I've long captured this by saying that a society based around the individual is a contradiction.

I don’t personally seen the contradiction here. Mutualism is orthogonal in many ways to individualism. Even the lone hermit had parents, acquired the basic skills form somewhere, and probably uses some tool(s) made by others.

Individualists can take on any number of voluntary social obligations. The ability to exit destructive obligations is a safety valve, and makes the carrying out of those obligations more meaningful in some ways.

Narratives, customs, culture, and shared interests all bind people regardless of their place on the scale of individualism to collectivism.

I grew up in the suburbs, and I've lived in big cities, urban areas in medium sized cities, and exurbs as well.

The cities aren't as different as non-urban people think. But also, they're better in a lot of the ways that most people would expect: more things to do, better food, better shopping. The only real downsides in my mind are less affordable real estate and higher local particle pollution.

By far my least favorite lifestyle of those choices was in the exurbs/rural areas. Incredibly boring, isolated, and it's not as quiet and tranquil as one might expect (you're probably near a highway where jake brakes are allowed or a 55 MPH country road).

Believe it or not, city areas seem to have better quality park space (because what most people who aren't into hardcore nature consider to be "a nice park" is usually quite heavily designed and built).

And, oh yeah, cities are where the jobs are.

We can and should change this as much as possible.

This isn't 1800's America where most families are on rural subsistence farms.

People can choose to stay wherever they want, but the networks that make up the economy have to physically exist. Factories, warehouses, etc...look at a satellite view of the Chicago River from Goose Island down to Midway airport. It's a bunch of physical industrial infrastructure: warehouses, factories, railyards, etc. Do you propose these all instead spread out and get located in random middle-of-nowhere places where there are no employees, shops, restaurants, schools, etc?

Even data centers need to be near population centers. Why put us-east-1 near Roanoke and Lynchburg, VA instead of Roy, New Mexico?

We can't all just become remote knowledge worker hermits. Heck, we all saw how terrible remote learning is for children with the pandemic. [1]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/online-school-covid-learning-loss...

The kind of take you have isn't unusual for HN though. Most people from HN have spent their entire lives in cities or suburbs, so their empathy is short.

I am going to go back to your original comment: you think we should change the fact that most jobs are in cities and suburbs.

I’m just being realistic here: that is not possible. The human population dispersing from cities and suburbs doesn’t make physical sense. You wouldn’t live in a rural area anymore if Manhattan decided to move out and go out to towns like yours. Your town would turn into a city in its own right.

The fact that most people concentrate themselves into denser areas makes your rural lifestyle possible in the first place.

I am not sure what I’m supposed to have empathy for here. I never said that rural people are dumb or bad or that nobody should live in rural areas. I have plenty of empathy for humans in general. I personally don’t prefer rural life but I also don’t have any negative feelings toward anyone who wants to live that way.

I’m just being realistic: concentrated areas where humans live in communities has been our reality since nomadic hunter-gathering was replaced by agriculture.

Good that you can read between the lines. That is the goal. Bring prosperity to these areas rather than extracting from them so regularly.

> The fact that most people concentrate themselves into denser areas makes your rural lifestyle possible in the first place.

Again, another HN fallacy. Rural is not a "lifestyle". Most people don't just move to a place where there's no ambulance services out of a "lifestyle choice". That line of thinking on HN as a default needs a swift and sharp death. Usually it's economic situations. If you start to drift away from the federal definition of rural, which is incredibly specific and not accurate to the average Americans definition, it includes a lot of small towns and cities. There's a lot of overlap as to why people live in those places and, again, it's generally not lifestyle.

> I am not sure what I’m supposed to have empathy for here. I never said that rural people are dumb or bad or that nobody should live in rural areas. I have plenty of empathy for humans in general. I personally don’t prefer rural life but I also don’t have any negative feelings toward anyone who wants to live that way.

Empathy isn't just a trait you have or don't have. Not only are there different kinds of empathy, but humans practice empathy selectively based on experience (largely). I'm saying it sounds like you lack perspective based on the things you've said, which often equates to a lack of empathy. Now, if you were raised in a city or suburb and have never left then that explains it. That doesn't make you awful or anything bad, at least in my view, if that's what you need to hear.

> I’m just being realistic: concentrated areas where humans live in communities has been our reality since nomadic hunter-gathering was replaced by agriculture.

Those tribes were how big? Nowhere near the density of tech cities or any city with the appropriate concentration of jobs I referenced. My idea is to spread the population out more and make better use of land and resources.

This is basically suburban sprawl, we're already doing this, and it's bad.

You haven't adequately addressed the physical impossibility of "spreading the population out" in the context of mega-population centers like China and India.

The ones I can point most directly to are service, retail, and healthcare. These need population densities in order to be efficient.

Unless you are looking at the classic old general store (or in the midwest - you do all your grocery shopping at Kwik Trip - the gas station), it is difficult to have a grocery store outside a city or town of sufficient size. Note that the prices and variety in the smaller stores are more than if you are able to go to a large store in a city.

Likewise, if you want to eat at a restaurant - sure, there are some that are in the "this is a restaurant located a 10 minute drive away from where you can see the window of your neighbor from your window". The norm for this, however, is in a town or city.

And then there's healthcare. Rural hospitals are failing. You don't find dentists on country roads.

These things (and more) 'conspire' to make it so that the services they offer are more efficiently done in a city and the ones in a city can out compete the ones that are located further away from others.

We can then bring up the carbon footprint of living outside a city. If you drive into a city to get goods ( https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/library/public/Dimit... ) that can be a hefty footprint that is exacerbated by not being able to use public transportation. Another look at it - https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-ener... :

> But a different picture emerges when you look at per capita consumption rates — cities have the lowest annual energy use per household (85.3 million Btu) and household member (33.7 million Btu) of all four categories. Rural areas consume about 95 million Btu per household each year, followed by towns (102 million) and suburbs (109 million).

And this then leads to that the jobs for the sectors of the economy where you need to physically be present somewhere (and that is a significant portion of them) are more efficient in a city. Coupled with the more efficent use of land and power with the city, this brings down the costs and maximizes the amount that a person makes... if they live in a city (all other things being equal).

Rural areas are failing because we continue to extract wealth out of them. You actually get right up against talking about it in your wall of text but then just abruptly lose the thought.

Of course, crime, housing costs and traffic (caused in large part by bad urban design) are real issues in American cities to varying degrees. But it's not as if all cities are lawless slums without any way to move about.

I shouldn't exert myself pointing out that the average cost of a vehicle is about $5000 per year [3], which costs a lot more than the unlimited miles you can travel with a $75/month bus/train pass in Chicago. [4]

It would probably blow the minds of car-dwellers to find out that it only takes 20 minutes to walk a mile. [5]

[1] https://realestate.usnews.com/places/new-york/new-york-city/...

[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/obesity.pa...

[3] https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/

[4] https://www.transitchicago.com/fares/

[5] https://www.nike.com/a/how-long-does-it-take-to-walk-a-mile

Which means you have massive delays between stops, and can’t do much if you don’t have hours available.

Especially in a city like NYC, essentially everything you need is within a mile. I live in Tokyo right now, and everything I need for daily life is within a quarter of a mile. I can get basically anywhere in the city in 30 minutes.

You know cities aren’t all like that?

I lived without a car in SF for 10 years and I think it covers that city as well. A lot of international cities work the same way.

Personal vehicles scale up to their passenger count. The single person with a car in the suburbs or rural effectively pays 4x more for the car than the family of four.

How do you get rid of the car? Live somewhere where public transportation or walking is the more efficient means of transportation - larger cities do this better than smaller ones.

Many aspects of managing a house are best done with more people. I've got a list of repairs that need at least three hands to do - but get put off because I've only got two. It would be much easier to live in a nice apartment closer to the urban center of the city.

I am posting this as a person born and raised in a rather small community. I personally do not yearn for the good old days when 'everyone knew everyone' and there were things to do together. We did things together, because of geographical convenience and random chance. We had no other options so we did kids things. Granted, I was lucky to be included in that particular group, because they all were much, much smarter than me, but despite relatively pleasant memories, I enjoy my current situation much more.

<< When I was young random strangers had regularly great conversations on trains.

I accept that being extrovert and/or social is(was?) the default mode in polite society, but I think we can agree that not everyone is built the same way. I certainly do not talk to strangers bar some unusual turn of events that requires cooperation.

<< Every single technological innovation has made it easier for the individual to function better alone.

Is that a bad thing? We can now individually decide the life we actually want to lead with minimal interplay between various mediators that would have been mandatory only decades ago. Should we not be celebrating this as a tremendous achievement of humanity as a whole?

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” — Abraham Lincoln.

As you note, individual freedom increased and number of individuals increased, but those increases also mean risk to the system since freedom means people being able to do things that are not always perceived well by society at large ( since they may be at odds with individual goals ). Some actions of individuals could be damaging to the society. If too many individuals take a path that is damaging, it becomes an actual threat to the system as a whole.

In other words, we either find a point that allows for society in general and individuals in particular to coalesce around ( in the past, American propaganda made you believe that as long you believed in some set of values, you were already -- mentally-- an American ) or attempt impose arbitrary way to create cohesion ( example: ensure National Anthem is played before each football game ).

I am not suggesting we take either of those paths or come up with a new one for two related reasons:

1. I am thankfully not in a position where I can make those kinds of decisions 2. While I see the issue you raise as an important, I am not able to offer a solution for it

being guarded against strangers is a somewhat ingraned fear. but there is value to overcoming the fear , or at least it s worth knowing whether there is value.

somtimes the journey is worth more than the destination. surely it's great that we can travel faster in life and break barriers, but it often leads to lonely destinations which feel very meaningless.

I don't think I am arguing for always abstaining from any human relationships. I am arguing for 'let people choose their own adventure'. I am sure there are enough people that want to do one or the other.

are you a vegan?

I am not sure I agree, but I think it is an interesting thought worth exploring further.

I wonder what do you mean by it?

Because, just as well, there's an aggressive collectivist movement which directly attacks individuals (and individual choices).

It's really easy to switch from "I like to do my things alone, let me be" to "society is evil" after having been made a pariah by the "collective".

I feel like this started with reality-tv which predates social media by a few years. I think reality-tv took poorly-behaved and uninteresting people and elevated them. I think this not only normalized bad behavior but even celebrated these people as special. It seems like this just primed the pump for what came after with social media. TikTok/FB/Instagram et al, seem to enable and encourage everyone to star in their own reality-tv shows where the mundane, banal and uncivil are treated as interesting and worthy of attention.

This article says that the trend has started since 2013. In what way has American individualism changed since then? I would say it hasn't. How could American culture shift that much in less than 10 years in this specific span? I don't buy that explanation without more thorough study.

American individualism has existed far longer than the data in this article. We've been sitting in cars by ourselves since the mid-century. I am most skeptical about easy and simple explanations like the one you're describing.

For one thing, I'm looking through the data and I'm struggling to find the data that the chart is representing: https://www.bls.gov/tus/database/tustabs.htm

Is anyone else able to find it?

Definitely, especially because the article seems to avoid the elephant in the room. The US is amidst full on class warfare, the transfer of wealth from the poor and middleclass to the wealthy has been staggering, we never recovered from the 2008 crash, only rich people did.

The rich are grinding us to pieces and honestly I just dont think most of us have the energy to socialize anymore. Wages are less, no one has much money to spend on recreation, everybody is stressed about rent, healthcare, and their bosses being assholes and making them do the job of 3 people.

There are certainly other factors at play here but avoiding talking about this factor just torpedoes any intelligent discussion of ANYTHING related to quality of life in the US.

In short, spending time alone could also have to do with being beat down by work. Long hours, lower pay, worse benefits. Statistically, America's lower class is getting poorer.

I have to think it's easier to get together with friends and family more when you have more free time and disposable income.

But even this speculation is a jump to conclusions. I am very wary of articles like this that are quick to assign cause.

Before that we've been riding horses by ourselves.

Before that we walked by ourselves.

- Influencers, streamers introduced and established 1-n relationships in society, somewhat replacing more organic 1-1 connections. People start mapping classic relationship-type emotions on what Onlyfans gives them.

- High quality smart phone cameras brought the selfie, the concept of frequently broadcasting a high quality picture of myself, rather than a more natural slice of life moment, picture of a group doing something, relying on another person to be available and willing to make a photo.

- continuing decline of newspapers and other general-audience media, replaced by chose-your-own-bubble media

- online dating becoming widespread, making people more selective, less patient to deal with random encounters; more random rejection, ghosting.

- the pandemic

- homeoffice

This sounds deep and wise in the abstract, but I think it's important that we're talking about is, like, because there are washing machines now, you can show up places looking presentable without there being a woman in your home dedicated to washing your clothes all the time.

Don’t get me wrong, washing machines are great, probably one of the greatest inventions ever. We now can lead meaningful and consequential lives, but newly potent sources of inconsequentiality have arisen.

The kind of murder where husband kills wife used to be waaay more frequent then it is now. It is one of reasons for lower murders clearance rate ... cause these were super easy to solve.

What forces exactly?

> A few decades back you'd join one of the few organizations or clubs that happened in your area, and instantly be in a reliable community (if you adapt a little - let's ignore all the downsides for a moment).

I’ve joined two different clubs. One 7 years ago and one this year. Both have resulted in good friends, outings, and even trips to other states. There are more people who want to see more of me than I have time for.

> Friends would hook you up with a partner who's as nerdy as you.

I met my wife at a friend’s party 5 years ago.

> When I was young random strangers had regularly great conversations on trains. A city street was a village, you knew everyone.

I know my neighbors on both sides and across the street, and routinely have conversations with people I meet when I’m walking my dog.

> That is not coming back anytime soon.

I don’t think it’s gone anywhere. As far as I can see there are far more groups of people doing interesting things than I have time for. Mostly I’m turning down opportunities.

A crucial point that gets brought up on HN time and time again, is that you need to let yourself develop interests that are outside of work, and then you can meet people who share those interests.

Isn’t it more nuanced? In order for someone to not need a wife for laundry service, we rely on the manufacturer. We rely on electricity.

It seems like we become more tightly dependent (single directional graph) on more people in order to feel superficially less intertwined.

I think people need other people more than ever. We just might not need them to be our masters or servants.

We rely on having money. And we rely on a mature economy where someone is willing to solve every problem in exchange for that money.

In an individualistic society, each person is expected to earn their own way and then pay to solve every problem they may have.

In more community-oriented societies, personal earnings are less important than a strong network of friends and family who can fulfill every need. Each person's income/wealth is contributing to the collective for whatever cannot be served internally.

This movement toward individualization correlates very strongly with the capitalism.

and as this community grew, accounting for such "favours" between friends/family become more important, and thus, the need for unit of accounts - aka money. You'd end up replicating the current system when given long enough time and a large enough community.

These societies tend to keep those communities smaller - immediate family plus some closer relatives and family friends. Then there are broader networks with shallower ties where business is favoured but money will usually change hands.

This idea never made sense to me. Capitalism is organized around people self-organizing to form companies. One man companies don't get much of anything done. There's nothing whatsoever about free markets and capitalism that prevents or discourages people working together.

BTW, even small voluntary collectives don't work. Jamestown didn't work, the first year the Pilgrims tried a collective didn't work, the kibbutzen in Israel doesn't work (they get subsidized by the government funded by taxes on capitalists).

Money as a facilitator for the exchange of goods and services long, long, long predates the rise of capitalism.

That's just one thing yet not sure how big or small of a driver it is.

When people are individuals, you know the name of your butcher and which farm your wheat came from. Now it all comes from the collective and you can't participate in the process without being a drone. Working for Walmart is not the same as operating your own farm stand. You lack autonomy because decisions are made collectively by corporations and legislators, and that makes everything bland, homogeneous and fungible.

which is what makes it cheap and available.

If you ran your own farm stand, the goods you produce would be some 2-5x more expensive than a factory farm could've sold for.

The modern wealth is predicated on such specialization and scaling. It's why artisanal products are so expensive.

By default if you buy something in a store, add 5% to the value by improving it and want to sell it on eBay, they'll charge sales tax on the full sale price even though you already paid sales tax on 95% of that. To avoid the double taxation you have to file paperwork, which most people don't know how to do, and pay filing fees, which eat into your already-meager profits.

If you want to sell things over the internet yourself, or accept digital payments in person, how do you avoid paying a fraction of the sale price that may exceed your margin to some payment intermediary that may capriciously choose to cut you off at any time with no recourse?

If you want to incorporate, your annual fee is the same one paid by Apple, but e.g. $500 is a lot more to you than it is to them.

Keep adding things like that up and individual-scale operations are no longer viable without charging thick margins and thereby having only the affluent as customers, which is what happened.

You're ignoring the middle ground, because that's the thing that was destroyed. The expert potter is still in business selling bespoke products to millionaires.

It's the one who might have done it for 15% more than the mass produced product who is gone, because we added on top of that so much bureaucratic overhead that the final price ends up being 100%+ more instead of 15% more and that exceeds what ordinary customers are willing to pay.

Why would you buy a product for 15% more, unless there's a compelling reason to do so? The mass produced ceramics are high quality, durable, come in a variety of shapes, colors, sizes, etc. People buy hand-made ceramics for the aesthetics, and to have something that's more unique.

I think you greatly underestimate how much cheaper mass produced goods are than artisan made goods. Op's choice of ceramics is really good. Machines can produce thousands of plates in the amount of time it takes an artisan potter to make dozens. The potter's source of clay may be limited, or they may have to pay a lot more because they buy in smaller quantities. They have to pay more for transportation for the same reason. They have to pay more for distribution for the same reason.

Bureaucratic overhead may play a part in this, but overall it's a small one that gets lost in the scale of mass production.

Individualism is something more like individual autonomy, which is in no way incompatible with individuals entering into voluntary associations with other members of the community -- as long as no one is forcing them to. But that's the thing we've destroyed through regulatory overhead and vertically integrated monopolies which force people into associations with entities they'd prefer not to be associated with and deprive them of their autonomy.

We are alone and not special. I'm trying to explore the advantages of that. I certainly find myself in less drama in a community I can readily disconnect from.

As an anecdote: I had a friend in high school who regularly said he wanted 'to be remembered', that his greatest goal in life was to have his name be recorded in history. I thought he was somewhat arrogant, but he truly wanted to become an Alexander the Great figure.

I'm considering it my own goal to be someone forgettable. I want to find comfort/success without recognition.

Marrying? Fuck that; pun intended. Friends? I can count the number of true friends I've ever had with one hand. Co-workers and comrades? Ultimately, we're just there to make ends meet. Societal collective (eg: neighborhoods, villages, towns)? Well, we're here talking about this because such things have become pieces of history.

I crave solitude, even if in practice that solitude relies on a handful of people and organizations that enable it (eg: supermarkets, gas stations, power company). Interacting with people fucking sucks balls, the less of it the better I say. I'd sooner deal with machines or our fellow animal peers.

The way I see it, back in the old days people tolerated being around each other because that was a hard requirement to long-term survival. But that is no longer the case, and given that relinquishment and freedom, I for one am going to take full advantage of that freedom and enjoy something my ancestors couldn't.

Of course, this also means I won't have any descendants to enjoy what I enjoy (or enjoy what I couldn't), but that's none of my concern because I don't care about leaving behind offspring in the first place. Individualism baby, everyone including Mother Nature can go pound sand.

* People are two-faced. There is a distinct lack of sincerity in any human interaction compared to interacting with literally anything else. I know a machine is being honest with me, I know a dog or a cat is being honest with me, and I know a human is being dishonest with me.

* The needs and desires of one will not align with those of another. Groups of people must compromise, and compromises leave noone happy. This modern age of people being manipulated into division and strife by the bigger powers-that-be make this even worse.

* The desires of some to wield power leads to awkward and harmful social dynamics. Best to not get involved at all. For individualists, this is perhaps one of the biggest sticking points to socializing. Outside of professional obligations, nobody likes being told what to do.

* People need sufficient time alone to remain mentally healthy, even those who are mega extroverts. The problem is, most people do not understand this and become nuisances in life. Worse is when certain social arrangements (eg: a family) make distancing oneself practically impossible.

For example, if half of the group wants pizza, and the other half wants BBQ, a compromise might make everyone happier if they value eating together over eating their preferred meal apart.

What we have in the west (and increasingly the east) is the opposite: the creation of isolated cogs, educated to be mere cogs, following mass fashions, work as replacable units, and leave no mark of their existence.

Their "individuality" is reduced to consumerism, and is sold to them through chosing among ready made brands (of gadgets, clothes, cultural products). They're "invididually" part of market groups.

Those are, as you observe, better able to function alone than in the past (e.g. no need to cooperate to get it), but they also have no support group, and often not even family and friends to support them, and help them do anything and to allow them to be able to resist (work conditions, political pressure, etc).

They're not individuals, they're cogs with cookie cutter "identities". Nobody knows or cares who they are even - because each of them is as good as any other, just a unit to get some services of.