This has actually been a trend since the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.
> Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.
I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
It turns out, being completely unbothered is also unchallenging, and challenge drives us. And being alone and bored is enabled by television and scrolling.
Honestly, I view the suburbs as the worst of both worlds (urban and rural), with few benefits.
BTW: As an aside, this is why i think the suburbs-class loves tesla self driving so much. The one downside is the long monotony of transitting to the place where people gather to do your work. I'm not against self driving cars, but they enable suburban self-imposed isolation.
My grandparents lived in what was then rural Pennsylvania.
Everyone had a part of their house that was essentially a bar and they would have house parties all the time.
So I don't think it's sub-urbanization per se.
On a larger scale I think it's _a_ factor, but not the only factor.
It's partly a numbers game. There are definitely amicable cul-de-sacs but if you are in an apartment complex there's 100x more "neighbors" you could interact with.
Suburbs also come with the tradeoff of driving, at least in America. It's a lot easier to socialize when you can put on some flip flops and walk to a friend's place or an event than it is to drive.
It can be hit or miss in either case, and there's socioeconomic and cultural forces that make real world interactions more scarce. If more of my income goes to rent and inflation is too high why would I burn through money on going out when I can stay home and watch a show or be on my phone
I grew up in suburban Wisconsin. The at-home bar was and is common there too.
People don't throw parties with them nearly as much any more because throwing a party with an at-home bar in a suburban house essentially requires drunk driving. We've gotten much more strict about since 1980 for very good reason.
Happy hours are still relatively common in cities because you can get home without driving.
Interesting experience I supposed. Mine is the exact opposite. Neighbors in the suburbs are a community , whereas in the city, it’s common for neighbors to remain strangers.
I've had far easier experience joining my neighborhood community in a city as many of my neighbors are literally walking around. My last 2 suburban neighborhood communities were on Facebook and the groups were less "lets get coffee" and more "that car that drove by is suspicious". One of my old neighbors in a city occasionally had a TV and cooler set up outside for people to drop by to watch baseball.
Prior to air conditioning the venerable front porch was the socialization locale of choice. A lot of houses in my city have a massive one and it's kinda sad to me to not see many people sitting on them virtually ever
That's not a universal truth. I grew up in the suburbs and I've lived in a city for my whole adult life. I feel a MUCH stronger sense of community in the city. I know so many of my neighbors that it's hard to leave my house without running into somebody I know.
It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.
In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.
Yes, its the suburbs, but it's because of the car-dependency -- not as much the single family detached homes.
I’m from Germany so I can’t comment on the exact dynamics of American suburbia but I grew up in a medium to small town in a single family House and we were regularly in contact with the neighbors. Eventually I moved out into the next big city and in the apartment complex that I moved into it’s completely anonymous and no contact between neighbors except the occasional head nod.
This has largely been my experience as well but in the US. However, a new couple moved in next door to my apartment. We’ve done happy hour with them and I share the fruits of my cooking/baking adventures. Stop and chat when we are not in a hurry. For whatever reason we’ve not gotten to be much closer than friendly neighbors. Could be the woes of young professionals in their 30s without kids but the effort definitely feels greater than at other points of life.
I live in a suburb by a major city in the US, and know so many neighbors. The sense of community is really strong. I help my neighbors remove snow and take their trash out as they are old.
I feel like some people are just making assumptions or are extremely introverted.
A lot of people are assuming that the main people you would be interacting with in a city are your neighbors. There are many more positive interactions you'd have, outside.
It's not just about neighbors.
When I rented an apartment in central part of large city for 2 years, I literally haven’t never seen people from 2 other apartments on same floor as me and maybe had one chat with last one. I rent house in suburbs, at nice cul de sac, I know names of neighbors in 2 houses and had chats with 2 more. So your mileage may vary A LOT. Although large city offers many more chances to randomly step up. Reaching literal center of city and it’s life in 30 minutes on subway is much different from reaching another burbs on car.
Yeah the point of apartments is not to socialize with the neighbors specifically, it's more that the increased density gets you walkability and density.
It's much more appealing to get to the street and walk when you have 4 cafes, a theater, two libraries and a gym in a 10 minute radius than when you just get to walk next to lawns for an hour.
And there's a point to be made for the added friction of a small home. The more self sufficient your house is the harder it is to convince yourself to get out.
Taking care of the lawn, etc, you will definitely meet your neighbors.
Thats wild to me. When I lived in an apartment I couldn’t get out the door without having the crazy cat lady telling me her new smoking spot the cameras couldn’t see (she wanted to smoke on the rooftop). It was a riot, that place had some characters.
The suburbs were soul sucking to me, the people were largely insufferable. I knew my neighbors, but hated them because 90% of our conversations were some form of “I noticed your grass wasn’t cut this week” or “your cans sat on the curb until the morning”. There were some good ones, but like me they mostly hid in their back yard to avoid the Karen’s.
A lot of people are assuming that the main people you would be interacting with in a city are your neighbors. There are many more positive interactions you'd have, outside.
People often don't socialize with their neighbors in a big city because it's nice to have a place where you aren't expected to socialize.
Sometimes I don't want to have a conversation with my neighbor who I really don't have anything in common with except they live next door.
In a big city you can find people that are exactly your tribe or explore a new one.
> I would also add the suburbanization of American society. A neat little home in a neat little sub-division with a neat little patch of grass. You can sit on your grass in your own little kingdom, and be completely unbothered by the world around you.
What are you talking man? Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family. Kids running around in droves, BBQ with neighbors, helping around with a house, etc. Good luck having that in New York rat cages.
It’s interesting that you think the opposite of the suburbs is high rises (I assume that’s what you mean by rat cages).
The reality is that prewar housing in cities in the US was still frequently single family housing. The Chicago Bungalow is an obvious example.
The difference was in how close they were to each other and how much of the infrastructure was given to cars.
I’m not sure I buy that there is some tidy explanation about suburbanization leading to the decline in social interaction but if you think everyone describing city living is describing midtown manhattan you’ve got to myopic view of what urban housing means.
This is true of suburbs as well fwiw. There are lots of walkable suburbs with common community space and not a McMansion or big box shop to be seen.
The pre-war streetcar suburbs are great. Everything is on a grid, which makes getting around easy. After WWII it's all cul-de-sacs and arterials, and there is no place for kids to walk to.
I live in a city similar to NYC (but not quite as dense) and IMO it's far better for kids than the suburbs.
I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood
One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?
I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it
Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.
> Atomic family from 50s with their suburb is literally the utopia for American and whatnot family
Where did that "utopia" ideal come from?
> Good luck having that in New York rat cages
Yeah, that isn't good either. That's poverty. Do you think poverty doesn't exist in the suburbs?
It can't possibly be something in the middle! All or nothing.
When I lived in the suburbs I knew all my neighbors. You’d just naturally run into people around the neighborhood.
Once I moved to the city I didn’t know my neighbors. People kept to themselves or the turnover was high.
My experience is literally the exact opposite. Suburbs were lifeless, soulless places and the city is where my social life got measurably better. There's no way I can ever go back to the suburbs now
Suburbs are good for families, it gives the kids plenty of space to play. Though, with people no longer having kids, they are kinda pointlesss.
I'd say there are upsides and downsides. The kids have room to play, but do you have to drive them to see their friends? Or are they close enough to walk or ride their bikes over there? It depends on the neighborhood.
In my suburb, the kids drive themselves. Electric bicycles and scooters are everywhere and they are crazy fast.
Space to play, but nowhere to go. Everybody has their own private space which isn't great for social interaction. Kids have to be driven everywhere which isn't great for families
Cities have shared parks. I don't have any yard. But I have wonderful parks within short walking distance. There are far more amenities and so much more to offer at public parks than private yards. It's a shared backyard
In the suburbs, everybody has their own play structure in their back yard. In cities, we have bigger, better play structures that more kids can use simultaneously which encourages more social interaction.
Kind of disagree, suburbs I see most of the kids literally played in the streets or alleyways. Usually it only stops in winter and mostly because it gets dark shortly after school and the extreme cold.
Plus the actual article itself is commenting on a decline of socializing that's occurred in the last 30 years. But suburbs have been predominant the US for around 60 years. And there's similar declines occurring in more dense cities like NYC and Washington. If it was strictly a suburb problem then someone living in Manhattan shouldn't have been affected but last I heard even those cities are affected.
So many of my neighbors never go out side except to get in their car.
Another problem with the suburbs is car-dependency. When you're in a car you're not interacting in a positive way with other people. In the best case scenario you're just isolating yourself and in the worst case scenario you're angry and frustrated at other people on the road.
This stands in stark contrast to my car-free life. Every time I go out of the house to travel somewhere, I run into people I know. I say hi to strangers. I nod to pedestrians crossing the street. I have a brief conversation with somebody on the bus. I didn't expect that traveling by transit or bike would have such a positive impact on my well-being.
Knowing what I know now, it's not possible for me to go back to a suburban car-dependent life. It would be a major step backwards
This sounds less like "mass transit culture" and more like extroversion.
I don't think anybody would call me extroverted. I'm a typical introverted engineer. humans are social creatures!
when you're in a car, the possibility for a positive social interaction is nearly 0. I don't know about you but I've never been happier after driving my car
when you're not in a car, there's just more opportunities for small social interactions. You can choose to take those opportunities or not, but they're there. There's just something different about being eye-to-eye with people and not separated by a sound proof metal and glass cage
The urban lifestyle is also to blame when it demands a lot of time for work and commute, leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
These however are all effects of a larger mentality of hyper-individualism and hyper-productivity, symptoms of late-stage capitalism.
> The urban lifestyle is also to blame when it demands a lot of time for work and commute,
ironically, urban commutes are substantially shorter on average
> leaving the individual with little time for self improvement and free time. It deteriorates the third place by not allowing time to dedicate to it.
what? there's so many urban third places.
It's common of Internet discourse to reduce an extremely wide range of experiences down to either the one you personally had or a stereotype. Suburbs are kind of like that. You can see it in the existing responses, with some people saying they experienced tremendous community in a suburb but not in a city and some saying the opposite.
The truth is there is no archetype of an "American suburb." They can be wildly different from each other. I grew up in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, famous for car culture. You can find videos today all over the place of lowriders on hydraulics cruising Whittier Blvd. It's referenced in rap songs from the 90s. But you could also walk or ride a bike. Whittier Blvd itself is two lanes each way for much of its length and is the biggest street in the city. I lived two blocks from this street and walked places all the time. I knew all my neighbors. Kids played in the streets. We walked to parks and played there, too. Whittier even has a really nice wilderness park thanks to Turnbull Canyon, where you're not really remote but you can feel that way. In high school when we were assigned to read Walden Pond and produce similar journals, I found isolated creekbeds where you couldn't hear or see anything except the woods and kept a paper journal I wrote in.
On the other hand, my sisters have moved out to Murrieta, CA and are raising their children there. It's a radically different experience. My wife asked if we could walk to a convenience store when we first visited and my sister was almost laughing at us. It's miles away, some streets have no sidewalks, the streets are a hundred feet wide with 50 mph+ speed limits. It's also hot as hell because it's out in the desert.
Both suburbs, even both in Southern California, but very different experiences with very different communities.
Hacker News talks past each other a lot by not acknowledging this and reducing everything down to "suburbs" or "American" and assuming that kind of shorthand has a clear, universal meaning.
Even television and media consumption in general are not the automatic atomizers they're being characterized as. Aside from the old watercooler monoculture of having something to talk about when everyone watched the same five primetime shows, for sports fans and especially when pay-per-view first took off, gathering at one person's house to collectively watch together was almost ubiqitous. That's not even considering cinema in theaters, which were always a group event. I grew up with that. We almost never watched anything alone in the 80s. If people are now primarily watching video media on their phones from their beds while alone, that is a lot different than how we grew up 40 years ago. Reading was more characteristic of alone-time media consumption.
My whole life, my mom would talk about how much she hated the suburbs, how she lived in a Chicago suburb and it was a miserable experience, she would never do it again, etc., all the while praising the time that she lived in Tiburon.
I finally went and visited the house where she had rented in Tiburon (it was just a block from the Paradise Loop path, a pleasant bike ride from SF), and I was like, "Mom, Tiburon is totally a suburb." And her response was "Oh, well your sisters could walk to school and I could walk to the grocery store, so it didn't feel like a suburb to me."
Are you kidding? Suburbs used to have thriving social circles around churches, golf clubs, schools, etc. Trust can be easier too because of greater cultural uniformity.
This hating on suburbs has got to stop. It's fine if you don't like it, but I have way more friends in suburbia than I ever had in the faceless city where people just walked right on past out of fear.
I live in a suburb and I know and talk to my neighbors way more than any of my coworkers who live in the city do.
I don’t think being unbothered is unchallenging/stagnating? You can have solo hobbies that push you. I hate suburbs and car-based societies as much as the next person, but being left alone doesn’t feel like the underlying problem.
My cultural anthropology professor used to study remote villages in Nepal. Once he told the class a story about this one village where a group of people used to socialize each night, with each family taking turns hosting dinner at their home.
Then one family got a TV, and they stopped rotating because everyone wanted to spend the evening watching TV at that one family's house.
Then the other families got TVs, and they stopped the socializing tradition altogether, preferring to watch TV at home.
Media in general is probably the real answer. We lack boredom at home. Earlier you were bored, so you signed up for sports, went on cheap trips, camping, pretty much anything to get out. Talking to older people 60 - 70+, some of them spent three or four days at the clubhouse of their chosen sport, they where constantly out of the house, because that's were you weren't bored.
Communal boredom is where a lot of our creativity comes from.
"playdates" is in itself a tell. That didn't used to be a thing. Kids would just... go out and find their friends and play. No parental scheduling or coordination required.
We use this term when little kids aren't old enough to just go out and find their friends and play. E.g., 2-5 year olds definitely aren't going to be let to go wander around the street.
When families had 3+ kids on average the younger kids would go with the older kids. Now you’re looking at <2 kids on average that doesn’t work.
Yes the post's title calls to mind that 'Bowling Alone' was already detailing loss of cohesion nearly 30 years ago.
People are alienated, y'all.
People form communities when they have shared stressors that they work together to manage, but what remnants of that lifestyle remain today is little more than a skeuomorphic throwback to more vulnerable times.
Everything about modern life is designed so you do not have to directly depend on anyone for anything. You can instead be entirely dependent on a series of distant and unaccountable corporations to get through the day.
my 94 yo gpa is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG. ill see my best friends between once a week to once a month and texting comes and goes. if i got a phone call i assume its an emergency
> First television, then internet, then smartphones
i like vr so i sometimes wonder if itll catch on and if were in the "we know one or two people with a tv" era of the early 40s. theres certainly seems to be a financial incentive since it seems like tvs and phones have gone about as far as we can take them. its also certainly seems like a another leap down the isolation path as well
luckily i think most people reject vr bc it sucks to wear something on your face
edit: grammar (still bad but better)
Older people grew up socializing constantly so they can just start talking to strangers like they've known each other for years, especially if they are from the same town.
I volunteered at an old folks home from age 10-16 or so, this was back in early/mid 90s - before the Internet stole my attention - and the old people were of the Greatest Generation cohort (maybe some of the oldest from 1800s). I really enjoyed those talks and have always liked talking with old people since. I can sit with any of them and just talk for hours but rarely ever do this with younger/my aged people. They just chit chat about everything and silence is never awkward, they could talk about anything from the weather to big social/political issues with an open mind. Unfortunately, I fear this is ending soon as this latest generation of old people is kind of vile and not really seeking positive conversation (wild generalization but it's my experience). Instead they tend to want to tell you how to live, what to believe, who to vote for, etc. and then judge/ridicule you when you don't comply or voice a differing opinion.
FWIW, I also think it's largely because boomer's collectively lost their minds and started acting out when their parent/grandparent generation was gone. It's like they didn't want to disappoint them so were acting on good behavior, but now their true colors show.
tbf part of the reason boomers are assholes is directly a result of the parenting of the greatest generation.
Maybe. I think they had good intentions though, but it just turned out they spoiled the generation. I don’t think this was obvious until way past when the damage was done. The fact they provided so much for them and they ladder pull from their own kids is when it became apparent.
I wonder... The boomers were the first generation born to "the nuclear family". Before that raising kids was a much bigger affair, there were always extended family or neighbors around to help with child care. Is this what made my generation (boomers) so fucked up?
I think you rode a humungous asset wave, but have left ripples for other generations. You are a generation of wealth. I'm an xennial, basically a latchkey kid. My childhood was roaming on a BMX or skateboard. Parents divorced at 4, dad is a trust fund kid that spoiled it all. He and his dad mooched on their early 1900s immigrant parents had success as a merchant in texas. They've let million dollar properties get seized from not paying a small utility bill. Like, if it were stated in this month's USD $5xxx bill with $2x,xxx,xx annual net income. They just never read the mail, none of the 200 notices over 5 years, and it doesn't help they think covert LEOs are watching, following, attempting to murder them. Make for a decent movie but this is the bat shit crazy version.
When my dad does this it’s mortifying
When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!
Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak
Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing
> try to order in languages I don’t speak
why not? I guarantee it's less offensive than you think to be bad at a language but try anyway. I get the desire to avoid embarrassment - it's something I find really difficult to push through, but you've gotta do a whole lot of speaking badly to speak well, and people are generally very appreciative of someone earnestly trying.
If you met someone in person struggling to speak english, would you be offended? or would you be collaborative like "lets figure this out together"
theres
> someone earnestly trying
and then there are occasions where someone orders in a language they dont speak because they assume the person taking their order cant understand english. being associated with someone performing that level of bad faith in public makes me wish restaurants had eject seats
Talking to younger Europeans today (or nearly any Dutch or Scandinavian-speaker under 60) and they may find it tiresome when foreigners try to practice their language, because just using English is more respectful of their time. No, they don't give the foreigner any credit for "earnestly trying".
But if the OP is talking about the US, there's that whole other dynamic mentioned in the sibling comment.
for both you and the sibling comment, I think these are hypotheticals. I hestate to call you guys out but on some level I think its rationalisation for being afraid of embarassment - I literally live in denmark as a foreigner and am learning the language. You can just say you want to practise a little, its not that hard.
You: hej må jeg have... et varm chokolade?
Them: of course, will there be anything else?
You: hvis det er okay jeg ville gerne øve mig på dansk *smile* åbenbart har jeg virkelig brug for det
Them: selvfølgelig! det kommer til... fem-og-halvfems kroner. Sidder i ind, eller ude?
If you don't explicitly say that you are trying to practise then yeah, they are going to default to whatever makes the interaction go smoother. Everyone does that, all the time! But people are generally pretty supportive of another person trying to learn. And of course, people aren't going to assume you think they can't speak english if you say you're practicing (it's not hard to smile and say how lovely you think the language is or whatever.
In general waitstaff and service workers deal with people being indecisive, slow, speaking with confusing dialects, speech impediments all day long. It is not an imposition to work through an imperfect language - and its pretty much the only way anyone ever gets good at a language.
I also get the impulse to be a little jealous of those natural born sunny extroverts who find it easy to do this. For me it does require pushing through a little discomfort, and often I wouldn't if I were busy doing something else. But it's 100% my own discomfort, not the other person. Being asked to hold a conversation in your own native language is not a chore
These aren't hypotheticals for me at all. I am a foreigner who long lived and worked in the Nordics as an linguist, and I have spent a significant portion of my adult life traveling the world mostly for language practice. I have seen firsthand shifting attitudes as more and more younger Europeans use so much English (sometimes even leading to domain loss in their native language) that this is by far their preferred way to interact with foreigners.
You may tell the Danish cafe staff that you need Danish and you want to practice, but that poor person is an employee and hardly in a position to tell you what they really think.
"poor person" it's literally their job. We're talking about such a minor inconvenience, on par with someone asking to pay with cash instead of card, or taking a moment to think about what they want to order. Again, you're asking them to speak their own native language in the country where it is spoken. They serve people in that language all day. Including old farmers that come in with difficult to understand accents, who speak slowly. They are free and welcome to say so if theyre that desparate to speak in english...
I also know Danish people who prefer to speak in english. If I were speaking to them for hours at a party, and they voiced that request, I would oblige. But avoiding trying to speak danish in denmark because of the fear some danish people would be annoyed or even offended without ever asking them is utter insanity.
You say you have travelled the world for language practise, but how did you manage that if you refused to speak the language for fear of somehow offending or inconveniencing people by speaking in their language. Why was it any different from just staying home and reading websites in your target language?
Of course you need Danish in Denmark and it is reasonable to speak Danish in Denmark. But the expectation nowadays is generally that one will practice the language e.g. in a course or with a patient partner and their patient family until at least the B1 level (and ideally B2) level, and only then impose one's imperfect language skills on the general public. At that point, one is no longer quite "practicing" or trying to use a language that one cannot claim to speak yet.
I travel the world for language practice and don't feel too embarassed because 1) I try to get to a B1 level before talking, and 2) I travel in a way that brings me into contact with a lot of elderly people happy for any social contact and novelty. But I am definitely aware of the need to avoid inconveniencing younger people.
> the expectation
Your expectation, imposed upon yourself. I get it, I was embarassed too. It's really not that serious, you can be bad at stuff publicly. Nobody is advocating following people around forcing them to teach you something, but you can still have a great time with people with whom share no language in common. Speaking anything at all just makes things more fun, and people are way more willing to help than you think.
It's just not rude to go to a foreign country armed only with a1 duolingo and a prayer. It's a lot less rude than going there and only speaking english to everyone you meet... Yes even in denmark, even to young people.
As I have gotten better at danish I have had many more young people (the majority of my friend group and social experienced given I went to university here) express that they would prefer to speak to me in danish than the other way around. They were, by default, always making themselves a little uncomfortable, feel a little slower, seem less educated for the sake of communicating with me, because I gave them no other option. Now that I give them the option of switching to a context where I seem like a fool and they are the master, they are happy to take it.
Again, I am not embarassed. And as for the expectation, it is not my own. Have you ever actually spoken to young Europeans about this, or seen the Reddit threads about how customer-facing staff are not there to be your language helper?
Younger Europeans do not necessarily see it as rude for a foreign visitor to come and speak only English. Many local younger people spend a significant portion of their lives in an English-language environment on social media, and mixed European marriages now often use English as the home language. English is no longer seen as an outside thing by which foreigners speaking it are being rude and unappreciative.
And again, domain loss is already ongoing for European languages (and for the Nordic languages this has been observed for like decades now), so it isn't necessarily the case that locals feel more proficient about certain things in their native language and less proficient in English. I have colleagues who would prefer to speak English about technical matters for their own sake, not mine.
> Have you ever actually spoken to young Europeans about this
I can't emphasise enough that I am not only literally a young european, living with a young european partner, with a young european social circle, but I also exist in the real world and not in reddit. I have lived here in denmark for coming up on 10 years.
Yes, I know some extremely online people who have learned better english than danish and talk about noticing a decline in their danish skills. Those few who spend all their time online, on reddit and the like. It's definitely a type, one that by my estimation skews male, autistic, and introverted. Prime hacker news demographic type thing :)
I get it, for you as a linguist its remarkable that this could happen, that people could exist that lose their native tongue or learn another to a higher proficiency of that of the country they live in. We do live in unprecedented times.
However I do not think it is universal, or a majority of young people - I also know many more people who have better knowledge in Danish than in english. It is explicitly on issues of politics, business, science, law, etc that people prefer to speak in danish with me because they do not know the words in english, including at meetup groups dedicated to those things.
I feel like if you are a young European keen on local languages, you should realize other people are choosing differently. I'll just point to three developments I have thought about a lot:
1) For some years now, restaurant wait staff in several large European cities, including my former hometown, often only speak English; you simply can't order in the local language. I am basically the only person who complains about this; my peers who are locals don't bat an eye, they don't see it as offensive at all because English is so normal for them.
2) I have a longtime asssociation with one of those Southeastern European countries known as an emigrant factory. My friends who left to Northern or Central Europe or the Baltics have relatively little interest in using the local language except where (like in Germany) required for interacting with bureaucracy. They feel fine living in English. Back in that country, it has not been unusual for the last decade-plus to hear younger people speaking to each other a mixture of English and the local language, and foreigners moving there now complain they get little opportunity to immerse in the local language as I once did.
3) Themes of anti-globalization and protection of European cultural and linguistic diversity have increasingly become associated with the far-right (a quarter-century ago, this was a passion of the left in some countries!). As is known, the far-right is a vocal force but a minority everywhere.
I have simply not experienced 1) here in denmark. I don't know what to say, I live in a city that's not copenhagen, but if it exists it seems to me it must be rare.
as for 2, yes young people sometimes speak to each other in a mix of english and danish. It's using danish grammar, and critically, not english. You couldn't follow at all if you only spoke english (and with significant difficulty if you only spoke danish for that matter). I consider this similar to the process that creates slang
the other part of 2 regarding people that don't rush to learn the local language. Yes I know people who do this. After living here long enough, especially if they plan to stay, they tend to change their tune. I think there is a lot of motivated reasoning on this topic in particular, including stuff I have said to people myself in the past that friends like to remind me of - Whne I first came here I literally used to talk about how its so hard to practise language because locals won't help while being surrounded by locals who are happy to help. I won't speculate as to why people change after staying somewhere long, its just a tendency I have seen.
regarding 3, it is seemingly often associated with the far right yes, especially when bound with nationalism and themes of invasion/protection, but not unique to those contexts. I have experienced this in leftist political spaces personally, up to the point of votes being held and passing, restricting language in spoken meetings to danish only, explicitly for the comfort of those attending. And of course, I have also experienced this in entirely unpolitical spaces like hobby clubs, discussions at parties, and at work.
I think that you are projecting some online subculture opinions on whole world. Most people do not even know what B1 or B2 means. In the context of ordering food, B2 is useless.
You can try to order the food in local language. And if they respond in English, you switch to English (if you know it), it is not an insult nor situation you should overthink.
You do not have to assume the worst possible attitudes just because someone is young. Yes, some do dislike foreigners in principle, but that applies no matter which language you use.
Lots of ordinary people in Europe know what B1 and B2 mean, because these are the codes used in standard European CVs, and many countries have language tests for citizenship (or, for non-EU citizens, permanent residency) requiring skills at one of these levels.
Not sure why you think B2 is useless for ordering food. B2 is the level at which one can work in an office environment in the local language, it is already beyond ordering food.
You’re absolutely right about learning languages. Perhaps I should have clarified, don’t speak and aren’t trying to learn.
The Trader Joe's people aren't flirting. It's their idiotic managers forcing them to do that. Angela Collier just did a video about it.
> my 94 yo GPA is calling his homies ALL DAY LONG
Our modern day equivalent is being on HN or Reddit all day long
It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.
Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.
And when you do find people out, they're wearing headphones and/or their nose is in a screen, and if you try to talk to them they look startled and annoyed like how dare you speak to me in a public place. The culture is just gone.
Everything happened so quickly too. All it took was a couple of decades.
Incredibly pedantic, but I think that's describing a positive feedback loop where the previous result amplifies the next result further.
Putnam did followup work investigating the causes.
https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....
I think the media influence went far beyond just pacifying or entertaining.
The relentless satire is what really did it. It was all written by some of the smartest yet depraved and depressed people who found a home in comedy. What did we think was going to happen?
Satire is all well and good, but what are we doing when we no longer take anything seriously anymore? Social media, but particularly reddit, continues to be an echo chamber for these mentally castrated and bitter people who couldn't challenge the comedy with a life that was actually any better than what was being mocked.
No longer take anything too seriously anymore?
That was a very 90s 'thing'. Today people, especially young people, are exceedingly lacking in levity. Everything is serious.
I've heard that everything is nihilistic. Things are funny when you're life's good. Things are serious when your life's not good but following them will to make it good. Things are nihilistic when your life's not good but gambling has a chance of making it good and that's the best option you see.
Example of past generation seriousness: investing - put all your money in housing or the stock market and you'll get rich and comfortable. Example of current generation nihilism: everyone wanting to be an influencer. Some people will become successful and some more will get by but most will fail at that, by the mathematics of it. Or literal gambling as in the rise of Kalshi - if your life's crap with $0 or $1k but wouldn't be crap with $100k, why not put it all on 100x odds? Or something like looksmaxxing: will doing xyz to your jawline somehow result in success? Probably not, but it might and you weren't going to be successful otherwise anyway.
GP is wrong anyway, comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking.
> comedy's always been about saying what everyone is secretly thinking
That actually was my whole point. How do you think they're saying what you're thinking? Where did you get those thoughts from? Comedy has been a tastemaking machine for a very long time.
People used to snap out of it around middle age, but I think that point is only getting younger. The illusion has been broken with recent politics. You can't satirize the already absurd while still being funny. The game has changed, but I still see a lot of defensive humor anyway. It's just sad really.
It’s not quite that simple, though. Various studies show that people are feeling increasingly lonely. It is not so much that media replace social activities, but rather that they tend to simply inhibit them.
> The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
It probably began with cave painting. Once Grog discovered cave art he realized that he didn’t actually like his fellow tribesmen all that much.
It's not just smartphones - it's any connected device. Before the pandemic, I'd arrange Peloton rides with my friends and colleagues with bikes, and we'd ride "together" from our houses, high-fiving as we went. I'd meet up with college friends in other cities on Xbox or PlayStation from the luxury of my couch. Social moved, but made us sedentary at the same time.
It feels strange to assign all the blame to media, like theoretically it should be a number of factors, but that's what I got from reading Bowling Alone (fwiw I read the 1995 essay and not the 2000 book).
Even on the TFR point, the birth rate in 1976 in USA was 1.74, 2025 it was 1.6. So it's not like a China situation where it went from over 3 to less than 1 in 50 years.
For some time every new form of isolation had limits causing people to keep finding friends. Early on, one family or shop had a TV set, so people flocked there. Video games were made to play 2 or 4 in the same room. Near free tech and networking was an inflection point.
I think Bowling Alone did a great job of describing the phenomena. I don't think it did a great job of explaining why it was happening.
It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid, nor does it cover the rise in wealth inequality or the weakening of labor laws or the obliteration of pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
Instead, it pins it all on 'television' which, sure, but there's a reason why people gravitate towards entertainment that is served to them much more cheaply per-hour than not. It's a little like saying the problem with small pox is that the boils are painful, not the underlying virus systematically destroying your body.
In my personal experience in community organizing, the main pain points people have are 1) that they have day jobs that exhaust them, 2) the traffic sucks and they don't want to drive to our meetings, or 3) they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs. And even to those points, it's hard to get a public space where you can regularly meet that doesn't charge a lot of money, to provide food/refreshment, to maintain an ongoing potluck which requires a lot of coordination especially when it comes to preferences/dietary restrictions, etc. It's almost never out of a lack of interest. People desperately want community but there are so many barriers in place.
Was the flight out of the cities to "preserve apartheid" or did many people simply want the suburban lifestyle with a yard and bigger house?
I don't thin racism was the dominant factor for people moving out of the cities. Today the suburb I'm in is packed with immigrants.
Regardless, I don't think you're being very charitable.
This has been written about broadly by social historians. This book, in particular, is illuminating: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133867/wh...
Some other links:
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/24906-research-ties-persistenc...
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/white-flight...
https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
There's also this rather infamous quote by one of the most powerful Republican strategists in the 80s, Lee Atwater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#:~:text=Later%20in...
I won't quote it here but it's very telling.
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is another good source on the topic, covering how racist governmental polices played a role.
That's been on my to-read list for a long time. I've read in brief about red-lining and loosely regulated mortgage providers but it'd be good to dive in much deeper. It's almost always so much uglier and much more deeply dystopian if and when you choose to dig past any surface layer of popular history towards more rigorous historiography.
In places like Detroit racism was very much the primary reason in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at least. Some of it was just personal racism, pure and simple. See "blockbusting" techniques used by realtors who would hire a black mother to walk down the street with a baby carriage to give the impetus for white people to sell quickly and cheaply. Or a black family moving into a house, the white neighbors trying to push them out via lawsuit for breaking a racially restrictive covenant, then losing so that all the white people left the neighborhood (e.g. read about Orsel and Minnie McGhee in Detroit, I was the primary author of the National Register nomination for their house).
The racist pressure to move was also a structural issue supported by the Federal government. Redlining meant you couldn't get loans to buy houses in certain neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods were exactly where black people lived. Literal walls could be constructed between two similar communities of different races so that the white side could be higher rated and have better access to loans (e.g., the Birwood Wall in Detroit). A ton has been written about the topic, I can't really do it justice, but the idea that people just wanted a bigger house was not the case. A lot of Detroit actually consisted of single-family homes with yards anyhow, so it was literally white people leaving a house for a very similar one.
I'm wondering how much of it was racism, and how much was people simply being aware that the "worse" areas of town had lots of crime (which they associated with the color of the people living there, not knowing any better) and they didn't want that crime to come to their area.
If I'm walking a street at night and I see a guy with attributes associated with poverty, I'm more likely to switch to the other side of road than if he's wearing a suit, just saying.
Racism might be part of the reason, but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period.
Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!
You don't think the racial make-up of Portland had anything to do with racism?
That's honestly a little wild that people don't realize exactly what principles Oregon was founded on and the role Portland played in all of it.
One, the Portland municipal government explicitly admits to racism during white flight: https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...
Two, the state itself has passed multiple anti-Black exclusionary laws and was founded as a 'white utopia': https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#...
> Any free Black person who refused to leave would be subject to lashing, a provision that was known as "Peter Burnett's lash law."
> The second exclusion law was enacted by the Territorial Legislature on September 21, 1849. This law specified that “it shall not be lawful for any n** or m*** to enter into, or reside” in Oregon, with exceptions made for those who were already in the territory.
> Voters [...] approved the exclusion clause by a wide margin. Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.
This, too, is covered extensively: https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020/06/oregons-founders-...
And more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53996159
I honestly don't know if you could've found a worse example.
> but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period
Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.
This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".
No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.
What they're describing is well documented, but my understanding is that the reality is a blend of what you're describing and what they're describing.
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
I think it's important to remember that the 1950s and 1960s were the time when western society really started to swing the government around for each and every thing in a way what we think is normal now but was fairly unprecedented at the time. When the government is seemingly capriciously regulating your life, pulling strings to get neighborhoods redeveloped in accordance with some new vision, bulldozing other neighborhoods for highways, that's not someplace you want to put down roots, raise your family or be in it for the long haul.
Hate to break it to you but that wasn't new in the 50s and 60s. The mechanisms by which it was done were changing away frome the machine politics of earlier eras - but ways to regulate what can and can't be done by neighborhood have been around since the birth of the country. Use of eminent domain for public works private ventures is at least as old as the railroads. Planned suburbs, company towns, bedroom communities and the like are all 19th century "new" things in the US.
The "new" part was who it was happening to. Instead of just stealing some poor hicks town for a dam and reservoir (after circling the plan for years to depress land values of course) they were interfering with substantially more established communities in far more volume than the railroads ever had. And it was more than just the highways, zoning codes and all manner of municipal regulation proliferated hugely over this time bringing government into people's lives (remember, the economy was way different too, people didn't all work in cube farms with a compliance department between them and the rules).
All those centrally planned things you mentioned were green(ish) field developments
People also moved to suburbs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
Cars enabled people to have free standing houses and work became decentralised, which was also due to cars.
Many people prefer to live in a free standing house.
In many American cities it definitely was about race. If you look at cities like Chicago you can still see today the effects of decades of overtly racist policies that have shaped the demographic layout of the city today.
> It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid
That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).
> that they have day jobs that exhaust them
The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.
> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.
Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.
>the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities
You're talking about an entirely different phenomena. The move from rural areas to cities and exurbs happened in the 50s/60s with cheap mortgage rates, WWII-provisioned education, and large sweeping social services being enacted. White flight is a phenomena that started in the mid-60s to 80s that specifically coincided with integration.
>The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people
There's much to be said about the behavioral manipulation and dark patterns in apps and devices, sure. But I don't think television inherently was employing Skinner-boxes to get people to watch and that's what I was specifically speaking to. Regardless, that dark pattern of it is class struggle related if that's the direction you want to frame it (I see it more as just MBA-brained corporate sociopathy) because it seeks to extract capital from its users while externalizing all negatives onto the users themselves.
>Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
Obviously. And this is clearly related to the fact that the more impoverished you are, the more you need to pool resources to survive. The pain points I illuminated are for individuals who are still showing up to community organizing work and much of what we do in these spaces is effectively providing enough mutual aid for them to survive.
> A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
You have proof of this? That they wouldn't just go home and get shitfaced or otherwise incapacitated? All steelworkers, per capita, were going out dancing regularly? And even so, this wasn't because they were economically incentivized by the rise of labor unions to be in community with others, building power and fighting for better rights? The 30 years of post-Reagan neoliberal expanisionism has effectively neutered unions - and that's something that wasn't covered either by Putnam.
I suspect another thing largely missed by Putnam was the rise of online social spaces. Connecting with friends via the phone, on Discord, in video game spaces - that's community. It's just different from the community envisioned by people in more elderly generations. The fact that you're even commenting on HackerNews is effectively proof against Putnam's claims.
You don't connect with your friends on these platforms, mostly. You connect with amorphous anonymous mobs of people. Like on HN, you aren't my friend, just someone posting, and your username is interchangeable with the one attached to any other reply.
Text on a screen does not make a friend. Seeing someones familiar face can be.
Nobody's commented on your most important point: "city" does not equate to "community involvement." Suburban people statistically volunteer more and join groups more than rural or urban people, and rural people are more likely to meet in person with their groups than suburban or urban people [0].
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...
I'm not sure how much that is age correlation. Suburbs are older and usually have more parents, so they're more likely to volunteer in clubs and organizations. Even in my urban area the most frequently volunteered at organization is the PTA and most of the soup kitchens and senior centers have volunteers in their late 30s to early-50s.
Community engagement isn't also quite the same thing as friend groups. This is making me interested in doing a similar analysis.
I thought that groups and clubs are where you go when you do not have personal friends, to find them.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing.
I doubt that steelworkers around 1920 typically went out dancing after their shifts. Back then, there was a lack of radios or sound systems, and live music was likely reserved for more upscale establishments. The average worker would more likely have gone to a beer hall or pub to have a drink with his mates.
I haven’t been able to quickly find any statistics for the U.S. that go back that far, but in Germany, around 67% of 18- to 25-year-olds were still consuming alcohol regularly in 1973, whereas that figure had dropped to about 28% by 2023. I’m not suggesting that this trend is inherently negative, but there is, at the very least, a correlation with a decline in social activities.
> The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people.
When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.
> Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.
This is what I found: "the social interactions of those from lower-income households tend to revolve around family members and neighbors" and "richer people spend more with their self-selected friends".
This would confirm exactly what OP wrote - people who do socialize do it with people nearby.
> I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle.
They are referring to what they see as they do their community organizing. You dismiss it all, because none of that should theoretically matter.
>When I am tired from work, I spend more time on phone after. And less time doing other more engaging activities. When I had easy workday, I am more likely to do something else.
I have a similar experience but I don't think this disagrees with the parent. My mental exhaustion makes me seek out low-friction "junk food" behaviors. But much like drinking after work because you had a long day, the phone exhausts you in another way. The cure and disease are one in the same here.
> The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.
And, as is often the case, the simple answer is incomplete/oversimplified. Because there are cultures which have absorbed those technologies while remaining much more social than Western cultures. And they are ones that are less individualistic and stress more of a group, family or clan mentality.
The issue with fertility rates is similar/correlated. Most of the developed world is seeing rates far below replacement, but some cultures are far more resistant to the influences of technology than others. Many developed countries have tried to address their low birth rates from a policy standpoint, essentially paying people a small percentage of what it costs to raise a child to incentivize parenthood. But I’d argue it’s far more important to address their low birth rate as a cultural issue, which is basically a semi-narcissistic focus on maximizing our own lives rather than doing what’s best for our (for lack of a better word) tribe. Because the less individualistic a society is, the less it’s struggling with these problems.
I’d posit that a lot of this has to do with the decline of religiosity in Western cultures. Religion was where a lot of people got their group cohesion and sense of an importance of something greater than self. And while I’m no fan of religion, we’ve removed it without replacing it with something else that serves the same function. We’re going to have to find that something or these sorts of trends will only continue.
> Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them.
Thats why we plan to move to the burbs. Lots of ethnic enclaves where kids go around the neighborhood on their own and play.
My controversial idea for urban planning: age and demographic based zoning.
There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.
You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.
It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.
I don’t have a direct response to your zoning idea but have observed in European cities there seems to be less age segregation.
One could say that, yes.
One could also say that there are old people everywhere now.
You should read actual studies on what you're suggesting rather than investing in "controversial takes" that are categorically wrong.
People are cynical about your idea, but it's not like it has never been done in society. There are in fact apartment complexes that focus on elderly demographics. Retirement homes are just that. What's a school but a bastion for a bunch of kids of similar age to socialize together (and should a random adult wander onto it, there'd be a lockdown).
Urban planning around these situations would be nice. But the very least we could do is build more third places that tries to attract that last middle demographic to come together; that mid 20's to 40's adults too old for college campuses but too young (and not on social security funds) for older gatherings. That's sort of what some bars can be, but a wide open space with less pressure to spend $15 on a "cheap" beer would be nice.
we already have it, it's called the Villages.
People stay in the same house their whole lives though. Your young family zone is going to be a retiree zone in 30 years and that’s where the schools and parks will be then. Can’t realistically ask people to uproot and move 3 or 4 times in their life, that’s a very expensive proposition.
Why not just make the new neighborhoods walkable with green space too?
Ethnic enclaves?
Yes like a suburban housing unit dominated by a particular ethic group.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
What you seem to be implying is people are lazy and choosing TikTok over real relationships. But I also think people choose TikTok because it’s low effort and they don’t have much gas left in the tank.
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.
This might be controversial, and I'm not saying it has to be the case, but I believe at least part of it is due to lack of sunlight / outside movement (vs all day in office, car, train, home with stuffy air and sometimes not even openable windows) and nutrition (too much processed and fortified food, not enough protein for many people).
I'm trying to focus on both in my life, and I have become much happier as a result.
>seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Counterpoint, people are TOLD and CONVINCED that they are exhausted and that life is way harder than it is.
Capitalism loves someone who is "too busy" to make stuff or avoid buying stuff.
Our lives are all about reducing friction and making everything easier.
Relative to 20-30 years ago we are so lucky and privileged. It's nuts how the victim mindset has spread.
I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
The baseline for what is acceptable has dropped so, so far. And I'm sure people will reply saying I just don't get it. Lol.
I think people are actually increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life, but that increase is basically entirely due to spending hours doomscrolling and similar behavior.
Real housing prices are the most expensive they've been in recent history, but sure it's almost entirely doomscrolling.
The Housing Theory of Everything is underappreciated: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
One could argue that both parents having to work is much more difficult than when one person could support a household. Houses, healthcare and education are objectively much more expensive as well. It's not "victim mindset", it's literal exhaustion because everything is much more expensive. There's also no way to retire vs pensions and other baby boomer offramps.
Life has become increasingly expensive. Safety nets that used to be there, aren’t anymore. We’re surrounded by enshittification. Social divides, and antagonism between social groups are high.
Your contempt for humanity is blinding you to real issues people face every day. Yes, some things have gotten better over the years, but some things have gotten a lot worse.
I don't need people to tell me. My rent and paycheck are a very convincing argument in and of themselves.
>I've lived all over the place and one thing I've seem priliferate is this mindset of "I'm a victim, doing this is too hard, so I just won't for X and Y reasons" while folks order Uber eats.
There's a lot I can do by myself. But at the end of the day, someone choosing not to ghost me for a hangout or take the time to get together regularly is a 2-way street. Even pre-pandemic, it's been said people are flakier than ever.
There are systematic reasons to explain this, but on a micro level: "just work harder" is not a solution to friendship.
20-30 years ago was 1996-2006. Granted, I was younger back then, but in my mind this post Cold War, young Internet, pre-smartphone age was the best of times. Since then life got easier in some ways, harder in others. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about today, but how do you think we're so much better off now?
> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.
Is life today bleaker or harder than it was during the Great Depression? People still made time for each other.
What if it is the media that is making people exhausted and disillusioned? Not the other way around.
I’m not arguing that today is the worst time to ever exist in the history of humanity.
I’m arguing there are legitimate reasons why people are exhausted and disillusioned with the current state of the world.
No one's saying there aren't legitimate reasons to be disillusioned with the world - but that's not mutually exclusive from people socializing or having community. If anything, it's one reasons people are so exhausted and defeated to begin with.
There's a reason people call it "doomscrolling", and it's not because it's healthy escapism. Bad news and defeatism is psychologically addictive, and platforms have financial incentive to pump your brain full of negativity. Regardless of how bad it is outside, the internet is not a protective bubble - it's an opium den.
Yes they are. People are blaming it almost entirely on scrolling social media.
In the Great Depression there was community and hope. People could band together, form unions or political movements.
Today, computers allow for mass dystopian control. Cameras and algorithms everywhere with no chance of appealing to an actual human.
There are multiple kinds of suffering, and even if more people have sufficient nutrition and health than in the great depression, it's much harder to see hope for the future today.
It’s bleaker because everyone knows a lot more. People back in the day were for lack of a better word- naive. They had no idea what others were doing outside of their neighborhood and what was in the newspapers. There are incredible, chronic hidden pressures in the world now even if you individually disengage from social media and the like.
I've read a study that stated that the average US adult socializes 90 minutes per week, down from 4+ hours in the 90s, and 16+ in the 60s.
Yeah, I don't think the age disparity is talked about enough. Admitedly I'm in this weird "youngest millenial" bracket where, growing up, I was always much older than my parent's friend's kids. But even in general with young adult life: once you leave college, everyone around you feels "older".
There's maybe 1-2 other people around your age at work, unless you actively chose the massive internship to employment pipeline of MAANG, Big 4, or your industry equivalent that was still actively training employees. Not really for me; my first gig was pretty young, but going to a large corporation for much higher pay: it was a satellite office with 2-3 other people my age than a bunch of seasoned veterans.
Neighborhoods are the same way too. Even today, I can make small talk with my neighbors. But they are some 15+ years ahead of life with two young kids. Different vibe from a single dude in his 30's.