Not even just the neighbors and friends - people used to live in large family units with 10+ people per household. This meant a much broader support network if, for example, you got ill and couldn't take care of your kid for awhile.

3 more family members are about to move into my house. No matter how much I tell myself that having a larger household and more social time will be "good for me", and of course having help with childcare will be hugely convenient, I'm really starting to dread the loss of privacy.

Put a lock on your door.

I'd feel the same way, and that's because I was raised in the Western environment of single-family nuclear households.

That's just a function of how you (and I) grew up. In many cultures, the norm is that offspring live with their parents until marriage, and in some, even the married couple lives with one set of parents.

This is just a reminder that a lot of the things we find comfortable aren't inherent; they're just a reflection of what the norms where during our formative childhood and early adult years.

Two years ago, my wife and I invited my parents to move into a home with us and our children. I expect to always be glad we did, but it has been challenging in ways we hadn't really anticipated. In particular, it requires a more conscious effort for my wife and I to have time to have conversations between just the two of us.

The help with childcare is great as well as the extra hands for household chores. The biggest advantage (and the trigger for this) is that we get to spend time with my ailing dad in his remaining months or years (and he gets to know his grandkids). It also allows us to own fewer cars (2 cars in a household with 4 adults, versus 1 car for each adult). I do wish I had bought a house with an extra bed/bath, however. Not enough to make it worth moving at this time.

Perhaps go on mini-dates with your wife? Coffee shop, park, etc

Yeah, we do that now, and it's a great example of something we wouldn't have had to think or plan for but need to make an effort now.

It also means you need to help others and sometime take time off work from it. People in age range 16-55 were actually people doing more help then receiving it.

On HN it always sounds like you are only receiving, but actual deal ia you provide until you are really old or sick.

As a reminder, you can still do those things. Have a weekly hangout day with friends with no firm plans. Spend time at hobbyist shops on the regular. Play board games with strangers.

It's theoretically possible, but not really if you're honest.

People have gotten used to the isolation, so they're not gonna enjoy it if you randomly invite yourself literally every day of the week. You'll need like-minded friends and that's not something you can really "just decided" to change.

I didn't pick random examples, I just used my regular practices.

you’ll make new friends if you stick to it

The great thing about joining a club is that you know everyone there is already interested enough in the subject of the club to participate with you whenever they've availed their time to be at the clubhouse.

You don't have to drag your old friends out so much as make a couple new (low stakes, with boundaries at first, if you are anxious about it) friends.

I'm seconding what the others say. I see a few close friends 1-3 times a week in relatively unstructured or impulsive situations, and I also go to martial arts and latin dance clubs at no regular interval (although I should work on getting that back on a regular schedule), and play dungeons and dragons once a month. You can absolutely meet people with mutual interests in person, and it is worth pursuing regardless of whether you consider yourself an introvert or not.

The trick is to have a living room and a regular habit of hosting something like “Monday night in” where people come over and just hang out.

It can’t be scheduled. The crux of the whole thing is people can drop by at anytime and more importantly you have to genuinely like it. Can’t treat people dropping over as some sort of event.

I think a standing day is fine. It just has to be low pressure and loose plans.

This is also how I remember my childhood and even early teenage years. My friends would just pop over unannounced and ask me out to play or play sports or something. Also relatives and grandparents would do this occasionally since basically my whole extended family lived in the same village. I also feel like things would have continued the same way if it wasn't for everyone (including me) moving away to study, work, etc. As an adult, it's very difficult to reconstruct the same kind of social network once it has been broken.

I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.

My teenage years were similar. Cells phones were a thing but relatively rare and texting was limited. Friends in HS would often enough just drop by. Nowadays, if you just stop by a friends house, it feels borderline rude or intruding.

My hypothesis is that given the rise of everyone having always connected cell phones, texting, etc, that subconsciously we've all shifted to viewing our physical homes as our form of privacy. Essentially dropping in takes away the last place we feel we can control our interactions with others.

I wonder how much of the changed behavior comes from the less intrusive communication options having gotten much lower effort. Even calling someone unannounced is almost unthinkable except if it's an emergency. I think that's because it's so easy to just send a text message first to ask if it's convenient. In the past text messages weren't as common. Before that, I could have called for example before stopping by a friend's house. However, I would have had to call the landline which nobody might have answered because maybe they were outside. It would also have been disruptive because anyone in their household would have felt like they needed to answer. So why not just stop by if I am passing by anyways? Now though, I better first send a text, then it's not ideal right now because they are cooking or something, so we postpone, even though I could have just helped with the cooking. But nobody wants to propose cooking together. It feels like you are imposing from both sides, but probably both sides would enjoy it. We are just overthinking it.

Anecdotal data for another factor: Too much effort is made! I've recently tried to make an effort to build up more of a friend network and turn some acquaintances into friends. I've noticed that we try to make everything so "nice" that it becomes inconvenient. The hosts always spend at least an hour getting their place ready and prepping food. This leads to a "barrier entry" for getting together that makes these events less. I even brought that up one time, but hosts seem unable to reduce the effort they make. Guests commonly bring gifts. Nobody needs the gifts or the super tidy home to visit. Just ring the doorbell, grab a beer and let's just hang! I say that, but I'd never do this either because it would feel like a transgression. The only exception I've noticed is that sometimes we'll end up chatting with neighbors for a prolonged time when we randomly run into each other while going for a walk or something. However, nobody would ever say "let's take this party inside". It seems to have become cultural and I am not sure how to fix this as an individual. I think part of it is that we are always busy now or feel like we should be. Gotta run those errands, work on my side project, etc.

> Anecdotal data for another factor: Too much effort is made! I've recently tried to make an effort to build up more of a friend network and turn some acquaintances into friends. I've noticed that we try to make everything so "nice" that it becomes inconvenient. The hosts always spend at least an hour getting their place ready and prepping food.

Most of my adult acquaintance friends are like this, but its nice to have a handful of friends that you've known for long enough where you don't feel bad just going to their house uninvited, without bringing anything and they will do the same to you. The problem is making these friends if you don't already have them, or turning the more polite acquaintance friendships into these. I imagine it will only happen after many years of effort. I've not created this type of friend in adulthood, only have kept around the ones I had when I was younger.

I lived in a very orthodox Jewish neighborhood for a while and what you described is exactly what happens on Shabbat still (since there’s no phones being used).

People just feel welcome to drop by. The house is usually a total mess because « work » is not allowed, and there’s no gift bringing either because of religious reasons.

I always admired it. Just one day where no one’s working or traveling and everyone’s free to come over and hangout.

Yup. Being Orthodox myself, you perfectly described it. It's refreshing, especially since they include required family meals.

This is so close to my thinking about these things that it's almost scary considering it came from a person who presumably lives halfway across the planet from me.

Since we are in HN, I feel obliged to ask: how do we fix this?

>I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.

This is just a real gem of an analogy.

Thank you.

> As an adult, it's very difficult to reconstruct the same kind of social network once it has been broken.

This describes my parents' situation perfectly. We are a family of migrants, my parents were very social and had a big network of friends back in their home country. Even since we moved here, they became insular, and never made many long term friends. In fact, they are pretty much alone and not very happy in their older age.

I have noticed in social circles that skew heavily Western that a large majority of small talk revolves around media consumption, whether it's recounting TV episodes, quoting movies, meme-ing Spongebob, etc.

There's a lot of factors to blame for our feelings of isolation. I tend to look toward the fortress-ing of private homes and the sprawl of suburban developments, which encourage seeking enjoyment through pseudo-socialization with the characters on your screen.

Parasocial relationships were a thing long before Twitch and OnlyFans, only people were attaching to fictional characters so the effect wasn't quite as pronounced until actual humans became the objects of consumption (see: Disney adults, MCU ultrafans, etc.). This probably has to do with isolation from social groups as you describe, particularly as people in general lost community centers such as churches due to the sprawl and pace of modern life.

Seeing parasocial relationships infect the internet like regular celebrities in the past is really a bummer and not what I had hoped for the technology. Real life interactions are the way to go more often than not.

I don't get it. Do people not do that anymore?

I grew up in the midwest and I remember a lot of non-commercial social events like potlucks that were commonplace. Some based around churches, others family groups, and others friend/community based. Talking to my family that still lives there, the number of these events over the decades has dropped dramatically. In general these types of events were low cost and had high socialization. It is thought by some that the commercialization of leisure [1] in advertising culture gives too much time and importance to high expense low socialization gatherings and focuses on convincing the consumer to consume more media thereby increasing advertising. Many social media outlets are thought to worsen this situation by optimizing to keep clicking an app (anger clicking, parasocial relationships, etc) rather than focusing on closer in person relationships.

So I would say yes, a lot less people meet in person [2]

[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almana...

[2] https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-t...

On this topic, I find this article fascinating:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23758087

But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.

There's a related documentary of the immense damage brought by paleontologists to those tribes on netflix.

I thought about her too reading the comment.

How do people who study dinosaur fossils damage tribes?

You're right, it was late, I meant anthropologists.

profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is

This is the main problem in my marriage, we don't consume the same media - we've tried to find something in common to watch, but mostly spend it on our phones watching our own media streams, edu-tainment YouTubers for me and Netflix/Disney/Facebook watch for her.

You can't make cultural references or have inside jokes if you don't consume the same media.

Put the phones away and find activities which you both enjoy?

It's been years of arguments that end with "we'll find something to do together".

Our media consumption habits probably aren't the core problem, being able to easily ignore the other person; because the barrier to entry to time wasters is so low, certainly doesn't help.

I don't know, plenty of alienation in 19th century literature where everyone was living in everyone else's pocket. A lot has changed in that time, including our openness to expression of our internal suffering. I grew up in a similar way, my overwhelming memory was that it felt utterly stifling! I couldn't wait to move away and be anonymous.

> many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is

Media consumption is just a replacement for social interaction. And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work. Our society is geared towards extracting maximum profits from people. It does not permit them to have any excess energy left at the end of the workday.

>And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work.

Did people not socialize in the days before worker protections demanded worker protections? I just don't think your reasoning covers the causes well, especially in the suburbanite 40 hour week type that travel by car for an hour+ a day to a single family home.

Media consumption exists because technology has allowed media to show up everywhere at all times very rapidly and we have not had a society wide inoculation to its negative effects.

They were actually exhausted. Fairly often, they just got drunk quickly after work and went to sleep.

Both parents were working 12 hours a day so many kids were unsupervised from age of 4 whole day. Before that, supervised by one older kid.

> Did people not socialize in the days before worker protections demanded worker protections?

Socialization was a luxury that certain segments afford before worker protections. Most families worked, children and all, and after doing what daily chore needed to be done at home, they slept. Socialization happened during dinner etc, which is why a lot of working class families used to give a lot of importance to dinner.

People don’t have the energy to spend time with people because everyone is guarded now. Back in the day everyone usually knew the worst parts/weaknesses/fears of everyone else you spent time with. This made spending time with those people very comfortable.

Any evidence for this? Cool theory that I want to believe but it’s hard to believe; sounds like a romanticization of the past.

No evidence but this is how it still is in South/East Asia.

Also anecdotally the best friends are the ones that are constantly making fun of each other. The modern recommendation of speaking in psychologist provided templates don’t lead to close connections, atleast in my experience.

This is one of the reasons living in a college dorm can be incredibly fun.

All of that os possible only if you work 8 or less hours a day and then go home close to work. It is not possible with current "if you work less then 60 hours a week you are not passionate" frequent ideology. Nor with long commute actually.

What you praise here is called being lazy. And also it relied on kids being unsupervised which was ok at the time.

That's a really interesting anecdote about that memoir. It immediately reminds me of a lot of fantasy type novels I've read.

For example, I'm a big fan of the Wandering Inn series. Essentially, one of the main characters is a young woman transported to a fantasy-style world who takes over an abandoned inn outside a major city. A large part of her story is about interacting with the locals, just wandering around shops and visiting friends she makes along the way, etc. Very reminiscent of the book you mention.

When I look at a lot of other similar books, they often rely on the same style of small community interactions among the characters.

Makes me wonder if part of the reason such stories are so popular is because we're missing so much of that in our everyday lives.

One thing I like about living in SF is that despite its problems, a lot of the city is based around neighborhoods and being walkable. I see the same folks at the local restaurants and hang out with friends and associates at the local pub each week. So I still get some amount of that traditional daily interaction, and unfortunately some of the drama that comes with it.

I mean look at the success of Stardew Valley, a game whose entire premise is that you move to a small rural town to start a farm and forge relationships with the locals. Its a well designed game to be sure but I really think some of the popularity stems from scratching that itch of communal living that so many folks feel they lack.

Been thinking about it a bit. Isn't the key thing about those interactions that you're all at work? You're tending your cows, Robin is running a carpentry business, that couple is running a shop, etc. (I forgot the names of everyone, sorry; been years since I binged on SDV).

Closest analogue to this in modern life is... your co-workers in the office. That chat you have with Maru on the way to sell your wheat in the store is equivalent to that chat you had with Frank from accounting on the way to give your report to the manager upstairs.

Therein, perhaps, lied the magic of countryside/pre-industrial socialization: everyone was always working, but always next to each other. The whole village was the office/plant.

Definitely something to that, although I think a huge part of the appeal of Stardew is that there's no actual pressure to do anything. It's relaxing because your engagement with anything like work is entirely voluntary, you can't really fail in any meaningful sense no matter what you do.

Very interesting observation!

And yes, I strongly agree! Just hanging out was the thing people did.

Kind of miss that. Time to maybe fix it some.

Is this why people like working in a cafe?

I love the ambience of cafes. People, aromas, usually well-lit (and not by moody halogens). Very energizing.

It's basically the only place I can muster the energy learning new programming-related things (not an IC anymore).

Few things struck me on this topic in the last year:

- both me and my in laws are buying estate and I found it curious how to both of us (and most friends too), cameras and alarms were priorities

- leaving my old flat me and my SO realized we knew no one in the building

- went back to where my grandma lived in Poland. Classic but beautiful (really) soviet style neighborhood with parks, swings, etc. In the 90s it was so alive, children playing anywhere, women and men speaking on benches, there was a terrific super safe community. Going there it was just sad: no one around, most of the benches and trees taken down for endless waves of cars "progress" brought.

Cars really have ruined so many things.

Remote work exacerbates this eh

There were idiots in the 50's crowing about how some day we wouldn't have to eat at all. I really wonder about the diet and favorite dishes are like for someone who thinks never eating is progress. And that's without even getting into the communal aspects of eating with a group.

You can enjoy eating, meal preparation, and the like and _also_ recognize how very, very, very money, time, and resource consuming it all is.

If you could replace a typical home-cooked meal which cost $3->5 in materials and at _least_ half an hour in personal labor with a pill that costs $0.03->0.05 and can be produced in the thousands per hour, that's a significant win. And if you can build those pills from the byproducts of vats of cheap-ass microbes (rather than through ordinary (or -worse- factory) farming), then that's a massive win for both the environment and animal welfare.

> [...] very money, time, and resource consuming it all is.

So where do you want to spend that money, time, and resources instead?

• Ending world hunger

• Making really tasty food for the foodies, rather than meh food for everyone (including people who don't appreciate it).

• Art

• A really big Minecraft server

• Doing something about the fact that populated islands are sinking into the ocean and some biomes are changing classification multiple times a year and we're all just sitting at computers and manufacturing thneeds.

Pretty much anywhere else, really. Wasted money, time and resources are wasted money, time and resources. If we could replace food with magic pills – and somehow ensure that the money, time and resources saved weren't just snapped up by the already-wealthy, leaving everyone worse off – why not do it?

The pitch was not that you could skip a meal when you were in a hurry, but skip all meals, every day, forever.

Also cramming 2000 calories into four or five pill sized spaces is practically violating the laws of physics, is it not?

Well biology but not physics (since from physics' perspective, there's plenty of energy in a nuclear fuel pellet), but yes. I think olive oil is the most calorie-dense thing food ingredient, and you'd need to drink about 8 ounces of it to get 2000 calories.

> The pitch was not that you could skip a meal when you were in a hurry, but skip all meals, every day, forever.

I'm aware, yes. That's what a nutritionally-complete pill would enable you to do.

I mentioned "home-cooked meal" for a few reasons.

1) Some people seriously underestimate the cost and labor that goes into small-scale commercial cooking. Such folks will _usually_ have a better understanding of the details of in-home cooking.

2) Some people have decided that all food that one gets at a restaurant is inherently unhealthy.

3) If you plan well (and/or have a large surplus of time and energy) you can totally set things up so that you can eat home-cooked meals every day. That's what leftovers are for.

> ...cramming 2000 calories into four or five pill sized spaces is practically violating the laws of physics, is it not?

I very much doubt it. I has been decades since I studied any physics, but I'd expect that there are many examples of substances that pack at least 2000kcal of energy in four or five pill-sized spaces. As mentioned elsewhere, it's a biology problem, not a physics problem.

Today I saw this great video of London in the 1960s, and I was struck by how many people were hanging out in the streets: https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/yn09ns/fashion_in_1...

I'm born late 1980s and I've never seen so many people out in the streets just chatting outside of parties and village fairs.

This reminds me of a joke from comic Sebastian Maniscalco called Doorbell (it's on YouTube) about how people reacted to having someone ring their doorbell today vs 20 years ago. He talks about how 20 years ago we'd be excited if our doorbell rang vs today we'd be upset by our doorbell when no expecting anyone.

I'd love to get completely unexpected visits, but it happens so so so rarely. I can only remember it happening once in the past 5 years or so. Sometimes, a friend calls me on the phone because they're nearby and then we meet up, which is the next best thing I guess.

I mean I am only 31 so I can't speak to 20 years ago, but I moved out of home at 16 and I always fucking hated unannounced doorbell rings, depending on who it was it could lead to a pretty massive disruption to what I had planned for the day

One thing I like about my apartment complex is we have a hot tub outside. The weather is almost always nice here, so it’s a nice place to be, so I go out most nights, and often hang out with regulars.

Even though it’s super nice (basically resort-quality), there’s probably only a half dozen regulars, while there’s hundreds (200?) apartment units here.

This is the good thing about shared facilities like this: the cost per-unit is really low because there's so many units to share the cost of just a few things like this (or an exercise room, a game room, etc.), and so much space is saved by sharing these things among hundreds of units. But most residents don't use them most of the time, so for the occasional users, they have it available for the 2x a year they want it, and the regular users don't usually feel crowded.

I just happened to see a YouTube video yesterday about how difficult life was as a baker in England in Victorian times. An average baker was not expected to live past age forty five, iirc from the video [0]. These people were working long hours so I don't know how much leisure they got.

Your comment reminded me of this video about how life for a baker used to be much better before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution didn't do much good for bakers. I can only hope our future generations will get to live so much of a better life than us so they can look back at us and try to feel empathy for us.

That doesn't mean everybody else had it easy. In fact, at some point, it seems like one in four(?) babies didn't survive beyond age five[1]?

[0] https://www.fostersbakery.co.uk/victorian-bakers

[1] There is a common misunderstanding about life expectancy, as though it is the age at which most adults could expect to die.

In fact, the mean length of life can be heavily skewed by infant mortality. For example, in 1850 in England and Wales life expectancy at birth was 42, but over 25% of children died before the age of five. For those who survived, life expectancy rose to 57. Moreover, 10% of people born in 1850 lived to over 80.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/18/misunderstan...