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.
Everyone’s expectation of what others need to be to be acceptable socially has skyrocketed while their expectations of what they themselves need to deliver has bottomed out. In dating women only want perfect looking and acting males of higher status and higher income (so much for income inequality) who bring in the majority of the income while also doing at least 50% of the housework. Men expect barbies that never age and also somehow do all the housework and bring in half the salary while on call for sex or gaming 24/7. Friends have to have the exact same income so that they can’t outspend you or become freeloaders while being constantly interesting and available while you can’t be expected to RSVP or even show up if it doesn’t suit you in that moment. There isn’t any common ground because no one should have to settle for less than their every desire, whim, expectation. No one is allowed to expect that much of them and must be willing to take them at their worst. Friends & partners must always do the right thing and never, ever make a mistake.
Somewhere along the line, social media meant people stopped treating each other as humans and instead as a commodity to use to get what they want. Then they look to said social media (exaggeration and all, mine included) to find the answers and find outrage instead.I’m sure there’s loads of reasons. But something that I notice is even with my good close friends (made in the before-times) it’s sometimes hard to find conversations that are “fun”. Politics has always been depressing, but while Bush era war on terror felt like an outlier, the current shit show feels like somewhat inevitable deathspiral. And it isn’t just a horrible time we need to survive together, until we get back to normal, instead it feels like we started to see how even the “better times” of our history were problematic.
Similarly, or perhaps because of, this gloomy realism in politics, I find it hard to be very exicted about other cultural products. We used to be excited for new tech or new tv, but not only is most modern tech underwhelming, if not outright horrifying, but it also makes me feel like I was dumb to have supported the rise of the Internet and move to an online society, since that seems to just be heading towards dystopia.
So, I think we’re at a (hopefully brief) nadir, where things have been bad and they’re getting worse, which kinda makes it hard to be hopeful or excited about the future. And we also can’t be nostalgic about the past because we see how many terrible things were happening in the background back then.
I’m actually doing OK compared to most people, and am a pretty optimistic person, but this societal pessimism makes it hard to be genuinely excited about stuff, even with friends. Even something as innocent as discussing the weather - is a sunny November a blessed long summer, or a harbinger of climate catastrophe? It’s exhausting and it’s easier to just escape into rewatches and computer games.
yeah i kind of agree. even fun stuff now gets politicized. like i love to read lots of kinds of books. but now people get ‘offended’ at me that i read the ‘wrong’ kinds of books that they don’t like and they feel are ‘wrong’. i don’t get it man. i don’t pick what to read based on it being ‘right’, i read the book then decide if i enjoyed it after i read it.
similar to movies. i see so many people comment negative about a movie now because it doesn’t 100% agree with their political views. on the lemmy the other day i saw a fantasy show get blasted for being ‘too gender essentialist’. like… it’s a fantasy story dude. i’m sorry the dragons aren’t lgbt+ enough for you? it’s so weird to see people politicize every thing. also if you watch older stuff. like mid century movies/books… that same argument comes up that it isn’t ‘progressive’ enough. well progressive didn’t really exist back then like it does today, it’s absurd to expect a movie from 1955 to cater to your politics in 2025 otherwise it’s ‘bad’.
hell i own a dog and a cat and people want to turn that into an argument about politics/culture. my cat and my dog don’t care about politics. they care about treats, walks, and attention. but people want me to have the ‘right’ kind of dog/cat, and feed them the ‘right’ food, and train them the ‘right’ way. it’s insane and i generally do not want to interact with people who think the breed of animal you own is some big deal or that it’s animal abuse unless you are feeding them raw food diet.
Join your town’s local discord server. If it has two, one is the shit one. If it doesn’t have one, start it. I started a city discord that grew to over 600 members in two years. Is important to delegate as you grow and encourage all members to try organizing and leading events if they like, at least trying once.
If you can’t host, you’ll need to recruit at least one person that can before the ball gets rolling.
If you like discussing books and films, which are some of my favorite things, movie nights are great easy get togethers and if you don’t have a member with a big living room and TV you can all go to the cinema together (but that’s expensive).
A book club can even be done in a voice channel.
If your town has a boardgame cafe, that’s really good to take prospective friend groups.
If you don’t have that option, look for community organizations with a building, such as a progressive church. Unfortunately that will put some members off events, especially members of many minority groups.
Hiking is free and doesn’t require securing a venue.
You can gain a lot of real (not nebulous internet) community, friends, gratitude, and (to put it bluntly) clout.
During the summer y’all can hang out in parks.
If you’re looking for inclusive spiritual community you can look for Unitarian Universalist congregations. They’re all over Europe and North America. They’re based on progressive values instead of Scripture so you bring your own deity/pantheon/no deity. They’re basically a spiritual community for the left from Pagans to Christians/Jews/Muslims to atheists and agnostics and everyone else.
In my area there are a lot of ageing hippies and a lot of millennials and Gen Z looking for community for their children which is a delightful mix. Lots of LGBTQ+ representation as well.
Could be a useful place to look!
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.
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
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.
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?
I suppose.
I was more thinking about where you as friends and share things about your life, rather than message boards with strangers.
no. unless you’re using lemmy as a method of bragging about your life accomplishments?
Money squeeze, destruction of third spaces , rapant misogyny and racism and so many more reasons.
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.
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.
I’ve also come to this conclusion. Twas a fun go but now I feel morally bankrupt and no longer want to be accomplice.
Y’all can come hang at my house. I’ve got snacks.
I’ll bring wine.
Cool! I’ve got board games. Not Monopoly.
My house has over 100 games, but only one rule: Never Monopoly.
Can we still play Risk! Or is that too close to home as well?
@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.
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.
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.
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.
hugs devops is cool
Is it? It gets harder as time passes for each person. Friends become fewer, more busy, and farther apart. It may be that it is objectively harder now. What do I know as an old man? But it feels hard for everybody as they age individually. I have no close homies that I talk to regularly. 30 years ago, I had many.
i don’t agree. my life is way easier as time goes on. the hardest part of my life was my teens and 20s.
Well, yeah me too. But my life being easier (food and money easier to come by) and comforts rarely in question - for me at least - does not equate to easier to make friends.
Yeah, I can’t tell if this is all legit or if Gen Z is sooooooooo vocal and online that they are just expressing what it’s like to get older and see how the world/relationships really work and so many are just bombarded with negativity that they then feel negative.
I’m in my 40s (Millennial) and have social media, but I still manage to meet up with the few friends I have and muster up energy to cook, walk the dog, and clean house. I can unplug and not feel guilty and maybe that is what my difference is?
i can unplug and not feel guilty and maybe that is what my difference is?
This is my big disconnect with people my own age, and younger people. They seem to have anxiety about these things. I don’t care. They get very upset when I don’t text back immediately, as if I am socially rejecting them. When I text back a few hours later, it’s ‘too late’. but if you ask them to meet up face to face they ‘are too busy and have no time’. And yet they will tell you how much time they waste doing nothing. I also talk to people on the phone, and apparently this is ‘rude’ now to call someone up and talk to them for an hour to catch up?
I don’t get any of it. I find all of it very alienating. Like, whatever happened to just going to a movie, getting a bite to eat, and chilling out? That was what I did like 90% of the time. Maybe 10% going to a party or dinner with someone.
Sounds a little… anxious. What’s up with that?
i don’t understand the constant anxiety. but it seems most folks are anxious all the time, probably from the endless social comparison on social media they are doing and the constant need for immediate and positive feedback.
which seems to be why people like AI so much? because it tells you how wonderful you are.
according to a lot of data, it is objectively harder for young people and everyone to be as social as we were in the 2000s, and going back further, like the 1980s, we were even more social.
it’s a culture born into the era of the touch screen
Few touch, much screen.
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.
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.
