"The United States is in some ways becoming a medieval society, in which people live and work in the modern equivalent of castles--gated communities, apartment buildings with doormen, and office buildings with guards--and try to shield themselves while traveling between them. They do this by riding in sport-utility vehicles, which look armored, and by trying to appear as intimidating as possible to potential attackers." - Keith Bradsher
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/suvs-and...
Riding bicycles alone isn't going to help; its going to take decades of urban planning to fix the last 60 years of mistakes.
Maybe look at it as joining a community, not specifically being about cycling. Being a cyclist gives you something in common with someone else that you can talk about it and, when doing it, it's rather visible. A running club, writing group, etc. can be similar.
I'm a transportation cyclist, but I don't think being a cyclist has measurably increased the number of friends I have. It did give me something in common with quite a few of my friends, but I didn't meet any of them through cycling. For a while I tried joining a cycling club, but I found that I didn't have much in common with racing cyclists.
Being a cyclist did however does apparently increase the number of people who seem willing to harm me, unfortunately. That's not loneliness, but it's not good either.
That's not true. US labor mobility is the lowest it's been for generations. Our parents' and grandparents' generations had far more people that moved for work. In fact, there's a strong case to be made that a lot of social problems result from people not having the opportunity to move to areas of greater economic opportunity, whether it's because they're caring for elderly parents, or because housing is too expensive in those areas, or credentialism and increased licensing requirements have made it impractical for them to move across state lines. Whatever the cause, a wide range of economists and social scientists believe that more mobility, not less will help solve many of the pressing social issues that we face.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-...
http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-l...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/upshot/its-not-the-inequa...
A big part of this is the degree to which people in their 20's and 30's are willing to unperson someone in public spaces -- even in person -- just for the suspicion of holding to the wrong ideological viewpoint, or even just for being from the "wrong tribe." It's so common to encounter some sort of unfounded imputation of hidden unsavory motivations. This sort of thing manifested itself in the 80's as a bigoted/snap judgement questioning of one's religious affiliation or sexual orientation.
It was back in the 80's and 90's when I started to develop my information-flow technique for evaluating people: I would watch how they would evaluate me, and gauge what information they used to jump to which conclusions. Bigots often jump to wildly inaccurate conclusions quickly on scant information. Bigots often impute under-the surface motivations without justifiable evidence. I've seen such jumping/imputation in rural South Carolina and from people in poor white neighborhoods in Ohio. What's surprising to me, is the remarkable frequency with which I've seen essentially the same jumping/imputation in the Bay Area.
If you want community, start by exercising the Principle of Charity. Allow for a Loyal Opposition. The vast majority of people have well-meaning (as well as self serving) reasons for their positions. If you want community, let people speak and listen to them. If you want to destroy community, then silence people and impute dark motives.
I think I was on a track where I valued learning and inference above everything, and that gave me a kind of a weird cognitive bias. Things I could rationalize that weren’t obvious got ++points in my head. The result being I overtrained towards using “scant” information, to use your nomenclature, and undertrained more abundant information sources that were more easily apprehended.
Kind of a masochistic information bias.
It did open my mind to some (very real) things that few people notice. Which is useful. But it also closed me off to some quite useful but more mundane realities. I probably share a lot with conspiracy theorists in that way.
It’s been hard reorienting myself out of that. In some ways I’ve overcompensated now and become more gullible.
Long story short these days I play single player games and board games. As a bonus, a well thought out board game stays relevant forever. It never has its servers disabled or becomes incompatible with new system.
I've noticed the people at my gym who seem to talk the most are the ones who don't really come to train, but to just casually exercise. They don't seem to be following a particular program, or even know what they're doing when it comes to performing certain lifts etc.
I can understand maybe being a small group doing circuits, but for strength training there's no time in between sets to have a conversation. I set a timer of between 2 and 3 minutes if I'm not supersetting, I'm not the best conversationalist during that interval.
Basically, there are 2 standard places that adults spend most of their time: Work and Home. The 3rd place is a community space like a barber shop, and allows people to participate in their community, meet people, share ideas, ect.
Well, heck, you could say the same thing for Capitalism, which has also benefited billions materially. Liberation is bound to cause social disruption. The problem isn't the liberation. It's how society needs to (re)organize itself around change. It's ossification in how society views itself, which may exist in the older, traditional part, as well as in newer conceptions. The problem is ideological rigidity, which can be found in both the religious right and the secular left. You shouldn't be rigid when it's time to adjust.
It's perfectly reasonable to construct a tribalism which aids in discovering the truth. Science itself is an example.
The best we can do is tell people "Prefer doing things that make you happy" and hope they don't commit their lives, careers, families, etc. to things that don't make them happy.
One of the best things we can do, is to have many non-exceptional role models, on which younger generations can make incremental improvements. What's needed isn't a whole-cloth re-imagining of the entire social reality. We need a kind of progressive traditionalism, where people can try and evolve towards a better society without dropping complex cultural systems which create value and human well-being.
Perhaps also it would help to give people an easy way out of things they don't enjoy doing? Kinda hard if those "things" are marriages or children, so I'm not sure how feasible it is.
I think it's far better to make people aware of the "price" up front, so such deep commitments are made by people who are ready.
With respect to creating positive and beneficial social systems, however, I'm personally of the opinion that the basics of social development are already nearly fully enumerated, and I think we're not going to stumble across something new which would do a better job than the things that we already know about. I'd love to be wrong, though. And so if what I'm saying is true, then it would seem to point back to education.
I also have a personal saying that "shared hardship is the key to utopia" but certainly it would seem that education is equally key. Like Will Durant said: "Education is the transmission of civilization". That being said, "One test is worth a thousand expert opinions" and nothing is better at teaching the lesson that war is hell and should not be undertaken lightly than a good old fashioned war (e.g. the Long Peace). Ah, but now here is the main reason I think a human hivemind would truly bring us into a kind of shining Star Trek utopia: I could just share my wartime memories and combat experiences with people that haven't been to war. That would certainly work to turn people off of it. I really kinda went off on a tangent here, sorry!
Why would you say that? Other than broad outlines, there are not so many constants in ways of life across history and around the world. Or, are you talking about broad outlines?
I also have a personal saying that "shared hardship is the key to utopia" but certainly it would seem that education is equally key.
My take is that Utopia == Neverland. It's like infinity. It's a useful concept, but you'll never have it physically realized within your grasp.
This is manifestly false. We went from murdering all out-group, to cultures of hospitality to strangers. We went from killing all members of defeated groups to enslaving them, then eventually went on to abolish slavery. We went from unfettered squabbles and mob violence to having the guilty hold bars of iron to prove their innocence before a deity to due process and trials.
History has clear examples of human beings "reducing friction at the interfaces of its tribalism." Human beings have, in fact, done this by changing the philosophical understanding of what constitutes a human being, so not far off from, "changing the definition of human being." This conception used to just mean a body. Then it came to incorporate a "soul." In many cultures, the person was equivalent with their "honor," which kind of amounted to their public image and reputation. (It was so in the early days of the USA, in fact.) Now we have a much more sophisticated notion of humanity and the self, which is evolving still.
The definition which includes what it means to be a human individual or a group, or what it means to communicate between human individuals and groups.
Clearly this is changing and evolving. Much of the time, it appears to be getting closer to some kind of objective truth.
What you think is an illusion. Add a layer of abstraction to get rid of implementation details, and we're the same animals the Romans were.
Neither of those follows from the gp comment. (Careful, your biases are showing!)
And you should really take a look at what our "much more sophisticated notion of humanity and the self" does every day in unfortunate shithole countries around the world. Or even what we do in nice countries.
You make some good points. However, I didn't say we were done; Just that we've made undeniable progress.
Sacrificing confidence, feeling like I am actually capable, social status, ability to be independent and all that in exchange to emptiness of lonely largely pointless household work and forced dependence sounds like bad deal.
Why not blame modern marketing techniques, the rise of human interaction replacing technology or leaded petrol while we're at it.
The correalations are all there and just as valid.
We don't share a sense of place any more, we move around from job to job, families spread around the country or globe. We rarely share an emotional connection and sense of place with our neighbours that our grandparents would have known. We haven't even kept the sense of virtual community that the BBS's had - social networks amplify dissent and engagement, not friendship and connection.
That's before you get to the amount of divorce and people living alone, with less and less free time or money outside of work.
I'm not the least bit surprised loneliness is becoming a global epidemic.