All of the replies so far are suggesting ideas for an individual but seem to be missing the real crux of the matter...
Yes, you'll be less lonely if you join a group, get out of your house, etc... But how do we actively incentivize that? Social media and whatnot have hundreds of thousands of people working around the clock to find ways to suck you in and monopolize your time.
While "everyone should recognize the problem and then take steps to solve it for themselves" is the obvious solution, it's also not practical to just have everyone collectively decide they need to get out more without SOME sort of fundamental change in our society/incentives/etc
I agree with this, and I think we're partly conditioned to think this way. We (think we) can change ourselves, but we (believe we) can't change the world. I think it's OK to think bigger.
To make friends, people need a place to meet, to have time and means to be there, and a reason to go there semi-regularly. A lot of the design of society completely ignores these needs. These are solvable problems.
We invented Soma from Brave New World. No amount of individual action will overcome the primary cause. Getting rid of Soma is the only effective solution.
Even if you avoid Soma yourself, you will still face the negative effects of a society plagued by Soma.
That’s kind of the conclusion I came to. I can make changes in my life, but when everybody else is sucked in by social media and doesn’t even see the issue trying to build bridges is futile. The only person you can rely on is yourself, the sooner you can accept being alone the better.
I lived in Japan for a while which is a much more solitary place than the UK. I think things in the West are going the same direction. More normalisation of solitary activities, increasing social distance, and fewer new families being started. Grim future.
Just because people appear to be doing more isolated things doesn’t mean it’s a ratchet that only moves in 1 direction. People adjust. When enough people feel too lonely, they will adapt and many of them will come up with a solution, likely swinging the pendulum in the other direction.
It is a ratchet though. South Korea's birth rate has been at an existential level for at least a decade and shows no sign of improving. Things won't improve while technology and tech companies are warping what it means to be human.
Now there's chatter about AI companions. If they take off and substitute real relationships it's game over. Swathes of the population will bed rot because they have no incentive to go outside for anything other than work.
Is immediately and completely solving the problem not a good enough incentive? If you go outside and interact, you will be much less lonely.
There is no barrier! You don't need to overthink this. Walkable cities third spaces etc., all great — but literally just go out and interact with people you can do it today many people do it to great success!
You're completely missing the point. The problem is people aren't collectively incentivized to do so. Individually someone can decide "oh wow, I'm lonely, I should get out more", but collectively there's nothing incentivizing everyone to do it, or even notice it's an issue. If there were, we wouldn't be in this situation.
---
"How do we solve the obesity problem?"
"Well people should just work out."
Obviously, that would solve it, but they're distinctly not doing that, which is why we're talking about a broader solution to actually get people to work out.
> The problem is people aren't collectively incentivized to do so.
Yes, we are — please believe me that a LOT of people go out into the world and interact with each other. Doing so is extremely heavily incentivized by all of the wonderful and beautiful things that happen in the world all the time, both quotidian and sublime.
This is pretty spot on. It is like telling deug addicts to stop buying legal and unregulated drugs. Never gonna work.
Real change will require enforced regulation on the methods and tactics social media is allowed to use. Things like notification limits, rules on gamification, feed transparency, and more.
In the states this will never happen. The corporations own the rules.
Pre-schedule it. Ideally recurring. Can be monthly. Possibly even bi-weekly. Agree on a time and do it on schedule. Pre-scheduling removes all the mental load of finding a time together.
While this is true, it's worth mentioning that a regular coffee machine small talk in the office is not building any relationships. At least that's how I experience it. It can start one, but won't automatically make one.
I can go for a coffee and routinely get dragged into 30 min conversation about politics, or cars, or weather, or any other subject I literally don't care about. All the good relationships begin with finding a niche topic between 2 people.
YMMV I guess. I've got tons of friends I've made walking around the office and just dropping in and asking people what they're working on and introducing myself, or sitting at a table with people I didn't. Some are no more than acquaintances, but some are close friends now.
It doesn't have to be an office - young people just need to get out and engage with the world in whatever way works for them. I tell this to my teenagers all the time. They are used to our nice house in the woods, 10 minutes outside of town, where their old parents work remotely and relax at home. But I remind them that this is a good place for our old age, not their youth. I spent my 20s exploring the world, climbing mountains, meeting new people, making mistakes, learning, and growing. They would be happier if they likewise got out and explored... hopefully with fewer mistakes.
But there is far more to the world than offices, so while I agree 100% with the sentiment, I'd broaden those horizons.
For sure. I would have been in real trouble if covid had happened when I was 20. The few times I tried to work remotely it took a matter of just a few days to go stir crazy. The office was a good environment for me (it helped that it was legitimately a good environment with good coworkers, not everyone has that).
As a family man with a wife, two kids, two cats, and a dog ... working from home is no big deal for me now. I prefer it. I got lucky that we did not get forced into this until I was in a position to handle it well.
I agree with this take. I'm definitely not friends with everyone I've worked with in person, but some of the most meaningful post-college friendships were formed by socializing with the people in the office (or people I met through socializing with office friends).
Yep, I met my wife at an office party - she didn't work for the company, just stopped by with someone who did
And not just the office friends that come from it -- I spent an hour a day on the bus, grabbed lunch around town, was downtown when work wrapped up and ended up at a nearby bar/restaurant, went to shows because I was downtown, etc.
Just being forced out of the house led to SO MUCH MORE.
Now I work from home and while we do travel a lot, we barely ever leave the house when we're home. We didn't make a single new friend for like 5 years (and we are a VERY social couple, generally the center of most of our friend groups). We've only just now started making new friends again now that our daughter is a toddler and getting us out of the house -- and it is incredibly refreshing
It's not just willingness, as the OP mentions, being forced out of the house lots of things happen, some of them social. Having everything in the house, from work to shopping to entertainment is a convenience that could even save you some money, but it has a cost down the line.
Yeah I'm very willing to socialize and actually do far more than pretty much anyone I know, even those without kids (but maybe not as much as a 25 year old just getting started in the world and living in SF like I once was). I'm lucky in that regard I guess.
This as well. You need to learn to talk to people, socialize, handle adversity, etc. Sitting at home and your only real connection to the outside world being an echo chamber like facebook or whatever cannot be good for us
Absolutely, I agree. Some of the people I had the sharpest debates with and didn't always agree with had way more impact on who I am today than the softer acquaintances. Most of them definitely made me a better person in the end, even if we weren't really "friends".
And yeah, even just having the basic daily connections can be a dopamine hit.
Yeah I'm impressed with its ability to do stuff, but not quite with its results. We have been working on more AI assistance adoption so I asked it to do some decently complex things with json/yml schema definitions and validations (outside the typical json schema we wanted things like conditional validation, etc)... It wrote a LOT of code and took a long time, and kept telling me it would work, and it didn't. I finally stepped in and eliminated roughly 75% of the code in about 10 minutes and got it working. It's great at tedious stuff, but outside of that, I'm skeptical.
Location: South Lake Tahoe, CA
Remote: Remote preferred, but could be convinced to move back towards SF
Willing to relocate: Only to Northern California
Technologies: Financial analyst stuff
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyona-timkina-8740b2107/
Email: aatimkina@gmail.com
She works for Disney / Hulu right now for several years and is an Associate Business Manager & Sr Financial Analyst. She manages a budget of over $250m and is universally loved. They're moving to in office and we have no desire to move to LA, especially to work in a cubicle. She wants to move more towards a startup, because she misses the fast-paced, team oriented, can-do attitude of Hulu, and is being drained by the culture of Disney. If you want a genuinely good person who will work her ass off, reach out!
What the sibling said. You also have to be sufficiently business-like in your projects, according to legal advice I got. If you slap an LLC on your obviously hobby project, they might be able to make the case that it wasn’t a legitimate business operation. That is fraud isn’t the only way to pierce the veil, I was told.
It's not technically fraudulent to use your personal bank account, per se. You need to keep great records though. But from what I understand that could be enough to consider the veil pierced. Also need to make sure you don't personally ensure any debts.
That's a really cool idea. Would you mind sharing more?
In particular, do you use something like Stripe Atlas for that? And if so, is there any impact to your account with them when you declare a bankruptcy?
Yep, while it's a few extra hundred bucks, Stripe Atlas is just super easy and you get tons of credits and stuff through the partner perks. Plus I've always enjoyed using Stripe for payments.
I've only ever used Stripe Atlas, but there's other alternatives. Atlas gives you a bunch of free credits with their partners and is pretty quick to get through, but you might be paying a hundred or two premium over doing it all ad hoc.
You sell it to an LLC and draft a bill of sale/invoice.
I’d only feel comfortable with a new account at Firebase explicitly in the LLC’s name, and keep my personal name/identity far away from it.
It’s not hard to get an EIN (a few clicks online and free), open a bank account (my credit union turns this around in a day or two), fund it, use debit card as billing method.
I’m not positive… I would imagine you’d need to transfer ownership. Like if I have an iOS app under my personal dev account then start an LLC and someone sues me for whatever reason, I think it would be hard to argue the LLC actually owns the app, but IANAL. You can generally sign up for most of these services as a team or business but I’m not familiar with firebase. It being Google though I’d assume they support business accounts
A pain point will be you’ll need to wait for your new LLC to get a DUNS number + apply for an Apple developer account. (Whilst you’re at it, set up Apple Business Manager too.) Realistically you will want a domain for that LLC that has email, so set that up too.
I love stuff like this... I'd also like to get away from using the term "pimp" to mean to make something cooler. Pimps take advantage of and often force people into sexual slavery. Nothing about that should be glorified and turned into a colloquial term to mean something positive.
Doesn't colloqializing it defang the term? Why should the word be gatekept within the harsh domain it came from rather than allowed to transcend alongside culture? Earnest questions, I don't think about this stuff much.
As the parent of a "severely retarded" (quoted from the first IEP report in 2009) child, I say who the hell cares if you use that word. I have to admit I find it kind of funny and use it all the time.
I downvoted because you said "as a parent". I completely disagree with the idea being the parent of a disabled child gives you special license to say words like that. You're not disabled just because your kid is.
I like and upvoted your comment! I think you’re absolutely right. It is a mild satire on the “my lived experience“ fad. Obviously being the parent of a severely retarded child gives me no special moral power. I will continue making crude jokes like this because even though I’m in my 60s apparently my sense of humor is still 15. That and I don’t like to give any kind of derogatory language special power of of its own.
I can’t wait till you hear my exceptionally insensitive jokes about white people, especially fat bald white men like me. Because, you know, it’s my lived experience…
Seriously, though, thank you for explaining your downvote.
I hate it that words become unacceptable just over time and we all have to adapt our language.
What could be more reasonable than describing someone as retarded? The word means "delayed or held back in terms of progress or development". No one would argue with that as a non-derogatory and accurate label, so why has the word fallen from grace?
Yeah that is a good point I guess. I see this spawned a talk on the word "retarded" as well. Words probably should be allowed to grow and change over time (we see it all the time).
I have a friend who is cousins with Elizabeth Holmes. His mom was her first investor and she has the original stock certificates... They're planning on turning them into NFT's and selling them.
Yes, you'll be less lonely if you join a group, get out of your house, etc... But how do we actively incentivize that? Social media and whatnot have hundreds of thousands of people working around the clock to find ways to suck you in and monopolize your time.
While "everyone should recognize the problem and then take steps to solve it for themselves" is the obvious solution, it's also not practical to just have everyone collectively decide they need to get out more without SOME sort of fundamental change in our society/incentives/etc