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Re:The Loneliness Epidemic by BurningFrog on Thursday July 18, 2019 @11:16AM (#20470681)
When people named themselves after their job, it was often because the whole family did the job, and it was inherited.

This is the opposite of loneliness.

Re:The Loneliness Epidemic by Balero on Thursday July 18, 2019 @11:56AM (#20471125)
It also isn't particularly good for personal freedom, or social mobility.

Recently society has been pushing for these two things, at the expense of personal connections. That means many successful people are working jobs that are out of the experience of their parents. They also do not necessarily share a lot of experiences of their formative years with the people they work with. All of this comes from personal freedom, but at the expense of being close to the people you spend your time with. I suppose you could also put it that its at the expense of spending time with the people you are close to.

Re:The Loneliness Epidemic by rleigh on Thursday July 18, 2019 @02:14PM (#20472497)
Maybe there's a spectrum here. A family trade is both highly social and highly stable, even if it is confining in terms of personal freedom and social mobility.

Maybe, our current obsession as a society with personal freedom and social mobility is an extreme which is itself the cause of all the loneliness. It's an extreme which reduces the stability and cohesion of our society, because in promoting the freedom of the individual above all else, you've harmed the social connections which make a society work.

Maybe there's a happy medium, but I think we might have passed it by over a century back.