It didn’t used to be. At least for me and i don’t recall constantly seeing posts on social media about how lonely and sad everyone was or how to make friends. Now every other magazine article is about how lonely everyone is, nobody gets together, and gen Z doesn’t socialize, drink, or have sex.
Why is there such an epidemic of loneliness and why are people content to be lonely rather than socialize?
Why is so hard to connect? Because people having nothing in common anymore? I used to connect with people over books, movies, hobbies, etc. But now it feels increasingly hard to do that. Most folks I meet don’t care about any of that, they just mostly complain about their lives to you or go on political rants about how unfair the world is.
My friends and my dates no longer seem to watch films, or do much of anything other than spend time on social media? I dont’ use social media so I’m pretty ignorant of it all.
Socialization is work that people forgot to practice. So, a lot of people became introverts and don’t have the stamina to socialize like they used to.
The breakdown of culture. Culture is what unities us and gives as a framework for interaction. Our intellectual world view doesn’t really recognize the importance of culture and capitalism mediates and shapes our culture now, and individualism is more in its interest. Those two things work in synergy to erode it.
Everything is too expensive. People simply can’t afford to do things anymore.
The only mistake in your sentence is “anymore”. The world has always been too expensive for a large part of the population. Most people from the past generations (in North America) never left their home area because they could never afford to travel. Camping was a thing because that was the only vacation many could afford and it was to a campsite within a couple hours drive. People came over for a dinner of hot dogs & chips because no one could afford to host a fancy meal. The house wasn’t spotless because everyone was working during the day but the point was socializing not one-upping each other. Entire wardrobes (winter & summer) fit into half a standard 8’ closet. If one looks at the past through extreme rose coloured glasses they only see the successes and miss the majority’s reality which was often something much less. What to do? Find free stuff to do.
You’re right, people do have rose colored glasses, when it comes to the past.
I’ve added the ‘anymore’ statement because I think that we’ve fallen below a ‘critical mass’.
Bowling isn’t a good example because it isn’t popular anymore, but I’ll use it as an example anyway. If there aren’t a core group of people that can consistently pay to play, the bowling alley goes bankrupt. That hurts the people that, because of a financial constraints, may have gone only occasionally. Even if there are a handful of ultra-wealthy people in a community that can go whenever then want, there are too few of them to really sustain a bowling alley, as they won’t be going everyday.
lonely and sad people spend more money than happy people, as you need to fill the void with something. our suffering means profits to the rich.
@TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world @asklemmy@lemmy.world
In parts, the answer to your question lies in the very title of your thread or, to be precise, the latest word from it: 2020s.
Something happened in 2020. And this thing, for good and bad, required people to distance themselves. And those who were stubbornly unconvinced of the reasons why people should keep social distancing, were faced by the harsh reality sooner or later. We saw people falling dead like flies. We saw how the whole world was facing the exact same struggle, we saw the burnout of their health systems as doctors, nurses and other health professionals were dying in numbers like never before.
Then the pandemic forced the world to go full digital. To a certain extent, it was really great: we could be finally free from metropolitan pollution, as we could work from anywhere (including rural towns, far from the large cities), we could work while petting our cats at home, we could work without needing to get stressed by human modes of transportation.
But this digitalization is what provided enough crude material for a dystopian dungeon to be slowly build around us. Shortly after COVID, we saw things like ChatGPT popping up into existence out of nowhere. And what follows is contemporary and needs no introduction. Of course there’s much more, but my reply is already big.
The fact is: people became (understandably) traumatized, like, for ever. Meanwhile, people became used to a fully digital life, with every aspect of their lives being an app (LaaS, Life-as-a-Service). People were never the same, the world got worse. “Third places” started to wane because Internet supposedly have all places humans need. Then capitalism, now technofeudalism, thrived to further enslave society.
To me, a Zennial (someone born in the cusp between Millennials and Gen Z), the COVID-19 is something that left a permanent wound, not just biological or physical (e.g. long COVID syndrome), but psychological, economical, social: all aspects of my existence were affected.
Before it happened, my social life was blooming, I was enrolled in college again to try and complete my degree I gave up a few years earlier. I was living plain adulthood, independent and far from my parents while living with nice stranger people in a hostel. I was well employed with not-so-bad paycheck and a quite steady IT career… Then COVID came and simply shattered it all. Not just my life goals, not just my academic or professional career, everything! And tech, which I used to love (hence my DevOps career), suddenly started becoming the dystopia I described earlier.
Eventually, COVID made me realize of the impermanence of this pointless existence, pushing me towards nihilism, until I simply gave up trying to deceive myself with mundane illusions. My attempts to seek friends, love, family and career are long gone: it’s all pointless.
I’m just biologically surviving against the will at this point… Billions of humans are, too.
Why is your life so pointless? I don’t get it.
I don’t see the work as technofeudalist… i don’t really participate in social media or any of that. I spend most of my life doing analog stuff outside of my workplace.
but I agree that the sentiment you are expressing is uber popular. but it seems very self-defeating and you have the choices to not be this way.
Perhaps I must illustrate this with a story I write as I compose this very reply.
Imagine someone is brought into this world, to a house of three.
Year after year, the small family slowly improves the house: the backyard got new toys for the kid to play with, a new bedroom is made, cradle becomes a desk for doing school homework. As the kid grows, he starts helping his parents with the reforms, both for him and for them.
Kid becomes teen, then he modifies much of his bedroom to fit his tastes. He grows more, then his former toys get carefully wrapped and stored for his intended, future children.
He becomes adult. He starts college and job. He’s made himself a career and he got promoted. He buys himself a better PC (the first thing he got to buy with his own paycheck) and he repurposes a corner of his desk for tinkering with electronics and ham radio.
One day, a strong climatic disaster happens, and the house partially crumbles to the ground. The whole family dies in the disaster. They get buried at the local cemetery. What’s left of the house is sold and the new owner, a construction corp, decides to further demolish to merge the land with the neighboring houses they also bought.
Land becomes a warehouse and, after a few decades, a data center for a mid-21st century tech corp, where exabytes are stored in quantum servers. The story of that very family, however, is nowhere to be found, as their gravestones, and the cemetery as a whole, have been seeing fewer and fewer mourning guests as time passes, also gets bulldozed cause more data centers are needed and cemeteries are such a “waste of space” for landlords.
Now there’s not even a gravestone number plaque. Nobody knows the names of those who used to be buried, let alone their stories.
This is the legacy 99.99% of humans are going to leave: none at all. Every happiness and sadness, every pain and relief, every fight and war, every love and passion, everything will end up being buried and all the bones will eventually be treated as part of the dirt of a land to be repurposed, first by “powerful” wealthy people, then by Mother Nature as climate change begins to redeem back a land which was originally Hers, and finally by the cosmos after Sol dies and Andromeda finishes the merger.
Why is my life so pointless? Not just my life: the whole existence. I don’t even need to rely on fictional stories: we don’t know names and personal lives from all those serfs of 14th century medieval Europe struck by Plague. We, living on a world highly reliant on writing, ironically don’t know the name or life of the very first Sumer person to ever do cuneiform in Mesopotamia.
And when one realizes how mindbogglingly fleeting this existence are, and how even our individual subjective experiences are just neurological tissue to be dissolved as cadaver fluids to be consumed by vultures which will also become cadavers themselves someday, it’s hard to unsee the fleetness.
so if you aren’t internationally famous there is no point in living?
that’s extremely egotistical. sounds like you need to get over yourself. you’re not that important. your argumentation that you need to be important or your life has no meaning is totally absurdist and incredibly selfish. you have a deep impact on the people around you, but apparently these people do not matter in your worldview. only fame.
that POV does seem to be incredibly lonely and sad. it’s basically saying life has zero value apart from the being on wikipedia.
so if you aren’t internationally famous there is no point in living?
What?! No, absolutely not even close to what I said! I guess you totally missed what I tried to express. Sorry to ask but, did you even read my replies?!
First and most importantly, I must thank you for reminding me and you’re right in this point, specifically: I’m well aware how irrelevant I am. I deeply know it and I live with this irrelevance on a daily basis, knowing how I’ll be nothing as soon as I get to finally die and find my own spiritual annihilation at the tip of Reaperess’s scythe, still thanks for making me to remind of my irrelevance once again!
Having said this, irrelevance isn’t exclusive to me: so is the entire humanity before the countless species on Earth (even though humans think of themselves as some kind of superior species). So is the earthly biosphere before the entire cosmos (even though life tries to fight the cosmic entropy). So is the entire cosmos before the underlying, transcendental fundamenta within it.
In fact, nothing is relevant when we consider cosmic fate, which is either one or more of (a) dark energy and cosmic expansion infinitely stretching the fabric of spacetime continuum to the point of quantum rupture (Big Rip) (b) depletion of energetic transformations (Big Freeze) © another cosmic bubble colliding with this one (Big Bounce).
Either way, all star stuff has expiration date, even though this expiration date is as far as billion, maybe trillion years from now. Life, by extension, is limited to that cosmic deadline, so both human’s hopes of legacy and Nature’s evolution of species are pretty much pointless if this farthest cosmic future is to be considered.
Then humans, aware of their own mortality, often hold on to religious views as to believe they’ll get to some afterlife, and while I do have spiritual views (dark pantheistic ones), I don’t believe in afterlife. The belief of an afterlife, a “fatherly god” is rooted on our deep fear of The Reaperess, She who’s part of the aforementioned cosmic fundamenta, She who touches the spiritual spark of every living being and pulls every baryonic matter to its inexorable decay.
Still we tend to be afraid of Her so we hold on to materialistic, we hold on to mundane, with the hopes of an afterlife being a spiritual extension of this.
So, back to previous point, at absolutely no point I said about the mundane having relevance, much to the contrary: the part where I said about me slightly believing in purpose and relevance uses past tense. It’s gone to me.
Currently, my views aren’t just of a personal purposelessness, it’s about cosmic and ontological purposelessness. Everything from “fame” and “Wikipedia” to “me” and “people around” are so trivially infinitesimal compared to the cosmos where all star stuff, macro and microscopic, are inhabiting and part of now; and compared to what’s going to happen with all those.
ontological and cosmic purpose lies entirely within yourself.
that’s why nihilistism is nothing more than egotism projecting infinitely into the world.
These two paragraphs are blatantly clashing with each other.
If “purpose lies entirely within yourself”, a manner of thinking which is egocentric insofar it centers the purpose inside the person themselves,
then accusing nihilism (and cosmicism), which completely negates and refuses to belief in any kind of human purpose (nihil = “nothing”), of “egoist projection” is not just a misunderstanding of what nihilism is, not just a distortion of what it states, it’s a distortion of the very statement “purpose lies entirely within yourself”, which is a statement often said by optimistic people and, thus, the exact opposite from nihilism.
I think their life just became so hopeless that they have fallen into this very deep feeling of meaninglessness. I guess it can happen when your life gets wrecked
Ok but the flip side of this is some ultimate freedom. If everything you do is going to eventually be forgotten, you may as well do what you want. And the concept of meaning doesn’t exist in the universe outside of the human experience, so whatever meaning you decide for your life is equally valid. If you decide your meaning to life is eating Doritos and watching anime, that’s just as valid as a CEO and ultimately through history just as important.
So go out and be weird and do whatever you feel like.
I was gonna say, this feel more liberating than anything else. Nothing matters! We’re tiny specks in a cold indifferent universe where eventually everything will fade to black! Everything we see will eventually turn to ash! Go out and have some fun experiences, and be present in those - don’t worry about the past, don’t put too much stock in the future, just be present in the moment and find what joy you can.
That too, will fade - your capacity to experience it (or anything) definitely will - so get some while the getting’s good. Do. Cool. Pointless. Shit.
i don’t really participate in social media or any of that.
That’s probably the main difference. I spend like 20 minutes a day on lemmy and that’s it. I used to be very active on TikTok and Reddit. Went from a depressed and anxious mess to having a job and being happy and outgoing basically by focusing on what’s in front of me rather than what’s on my screen. Many people stay in their defeatist echo chambers and that’s the only reality they engage with. There are plenty of reasons to be worried but the thing is there always are. Life, society, family and so on have always been fragile. All you can do is enjoy what you have in this very moment.
good for you man. i tried tiktok. a few years ago but i just… i didn’t understand it. it’s so stupid and repetitive and dumb. i find the experience of it very frustrating as it has zero point or redeeming value.
i used to use instagram but i gave up when it became nothing but ads. it was really cool in the 2010s when it was just your friends
i spend most of my free time reading, playing games, and doing outdoor activities. I also like to go to museums, music shows, etc. and i often go out without my phone.
This was briefly touched upon during the Nexus conference, which I was reading about in an article just before browsing Lemmy and coming across this post. Although it offers no answers, it seems relevant as it might deepen the understanding of the problem:
The people financing the AI revolution were already responsible for the expansion of social media, which ruins many lives, says Leahy. Permanent online surveillance via social media makes young people afraid to even dance at concerts, says the 30-year-old software developer. The algorithms of dating apps have also turned the dating scene into a messed-up place. None of his friends have children, and everywhere he looks, he sees “dejected” peers. “My generation realizes that the promise of ‘let technology run free and everything will be fine’ is not true.”
The original article was in another language, no other paragraphs were relevant, so source has been omitted. Feel free to ask though, I’ll share (a translation of) the article.
This place was great when technology ran free. The internet is way way way more controlled than it was 25 years ago. Many folks don’t see it that way because there are billions of people on here now and the control isn’t being done by government censors, but in the end, there’s nothing “running free” in today’s modern internet. If you replace that quote with “My generation realizes that the promise of ‘let billionaires with profit motives run free and everything will be fine’ is not true” sounds like something a moron would say.
Nah, that sounds like something someone based would say.
Everyone else didn’t have these social media options. So, a lot more people were seeking interaction via community locations.
I think certain shared topics like religion have fallen aside too; even if you find Sky Man to be silly, it was quite often a good reason for people to gather and chat.
Increased media also means we have limited time and attention spans. We have such a ridiculous number of options for how we use our eyes, it feels wasteful to commit them to one thing, even just socializing, for a long period.
It’s not impossible to break the cycle if you recognize how everyone else also recognizes the issue. But being open with others, especially being the initiator everyone appreciates, takes practice.
tbh I have given up on being initiator because it is so draining to be around people who actively choose to be unhappy despite their life being objectively great.
like i went on a date two weeks ago with a new woman I met… she spend 45m complaining about her stocks don’t doing as well as she wanted, her tennis game not being as good as she wanted, etc. it was frustrating and annoying how selfish and self-important she was. i find this experience to be very common… people are super negative and refuse to be positive about their circumstances. this person was living a life better than like 99.5% of everyone else. but seemed to think their life was a failure because they were not a billionaire or something.
It seems to me that dinner and cocktail parties have really fallen out of favor. It makes since to me though. Both my spouse and I work, so neither of us can do the prep work to get our home ready and a meal ready in time to have guests. Hosting norms would also have me pay for the food or drinks which fine once in a blue moon, but not something I could do frequently. I’m one of my few friends with a space that would even make sense to host in, so I’d pretty much be the only one hosting, so the only one spending money. It quickly becomes something I don’t want to do.
There’s also a reduction in affordable third spaces. I get third spaces needing to make money, but it’s so expensive to go out with friends and just hang out.
Everybody, and every corporations jumped on the landlord bandwagon, rents went crazy. Now there is nowhere to go, most small cool places, with live music, or a kitschy theme, have either closed or have become too expensive.
This is bad. At least in the 1990s when the economy was hard, someone could afford to rent out a small place and make a fun bar.
No money to do anything is my main reason.
And then there’s the feeling that it’s less evil to not participate in American culture. American culture doesn’t feel genuine to me and when I find myself in it I feel like I’m losing myself like the decline of a meth user. Participating in American culture makes me feel like a bad human being.
I’ve also come to this conclusion. Twas a fun go but now I feel morally bankrupt and no longer want to be accomplice.
Ads. Ads everywhere and they’ll all attacking your sense of contentment to sell their shit and all their shit is terrible. Terrible of the environment. Terrible for human ethics. All the big companies are clouding with the fascist government.
it’s a culture born into the era of the touch screen
Few touch, much screen.
Money squeeze, destruction of third spaces , rapant misogyny and racism and so many more reasons.
Hmm, happy to say that I can’t relate.
I’ve always been on the introverted side and with a few social activities per week I’m pretty much maxed out all the time.
Mostly do walk and talk out in the city, maybe stopping somewhere to enjoy a coffee on the terrace. Still making new friends, but now more through kid and dog, rather than school. Keeping in touch and even rekindling some older friendships. There are also a few former colleagues I will meet up with from time to time and additionally my wife’s friends.
Now, in my mid thirties, I’ve even started with a small tabletop gaming gang.
Haven’t been active on social media for nearly 15 years…
Does this not count as social media?
no. unless you’re using lemmy as a method of bragging about your life accomplishments?
I suppose.
I was more thinking about where you as friends and share things about your life, rather than message boards with strangers.
Gen Z doesn’t respond to phone calls or texts.
Source: My Gen Z neices.
how do they communicate? discord?
The stare.
I was ahead of my time
Zoomer here. Discord is way better than SMS
I don’t have time for it. I live so far from my friends that it takes me an hour+ if I want to hang out.
My house is always dirty, I don’t have the will to clean.
People are more anxious and have less common friends (low clustering coefficient).
Distance can be mitigated by gaming. It’s dependent on it being more about your socialization with those people though, than an obsession with a game. It’s what we siblings do. And the grandmas play Roblox long distance with their grandkids while FaceTime-ing.
It’s not the social media that’s necessarily bad, it’s how it’s used that can be bad.
I think it’s a combination of many things from social media, to the lackluster economy.
In many ways technology has made us less human and less tolerable of other people. We are becoming like the humans from Wall-E where they are content to eat and watch slop all day, even losing the ability to walk and think because the machines can do it for them. We are becoming mean, self absorbed blobs!
All this technology has made our lives so frictionless and easy. Everything can be done with our phones that in many people’s minds humans are “obsolete”. Which I disagree with, but I’m not better too. I struggle with making friends and maintaining connections, it’s so hard but it’s something I would want to change as well. I guess it’s just a sign of the times, and zoomers, hell other generations too need to try our hardest to connect with our fellow humans.
I was on sub stack and some put it perfectly: " We must resist the pull of the machine." And that’s the struggle being human today and why making human connection is so hard. Our machines are so designed to be so alluring that we must fight against it to stay human.
In many ways technology has made us less human and less tolerable of other people. We are becoming like the humans from Wall-E where they are content to eat and watch slop all day, even losing the ability to walk and think because the machines can do it for them. We are becoming mean, self absorbed blobs!
Yeah honestly, that is the vibe I get. people just want to watch slop, and make zero effort to do anything. I also notice people just want to do the same slop things, there is less and less of a spirit of adventure or curiousity. people just want the familiar.
i feel like i used to connect with people over trying new things, going new places, and learning new things but that spirit is very outdated? also being open minded about other people’s lifestyles, politics, etc is now very ‘bad’. it used to be good?
“From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.” is meant as dystopia, not something to aspire towards
I’m not going to say to go build something. The last 10 years has made anything hobby related incredibly expensive. Fabric. Wood. Paint. Even garden supply. They’ve priced out most people.
Day hiking though, that can be free or cheap. Hearing and smelling are underrated. Get away from the music reminiscent of old school TV commercial advertising that has infused most of social media and YouTube. Smell trees. I’m not saying lean in like it’s a flower. If you day hike, you will notice the nice smells. ASMR sounds are, I think, based on nice sounds you hear while walking: dirt and pine needles under your shoes, leaves rustling in the breeze, etc.
And it’s free. Like a library card. So go take advantage.
i love to hike and go to the library. it is very analog. i borrow DVDs and books. i enjoy how ‘random’ it is to stumble across something totally unexpected.
most people i am meeting nowadays think that is ‘weird’. they are turned off by both things, actively for some reason. the library is mostly very young kids, high school, parents, or old people. very few 20-40 something people.
