How many people think today's children are having better lives than the last generation? 25% of US university students on antidepressants.
We optimize for a big GDP number but never for a population happiness level.
Are they on anti-depressants because life has gotten worse or because of decreasing stigma resulting from greater accessibility to better-informed patients? Until the turn of the century, just mentioning you saw a shrink in any sincere capacity would get you funny looks in most parts of the country.
> Unfortunately it involves stopping staring at screens 10 hours a day, which is the funds supporting half of this forum's careers.
There's an old joke where a reporter asks a bank robber why he robs banks. The latter's response: "Because, that's where the money is". The bank and bar of today is the Internet. It's what funds and facilitates most social ventures, even the ones that take place IRL.
Happiness isn't a quality you can optimize for on a national or global scale as it's a purely individual affair.
This right here is exactly what's wrong. People are put into impossible conditions and then blamed when they can't magically make themselves happy with the arrangement.
Tell me, are animals happy to be in a zoo? Why not? Why can't they just make themselves happy?
> Tell me, are animals happy to be in a zoo? Why not? Why can't they just make themselves happy?
Not every animal views a zoo (or for that matter, a farm or a pet-owner's house) as a prison. For a significant population of zoo animals, life in captivity is the only life they know. For the most part, they are as happy and content as they are well-fed.
Not if they are given a space which is too small and not stimulating enough for them, then they just pace around for their whole lives.
The conditions that make someone miserable are just as variable. Some of the most content people possess little education and are mired in the throes of poverty. If you started a national misery program where the government impoverishes its population left and right, there would still be a minority who find enjoyment, even thrive, in such circumstances.
Is it because they're emotionally worse off, or is it because pharma is advertising them more aggressively, kickbacks, etc
https://www.cdc.gov/healthy-youth/mental-health/mental-healt...
Increased pharma pushing is an easy scapegoat, but it would have to be making these youth more depressed before they were ever taking antidepressants.
Social media and phones have been disconnecting real interactions and pushing people onto fake digital "connections." Then when people are more lonely than ever, we're now pushing them "AI bot connections" to help loneliness, purely because VC's see $ in it, basically giving desperate people soda to help their hunger.
I don't know how to make that a movement, but I'll be more mindful of it.
I did a soft launch earlier this week by posting on NYC subreddits to get early feedback and test out my hypothesis . The reaction has been very positive with many comments saying they like the concept. Obviously there's a long way to go to really nail down the product market fit and build a sustainable business around it but the early feedback makes me feel like there is really something there.
I share your enthusiasm for making it easier for people to connect in person, focused around shared interests (incl. established online social networks). I'm sincerely concerned about the potential outcomes of our current and growing social isolation.
That said, I believe that "third spaces" are still essential. Effective third spaces can provide safe, neutral ground for those who are unacquainted to get to know one another on their own terms. I think that the thought of inviting a strangers into your personal space is pretty uncomfortable to many people. I also think people want to get out of their cave every now and then--especially with the rise of work-from-home.
I think the failure of traditional third spaces (cafes, bars, social clubs, libraries, etc.) has more to do with them being unable to adapt to the needs of modern society & socialization.
My thought is that there needs to be a new type of third space which meets those needs. Perhaps something like WeWork, but geared towards the third space? Something that can adapt to and support the diverse interest/hobbies/networks that have come about due to the internet. Something that tics all of the "Great Good Place" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place) boxes and more. I have some ideas, but need to develop them further.
I agree that third spaces are very valuable but the reality is that they are declining in the current market and the trend doesn't seem to be changing any time soon. I think some venues will figure out how to make it work in the modern market but ultimately there will be fewer of these places in general.
And you're right about people being uncomfortable with strangers in their home but most people will meet in public first before having people over. This is a pattern I've seen a lot in NYC where a community will have public events to attract newcomers. Once these people are vetted, they are invited into a private Whatsapp or Discord. Once accepted into the private chat, people will organize private events which sometimes takes place at someone's home. In a way, my platform hopes to formalize this pattern and make it more accessible for individuals so it's less dependent on having formal organizers/hosts. This pattern still requires public spaces but I think it's a bit more flexible.
I suppose theoretically it should lead to more connections based on interests and commonalities, as opposed to superficial characteristics (at least in the case your app, going off of your Reddit post; Tinder is a bit of a different story). I do feel like something is lost in the process, though. There are many people who have good friends that they have very little in common with.
1) Swipe based interfaces inherently cause users to see other people as more disposable. I'm trying to have my app be centered around plans, which is a mix between a traditional event with a set time and location and a social media post.
2) Paradox of choice. I'm testing whether providing people with fewer good options will make it easier to commit to something instead of having endless choices.
3) Friend dates are awkward. When people meet through traditional friend making apps, the first meeting is usually dinner, coffee, etc. I think people become pickier when this is the common mode of meeting because if you don't really click at the meeting, it's a waste of time. My theory is that when the meetings are more focused on doing an activity you already like, even if you don't completely click with the group you meet with, it can still be an enjoyable time. I'm hoping this makes people more open to getting out there more.
I'm also on discord as com2kid
The human pool of Attention is slow growing and finite (the limit being number of minutes in a day*people). Yet Content keeps exploding to infinity.
Just like inflation devalues money, content inflation devalues individual Attention.
In traditional economics, more money chasing the same goods = inflation. In the Attention Economy, more content chasing the same attention = engagement inflation (harder to get noticed, costs more to be seen).
The real winners - Platforms, since they act like central banks controlling both supply (content) and demand (attention via algorithm).
The Attention Economy behaves like a manipulated market where demand is fixed but distorted, and supply keeps increasing, benefiting the gatekeepers (platforms) while exhausting the participants (creators, advertisers, businesses, users).
History teaches us where the story goes.
Does it? When else has this happened before? Or do you just mean manipulated markets specifically?
In some sense perhaps, but I now value my attention more since there is so much more competing for attention. Out with Twitter/X, in with Hacker News; out with daily papers, in with long news: Aeon and Atlantic and Foreign Affairs. And zero broadcast TV.
It's just so damn hard for any in-person activities to compete with instant gratification and addictive rage. In college in 2022, I was a member of several clubs with varying subjects and members. Every one of them struggled to get anyone to attend. The CS club hosted drone races and 3d printed model painting. The improv club had weekly themed meetings. The theater department hosted at least 1 large and 1 small show per semester and we couldn't even get people to sit in the audience. And this is college, where demands on participants' time are relatively lacking (compared to kids and a 9-5). I imagine a lot of social activities have failed to get members and then just ceased to exist as a result. Several of the clubs I was in no longer exist due to a lack of participants to take up leadership after my class graduated.
Don't even get me started on how people talk and talk about causes they admire on the internet but then never actually volunteer their time to make anything better.
I really think society has just fucked itself over by letting social media companies run rampant with our attention, feeding us lies and gossip that doesn't matter 24 hours later. I genuinely just don't know if most people can be conscious and disciplined enough to get themselves out of the trap. At the very least, it will take a few generations to develop new mores and standards and who knows what new tech will be around to ruin their lives by then. I find it hard to believe that anyone was ever hopeful about working in this industry.
I think my book is missing that chapter -where does it go?
In any case - approaching this as if it is damage, will end up putting you in opposition to choices people are making.
You can be incredibly alone in a crowd of people. You can be empty when people are singing your praises.
Meaning - is different simple social interaction. People can find their comfort zone of personal interaction is much smaller than others.
TLDR: Treating it like a problem, results in bad suggestions. Treating it like a choice, suggests that one look at the options available to people.
It may turn out that people aren’t hanging out at bars, but at home. Frankly, why wouldn’t people stay at home, if home is where they have put their time and effort into setting up.
If you want a good place to find solutions, look to boredom and monotony.
Do note - polarization started well before the personal computer showed up in the geological record.
What do you mean?
The Internet does give ordinary people the opportunity to be mean to each other on a daily basis rather than having wars. I'm genuinely not sure that's an improvement, since at least people would think twice before going into combat. The level of desiring to harass each other seems roughly constant.
"We find that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing"
"Partisanship has been attributed to a number of causes, including the stratifying wealth distribution of Americans [2]; boundary redistricting [3]; activist activity at primary elections [4]; changes in Congressional procedural rules [5]; political realignment in the American South [6]; the shift from electing moderate members to electing partisan members [7] movement by existing members towards ideological poles [8]; and an increasing political, pervasive media [9]."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
It’s like the physical exercise which until the 20th century was just a part of everyone’s life. We sought relief from it whenever possible, but that wasn’t often possible. But in modern life we can go weeks without much physical exertion. And we know the consequences of that.
"It may turn out that people aren’t hanging out at bars, but at home." I understand that entertaining at home has been in decline over the last few decades, and is at or near an all time low. Putnam discusses this in Bowling Alone, and all research I've seen lines up with that.
My belief is that most people agree that the decline of community is a problem (I'll cite the Surgeon General's report, for example). I'm open to reconsidering my position if you have sources for the opposing viewpoint.
Yes: Finland. Purportedly the happiest country on the planet. A bilingual nation who will merrily shut up in two languages simultaneously. Whose complete lack of small-talk is legendary.
Hell is other people.
Ob-disclosure: I'm a Finn.
The article thinks the problem is declining quantity, but I'm unconvinced. Americans have always been low on quality, since as far back as slavery and native american genocide.
If anything I think the "meditation" mentioned in the article is a really good sign.
I'm failing at finding it via google, but I also recall a study that showed drivers tended to view other drivers/cars on the road not as a person in control of a vehicle, but rather an inanimate object, which I think further supports your point. If anyone has a link to the study, I'd be grateful.
my life is drastically different today since I’ve ditched ALL social media. unlike other addictions, this came without withdrawals (10-20 minutes on HN helps :) )
Once you have been sufficiently traumatized, this "biological cue" (if it even exists) goes away pretty fast and rarely returns.
The USA is the land of trauma, multifaceted and pervasive, and telling people to touch grass or go to their local bar won't stop it nor heal the damage.
Note: the word "trauma" appears nowhere in this article, nor does the word "capitalism". The author does expend a lot of words to tediously lecture about phones, screen time, and the giant houses we all supposedly inhabit.
You might find something resonates in this essay [0]
I don't think it's unique to US America. It's well documented via writers like de Toqueville and Putnam, but the same phenomena are there in the UK, in Australia, and elsewhere.
Technology lets us see ourselves, and we are quite sickened by how we treat one another.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/radical-disbelief-and-its-ca...
This view has _some_ merit, but has been taken in uncritically as a fundamental assumption of life. Forcing yourself to imagine traumas, or constantly revisit legitimate traumas is deeply unhealthy. There was a time when no one could talk about their psychological issues, but now the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction: we has been discussing our trauma to a greater and greater degree for the past 30 years, but mental health outcomes are only getting worse. I’m undecided if this is casual, but there is no evidence it’s _helping_.
This is not "American culture", it's American leftism. Almost no conservative American thinks like that. And it's dying out by itself because American liberals aren't having enough children and views/values are partially heritable.
Of course they do. Victimhood is a common driver of all politics.
And since we're talking about trauma, it's important to remember that suicide rates in the US are highest among middle-aged white men.
That is unless we assume builders and maintenance people are exempt from working less
Or you know, Japan. They are such slackers that they have a special word for death by overwork (karoshi). I hear they live in giant mansions.
My point is simply that if everyone works less, society will have proportionally less material stuff.
This partially contradicts your point.
What I would add (to reconcile the two points), is that one kind of work is not fungible with another kind of work. Yes, people work very hard in Silicon Valley -- but they are not working hard at building houses. If they were, there'd be a lot of supply, and the price would fall.
Overall, this is perhaps a comment about the (mis-)allocation of work in society.
Time and effort and suffering are distinct from value creation.
Given all that, "houses would be proportionally fewer, smaller, and and in need for repair...unless we assume builders and maintenance people are exempt from working less" is not actually self-evident, and is more likely to be taken as an attempt to paint an exaggerated picture for rhetorical purposes.
There are lots of things that can be done, but they revolve around increasing either productivity or increasing efficiency. Neither of these is synonymous with simply cutting back on work.
A large portion of workers believe their own job is "bullshit" and does nothing to benefit society. Perhaps if we had more breathing room we could find ways to move workers into meaningful jobs.
It's complicated, and working fewer hours doesn't necessarily mean less productivity.
Sounds like people are just eating out more?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/239410/us-food-service-a...
2. I'd search for some hobby/interest groups that would fit my interests, but nothing really fits. Either there are no meetups for such interests or there are meetups but the demographic at those meetup is not the demographic that I am interested in meeting.
3. Out of desperation I tried to be open minded and joined some hobby groups and did some sports that were really out of character for me. Here I did meet some interesting people, but I did not make a good impression because I was so obviously out of place.
4. Eventually my Friday nights consisted of going for a swim at 21:00-22:00 or going to the library of the nearest university so that I could feel some kind of social warmth sitting in a hall with all the other people.
2. What are your interests, precisely? And what do you mean the demographic you are interested in meeting-- what is that demographic, precisely?
You can just start your own group in this case. That's what I did with Lisp Ireland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour
"Asocial" means being non-social. "Anti-social" means being a problem to society. It's terrible terminology to be sure, but those are the current definitions, and it's surprising that no one in the chain of publication for this article flagged that.
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his word- processor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern[...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’: the body is a scenario and the curious hygienist threnody devoted to it runs through the innumerable fitness centres, body- building gyms, stimulation and simulation studios that stretch from Venice to Tupanga Canyon, bearing witness to a collective asexual obsession. "
He was one of the first people to point to the irony of a health and beauty obsessed culture that doesn't actually use their health or beauty for anything, because they've removed any real social contact from their life, just existing in isolation in front of a screen. This is the gym goer / instagram influencer who Baudrillard would have compared more to a corpse in a morgue than an actual person.
> In 1979, two epidemiologists published a paper that would trigger a seismic shift in the scientific community's understanding of and interest in the link between relationships and life span. Lisa Berkman, then at Yale University, and Leonard Syne at the University of California, Berkeley, followed nearly seven thousand adults for nine years. In that time period, men with fewer social and community ties were twice as likely to die—regardless of how physically healthy they were at the start of the study, their socioeconomic status, and whether they smoked, drank alcohol, were obese, exercised, or used preventative healthcare services. For isolated women, the risk of dying was closer to three times that of their connected counterparts.
I think that this point is the underlying rationale for writing the article. "Not enough" people are making sacrifices. It isn't that they're less happy, it's that the author doesn't want them to be happy. They'd rather rewrite the definition of happiness
If all you're doing is giving, why bother? You could have a wife and kids, or you could do FIRE. If you go the wife and kids route, suddenly all of your money and time are no longer "yours"
I think, if some people look at society and institutions and say "I'm giving more than what I'm receiving here", there's nothing wrong with that. Framing it as the individual's problem is dumb and counterproductive. Religion is on the way out, people are getting sick of lying to themselves
if you're equating that lifestyle pipeline to walking or participating in society, it's not really a valid point
It seemed less like a wife-kids-retirement pipeline and more like a general aversion towards any kind of social/communal obligation. The former is unnecessary, I agree, but the article makes the case and I agree that we have a certain innate need for the latter kind of relationship.
not every community is worth the engagement
my point isn't that community in general is bad, it's that communities aren't entitled to engagement unless they actually make it worth it for the participants. if the social pressure to join goes out the window and communities have to exist via their own merits, that's not a bad thing. it's a correction
There are two big cultural shifts I have in mind here:
the "liberalization" of American society (divorce is more common, LGBT acceptance (and in general, the freedom to have a non-hetero life)). hetero relationships come with an "escalator" that ends in having a family, etc. But as long as there's a socially accepted alternative to this lifestyle, it has to justify itself against the alternative. (Imo, this is the real reason why LGBT was stigmatized for so long)
also religion dying out, less pressure to buy into religion, that's one big third space that's gone
Where do you get that? Here are some quotes from the article:
"activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self-reported happiness."
"Afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel? Despite the broad assumption that the best commute is a silent one, the people instructed to talk with strangers actually reported feeling significantly more positive than those who’d kept to themselves."
These are self reports, not another person's definition.
put differently, if enough people were getting married, having kids, etc, you wouldn't see this kind of article. it's not about making people happier, it's about pressuring people to do shit that's not in their self interest
This is both exceedingly cynical and completely unsupported by the text of the article, which talks about things like public spaces, TV, smartphones, and dinner parties. Where exactly does the article prescribe marriage and kids as the solution?
Also, the comment about secular monks mentions friends before spouses and children. It's about the total lack of other people:
> What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children.
The article talks about sixth graders, who are kids themselves and obviously can't get married and have kids:
> In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent.
And marriage in itself is obviously not the solution:
> Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week.
Again, kids and teenagers can't get married and have kids:
> American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens
The article talks about young people meeting friends. Again, this is not about marriage and having kids:
> Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.
I could go on and on:
> The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.
It's only in your mind that this article is somehow a "marry and reproduce" message like in the movie "They Live".
More recently, I've engaged with my city's kink community which has no shortage of public socials. I'm at the point where I have to be choosy about how I want to spend my time because it's easy to get over booked.
Maybe I have higher initiative than most, but I found the experience to be dependent on how much effort I put into it and incredibly rewarding.
This isn't an insult, it's just that the variance in discord users is narrow enough that that common trait alone is enough to make a viable social group of broadly like-minded people.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
In other words, OP's action isn't orthogonal to the average HN'ers interests-- it's a healthy alternative (well realistically, supplement).
There is a regular cuddle party event in my area that begins with an informative and interactive workshop on consent and negotiation. Being able to practice delivering "no", negotiating to find common ground, and asking for what I want has been transformative experience for me. I'm a better communicator - something that I use now in both my vanilla and non-vanilla lives.
This seems particularly interesting.