It took me years to realise that what made me unhappy was trying to maintain these 'real' relationships out of a similar belief that it was what I needed.
It's not that I can't enjoy relationships with people face to face. I do sometimes. But it takes a lot out of me. It drains me of energy. [sometimes that's worth it; sometimes it's not; sometimes it'd be worth it but I just don't have the energy.]
The relationships you don't consider real often makes me happier. They're as meaningful to me as face to face relationships, but a lot less exhausting.
The right balance for me is to be close in 'real' life with a partner and my son, and rely on my colleagues and the occasional other person for some limited other face to face contact (and a day or so a week is enough, thank you), and otherwise stick to myself in 'real' life and keep interactions largely online.
Even then I often I prefer total solitude, and I'm happier this way than I ever was spending time with people for the sake of trying to be someone I'm not.
Chasing 'Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to' can be as soul sucking and damaging as locking yourself in if you're doing it just because you're made to think that's what you should be doing.
Not everyone is like you.
We, are introverts.
Introverts can function in the real world, but only for short bursts at a time. We can make friends, go to parties, even be the life and soul of a party - but only for short bursts at a time, then you'll usually find us chilling out somewhere quiet, recharging our metaphorical batteries.
A lot of people confuse introversy with being shy or timid or other negative connotations, and they'd be incorrect.
There are many good articles on what being an introvert is and means. For example https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-introvert/
You might be, but that's not the reason why real relationships "drain [you] of energy".
> The relationships you don't consider real often makes me happier. They're as meaningful to me as face to face relationships, but a lot less exhausting.
That's more than just being introverted.
That's not a value judgement, btw.
People are quite able to differentiate if they’re fearful if they’re under people or just exhausted.
I’ve no clue what you’re talking.
> Besides, the article doesn't describe any particular "illness".
Calling it illness might not have been the right term, but at least it’s some kind of personal development which has gone a bit into the wrong direction. And if that’s the reason why an introvert person isn’t going more out, isn’t going to meet more people, then there’s something wrong with the introvert person and perhaps this should then be changed with additional personal development, perhaps some kind of therapy.
If that’s not what you meant, then fine, otherwise that’s the reason why I’m a bit upset, because it puts introvert people into a light of wrongness, that something has to be changed in them.
I think you're making assumptions based on yourself and extrapolating. I don't really spend time around "very close friends". My closest friends are people I haven't seen for years, and I'm fine with that. It's not that I wouldn't enjoy spending time with them, because I do, and there are people I spend time thinking about regularly, but I just don't feel a need to go out of my way to see them - when it happens, it happens. And I'll need time to recharge afterwards, but that's ok.
> If you have balance in your life good but be careful of loneliness, we are social beings, even introverts.
While this is pretty much a truism, I think it exaggerates through omission. Yes, we should be wary of being lonely, and yes, we're all social beings, but that does not mean we have need for the same volume of social contact. I haven't felt lonely for decades, even when alone for extended periods of time. I don't see why I would - I don't know what it is like for someone to feel that kind of need for social contact. Again, it doesn't mean I don't like social contact now and again, but it takes very little of it to keep me happy and content.
That’s certainly not the case for myself. If I’m exhausted I need to be completely alone to recharge. Yes, being with close friends is a lot less taxing, but it still is not the same as recharging,
I have ADD and interacting with people is draining... I have to focus on the conversation and most people don't understand that sometimes they say something that gets my imagination going, which makes me lose my focus so I miss some parts of what they say. Until I notice it and zoom in on the conversation again. Which in turn makes me sometimes miss some crucial points. Even when they know I have ADD it still might upset them, even though I do my best. And that is just one example of what makes it hard for me to interact face to face. I prefer writing.
At my worst I even forget what I wanted to say mid sentence! Or I have to blurt it out and interrupt people...
Or is that in fact what you are saying? I suppose there are alternative explanations I haven't thought of either.
I'm saying it really doesn't matter to me if a relationship is "real" or online most of the time. All else being equal, it doesn't make much difference. But all else is rarely equal. I can't choose to have an online-only relationship with my son. And I do enjoy time face-to-face too, it just isn't sufficiently important enough to me that I tend to seek it out for my own sake very often. Sometimes - variety is good - but not often.
Before my son came about, I didn't feel a lack of anything when I was single and childless. I remember a year I spent my summer vacation holed up in my flat coding only going out to go to the shop where my interactions with staff was pretty much single words. That was the entirety of my "real" social contact for three weeks.
I remember that vacation fondly.
I also remember vacations that brought more social contact fondly.
The point being I can be happy with people in real life, but I can also be just as happy keeping things entirely online. I don't need that real-life interaction. Sometimes that real-life interaction is nice or even great, but that is different (online interactions can be equally great). And since those real-life interactions tends to be more draining, I prioritize them only with a very few people.
> Otherwise, the implication is that you would prefer online relationships over that with your partner and son, and you see your partner and son as simply obligations to which you do not wish to abdicate responsibility, presumably due to societal norms or something else.
You're conflating my general needs with what it takes to maintain specific relationships.
That I don't need to see people in real life to be happy, doesn't mean I don't realize that others do, and since I can be happy seeing people as much as I can be happy just talking to them online, I certainly will make time for people in real life when they are sufficiently important to me and I know it makes them happy. That's not out of obligation, but because I care about them, and I accept that not everyone can make do with as little social contact.
But it is still draining, and I still need time to recharge. Even with my son. It's worth it because it matters to him and I love him and want him to happy, just as you'll do all kinds of other things that you yourself don't need if it matters to those you love.
At the same time there are people I also care about that I have never seen face to face, or haven't seen in many years, but where I don't feel that face time with me is necessary for their happiness (the wording is deliberate - I'm not saying they wouldn't be happy to see me), and so it's not a priority for me to ensure we meet face to face unless they make it clear it matters to them even though I do care how they're doing.
This is the vast majority of the comments on 'hacker' 'news', including your own here.
> Not everyone is like you.
Non everyone is like you either. That's the problem with a social media site like this one where anectdata is king.
I did not question that things aren't that way for the person I responded to, which necessarily suggests I accept entirely that not everyone is like me.
I also explicitly said as much in my comment in the very first line by explicitly stating that I don't suggest their statements may be right for some people.
If anything, I expect from experience that I'm in a relatively small minority.
I'm actually astounded by how many people replying seem to reject this idea entirely. I fear they may have eschewed real world relationships for so long that they haven't really got any, don't remember the difference, and use online "relationships" to fill the void as best they can.
Sure, you can have relationships online. But it's never the same as real world relationships. Not even close. The satisfaction I get from being with my wife, my family, and my friends, is so, so, so much greater than any interaction I've had online with a person I've never met. Not remotely comparable.
That the article is talking about a "karma whore" is telling. That title would imply that the main benefit of the online "community" is getting points, not having relationships. It's just a silly Internet game with short, rapid dopamine feedback loops. Social media, with its likes and upvotes, hardly seems like actual social activity.
There's a long history of people choosing to live solitary lives, and as far as I can tell there's no good reason to assume that they made the wrong choice. Sure, most people might need real social contact, but humans are a varied bunch. Let's accept or maybe even celebrate this, even while still keeping in mind that the more 'deviant' a behavior is, the higher the chance is that it's unhealthy.
I'd never recommend a random person shut themselves in and replace real human contact with a digital version, because on average, it's probably not a good thing. But I try my best to also not impose what is 'normal' on them, because for all I know they're one of the odd ones out.
(I am one of those odd ones, to an extent, and trying to conform to the 'healthy mean' has had some bad consequences.)
I recognize that not everyone has family that lives nearby, and some have lost their natural families, which is very difficult. And there many who are estranged from their families for various reasons. I was estranged from my family, but that improved greatly with some considerable (and still ongoing) effort on my part, even though some of them have diagnosed mental illnesses.
I guess my point is that if you have family members, it is well worth it to try to salvage what you can. If you do not have any family, it is well worth it to try to make one. Yes, those family members could be found on Reddit. Better to make the effort to have "real-life" friends and family you can see and talk to and touch daily so you don't have to be miserable alone. It can be hard to see when you're in the midst of it, though.
I for one am not miserable when I'm alone. I love my alone time. And to be clear this is not because it is rare. I make a conscious choice to be alone a lot of the time.
I sometimes love time with people too, but only in small doses and only a very few people (this does not mean I can't enjoy being out in public - being around people I'm not interacting with constantly is just fine).
I certainly don't want to have people around to see and talk and touch daily. The very thought is an exhausting nightmare to me.
People manage to do that just fine all the time. All that's required is to write with the presumption that people might have different experiences. It's fine to suggest that some people are not living healthy lives if they don't have more social contact, and that it's a good idea to ask yourself why you might have a negative reaction to someone suggesting you have more, because everyone ought to understand their own needs and sometimes we don't.
What came across as insulting was that it is worded in a way that suggests this applies to everyone, and that people with different experiences just don't know how bad we have it. That generalization was unnecessary and took away from the overall point.
> when there are a e.g. million+ people in japan who don't leave their bedrooms and never grow up or grow out then there is obviously a new unsustainable pattern of anti-social behaviour
And the way to address that is to with the simple qualification of addressing specifically those who are unhappy with their situation, instead of suggesting that everyone who chooses to have most of their social contact online must necessarily be miserable.
I have no problems believing that lots of people are terribly lonely. At the same time I know that ironically a lot of people put a lot of energy into telling people who are not lonely to be more social. If only they'd spend that energy on people who want more contact (here's a simple one I wish more people would try: give eye contact to people you meet, and ask "how are you?" and actually wait for an answer when e.g. interacting with people in service jobs - you'll be astonished how quickly people will pour out built up emotions on near total strangers the moment someone shows the smallest sign of caring even if that sign is something as basic as actually waiting for an answer instead of just treating questions like that as meaningless greetings) instead of continuing to try to get people like me who are perfectly happy to be more social.
You'd be out there trying to find real friends at meetups, clubs, gatherings, etc. don't ya? It helps a lot if you assume that internet doesn't exist for a day and see what miracles your mind comes up with then!
But it's not like it would make more sense if the term was longer. The whole reason the Internet was created was to be the network that could survive a nuclear war. It'll always be there. People communicated via the Internet way before reddit and others, and would continue doing so if they were to disappear.
"Imagine living without the Internet" is a useless imagination. It's a thing of the past with no way of reappearing. If your ISP were to go down, I assume you'd just switch to mobile data. Assuming you're using two different companies, it would take quite a catastrophe for both of them to be down at the same time, at which point your survival instinct would kick in, not a desire to make meaningful relationships offline.
You can't build a healthy social diet on just approval. Some people do that with real life. It just happens to be far easier to do on the internet because we figured out that approval is addictive and drives user engagement.
For example, I see this every time a discussion about code review culture comes up. The thread is always popular, and it always gets exactly two opinions: "we should be nicer" and "grow a thicker skin." God forbid there could be a situational truth to either point! You'd think from the discussion that every developer is either a caustic veteran or a thin skinned newbie who needs to get over themselves.
For one, the current top comment in the thread to which you link is careful not to take the word “insane” at face value, in keeping with the spirit of the featured (OP) article.
> The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. [0]
The OP also observes
> Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is. [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18884146
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
When I moved on to better work I was able to leave it behind. HN is my only “social media“ now and I try to keep even it to a minimum.
It was that it was a slow creep that lead him down the path and sometimes you don’t realize where you’re headed until you have a come-to moment where you take stock of your life.
Speaking of which, could someone with enough internet points on Math SE ask this guy https://math.stackexchange.com/a/35238 how does he deal with carries during multiplication? I made an account specifically to ask this, but I'm not a mathematician and don't have enough expertise to answer questions asked there (or perhaps I'm too lazy to hunt for questions that I could answer).
Almost anyone with history of using the Internet in a psedonymous capacity can attest to this fact - remote relationships one builds can be very strong and fruitful, surpassing even one's most intimate "IRL" connections, and real life relationships can be weak, obscured, superficial, and lonely. In my experience most people operate thinking that online relationships (and even all interactions) can only be adversarial and abstracted from the real people behind them (e.g. a battle of ideas) but I think there's a lot to be found in positive human interactions online.
Taking this further, I think the idea you espouse has the potential to be dangerous and alienating - it denies certain modes of interaction that some people are not only comfortable with but satisfied with. In denying this capability, you not only shut yourself off from this potential, but you alienate people who find it most fruitful to explore this potential.
This opposition comes up a lot - many people simply cannot understand how one can build a meaningful mostly-anonymous relationship online, or they cannot understand how one can build a sex life in the comfort of their room. They view it as a kind of degraded way of having a relationship or sexuality, "not the real thing", a mere substitute, that the person must be sad or lonely to be finding such enjoyment, to be deprived in order to seek it out, and unsatisfied to pursue it.
It calls back the idea that the masturbator (or the contented asexual) can't be satisfied, since she's not experiencing the joy of sex - she's living in a sad, lonely, isolated and lower-tier way. It calls back the idea of the anime/comic book/sci-fi fan who can't be satisfied with their pleasures (or worse, that they are stuck in a childish imaginative state) because "it's not real/they're just comics/they're pixels on a screen". It calls back the idea of those who enjoy atonal music being either posers or fundamentally broken because they enjoy it more than classical period (or pop) music. It calls back the idea of asking why people would want to listen to music sung in languages they don't understand. It even calls back the idea that philosophy and abstract math are useless because they don't solve any real world problems. In its most egregious form, it calls back the idea that one can't enjoy a good story in a book because it's not visual/auditory and therefore can't appeal to us in the same way a movie can. Why read the Harry Potter books when you can just watch the films, right?
With all due respect, I cannot express how much I detest this concept. It only comes from narrow-mindedness and pre-established ideas. The concept figures that because I can't see the value, the value can't exist for anyone else. Nobody else could experience the world differently. Ironically, it displays a lack of empathy - something, as conventional wisdom would have it, can only come about through real life interactions.
To be clear, I'm not saying you adhere to the general 'conception' I've criticised here, but I am saying that your point fits very nicely into this ultimately harmful conception. I realize the irony of having this kind of argument online.
You set up a false comparison, by the way. There are both meaningful and not meaningful offline relationships, as there are both meaningful and not meaningful online ones. Most offine relationships are not meaningful. It's not useful to compare offline acquaintances with close online friends, just as it's not useful to compare offline friends to online pseudoanonymous interactions.
I grew up on web forums and had/have friends who are just online friends, so I'm no stranger to the phenomenon. But you can't get a hug online.
I'm not implying that a hug is essential, but it represents a class of interactions mostly around intimacy (both platonic and non-platonic) that the digital medium has a lot of trouble substituting. I'm not a touchy feely person, and I'm more fine with traveling alone than pretty much all of my friends, but I still carefully maintain local meatspace friends because I find those interactions essential to my long term happiness regardless of having online friends.
In other words, I disagree with you because I think the medium really does matter, orthogonally to the question of the quality of the relationship.
I think you can be perfectly content without making new friends online, if that's what you mean. But the line is blurry. Do you consider keeping in touch with friends who you used to hang out with but don't live in the same place any more as "online friendships"?
I don’t believe it can be argued in good faith that touch and sight are valued due to completely arbitrary reasons.
"I shut myself up in my room. The further I removed myself from the people I knew in the real world, the further I descended into the minds of people I’ve never interacted with and would never meet again."
It seems the author isn't even aware of how awful this is, since later he admits he's still a karma whore. I am thankful that I recognized what an abysmal facsimile of an actual life this sort of thing is when it was only Usenet. I had a similar addiction for a little less than a year in the mid-90s. It seriously damaged my marriage, and more than I realized at the time, in hindsight.
Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to are essential for a healthy life. If this statement causes a negative reaction, please ask yourself why. It needs your immediate attention.