as it's coming from someone who I respect, who has something I admire about them. This part is important for a friendship. It can't just be any random person, it has to be someone with qualities I admire. I'm still trying to work out what that means and why it is.

All of the replies so far are suggesting ideas for an individual but seem to be missing the real crux of the matter...

Yes, you'll be less lonely if you join a group, get out of your house, etc... But how do we actively incentivize that? Social media and whatnot have hundreds of thousands of people working around the clock to find ways to suck you in and monopolize your time.

While "everyone should recognize the problem and then take steps to solve it for themselves" is the obvious solution, it's also not practical to just have everyone collectively decide they need to get out more without SOME sort of fundamental change in our society/incentives/etc

I agree with this, and I think we're partly conditioned to think this way. We (think we) can change ourselves, but we (believe we) can't change the world. I think it's OK to think bigger.

To make friends, people need a place to meet, to have time and means to be there, and a reason to go there semi-regularly. A lot of the design of society completely ignores these needs. These are solvable problems.

We invented Soma from Brave New World. No amount of individual action will overcome the primary cause. Getting rid of Soma is the only effective solution.

Even if you avoid Soma yourself, you will still face the negative effects of a society plagued by Soma.

That’s kind of the conclusion I came to. I can make changes in my life, but when everybody else is sucked in by social media and doesn’t even see the issue trying to build bridges is futile. The only person you can rely on is yourself, the sooner you can accept being alone the better. I lived in Japan for a while which is a much more solitary place than the UK. I think things in the West are going the same direction. More normalisation of solitary activities, increasing social distance, and fewer new families being started. Grim future.

The end of this assumes the snowball fallacy.

Just because people appear to be doing more isolated things doesn’t mean it’s a ratchet that only moves in 1 direction. People adjust. When enough people feel too lonely, they will adapt and many of them will come up with a solution, likely swinging the pendulum in the other direction.

It is a ratchet though. South Korea's birth rate has been at an existential level for at least a decade and shows no sign of improving. Things won't improve while technology and tech companies are warping what it means to be human.

Now there's chatter about AI companions. If they take off and substitute real relationships it's game over. Swathes of the population will bed rot because they have no incentive to go outside for anything other than work.

I believe it's more likely to lead to political extremism and a positive (rather than negative) feedback loop.

Yeah, lots of "change your habits" type responses that won't change the reason we're here.

> But how do we actively incentivize that?

Is immediately and completely solving the problem not a good enough incentive? If you go outside and interact, you will be much less lonely.

There is no barrier! You don't need to overthink this. Walkable cities third spaces etc., all great — but literally just go out and interact with people you can do it today many people do it to great success!

You're completely missing the point. The problem is people aren't collectively incentivized to do so. Individually someone can decide "oh wow, I'm lonely, I should get out more", but collectively there's nothing incentivizing everyone to do it, or even notice it's an issue. If there were, we wouldn't be in this situation.

---

"How do we solve the obesity problem?" "Well people should just work out."

Obviously, that would solve it, but they're distinctly not doing that, which is why we're talking about a broader solution to actually get people to work out.

> The problem is people aren't collectively incentivized to do so.

Yes, we are — please believe me that a LOT of people go out into the world and interact with each other. Doing so is extremely heavily incentivized by all of the wonderful and beautiful things that happen in the world all the time, both quotidian and sublime.

There is critical mass!

So then I guess it seems like you're rejecting the premise then that there's a loneliness epidemic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic

I get what you're saying -- I leave my house more than most. But I think it's pretty clear we're trending away from that being the default.

This is pretty spot on. It is like telling deug addicts to stop buying legal and unregulated drugs. Never gonna work.

Real change will require enforced regulation on the methods and tactics social media is allowed to use. Things like notification limits, rules on gamification, feed transparency, and more.

In the states this will never happen. The corporations own the rules.

Drive up demand for third places where people can meet new friends.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink

>> But how do we actively incentivize that?

Pre-schedule it. Ideally recurring. Can be monthly. Possibly even bi-weekly. Agree on a time and do it on schedule. Pre-scheduling removes all the mental load of finding a time together.

People need to purposefully and intentionally do things. Sitting home on an app, watching TV is easy. There is no fear or rejection, there is no work to get out of the house, there is no risk. But there is also no reward.

My thoughts on this are you need to have multiple roots into your community. This is something that you go to often and talk to people, become a regular, say hi. Think back to how your parents or grandparents did it: They went to church/temple/synagogue, they went to PTA meetings, they talked to their neighbors, they were in clubs, they went to the same bar.

So I think doing things that get you out of the house, consistently the most important part:

1. People need to make a point to talk to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner or bbqs, make small talk. How towns are constructed now is a hindrance to this (unwalkable towns where all of the houses are big garages in the front and no porches).

2. Join a religious organization. Go to church, but also join the mens/womens group, join a bible studies class. Attend every week.

3. Join social clubs / ethnic organization. The polish or ukrainian clubs, knights of columbus, elks, freemasons. Go every week.

4. Join a club / league. Chess club, bowling league, softball league, golf league. Tech meetups, DnD Night etc. But you have to talk with people and try to elevate things to friendships.

5. Have lunch, happy hour, etc with coworkers.

I think the trick is getting off social media.

When I was a computer nerd in the 2000s, I noticed people used to like to hang around and chat, but I mostly didn't.

Now, everyone is an internet addict, and I was just ahead of the curve. No one hangs around and chats anymore.

When you get off social media, real life becomes far more interesting. The problem with addiction is that it's so stimulating that everything else is boring. You have to let your mind reset.

I agree but if your goal is to socialize more, it's not enough to get off social media. You need to be in a place where enough other people do too.

Think of a city as both a spatial and a temporal grouping of people that are in the same place at the same time. Every hour a person spends at home on social media is an hour that they aren't really in the city and are not available for you to socialize with.

The cumulative hours that people spend staring at their phones are effectively a massive loss of population density. That lost density makes it harder to find people even if you yourself are getting off a screen and looking for them.

I thought of this the other day. I was on the train ride back from Chicago, and there was a family of four adults, sitting across from me, all just staring at their phones. I was effectively alone at that point in time. None of them were present. But you explained it in a new way I had not thought of before. They're quite literally not there in that moment, for however long that moment lasts.

I took the train from Seattle to Portland last fall. Half of the people in the observation car were on Nintendo Switches the entire time. In the observation car.

I heard the unofficial motto for BlackBerry from friends, something along the lines of "make distant friends be nearby, and nearby friends distant"

just find a hobby that involves other people. any kind of team sport, r/c airplanes, shooting, bird watching, the options are pretty endless. You'll meet other people, make friends, and not be so lonely.

> You'll meet other people, make friends

'Making friends' doesn't occur by just being in proximity to people.

Quite likely at the end of the night they'll return to their lives and you won't be invited to interact with them again until the next meeting. That's if you're not excluded from existing club cliques - I've gone to many different meetings and come away at the end feeling more alone.

You're right, you have to take a risk and go introduce yourself and talk. The thing with joining hobby clubs or groups is that you immediately have something in common to talk about. If you're lucky, some groups will have a person in the group who will see someone sitting alone, and go introduce them and drag them in. But not everybody picks up on that stuff or wants to make the effort on your behalf.

And yes, it's normal that people don't just immediately become best friends and want to hang out with one person they just met for an hour at a meeting. Especially if that person doesn't even say hello. Sometimes it happens though! It helps a lot if you just go back a couple of times.

The thing I love about car meets is that I can just go up to someone, ask them about their car, and tell them that I like it. You can do the same with any hobby, just go to meets where people are doing things, and not just showing up with nothing. Bring things to share, and a lot of times that brings people to you. Another thing you can do is ask for help with something. People love to help!

Ham nerds are the same way. Electronics nerds are the same way. Computer geeks do the same thing too. I'm sure every hobby is the same way. Find something you like doing and it makes it a lot easier. But the point is if you don't put in any effort, nothing will happen.

> 'Making friends' doesn't occur by just being in proximity to people. [...] Quite likely at the end of the night they'll return to their lives and you won't be invited to interact with them again until the next meeting.

Yes because sharing an activity involves greetings, interactions, group laughs which break the glass before more conversations starts and making friends becomes naturally a possibility.

Friendship is something that grow, not something that gets created in all its deepness from nowhere.

I think the real cause of the loneliness epidemic is that the older generation never taught us how to socialise and make friends.

I make an effort to talk to people and now we have "come over to dinner" friendships with people we met at a public park.

> I think the real cause of the loneliness epidemic is that the older generation never taught us how to socialise and make friends.

That is false. First because most of the social learning is done by mimicking what others do and we certainly all saw our parents invite and get invited to stuff.

Plus there is school which is the #1 place where your learn to socialize and make friends.

I think "meetings" are a poor (or at least, very inconsistent) way of making friends. Doing activities together is the best way of making friends. Bonus points if it's for multiple hours, or there's an element of risk where you have to look after / trust each other, or stay overnight somewhere.

Examples include clubs for walking / running / cycling / scuba clubs etc. It doesn't have to be physical activity, but since you need exercise anyway, then you might as well get those endorphins whilst socialising.

> just find a hobby that involves other people... shooting,

Ok that one made me chuckle just from the initial reading of the wording.

I don't disagree though, I do competitive bullseye, and it is definitely a communal thing. Many old guys at the range in particular seem to be there for 99% talking at you, and 1% actual shooting related stuff.

If I'm going to the range for a set of three position, a 120-shot session by myself takes like 2.5 hours including setup and teardown. If there's talkative-old-guy at the range, then I'm there for 4 hours, and I don't even make it through 60 shots lol.

Which is fine for someone like me who is a competitive shooter but not like really trying to be the absolute best, I don't mind spending 60 minutes doing bullseye and 180 minutes chatting about whatever. The actual competitive shooters at the range though, they'll either have someone screen talkative-old-guy for them, or just otherwise make it clear that they are Serious and not to be bothered.

I tried to list things that are very different to just illustrate the range of options that are out there:)

"Activity partners" are pretty easy to find. What's harder is getting them to make the transition to deeper friendship where you spend time together outside of the activity.

Birding is great.

This problem is not going to be solved by individual action. Sure there is some things you can and should do, but for it to be solved at a population scale it has to involve changing the actual structure of society that caused the problem in the first place.

Tackling phone addiction and lack of public spaces is going to be critical.

A big problem for me personally is that, well, frankly, there really aren't many options around me. I live in a small farming town of 6000 people, and most things are 25-45 min away *by car*.

> I was just ahead of the curve.

I can relate to this. I was always moderately extroverted and sociable, but the irony has never ceased to flabbergast me that the very behaviours and interests for which nerds like me would have been stuffed into lockers and garbage cans (if I had dared to tell anyone in school that I was into computers) became, only a decade later, de rigueur for every young person.

I remember sitting in a coffee shop in 2003 (senior year of HS) trying to get kernel drivers for a PCMCIA 802.11b card to work on an ancient Compaq laptop, and being pointed, laughed at, and called -- by modern standards -- unconscienable names by a table of high schoolers nearby. It must have seemed so strange to them to see someone's head so deeply in a laptop.

And my goodness, I wouldn't have dared to confess that I talk to strangers in faraway places _online_. To be known to have substantive computer-based interactions would have branded one so profoundly socially unsuccessful, that one's very family name would be cursed with this prejudice for two generations. AIMing one's classmates on the family PC was one thing, but chatting online to likeminded peers in other countries? Why, that was radiantly gay!

But literally a few years later, I can't get anyone to make eye contact and they frequently plough into me because their heads are buried in their phones, texting people they never see.

A'ight.

Trust me I am in 2025 and I am in senior high school and whenever I try to talk about open source or linux or anything others. Friends have point blank said that they aren't interested in it. (only one friend showed interest/shows interests at times)

the most ironical part is that they want to become software engineers for just the money aspect but fundamentally they really don't know anything about the field or are even interested to talk about.

So in a sense this still happens :) This happened so much that I had to cut off my friends because the only thing that they were interested in talking about were woman or insta shorts and very few intellectual discussion could happen (atleast with that friend group and I would consider that friend group to be more intellectual among other peers but for some reason they just never wanted to discuss intellectual topics other than some very few occasions, mostly just shitposting being honest and I didn't enjoy the shit posting aspect that much if I am being honest as well)

For what its worth, the field does have something of an immune response to those sorts of people (software engineers only in it for the money). You often hear a lot of nonsense online about leetcode interviews or whatever, but most of my jobs have asked questions like "do you have a computer at home? what kind?" and "have you ever used linux?" or "tell me about some hobby projects you have done, its okay if it was a long time ago" and used the responses to try and figure out if you were interested in computers. Ive often had bosses talk about how its been much more successful for them to train someone interested or give them space to learn themselves rather than hire someone checked out who has only credentials. If anything, thats the entire risk that hiring is trying to avoid.

I get it a little less now, but perhaps thats because i'm starting to have a good amount of experience to talk about - and getting questions more like "talk about a project that you thought was going to fail. What happened? did you do anything? why?" to try the same thing but with management concepts. They want to see that you're interested.

Some of these were ten years ago, some in 2025.

Hah! I had a very similar thought enter mind recently. I used to get shamed for being on screens too much, now the situation seems to have flipped. Who's the nerd now??

Also just an aside - I love your writing style.

Let me tell you about real life. I’m a caregiver and leaving the home is simply not an option. Short trips to the store, a walk around the block, maybe, if it’s before sundown, provided the person I’m caring for is in the right mental state to be left alone for 45 minutes. If there were neighborhood pubs that might be a thing to do if I drank. Getting off social media is great for those lucky enough to have the option, but with an increasing number of people getting into their dementia years, many with no savings to afford respite or other forms of care, social media is going to be the only option for a lot of people like myself. It’s better than nothing.

First, sorry for what you're going through. Also, your situation is definitely an outlier that I can't focus my main efforts on. Maybe someone else is meant for that. But I'm curious, why not have friends over? Is anything like this possible?

Tip of the hat there, it’s a very selfless thing to commit to caregiving. From a 50kft view, we have an aging demographic globally, and the bet seems to be robotics- hopefully they will get good enough to help meaningfully in this capacity. What happens to an economic system predicated around having more kids (GDP growth) is another concern.

We already have the ability to take care of people now. All it needs is is for someone in power to give a fuck and set up a system and fund it. The suggestion that we do nothing for 30 years so we can leave our loved ones home with a robot care taker is kind of fucking angering.

The robotics thing to replace caregivers misses the point that elder people also want connection. Yeah, it might free caregivers but still we will have a loneliness epidemic. I think this is more related to the desire for progress which is the backbone of modern life (you see it politics, school, your family, etcetera). This, I believe, has been slowly replacing the social glue of societies like religion, public space, play, chatting, etcetera.

It's like China during the opium epidemic.

Maybe we'll see Europe try and ban social media, leading to a kind of "Opium War" to keep it going on the pretext of "freedom" and so on.

My friend, don't scare quote freedom.

Sure, it may not have infinite value, but there are plenty of far less valuable things we endure significant harm to be able to enjoy.

And I say this as someone who absolutely hates social media.

Usually countries don't go to war over actual principles such as these but for self-interest. That's what I was getting at. Scare quotes indicate the position of the concept within public-facing rhetoric for an Opium War style operation (which would presumably be about profit, control and so on, the usual).

> Now, everyone is an internet addict, and I was just ahead of the curve. No one hangs around and chats anymore.

A lot of the events and spaces I go to have people who hang around and chat.

I agree that internet use has had an impact, but I think it's easy to underestimate how much situations change as you grow up. Now that I have kids, it seems like we're always ending up in spaces where people are hanging out and chatting. As far as my kids know, that's just the way the world works.

I thought the same up through college, then I graduated and suddenly spontaneous socialization ended. I had to change my habits to go find other people.

>how much situations change as you grow up

And yet this looks very different from what 40+ years back looked like for adults so it's not just about growing up, there was other massive changes in our society.

For example the number of kids we had in the past dramatically affected 'forced' socialization.

The post war suburbanization that forced us to spend huge amounts of time on the road.

Things like TV that took entertainment from a group activity to a single person event.

All these things added up.

>Things like TV that took entertainment from a group activity to a single person event.

TV was the visual replacement of radios, and both used to bring families together for tv events… I remember lots of instances of that as a child.

It also brought people together at work. Everyone used to watch nearly the same things, and even up to 15 years ago, there’d at least be groups you could find in your office who was watching the same things you did, and could engage in water cooler talk.

Now theres so many shows on streaming networks, and you can watch whenever, so its all fractured.

Thankfully social media is getting so much worse so fast it's making this easier and easier. HN is the last social media platform I still participate in... and I suspect that might not be for too much longer.

I recently logged onto Facebook and Instagram to update my 2-factor auth settings after having too many notifications of malicious login attempts. It was incredible to see what a transformation has happened there, it's like going to a decaying suburban shopping mall with only a few stores left open (and sort of sad to see the remaining users so continually desperate for a drop of approval from some imagined community).

Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.

Twitter used to be my strongest addiction, but it's almost unbelievable how big a transformation has occurred since it became X. It's almost a parody of everyone's dystopian social media fears.

HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

> Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.

It's hard to classify Reddit as one thing, the communities are all so different.

The subreddit for my town has led to several new friends that I meet with in person. Most of that came from coming together to advocate for something at a city council meeting or similar, where there was a directed meat space purpose. Getting together for hobbies like hiking or other things happens once in a while too.

On other, technical subreddits dedicated to digging deep into details, there are few bots. It's all real people with shared interests. Reddit is far better than most forums that I frequent for finding those communities.

The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest, then the subreddit would get tons of new commentators from other subreddits, which was the indication of bots. Fortunately the mods took swift action when this happened, becuase my god the discourse is awful when bots flood the zone with their babble.

> The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest

The thing is, bot operators know they can’t just post on Russia-related topics - they need a smokescreen of other ‘normal human’ activity, to avoid getting detected and banned.

If the bots that swarmed you want to appear as only 5% pro-russian, for every response you got they had to make 19 other posts. Predictable advice in advice subs, lukewarm takes in entertainment subs, reposts in image subs, repetitive worn out jokes everywhere.

Totally agree. When people say "Reddit is mostly bots" I find they're really talking about political subs.

Niche/hobby subs are mostly bot-free.

Yes I feel the same way too. This exactly captures what I am feeling right now. I wish there was a way to upvote this twice, thank you so much for writing this!

The only place I am usually active is on Hackernews and on bluesky as wel

> HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

I am not kidding, this is so true. I don't know if I can get flagged again but oh well, The amount of manipulation happening in HN is insane and flagging and just about everything

People called me bots twice on Hackernews for no apparent reason which really hurt and then I created a post about it which got flagged again as well and the responses were.. well not so sympathetic

I feel like I would be better off being an robot than a human in hackernews at this point smh. You get called bots for simply existing and showing your viewpoint or having a viewpoint (different?) or just no apparent reason and I genuinely don't know.

Bluesky has some faults as well but It's (I must admit) more focused on politics. i like the weeds of things in coding. I found some coding spaces in bluesky but they are just not there yet. I ended up spending 2 hours or something trying to build an extension which can automatically create threads for large posts because (you can see) i love writing large posts and bluesky has 300 characters limit and that annoyed me

I don't know what to do as well. I am thinking of still using Hackernews and bluesky but to an degree of moderation. I have tried discord and that doesn't work as well.

Honestly I just don't know as well but right now I atleast feel that I am not alone in this. I am not feeling lonely about feeling like this so once again massive thank you man, these are the comments which lure me into entering hackernews. Not people accusing me of being bots for no apparent reason and this happened on both bluesky and hackernews where pople called me bot and I actually try to be respectful and uh in bluesky someone went on 10 thread comment saying silence AI or silence bot when I was trying to be reasonable for the most part until I trolled them back

And in all of this questioning myself what did I do wrong, did I have a stance and they wanted to deny it and said something, the HN instance just mentioned my name as the reason I am a clanker. All of these things genuinely made me feel like people just wont trust me in being part of this community if someone (even after being a year in) trying to respond nicely and following the rules mostly can call me clanker

Like I just don't know what to do with either bots or people who accuse (you) of being bots. Both just feel the worst in social media and are actively rotting both HN and many other communties to the point that I dont even know what are some good alternatives

I think the biggest negative impact of AI is the fact that we aren't able to trust each other online in my opinion or trust art and other issues as well.

Once again thank you man for writing this. Your comment gets what I am talking about as well and I didn't know how to summarize what I wanted to say!

People are seeking multiple things on social media. One common one is connection. I am in Mexico dealing with family business. I am in a rural area. My Spanish skills are developing but are still weak. I can have light conversation here, but I can't deeply connect. My desire to use social media has drastically increased.

But I only want to engage with my friends. Every platform feeds me various flavors of rage bait mixed in with my friends' content. Some of my friends groups have moved to chats on other less public platforms like Discord, Signal, or Whatsapp. But that's not the same experience. And a lot of the people I like to engage with aren't moving over to those platforms.

We all thought maybe social media would evolve into something good... but it was enshitified. So maybe part of the solution here is to develop a tool that offers that connection without the whole being exploited aspect?

I know the feeling but my impression is that interacting with people that are strictly internet friends is a proxy to the real thing, the same way watching porn is a proxy for the real thing. When you spend X hours talking to people on the Internet you're spending at least less X hours talking to people IRL and building the sense of community that we now feel thinning away.

I know people that are internet famous and are terminally online all the time. I'm pretty sure it must feel like they're accomplishing something but for somebody IRL not familiar with the game they're playing their life looks very weird socially.

My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.

> My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.

110%

I feel like the idea social media prevents socializing in real life is a bit of a straw man.

I've made many friends over the years through platforms like Instagram, some in countries I don't even live in, and we've met many times in person.

Of course that won't necessarily work for everyone but the point I'm trying to make is that social media isn't some one way street that won't return value.

There's social media, and then theres "social" media. Someone veged out to tiktok or instagram reels is not socialising. They are trapped in an endless state of scrolling slop.

We probably need some laws or regulation that strip out the random algorithm selected junk from feeds and return it to just posts from your friends and family.

Maybe it’s ironic that I’m saying this because right now I’m scrolling HN while waiting for my flight to board rather than trying to strike up conversations with people … but when I was riding the bus home a few days ago, I got fed up with the algorithmic feed (too many “you’re single because you don’t follow a dating coach that will tell you to gaslight people” ads in a row). I put my phone away and just decided to take in the scene around me.

Every other person was on their phone. Started wondering what these people did with their day, what new restaurants they discovered, what quirky thing they may have seen in the city. Conversations that might have been had if people weren’t afraid to strike up conversations with strangers. (something I definitely struggle with myself too)

Anyways, random thoughts as usual.

It's honestly very scary, and if people aren't on their phone, they have something masking the outside world and blasting noise into their ear.

> (unwalkable towns where all of the houses are big garages in the front and no porches)

You can turn the garage into a hangout spot. A neighbor has a full bar with communal table plus TV for sports and he opens up the garage door once a week on a schedule (Sunday game day or whatever depending on the season) and whenever he feels like it on work week evenings. As people pass by we invite them over and after a few months everyone knows that when the garage is open, they can come over for a drink and to shoot the shit. Low pressure social interactions that often turn into weekend outings, regular poker games, etc.

Now years later we get impromptu block parties when he brings out the grill onto the driveway. It’s done wonders for our community in an otherwise unwalkable SoCal suburb.

This works wonders. I did it accidentally. In March 2020 when my gym closed, I started working out every night in the garage. After a couple of weeks a neighbor who I only ever said "hi" to wondered by and asked if he could join since his gym was closed. After a while more showed up, and now I have like 12 people every day show up. One Friday someone brought a bottle of whiskey and we hung out after the workout and now weekly happy hours are a regular occurrence. The neighbors who don't workout stop by after the workout for happy hour. It's almost become expected and folks schedule their weeks around it so that they can be there for drinks in the evening. As a super introvert nerd, I never thought I'd be the center of community in my neighborhood.

This is something I absolutely would not feel comfortable doing unless I was warmly encouraged to join in, that's how I've been turned into a social outcast in my youth. I know some people who for a fact feel the same way.

Maybe one solution is therapy, to help massage them out of their shell, to help them learn to be vulnerable and unafraid and friendly. But many of them refuse to go to therapy for whatever reason also.

These are things I will be running into as I try to resolve this. I have already encountered a young man named Daniel who remembered me, and told me that he was hospitalized, and that the thought of me and my sign helped him get through it. I'm dealing with people on all spectrums of mental health.

In fact, maybe that's kind of the point. I'm trying to reach out to people who refuse to go to therapy, who have internal thoughts berating them all day long, and I have the unique opportunity of helping them through the darkness and into the light of the truth, that they are valuable and lovable, if only people saw the true them, and trusted them to become that.

I am affected by extreme conscientiousness and would be described as a social outcast in my current state I'm sure.

I've always had a decent social network through proximity alone (neighborhood, education, etc.) and in this comfort, built a harsh prejudice against outgoing behavior. I'm not even sure why I held this perspective so deeply for so long, but I reviled the thought of intruding on others and only warranted intrusion on those I judged willful intruders. Most of my relationships are sufficiently available, but not very deep given my refusal to assert vulnerably (including against others vulnerabilities).

I was lucky to find Dostoevsky, Camus, and Hesse notably, which helped break some of my absurd dispositions. However, my entire social network was still rotten on a basis of inauthentic connection and intellectualizing this can only go so far. You must live the perspective and it is hard and vulnerable.

Thank you for these words, I find your mission deeply humane and I strive to live through a similar spirit.

Yep. I grew up in the era of ‘stranger danger’. We were explicitly taught as kids to fear strangers and socialising. We were taught “don’t be rude and butt in to conversations uninvited”, etc.

Still, something else is off. In the 90s, the Internet was a way to expand your social circle. So many friends made on IRC groups that moved into real life.

Nowadays yeah, commenting on Reddit and chatting to friends in message groups does feel like socialising, even though you might go two weeks without seeing anyone other than coworkers, cashiers (maybe) and Uber Eats delivery drivers.

> This is something I absolutely would not feel comfortable doing

Part of it I think is to endure the uncomfortable for a bit.

I felt really uncomfortable in social settings, and still do sometimes. But I forced myself to ignore those feelings. Now I'm at a point that if people think I'm weird or whatever then that's their problem.

I try not to be rude, be considerate and such thing, I'm not totally unhinged. But I am much more relaxed about just being me. Sometimes it doesn't work, but often it's all good.

on my son's bday i drug our firepit out to the front yard and setup some chairs for my wife and I to welcome his friends as they arrived. Maybe a dozen people in our neighborhood walking their dog or out for a run just dropped by to say hello and talk. I guess the fire looked very inviting (it was a chilly evening). I'm going to start doing it regularly, it's an easy way to meet people in your community.

In some neighborhoods the neighbors would call the police about your illegal open fire. It's nice that your neighbors are cool with it.

This is totally badass. Makes me want to clean out my garage for just such a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

The common retort is that these don't exist any more, but in my experience they're all over. If you have kids you start seeing them everywhere, too. They're not as classically romantic as an ancient Greek agora, but there are plenty of spaces. During the summer I'm probably at a different space 5 days a week with the kids after school.

I think the real problem is that some people forget how to go places. It's so easy to do the routine of work -> dinner -> screen time -> sleep -> repeat that time vanishes from people.

Whenever I hear people, usually young and single, complain that their 8 hour job leaves 0 hours in the day to do anything and they're too tired on the weekends to go out, it's always this: Their time is disappearing into their screens, which makes it feel like their only waking hours go to work. I try to give gentle nudges to help give people ideas, but none of them really want to hear that it's something they can change. It's just so easy to believe that life has thrust this situation upon us and there's nothing we can do about it.

> The common retort is that these don't exist any more

Usually when I see the retort, its also with the understanding that 3rd places need to be free, or essentially free. If theres a significant expectation of money being spent in order to spend time there, its not really a “3rd place” by the intended definition. (Thats the argument I’ve seen)

Essentially free covers a LOT of places... Coffee shops, pubs, etc.

Though I do agree that the privatization of public spaces is a problem (in the US, not sure about globally). For example, the local "town center" is owned by a giant developer (BXP/Boston Properties) and bans photography. The layout is like a typical downtown business district - grid streets, mid-rise buildings with retail/commercial on ground level, office or apartments above, and a park on each end. And crawling with rent-a-cop losers who have nothing better to do than chase people who aren't actively shopping.

That has never really been part of the definition. If you look at that Wikipedia article a couple comments up, I only see two examples (i.e. stoops and parks) that are free, and I think parks are a stretch because conversation is not a primary reason for most people going there.

Also, people forgot how to find places. If you're driving a car, places speed by too fast to see or remember (and it's dangerous to spend too much time looking at them). On Google, places are actively hidden from you for the sake of making the map look "cleaner". Every time I go downtown (on transit, not by car) I notice new shit that just doesn't exist on the map unless you specifically type in the name to get Google to admit that it exists.

I noticed this the first time I took a walk by myself to the town center rather than letting my parents drive me there. You know the routine: drive to the mall parking lot, go and get the thing you're looking for, drive home. Well, I didn't have my own car and figured I could walk there (about an hour, so probably 2-3km, in a country that uses sidewalks). It's basically magical how much stuff you notice that you would just ignore when in the car, even as a passenger.

I wrote on my white board, "There goes today's hour." So if I'm walking by and I read it again, and I just spent some time on some mindless phone thing, I remember that I could find a better use of my free time tomorrow.

What happens when they try to go to that place, they go there, they are there alone and bored. There is no one to talk with. So they end up being on the phone and more depressed.

Yes.

Our lopsided emphasis on individualism, our definition of economic efficiency that does not include the mental health value, these have been detrimental to our connections, roots, community, family etc.

We said, let the mom and pop stores die, their replacements provide the same value but more efficiently. Let community bonds die they intrude upon our individual destiny.

But we did not correctly account for the value provided by those that we chose to replace. So it is not surprising that we find ourselves here.

Could it have played out any other way ? I doubt it. Our world is an underdamped system, so we will keep swinging towards the extremes, till we figure out how to get a critically damped system. The other serious problem is that the feedback system is so laggy, that's a biggy in feedback control loops.

The world has become a much bigger place. You used to know who to avoid, the default was someone was acceptable. Now the ones to avoid move around and it's all too likely that a newcomer is such a person.

> Now the ones to avoid move around and it's all too likely that a newcomer is such a person.

This seems a wild generalization to make, though I guess "be suspicious of newcomers" is a little biologically hardwired. What's your epistemology for believing "newcomers" are "the ones to avoid"?

The problem is the bad guys move around a lot more than the good guys.

That's not an explanation, that's a restatement of the claim.

I think it's still likely that most new people you'll encounter aren't malicious. I have to wonder what your mental image of a 'newcomer' looks like.

> Our lopsided emphasis on individualism

This reads like that pattern where people assign blame for all issues to whatever thing they happen to not like. The US is the least individualistic it has ever been, but there was much more community and less loneliness in the past. That make it pretty obvious that the issue here isn't "individualism".

I am not from the US but your observation, if correct, would offer a counterexample worth thinking about.

You are saying that in the past, more resources were spent supporting individuals than the resources spent supporting communities and yet communities were stronger. That sure would be an interesting thing to understand if true. My interest is certainly piqued, seems too good to be true though.

Exactly this. Vote for representatives that want to build walkable cities, support small businesses, and want to build parks. Suburban sprawl sucks.

No it doesn't. I live in a planned neighborhood in the suburbs. I can walk to a branch of my local library, a few restaurants, a bar, a bookstore, I even get my haircut in my neighborhood. And even if none of that existed, nothing has stopped me from being friends with my neighbors, or the parents of my kid's friends. The suburbs are a different model with tradeoffs, but they're also useful for periods and phases of life different from the ones served by urban settings.

A planned neighborhood is technically by definition not suburban sprawl, as sprawl requires a lack of planning. On the other hand, I'd argue if you can do all of that (and said walking distance is under a mile[0]) you're not even in a suburb, you're in a dense enough location to be a town or small city. Unfortunately thanks to American zoning and planning it can be very difficult to know what your home area is actually considered and it makes this type of anecdotal evidence not particularly useful[1].

[0] A mile is essentially the farthest the average person will comfortable walk versus driving a car for travel that does not require carrying anything back. Once you add in carrying things (e.g. groceries) it drops to half a mile. Anything less dense than that and people won't want to walk, anything more dense than that and you're into standard city planning.

[1] Assuming you're American of course and obviously I'm not about to ask you to dox yourself, considering this type of thing can vary right down to the neighbourhood level.

>I can walk to a branch of my local library, a few restaurants, a bar, a bookstore, I even get my haircut in my neighborhood.

If you can walk to these things, you don't live in the areas the parent comment is talking about. "Suburban sprawl" doesn't mean all suburbs, it's specifically the ones which don't have facilities and community.

Sounds like you like in a “streetcar suburb”, not urban sprawl. I’ve been in real urban sprawl and you can’t walk to anything. Not that you’d want to, since there are no sidewalks. Drop a Google Maps pin anywhere in Texas not in the direct center of a major city to see what it’s really like.

Urban environments blunt people's connection to other people too, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

If you pack people in too tight they just tune each other out.

That's my neighborhood you're "citing". It's a walking neighborhood--cars are useless with no parking next to stores. I talked to more strangers there than in any other place I've lived. My doctor would stop me on the street to look in my grocery bags.

I mean, the very first paragraph of your own link says: "However, subsequent investigations revealed that the extent of public apathy was exaggerated." and the second paragraph says, "Researchers have since uncovered major inaccuracies in the Times article, and police interviews revealed that some witnesses had attempted to contact authorities."

I live in probably the most walkable city in the world, but there are millions of lonely people here as well. From any of my observations, I can’t pinpoint to one single problem.

It might be a composite effect of different things contributing to the easiness of being alone. Cultural skill that overtime gets eroded, and as less time people spend among others, it becomes even harder to go back.

Voting isn't going to fix this problem in our lifetimes.

We need to do things ourselves.

This. I also like the idea of libraries having a cafe, internet access, a place to meet, all non profit and owned by the community. Community is a function of distance, broadly speaking.

I also like the idea of libraries having a cafe, internet access, a place to meet, all non profit and owned by the community.

There are lots of libraries with cafes, maker spaces, and more. Seattle is one.

If yours doesn't, this is your wake-up call to get involved with your local library. Stop waiting for someone else to do things.

Which Seattle library (am assuming you're referring to SPL/Seattle Public Library system) has a maker space?

There is no maker space listed at https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/a-z-programs-and-s....

Within KCLS, there are two public libraries that have maker spaces (AFAIK): Bellevue, Federal Way.

PS this is not meant to be confrontational, would love it if there were more maker spaces in libraries (when have asked in the past, the usual answer is that they do not have enough space for it).

No, the Seattle reference was for the cafe, not a maker space.

I'm willing to bet that the libraries near the person you're talking to have all but maybe a cafe. I mean, I've never seen a library in the US that didn't have internet access and a place to meet and that weren't nonprofit.

Suburban sprawl is not going to be "fixed" in anyones lifetime. But it doesn't have to be limiting. I grew up in a very typical suburban style neighborhood in the 1970s. Tract homes, lots of cul-de-sac streets. But neighbors talked to one another, kids played together, there were summer gatherings in those cul-de-sacs on the 4th of July or Labor Day.

Don't think you have to live in some idealized fantasy land to go talk to your neighbors.

I live in a suburban neighborhood with a couple bag ends, our neighborhood is pretty social. couple of neighborhood bbqs a year, kids all playing together every day, dinners, etc. It is quiet and not a lot of traffic with long term residents. I am not 100% on what exactly the key is for a town is, I think style matters, but Ive been in walkable neighborhoods without a good community, and non-walkable neighborhoods with one.

I'll say that when I was a kid, the neighborhood was still as it was originally built, no sidewalks. Didn't stop anyone from socializing, didn't stop kids from biking around.

The city added sidewalks there in the '00s or so, but when I go back there I almost never see anyone using them.

I think the trend of isolation and loneliness is not really related to infrastructure or stuff like "walkability." Those things are pretty minor obstacles.

How big were the lots? How far of a walk was the closest bar, grocery store, cafe? Do you have to walk onto someone's property to talk to them if they are sitting on the porch?

I lived in a car dependent burb for 20+ years and would rarely, if ever, run into my neighbors out on the town. Living in a walkable neighborhood in a medium-low density city for under a year and I regularly run into my neighbors.

Standard 0.25 acre suburban lots. No markets, cafes, or anything like that it was a bog-standard subdivision. There was a small park sort of centrally located but that was really the only ammenity. Supermarket was a few miles away. Nobody walked there, cars to go anywhere. Neighbors still knew one another, at least on the same streets. Kids met at school, figured out where each other lived.

> bag ends

Never seen "cul de sac" in English before...

I knew cul de sac was french for bag end, or end of sack or whatever the translation was. One time reading lord of the rings after learning Tolkien explicitly avoided french loan words, I realized Bilbo living at Bag End is kind of a joke. Its just saying Bilbo lives in the cul de sac.

Never heard "bag end" myself.

> idealized fantasy land

For what it's worth, many (most?) countries have most of their people living in places that are not sprawling suburbs. It's worst in the "Anglosphere" countries (US/Canada/Australia) within the last 50-70 years, but it's absolutely not a fantasy land. It's the way things were everywhere before 1940, and most places still are today.

I say that because it is fixable, if we let ourselves fix it...

Your point stands though, even in a fairly antisocial layout of a suburb, you can still usually make friends with a decent number of people nearby.

Most countries pack a large chunk of their population like sardines instead. Not really any better.

This is answering the wrong question.

You're answering the question, "In a loneliness epidemic, what can I do to be less lonely?" Your answer is to use self discipline (which is hard) to get out of your house consistently, a decent answer to that question.

To actually fix the loneliness epidemic, you'd have to get everyone else to do that.

In the 20th century, getting out of the house consistently was the easiest way to interact with other people. Now, you can interact with lots of other people (in a less satisfying way) without leaving your house. What's going to fix that?

How do we get everyone to eat better? How do we get everyone to get enough sleep? How do we get everyone to exercise more? "Just tell them to do it" won't work. "Why don't we all just put our phones away?" won't work. We'd need a policy.

(My best guess: in the US, mandate that health insurers pay for therapy, and provide therapy at low/no cost in countries with national health care.)

I was with you up until you said policy was the solution. No, action must come first. Policy needs people to agree on it, and can take a long time to enact. Action can be done now, and allows experimentation and disagreement. I am looking for actionable solutions that I can experiment with as one lone individual with time to spare on Sundays.

If you're looking for individual advice, instead of "solving" the whole epidemic, then here's mine.

To solve loneliness for yourself, you've got to get out of the house more. But, deep down, you already knew that, right? Just like we all know we should exercise more, eat better, etc. Self discipline is hard.

So, my advice for that is to work with a therapist. A therapist can help you do the thing that you know you need to do but can't make yourself do.

People often think therapy is only for "serious" problems, but it's great for just helping you to stop sabotaging yourself (and we all sabotage ourselves, in big ways and small).

Therapists have regularly scheduled appointments, which also helps in its own right. (You'll get better workout results if you exercise weekly with a trainer.)

Scheduled recurring appointments make it easier to attend other social gatherings, too. The chess club means every Tuesday night. People will be watching Monday night football at the bar. Church is on Sunday. (Temple is on Saturday, Jumu'ah is on Friday, etc.)

But you knew all that, already, too. To do what you already knew you need to do, try therapy.

Sorry no, I think you misunderstood.

For the whole thread, it's open-ended. People can brainstorm whatever they want to based on the title. It's good that it's ambiguous. The more conversations, the better.

But for me, I'm looking for ways that I can help solve other people's loneliness, both on an individual basis, and eventually en masse, but still me doing something as one individual.

This is what all my replies have been about, and why I posted one top-level comment asking that very specific question. I want to know what individuals can do that's actionable to help other people.

Policy could make a huge difference.

Investing in free places where people can do cool things in public like libraries can help. Investing in public transportation so that more people can get around easier can help. Making sure that people have enough money that they don't need to work 2 jobs to get by and they aren't under constant worry of not being able to pay rent would help. Making sure people are able to get the healthcare they need so that they are feeling well enough to go out places would help.

It's hard to act when you're sick and exhausted and physically isolated and broke and there's nowhere in public filled with people worth visiting. Policy can help improve that situation so that action can happen.

> I am looking for actionable solutions that I can experiment with as one lone individual with time to spare on Sundays.

Since you've probably already got the time, energy, and money to invest this should be pretty easy.

The easiest answer? Go find a protest group. There are people out pretty much every week all over the place. You'll meet tons of very friendly people and you'll already have something to discuss with the strangers you meet. You can spend your weekends with new passionate people outdoors holding signs and marching around. Doesn't get more actionable than that. Comes with a low risk of getting shot or teargassed and a high risk of being profiled by the feds (although these days who isn't on a list right?)

Not political? Volunteer helping people. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and food banks are a great place to start. You'll be doing something good for others in your community and get a chance to meet and speak with other volunteers and the people you're helping. (Fair warning: repeated exposure to good people who are struggling may cause you to become more political)

Are you active? Join a sports team for a sport you enjoy or have always wanted to try. There are usually local groups looking for members and again you'll be starting with something to talk about and a shared interest.

Pay for classes in something you're interested in. Meet your teachers and classmates. Learn something cool in the process! Works best if you're learning something that requires you to create or do something.

Not in a relationship? Try dating. Be open about the fact that you're just looking to meet more interesting people. (this tip works infinitely better if you're a woman, but if you're comfortable with rejection, patient, and able to pay for multiple dating apps for indefinite periods of time where you don't get any takers it can work for almost anyone).

Pick a local bar and become a regular. Pay attention and if after a month or two you haven't clocked who the other regulars are pick a different bar and repeat. Once you've found some other regulars introduce yourself. As a bonus you'll both be socially lubricated when you meet and if it goes badly you can drown your sorrows in more drinks.

Like to drink but want to meet fewer alcoholics? Do the same thing but go to bars during karaoke and/or trivia nights.

Nerdy? Check gaming stores or the internet for a D&D group looking for members or even better look up where your local Society for Creative Anachronism meets and go there. You can meet people while you learn blacksmithing, or calligraphy, or archery.

Religious? Tour churches. This can be pretty fun even if you aren't religious. Most people will be very friendly and welcoming (results may vary depending on the church and your color/sexual orientation).

100%. Telling people they just need to work harder and do better feel like good advice but it isn't going to solve a population scale problem. Sure _you_ should do it because it's the only thing you can directly control, but also understand it isn't going to solve the problem an entire society is facing.

In the 20th century you left the house because otherwise you were bored.

I love being alone but I am not "lonely" and I am never bored.

When I go for a walk on a beautiful summer night in America, always alone, there is rarely anyone outside. They are in the house, mostly alone unless they have a partner/kids.

I think we have a loneliness epidemic because we have a culture that makes it fun to be alone. Some people don't like this level of being alone but many do. Those that do aren't really going to pitch in to help so I am not sure what the solution is. You can throw a party but I am not going to show up. I would rather be alone. This is enough interaction. There is also a culture of narcissism, hyper stimulation or both involved I imagine. I can't just close the browser window in person if the conversation seems boring or jump to something more interesting instantly. I would even say that being alone is more fun now than hanging out at someone's house in the 20th century. There is just so much more to do. The group was less bored together but it was still pretty boring then. That is why going to the bar was so popular. Not much else to do then besides get drunk and smoke cigarettes in groups to get rid of the boredom.

I do this. Even to the point where I go to church yet am openly agnostic. Takes the right church, I enjoy a good pastor and message even if I don’t technically believe it can be rooted in morality or philosophy and I can filter out the religious aspects. I could do without the singing but that’s my wife’s favorite part.

The thing is, church works for this because it’s an agreed upon and set time of the week. It’s also a broad group of people. Having friends of all ages is beneficial. I prefer it to a hobby group or our parent groups where we are all very similar in many aspects, although I do those too I just feel like their impact is less on building my own character.

It’s hard to lose what has been lost in the macro sense and then go from 0 to 1. A social movement like “screen free Saturday” or something would be ideal. Kids had to prearrange where to meet, where the teens will party (they don’t party anymore yall!), arrange logistics, and deal with being bored during some part of the day (underrated life skill, as a busy adult I love being bored, but hated it when young). I just recently explained to my kid how TV worked in the 80s. You couldn’t pick what to watch and there were very few times when cartoons were on. You either watched the news or MASH with the adults or found something else to do out of boredom.

> Attend every week.

In my experience, this is the key. “90% of life is showing up.” If you are around the same people every week, for whatever reason, with even a minimal amount of openness and friendliness, you will get community.

Exactly. It can take a month or more but the secret for me is to “become a regular” at places I like.

I'm open and friendly to everyone I meet but get treated like a weirdo and ostracized (I am also a weirdo).

You don't only have to be "open and friendly", you have to say the correct things in the correct way in the correct order in order for people to accept you.

That doesn't work for everyone and everywhere.

But it works for most in most places

> People need to purposefully and intentionally do things. Sitting home on an app, watching TV is easy. There is no fear or rejection, there is no work to get out of the house, there is no risk. But there is also no reward.

This is the wrong model:

Sitting (alone) at home and working on program code or reading scientific textbooks does have a reward. Many things for which you go outside of the house or where you interact with other people have a much lower reward. So you rather loose a rather decent local optimum, and if you don't know very well where to look outside for something really good, you get much worse results than if you simply stayed at home and do there what you love.

I think by "reward" in the context of this discussion on loneliness, OP may have meant the opportunity to meet people, make friends, perhaps hit it off with someone and land a date, if you're single. Not that it's entirely useless/detrimental to spend time at home reading or pursuing whatever solo hobbies you happen to have.

To be sure, there certainly are many introverts who are perfectly happy on their own with no need to get out and meet people. More power to them! But there are many that crave human connection, even if they happen to have many intellectual interests and for these types of individuals, they would be well served at least carving out some portion of their time to get out of the house with the explicit aim of meeting people. And yes, not every such outing will lead to lifelong friends or meeting your next soulmate, but it's a numbers game.

"Opportunity" is not reward. Actually making friends is reward. And that actually making friends requires a lot more then just "go outside somewhere we cant tell you where". If you just go to a cafe or club, you will sit alone in cafe or club. And if you walk to someone randomly, they wont appreciate it because it is weird.

> you get much worse results than if you simply stayed at home and do there what you love.

That's a sense of risk and caution that gets too comfortable for some people to compete with over time. If you don't build yourself better options, all you want to do is sit at home and do the thing that guarantees a reward. Then you get in your car and move about the world in a way that you feel is guaranteed to protect you from conditions, other people, but really is dangerous. You bet only on certainty, and outcomes are predictable, but they're not compatible with not being lonely

We are optimising for reducing loneliness, remember.

I am of course aware of that.

But reducing loneliness is just a means to an end. My point is that there exist a lot of rewarding things that you can do alone at home, which may give you a hapiness malus because of the loneliness, but also a happiness bonus because you like the activity.

If a solution to reducing loneliness shall be sustainable, it better increases the happiness or rewardingness overall, too. Otherwise you see loneliness as a problem, but see the alternatives as being the worse options, i.e. by rational choice, the loneliness will not be reduced.

You can be happy, well maybe content, but still lonely. It sounds like you're just trying to optimise your happiness, which is fine for you.

My son is comparing every alternative to what he can accomplish by staying home and practicing guitar. However, we are trying to start an anime theme song cover band (e.g. "Upstate NY's most energetic opening act") for which he's going to play Bass, Rhythm or Lead as needed and I'm going to be the Kitsune/Band Manager/Mascot.

I have been meaning to (get LLM) to read this and others of his

https://www.amazon.com/Yourself-First-Chinese-Nishimura-Hiro...

apparently a lie-flat manual for Chinese and Japanese Gen-Z

Founder of 2chan who reverse took over 4chan in a pattern which should be familiar to you :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroyuki_Nishimura

I've heard it said that Swedish and Japanese cultures are more aligned than is usually appreciated

https://archive.ph/2020.05.30-154951/https://hbr.org/2013/09...

Especially this

>Balance explicit and implicit communication. Too much explicitness can lead to mistrust; too much implicitness can result in misunderstanding.

It's also possible to write code or read scientific textbooks for the goal of promoting social connection.

What a stupid take, but it showcases the underlying problem: there is no loneliness issue, there is a "me me me" issue.

Friendship is a two way contract: you add something to someone's life and they will consider you their friend, they add something to your life, making them your friend.

If you "optimize" for your own and only your own benefit, nobody is going to be your friend.

This is good advice for your friends and family, but a bad answer to the question. "How can we solve the obesity epidemic? Stop eating so much and get some exercise." Well sure, but this misses the big picture. We built a social infrastructure that encourages a sedentary, solitary life. We shouldn't be confused by physical and emotional health implications. We can expect some people to be proactive about it, but we can't expect that of everyone.

I guess we need to delete the internet and tv from existence.

I think that the more people getting out and putting effort in the better, it helps create a knock on effect.

> I guess we need to delete the internet and tv from existence.

If only. My preferred solution is a 4 year national service. College is a key place to form a friend network, but not everyone gets to go.

National Service means largely:

* Giving people guns and teaching them to kill

* Teaching people to blindly follow orders barked at them by an authority figure

* Enormous potential for mental health problems, including bullying, abuse and suicide

* Wasting 4 productive years of someones life

I'm pretty certain national service is a Bad Idea™

Yeah there's countries who have faced actual existential threat (South Korea, Finland, Israel, etc) and national service is still extremely unpopular.

Maybe it's a bad idea, but it is an idea. "People should get out more" is _not even wrong_

> We built a social infrastructure that encourages a sedentary, solitary life.

No. Pro-exercise propaganda has been extremely strong for longer than you've been alive. Large parts of the economy is focused on exercise and health, and it is accessible to everyone.

But it sure feels better to think that every problem is "society's fault". That's the easiest and cheapest cop-out. Just takes a few seconds to type on the keyboard, instead of doing something.

I’m not sure what you’re advocating for. Is “pro-exercise propaganda” hinting that you’re against exercise? I think it’s cheap and easy to dismiss large scale social problems as the individual’s responsibility. We badgered people to exercise and change their diets while the obesity problem got worse and worse. The first time we saw an improvement was with the introduction of GLP-1s.

If your goal is to feel self righteous, keep believing the problem can be solved if people just get stop being lazy and join a club already. That’ll work for some people, but what I’m saying is it’s not a solution to the problem.

I'm very pro-exercise myself, and there is no denying that exercise, athleticism, sports are celebrated everywhere and anywhere you turn, and has been so for decades. And it's not only the propaganda, everywhere there are gyms, yoga studios, sports halls and fields for a great variety of sports, running tracks, bicycle tracks, promenades.

Athletic clubs and sports clubs are a core ingrained feature of both rich and poor societies, and for all ages and abilities. Whether that is just playing a sport for fun once a week as a social activity, or serious endeavors for top talents aiming for Olympic gold or a pro career.

Any kind of sporting equipment you want or need are available for purchase, whether it's an expensive sport or cheap sport.

Athletes are celebrated and greatly admired, and top athletes can reach superstar celebrity status. As well as a big pay-check.

So I completely disagree that the "social infrastructure" encourages a sedentary and solitary life. The "social infrastructure" is very pro-exercise, pro-sports and pro-health.

> If your goal is to feel self righteous, keep believing the problem can be solved if people just get stop being lazy and join a club already.

As Prince sings: "Do what you want, nobody cares". Finding a physical activity that you enjoy is greatly beneficial for you. Whether it's a social sport, or exercises you do alone. You do it for yourself, not for anybody else. And everybody can find something which they like.

Righteousness has nothing to do with health or exercise.

We're not disagreeing that exercise is good. I also happen to be very pro-exercise. What I'm trying to do here is reckon with the fact that, as you say "exercise, athleticism, sports are celebrated everywhere and anywhere you turn", and yet the obesity epidemic only got worse. And providing the same kinds of answers for the loneliness epidemic will show similar results. It's possible that this disagreement is rooted in differing understandings of what "social infrastructure" means.

Sure, but what about the people who don't do this? Those who sit at home all day, scrolling away, drinking themselves to death, wondering why life is so lonely.

The only time you ever see such people is when they're walking to the grocery store. How do you reach out to them to let them know about these ideas or encourage them to try it? Especially when they're filled with discouraging thoughts?

What if all they need is one single person to say hi? How can I find them, reach them? This is what I'm asking.

I've reviewed this and your other comments on the thread, and I think you're making a mistake, believing that to solve the loneliness epidemic, you primarily need to "reach people."

As long as leaving the house and making real contact is harder (requires more self discipline) than staying in and scrolling, all you can do is project a message to folks at home, like "hi, you're not alone in feeling lonely," but you haven't solved the fundamental problem: it's harder to do the right thing than it is to do the wrong thing.

To solve the loneliness epidemic, you have to make the right thing easier than the wrong thing. "Reaching out" to more people will not accomplish that. Elsewhere in this thread, you've rejected the idea of pursuing a public policy, but policy is the only answer anyone's provided in this thread that could make that happen.

(Now, it turns out that you'll have to do a lot of outreach to make a public policy happen, but you'll be asking for their vote, not a regular commitment to show up weekly at a club; outreach is the right approach to that problem.)

We need the Tiktoks of the world to realize their responsibility: users get addicted to the apps in order to numb their feelings of loneliness. So we'd need an intervention within these apps that makes them unbearable for the lonely, combined with a healthier way to engage with loneliness.

Imagine TikTok asking you "you've scrolled for 30 minutes. You might be in a loneliness spiral. Write down the name of someone you would like to be closer to."

TikTok does in fact remind you, quite often, that you've been scrolling for a while, and suggests taking a break. Last year, for most of each day, I would just ignore this and keep scrolling. I'd see it so many times each day. That wouldn't change if they added a suggestion like writing a name down. I'd still ignore it, and I think most people in the same situation would too. But when I was at the store, or walking to the store, that's when someone could have found a way in, and been able to get me to make a connection and open up.

Sure, in the same way gambling companies tell you to "Gamble responsibly" at the end of their advert to get you to gamble more.

Imo short form video with infinite scrolling is straight up poison and it's impossible to resolve without just completely destroying it.

Or hear me out, puts you in video call with someone watching the same short as you. Involuntary friend

Omegle + TikTok sounds like a very bad idea.

If you're willing to put in the legwork, set up a event on your events platform of choice, take out an ad targeted locally and emphasize that it's free, and someone like me would sign up. I occasionally get ads for things happening locally but it's usually has some prepay component and feels like they are "dropshipping" an event. There are also [city] events pages on IG/fb

> What if all they need is one single person to say hi?

Then say 'hi'. By definition they're not going to seek you out nor are they going to be findable so you're only option is to say hi to everyone and hope one sticks.

edit: heh i hope you're not talking about me, i walk to the grocery store regularly by myself. It's how a take a break from work and get some exercise. i'm fine :)

That's my point. How can I tell the difference?

One of my ideas was legitimately to just hold a giant sign that just says "hi"

I had this idea a few months ago, but never wanted to waste a whole Sunday on it. Maybe I should.

To me that seems like not saying hi, rather a device to shift the risk of engaging off of you. Don't be scared. Just say a few banal words to people you don't know every day and gauge their reaction, start a conversation if you like and they seem to be up for it.

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You just have to become the most friendly ultimate host in the world. Start up random conversations with those people at the grocery store or on the street and invite them to your bbq you are having this weekend.

But ultimately, if a man is sitting in his kitchen and its on fire. Its up to him to run out. No amount of reaching out will help until he decides to make the change.

this is one reason, while i personally work from home, i actually lament that many 20-somethings will never be in an office

i'm nearing 40, have a wife and kid, house in the mountains, etc... but, damn, those office days were foundational to the person I am today

While this is true, it's worth mentioning that a regular coffee machine small talk in the office is not building any relationships. At least that's how I experience it. It can start one, but won't automatically make one.

I can go for a coffee and routinely get dragged into 30 min conversation about politics, or cars, or weather, or any other subject I literally don't care about. All the good relationships begin with finding a niche topic between 2 people.

YMMV I guess. I've got tons of friends I've made walking around the office and just dropping in and asking people what they're working on and introducing myself, or sitting at a table with people I didn't. Some are no more than acquaintances, but some are close friends now.

Do you put any effort in steering the discussion towards something you care about?

A discussion that started about the newest model of some car, ended up with that person fixing my boat's outboard motor.

It doesn't have to be an office - young people just need to get out and engage with the world in whatever way works for them. I tell this to my teenagers all the time. They are used to our nice house in the woods, 10 minutes outside of town, where their old parents work remotely and relax at home. But I remind them that this is a good place for our old age, not their youth. I spent my 20s exploring the world, climbing mountains, meeting new people, making mistakes, learning, and growing. They would be happier if they likewise got out and explored... hopefully with fewer mistakes.

But there is far more to the world than offices, so while I agree 100% with the sentiment, I'd broaden those horizons.

Oh absolutely... I just look at the office as a "forced" version of what you said. Totally agree it's way more than just the office

For sure. I would have been in real trouble if covid had happened when I was 20. The few times I tried to work remotely it took a matter of just a few days to go stir crazy. The office was a good environment for me (it helped that it was legitimately a good environment with good coworkers, not everyone has that).

As a family man with a wife, two kids, two cats, and a dog ... working from home is no big deal for me now. I prefer it. I got lucky that we did not get forced into this until I was in a position to handle it well.

Ha, I could have written this comment word for word myself.

Sometimes when I think back to the good times at the office, I wonder if I miss being in the office, or if I just miss being young and full of energy.

Either way, I agree it's a shame for any young people today that won't get that experience. They were among my fondest times.

I agree with this take. I'm definitely not friends with everyone I've worked with in person, but some of the most meaningful post-college friendships were formed by socializing with the people in the office (or people I met through socializing with office friends).

Yep, I met my wife at an office party - she didn't work for the company, just stopped by with someone who did

And not just the office friends that come from it -- I spent an hour a day on the bus, grabbed lunch around town, was downtown when work wrapped up and ended up at a nearby bar/restaurant, went to shows because I was downtown, etc.

Just being forced out of the house led to SO MUCH MORE.

Now I work from home and while we do travel a lot, we barely ever leave the house when we're home. We didn't make a single new friend for like 5 years (and we are a VERY social couple, generally the center of most of our friend groups). We've only just now started making new friends again now that our daughter is a toddler and getting us out of the house -- and it is incredibly refreshing

Seems like someone else (your employer, or your daughter) is controlling your willingness to socialize. It doesn't have to be this way.

It's not just willingness, as the OP mentions, being forced out of the house lots of things happen, some of them social. Having everything in the house, from work to shopping to entertainment is a convenience that could even save you some money, but it has a cost down the line.

Yeah I'm very willing to socialize and actually do far more than pretty much anyone I know, even those without kids (but maybe not as much as a 25 year old just getting started in the world and living in SF like I once was). I'm lucky in that regard I guess.

I'm not friends with anyone but still it's better to spend some of the day around people versus all of the day alone.

This as well. You need to learn to talk to people, socialize, handle adversity, etc. Sitting at home and your only real connection to the outside world being an echo chamber like facebook or whatever cannot be good for us

Absolutely, I agree. Some of the people I had the sharpest debates with and didn't always agree with had way more impact on who I am today than the softer acquaintances. Most of them definitely made me a better person in the end, even if we weren't really "friends".

And yeah, even just having the basic daily connections can be a dopamine hit.

This movie

https://joinordiefilm.com/

based on the work of Robert Putnam is an essential backgrounder on the topic.

Yet, if you're concerned about Gen Z, 2-4 are aspirational at best. Churches, clubs, live music events, and every other group my son attends have a lot of people who are 35+ and children that tag along but the 18-30 demo is almost absolutely absent at events away from the local colleges and universities. [1] It's quite depressing for someone his age who is looking to connect with his cohort in person.

Leaders of groups are somewhere between outright hostile, completely indifferent, or well-meaning but unable to do anything about the "cold start" problem.

I'm sympathetic to the argument of Ancient Wisdom Tradition (AWT) practitioners that secularism is to blame, but my consistent advice to anyone is you can control what you can control and that secularism would not have encroached as much as it has if AWT organizations weren't asleep at the switch if not doing the devil's work for him.

Personally in the last year I've found a lot of meaning being an event photographer for this group

https://fingerlakesrunners.org/

where I know you can find some people in the 18-30 hole because I read their age off their bibs.

My son is doing all the ordinary things and I am supporting him in all the ordinary ways but I do believe extraordinary times require extraordinary methods.

I can't advise that anyone follow my path but I felt a calling to shamanism two years ago which recently became real, I "go out" as

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115901190470904729

who is a "kidult" and who embodies [2] the wisdom, calm and presence of a 1000-year old fox who's earned his nine tails. In one of the worlds I inhabit I'd call this a "platform" for gathering information and making interventions as it builds rapport and bypasses barriers and the social isolation of Gen Z is my top priority for activism in my circle of influence.

[1] ... and our data there seems to indicates that Asian students seem to be OK and white kids, if they do anything at all, drink.

[2] ... at least aspires to

While I have no doubt that this is a liberating practice for you, for anyone else reading, you can also actually become a real shaman in pretty much any shamanic tradition, and I know many people who who have done that.

This is, in fact, an excellent way to fill your life with meaning and connection if it's something you're called to.

I agree. This was my path which came out of about 20 years of research and experience. It is usual to get an initiation from others, be part of a lineage, etc. My route was the hard way, I spent my time in the wilderness and paid my dues in my own way.

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A somewhat cynical response given the frequency of this topic/question being posted here and on other social media platforms. Add a weak "/s but not really" if you want:

People sitting at home living on apps and watching TV who decide to go to a new group social event to change things up will struggle to make a connection with someone else who was at home on an app and watching TV deciding to get out and meet someone else.

The people who have friends.. already have friends. Those who don't are numerous social cycle iterations in on that.

And how long before those people just end up talking about TV shows anyway?

> who decide to go to a new group social event to change things up will struggle to make a connection with someone else

I can't imagine going to a general "group social event" like a party and making a connection. I'd end up just sitting there being bored until I left. I don't have the personality to just strike up a conversation about nothing with some one I don't know. But I do somewhat often go to events that revolve around my hobbies. There, I already have a connection with the strangers, through the hobby, and I have something to talk about or listen to. I've met plenty of new friends that way.

Nonsense. It's fine to be boring, and to have boring friends. This expectation that you need to be travel influencer or a deep philosopher in order to have anything to talk about is an artifact of social media.

I'm old enough to remember what socialization was like pre-Internet. And by curated social media standards, it was really boring. It was also great.

My post wasn't about socializing, it was in the context of the "loneliness epidemic" as a social topic construct.

I mean, if you've already convinced yourself that you'll have a bad time and no one will like you...that's what they call a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It's fine to feel intimidated or shy, but then find something else that does feel manageable. It's something you can get better with by practicing. And I say that as an introvert who went semi-feral after Covid lol.

Join a religious organization to fight loneliness is like start smoking to loose weight.

Yeah I thought that was weird, along with joining ethnic organizations. I don't really need to explain the religion thing, but ethnic organizations are weird since you are forming an identity based on your unchoosable parent's DNA. I've seen both used by leaders to weaponize their members at their members detriment.

Although, if you are doing politics, I can see this being pragmatically useful.

So in my city there used to be some clubs, like the Ukrainian Lounge, the Polish Club, etc. which was a club where people paid dues and the only real requirement was to be part polish, ukrainian etc. It was basically just a bar to hang out at. The reason I put it there is that those guys seemed to get lifelong companionship and socialization out of it. Instead of shaming people for what may drive them, I am throwing out options I have observed.

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Telling people to bond over traits they can't choose seems like an excellent way to isolate people with rare traits they can't choose.

I have more in common with a factory worker in China than I do with the president of my own country, even if we happen to share the same skin tone. I am defined by my experiences, after all, not things like genetics, culture or history.

it also doesn't even fight loneliness. Loneliness isn't solved by merely not being physically alone. I grew up in a Catholic environment but because I bought exactly none of it the religious environments were exactly where I felt most isolated.

You're not solving loneliness by joining a cult or a gang. You can only deal with it by making authentic connections to people you actually want to be with. Countless of people are lonely and miserable within families.

I agree, unless faith actually means something to you, forcing yourself to go to church won’t help. Sitting through Mass miserable, disbelieving, and avoiding everyone defeats the whole purpose.

Churches get brought up a lot because they regularly gather people (weekly or even daily) and offer events, volunteer opportunities, and so on.

The point is to find an activity you like, with a specific group of people and consistently attend.

P.S As a fellow Catholic, I’m really sorry you went through such an isolating experience. I hope things feel much better for you now

I think what makes this good advice especially difficult is that it cannot be one-sided. When everyone is letting doom-scrolling replace their social interaction, then one person won't easily solve their own problem by going out to socialize. We need a broader solution, probably a cultural shift away from using technology as a crutch to avoid other people. Maybe the current younger generations will evolve a balance.

Yes, for years now I’ve had this creeping feeling that it’s a social version of the prisoners dilemma: if you’re the only one that puts down the phone (or gets off social media, etc) then you’re just left behind. It’s a coordination problem.

I think that there are a lot of people that are kind of waiting for other people to pitch something to do. Maybe you want to call them type A and B, leader and follower, I think of it as the Host and Attendees. The more of the Hosts the more things that will be happening, so trying to become a Host is just creates more opportunities.

Agreed. I'm not sure how it happened, but it feels like we've experienced a societal shift where a large number of people now expect and wait for other people to create nicely packaged solutions to their (real or imagined) problems. From social apps to medicine to play dates to curated vacations, too many people are unwilling to face "the great unknown" that is just going out and seeing what happens, warts and all. Somehow the ability of boomers to make conversation with strangers has become a meme instead of a norm - they're good at it because they practice it.

> 2. Join a religious organization. Go to church, but also join the mens/womens group, join a bible studies class. Attend every week.

So no atheists then?

The great thing about the comment you're replying to is that it has a list of suggestions. So you've got two options: you can get angry that one of them doesn't cater to you, or you could skip that one and look at the others that do.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t angry.

Surprised to see this comment strike a nerve with the HN crowd. That was my first thought as well. Religious organizations? No thanks.

If you agree with the entire comment, except just that line, do you upvote or not? I think maybe that's why :) If that line was the only thing in the comment, the reaction would probably have been different.

Well that’s part of the problem. secularism didn’t make an alternative.

I'd say particularly if you're an atheist. I've always been atheist, but fascinated by churches and religions regardless, because no matter what you believe, it's hard to refuse the proof that the ideas themselves are powerful and helps people a lot of the times. Why is that? Best way to find out is to talk and engage with those who have these different ideas, probably where they are the most comfortable.

Doesn't mean you need to forget all the horrible impact it has had too, and how much better humanity would probably be without it, or even continue thinking about ideas how we could finally get rid of it once and for all, without violence.

Also, probably different in different parts of the world, but in many places churches are just purely architecturally/visually beautiful and historically interesting buildings. Some of them have really interesting acoustics too, and organs. Many interesting stuff at churches :)

Start an atheist club.

Or join some community.

It's not even just an atheist issue. You have to have spiritual beliefs that value the specific repetitive church rituals so as not to be bored out of your mind.

Join a hackerspace I suppose. Technology is a religion anyway.

I always said science is kind of like a religion in a way. Wonder if that's closer or further from some truth than "technology". Interesting perspective nonetheless.

   if [ atheist ] then
      's/joins a religious org/join a service org/'

I want to do this "grow at least 2 roots into your community" idea but a huge challenge for me is simply that I'm 2nd shift. That naturally leads to a lot more isolation than 1st shift. (3rd shifties, my heart goes out to you. I've done that job. Not a fun time personally.)

I always tell people to find a meetup group and then you will run into people with similar interests. I’ve made some good friends that way.

Sounds like a lot of work.

Isn't there an app where I can just order a temporary friend for a few hours.

Uber Friend.

> Isn't there an app where I can just order a temporary friend for a few hours

there's two. Only Fans and making an appointment with a therapist (basically a professional listener/friend educated in helping you help yourself).

It was just a couple of months ago where I found myself complaining that we shouldn't have to pay exorbitant amounts of money for friendship.

Last time I went to a bar a pretty woman and her friends decided to sit next to me only after I closed my tab and was getting an Uber to go back home. She seemed super nervous just sitting next to me and I assumed that if I butted into their conversation I'd get ignored like last time.

I'm working on a decentralized open source Meetup alternative where people can find social events and meet new friends. https://codeberg.org/createthirdplaces

> 1. People need to make a point to talk to their neighbors

There are people who find this satisfying. However, you don't typically choose your neighbors. Don't be afraid to eschew spending time on this in favor of groups you deliberately choose based on common interests.

You might not choose your neighbors but, like your family, they're a part of your life anyway. You can choose to build bonds with them (rely on them to water plants, pick up packages, borrow spices) or create your own little world.

You can also find these things elsewhere—I know someone whose dry cleaner cat sits for her—but your relationship with your neighbors can still really affect your life.

The world could use a lot more of learning to like, or even love, the people you didn't choose.

That's how it was forever. Now it's not, and we're talking about a loneliness epidemic. I don't think those things are unrelated.

The people who enjoy doing that should absolutely feel free to do so. My comment was addressed at people who don't, to remind people that it's okay to not, and to choose to spend your time in other ways instead.

You missed the point of my comment.

My comment was saying that the people who _don't_ should learn how to do so. It's a skill like any others, and what you're proposing contributes to people being lonely. Instead of making connections with people around them, who they didn't choose, they hold out for some platonic ideal of a friend who they have the right amount of things in common with.

You see it in this comment section where you've got people shooting down every idea that people put out there. Oh, I can't go to the gym, I don't like working out. Oh, I don't want to join clubs because they don't have my interests. But I also don't want to be lonely, so I guess I'm just stuck.

No, I understood the point perfectly, I just think it's completely wrong.

It's always possible to find people. If someone is shooting down every idea for doing so, they may have issues with motivation, or being defeatist, or any number of things. Those need solving.

That doesn't mean finding perfection. It does mean actively doing something to find people you enjoy spending time with.

Life gets immensely happier when you spend time primarily with people you find fulfilling. You can absolutely make a conversation work with anyone, it's absolutely a skill, and it can be useful. But you will in your life have a certain amount of time and energy to interact with people. Spend it well.

1. fair 2. did this but they are all 80+ 3. ok 4. not that good at anything, too old for most groups. gym no one talks with anyone. bjj was the best for this, since its more older and mostly men 5. remote work ruined my mental health

As far as 2 goes: As far as churches go. The type of church matters a lot. If you go to a Universalist Unitarian, or progressive Lutheran Church, yeah itll probably be 80+. Evangelical/Baptist, Latter Day Saints, Orthodox, Catholic (more traditional parishes) all are significantly younger. The more conservative the denomination the younger the congregation. The more liberal, the older they are. With conservative/liberal being adherence to scripture. This also tracks to Judaism, with Reformed Synagogues being much older than Orthodox. I am not sure and haven't seen numbers of Islam, Buddhism, etc. i the US.

For 4: You don't really have to be good for like a rec league kickball, or beer league golf. Gyms are better if youre doing classes though I think, like BJJ or wrestling.

> The more liberal, the older they are. With conservative/liberal being adherence to scripture... The more liberal, the older they are. With conservative/liberal being adherence to scripture.

And yet many young Evangelicals have deconstructed and dropped out of those conservative congregations over the last 20 years or so. They couldn't bridge the cognitive gap between the conservative political stance of their church and what they read in the bible.

    > gym no one talks with anyone

    > remote work ruined my mental health

Remote work has allowed me to build the structure I need to function and perform at a high level. I have severe ADHD and do not fit well into conventional office environments, not because I lack capability, but because my work is most effective when done on my own terms and schedule. I've worked remotely on and off for most of my life (I grew up on a farm, so "working from home" was already quite natural to me.)

This is also colored a little by the fact that remote work is no longer really just an optional for me. Due to a spinal cord injury, I need flexibility to manage just ongoing existence, rehabilitation, and frequent medical appointments. An in-office role simply isn’t compatible with those realities, though the most recent surgeries do make it more viable than it was even twelve months ago.

I’m fortunate to work for a remote organisation that recognises this arrangement as mutually beneficial: I’m able to do my best work, and they get the full value of my expertise.

With all of that being said, I know people whom are far more aligned with you. Remote work is not particuarly beneficial for them, they indeed need an externally inforced structure and so would be best (and happiest) in office. I would never tell them otherwise and nor would they do the same to me.

I am thankful for the most part that many (though not all) of us somewhat have the ability to work in the way in which is best for us (and those employing us.)

> "Oh yeah, I have a bunch of friends at the gym."

Their definition of "a friend" can wildly vary from yours. Especially if such relationship is cultivated only at the gym. I'd hardly call it "friendship".

on the other hand, having people you see regularly and exchange pleasantries with can change gymming from a lonely to a sociable experience.

> gym no one talks with anyone

The thing about the gym is you need to be consistent at the same days/time for a while. Eventually proximity will lead to some interactions. Instead of having full blown conversations at the gym though, I've also found it really works when I see a person from the gym somewhere else. Obviously in a place like NYC this is less like than a smaller town/city.

> Sitting home on an app, watching TV is easy. ...there is also no reward.

Like hell there isn't. Speak for yourself.

I think part of the problem is the stuff you’re suggesting. I think everyday life needs to happen organically and if everything is scheduled and regimented and needs to be planned for, it’s very hard for the vast majority of people to actually accomplish. In the past the way, this worked was you went to church which was societally and peer enforced. People need to have marriages that last a lifetime. It’s my opinion that marriages that are a partnership without any sort of hierarchy like we had in the past are essentially doomed to fail except in a small percentage of cases. You need to have kids with stable homes that can go out on the street and be outside all day without fear of crime. Extended families need to live close to each other so there are a lot of folks raising kids and approaching life’s every day problems together. You need to shut off indoor sources of entertainment like social media and video gaming. You need to have a solid education system that is factual and science based, and only lets kids get through on the basis of meritocracy so they can be good informed citizens, and not vote for populist nonsense like we currently have. In a nutshell, what I’m trying to say is people cannot act on what’s best for them but society can put enough peer pressure on everyone for everyone’s good. This might be very hard to listen to in an individualistic society like ours and I don’t even know if I would want to live in this society, but I believe that if that’s the only option, everyone is better off.

I see this as quite a problem in the US. The default place a lonely person has to go is usually a church - where you can expect a modicum, possibly even a seeming profusion, of welcome. This is their hook. They provide automatic acceptance - of sorts. This is also how the right wing fascist regime convinced people to let Trump take over the country - propaganda through the churches.

The only other options people hear about are 'join a club.' Interesting clubs aren't that easy to find. Hanging out at the local pub has obvious downsides, though I guess it sorta works in some countries.

We need more ways for people to casually meet others that aren't trying to manipulate you or program you with religious doctrine...

> where you can expect a modicum, possibly even a seeming profusion, of welcome. This is their hook.

Do you think that, possibly, they're really just happy to see you?

It's called "Love Bombing" and it's almost always a precursor to abuse and/or exploitation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_bombing

Love Bombing can be a real thing. Being kind and welcoming to others is not it.

We don't need to pathologize completely normal, and healthy, behaviours.

Sure, the way cult members are happy to greet new recruits. It's very insincere. If you have a real issue and you want to talk to someone - you are very likely to hear something like: "Well, pray to Jesus dear, only he can help you." In other words, if you actually need any support - go home and pray about it - don't expect real connection with people. The only connection comes through the imaginary friends they encourage you to divert all your attention and problems to...

Also, you have to accept the brainworms to be accepted into the church community. You gotta join the Borg. You can't have a different opinion or be an atheist. Or you have to hide it well and be comfortable with doing that.

It's a cult - a very old one, 20 centuries old. This longevity gives it a feeling of validity or that it's the 'only truth'. But it's really just collective sunk cost fallacy. It's the cultural bandaid that we apply to all problems because no one dares think up a new one. Rip off that bandaid and all kinds of problems it was patching emerge. That's why we dare not speak of parting ways with it.

The causes are deeply structural. It won't be solved any time soon. We're talking about the fundamental organization of modern society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic#Causes_of_...

I think there's a lot of good advice in these comments already, at least for individuals to think about for themselves.

I happen to have discovered a fantastic contra dancing community[1] in Chicago that could be great for some who are lonely. You have to chalk up the courage to go (if you aren't used to trying new things, or dancing), but everyone is extremely welcoming, the dancing is easy even for people "with two left feet", and the happiness going around is truly contagious.

I think it's a terrific place to find community. It's a social dance where you'll basically dance with everyone by the end of the evening. There's time before, in the middle (snack intermission), and at the end for striking some conversation. The dancing is every Monday so it's routine. The crowd (100-150 people on average) is diverse in many ways (at least in age, gender, income, interests) so you're bound to find people with commonalities that, using some of the other advice in these comments, you could try to hang out with outside of the dancing.

As far as getting people to feel like they can join, I'm not the expert, but I've had such a great experience that I'm happy to at least bring it up and "spread the good word".

For outside of Chicago: contra dancing is a bit niche, but a surprising amount of large-ish US cities have it. I think it's more popular (relatively) on the East coast. Can't speak for outside of the US.

[1] https://www.chicagobarndance.org/

Late to the thread but I recommend volunteering. The best medicine for loneliness is to serve others in greater need. Churches, hospitals, libraries, all not-for-profit institutions.

Part of loneliness is feeling like you won't be missed. When you serve others (even indirectly if direct contact is not your thing), you feel needed and have purpose.

Volunteering is a great way to get out of a slump. Service of any kind is really great at gaining new perspective and finding value in life. It helped me realign my life years ago, too.

But I ended up taking it too far. Boundaries start to get blurry, my value started to get wrapped up in my service, to the point it became “well if I stop serving I’ll be worthless”. Which is a tough feeling to face, especially when a subset of the people you end up serving, while appreciative, really end up not caring that much about you as a person. They’re not in a place to give you emotional support, usually.

All that to say, balance is the spice of life. Service is great. Just be sure to balance it out with another source of replenishment.

This definitely helps a little.

But the other part of loneliness is feeling like (or knowing that) nobody cares what you think or feel or have to say.

I've been (accidentally) helping people with my surveys for a few months now. It brings a sense of joy when someone comes up to me and tells me that my presence has helped them or that they look forward to my surveys. But it also increases the loneliness that I feel, because none of them care about me or what I think or how I feel. None of them have ever asked.

Well, except for a couple friends I've made, who clearly do care now, and have shown it in a few ways, but we just haven't had an opportunity yet to have coffee or some other interaction where they can show more directly that they care about me, by asking me about how I feel, etc. But those are the exception.

I suppose, that's what I'm after. Not just personally for myself, but what I'm trying to help solve for other people: to help them get to a point where others actually do care about them, and they have opportunities to show it, such as asking how their day was over coffee. For countless people who are just like me, I think this is all they need to not feel lonely anymore. So that's my goal.

And I don't think volunteering is the answer, but I think it can be a start for some of them, a way to meet people. But just as good a way to meet people as saying hi to the person at the next self checkout kisk or the bus stop. The problem for most people is that they don't say hi. Maybe they're convinced, like I am, that nobody would ever want them to, that they would only be a burdensome bother to others, and therefore should always stay silent.

I suppose this is what I'm trying to solve. How to convince others that this isn't true, as one person standing outside holding a sign.

I usually do night walks, talking to strangers, outcasts such as homeless people, street children, store or restaurant sales persons. I treat them food and talk with them and learn from their stories, I do this consistently that they know me. I genuinely love helping people, I also do ministries which I can say is very effective on helping people with depressions, they will learn to have a purpose in life or at least they will learn that some people are living life with much difficulty. I organize people I do not know and play sports I do not know how to play, and ask people to join. We do monthly activities which is optional for others to join our not. Nothing is forced but every one is welcome.

I do think it's worth separating two things, though. Helping others and building community can be deeply meaningful, but not everyone who's lonely has the capacity

In the past, whenever I felt lonely and hopeless, I jumped into helping others: volunteering, helping an old neighbor garden, help someone move, etc. Helping people gave me a short-term purpose, which eventually let me ride out the low phase of life. YMMV, of course.

I have noticed that doing the sign leads to some good conversations in which I've helped someone in a small way, and that gave me a nice little dopamine boost. It's also led to about half a dozen genuine friendships over the past few months. I wonder if that's the answer, a sort of meta-solution: organizing this thing I'm doing into something that other people in the same situation can do, as a way of meeting people and getting outside their comfort zone. Like setting up a chess table in public if chess is your thing. But no, there are already public chess tables, and they'd have already done that. I don't know, just thinking out loud.

One key is to keep doing it for awhile - the first day with your sign, you were someone on the road.

The eighth time someone sees you? You're the guy with the sign.

Routine and familiarity is important, and it's very easy to fall into situations where we don't see anyone in our routine so we can't become familiar.

This is my go-to strategy as well. When I feel irrepressible bits of loneliness or depression, I just make some food and go out and start handing out to the needy.

Or go for a walk and find people that need a hand. People moving, lifting things, carrying things. Small little acts of being useful and helpful for a moment help.

The feeling will creep back in eventually, but at least for that time I was out and about, it's not.

The common denominator is to have shared spaces where it's expected to be among strangers' presence, and for those strangers to eventually become repeat guests in a person's life. That's the maximally comfortable scenario for inducing social behavior and it's responsible for eons of human social history. Think church.

The problem there is that it's the responsibility of groups or society to arrange that. There's not much that a single lonely person can do there.

The less common denominator, that an individual may partake in until society concocts a better solution, is to intentionally visit existing shared spaces even where they otherwise wouldn't (hint: bouldering gyms are good for this because there are repeat faces as well as a social okay-ness to congratulating strangers, or asking how certain challenges can be solved).

Or break with convention, comfort, and perhaps etiquette, and instead just talk to people. Even outside of those spaces. (This is the advice that will piss a lot of people off if it's presented as their only option.) This advice is horrible until it isn't. It does, with enough practice, 'just work'.

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For an entrepreneur or organizer: it would just go a long way to think about things in terms of allowing conversation to happen unimpeded. Pay attention to where people talk, and about what. Conversations happen a lot in hallways but famously by water coolers, perhaps because it affords people enough time in a shared space to muster the internal capital to start a conversation.

In college I ran a forum for people to meet others and some of the most self-reportedly successful participants just asked questions into the void and were surprised by the number of responses.

>The common denominator is to have shared spaces where it's expected to be among strangers' presence, and for those strangers to eventually become repeat guests in a person's life. That's the maximally comfortable scenario for inducing social behavior and it's responsible for eons of human social history.

This is spot on. It's why you meet so much people during your high school / college years. You're among strangers' presence, while attending to class, which makes a natural topic of interest between the people involved.