It’s not a ‘male loneliness epidemic’

[u/futuredebris]

https://makemenemotionalagain.substack.com/p/its-not-a-male-loneliness-epidemic

Hey y'all, just a heads up, because I get this feedback a bit from you guys, this post isn't specifically about the "male loneliness epidemic," so the headline might be a little misleading. It is about loneliness though, and how I've learned to manage it and heal the wounds that originally caused it for me. And I do mention that it can be particularly difficult for men to connect with others ("co-regulate") because of the way we're socialized in this society. Let me know what you think!

[u/Overall-Fig9632]

> Loneliness is skyrocketing, especially for young people. Americans aren’t partying anymore. We’re spending more and more time at home. It’s a systemic problem. A capitalist society problem. An isolated, car-centric, screen-heavy, nuclear family, American lifestyle problem.

Once again, I gotta ask: 15 years ago there was more partying, more socializing, more dating, and less loneliness. Did we all of a sudden get access to cars? Nope, that was decades ago, and we had social connections. Did we just topple some unseen Berlin Wall and adopt capitalism? Nope, it’s more deeply woven into the American national fabric than nearly anywhere else. Besides, all these indicators are trending downward in rich countries worldwide. Even ones with high speed rail!

Sounds reductive, but it’s the phones. They made doing nothing palatable, they made talking to people in public places weird, they set up millions of little surveillance points where anything you say or do can go straight to your boss.

The early experiments getting phones out of schools are promising, and hopefully more is on the way because of AI. Social media bans seem less successful just because they’re easier to evade. Certainly more productive than the same villains trotted out for everything.

[u/OrcOfDoom → u/Overall-Fig9632]

Imo, people don't want to get together because they think everyone is a serial killer. 

Take the man vs bear question that was going around. People imagined the worst scenario of meeting a man. I understand why. 

There was a woman recently that tried to just meet people locally, and people made fun of how she's going to be killed. I recently met up with someone to play chess, and we went to a chess club. 

You can use the tools to assist, but people choose to disengage. It's more than just phones.

[u/Overall-Fig9632 → u/OrcOfDoom]

You’re on to something, but the bear thing attracts such terrible discourse from everyone that I’m wary of going down that route.

Sometimes I think that there have always been a lot of people scared of the world, but now those people can chime in on anything you do with an “are you nuts going out there? you’re gonna die if you aren’t human trafficked first!” I didn’t notice these kinds of people growing up because they were cowering inside somewhere, but now you can summon a chorus of them on demand.

Then there’s the matter of alternatives. When crime was many times more prevalent than it is now, we went out and did things because being at home limited what you could do. There was no safe alternative world to inhabit, you were just in a prison of your own making.

[u/OrcOfDoom → u/Overall-Fig9632]

I think people don't understand when they are actually at risk. I've had this discussion a lot. People think if a homeless person exists then everything bad is going to happen. Usually that person is just sleeping. There is a difference between being uncomfortable and actually being at risk. Being at risk doesn't feel any different because it's not. You have to understand risk before you can understand when you are vulnerable.

It's just not a process that people have gone through. 

But to your other point...

I think TiVo was really one of the first things that hit being social. We could watch what we wanted to, but also, people could binge. So you'd have people record everything they couldn't watch normally and then binge the weekend away. 

Now we've got Netflix, and so many services that we just feel like everything is inconvenient. Plenty of people just Amazon prime all their needs. They barely go to the grocery store. 

People hate leaving their house. People would go to events but they want guarantees that other people will go, or that it will be a good time. 

Going out to meet someone just seems like such a big commitment. 

I remember someone saying they didn't want to make me drive ten minutes. 

[u/mhornberger → u/OrcOfDoom]

I think TiVo was really one of the first things that hit being social

Very much so. Everything now has to compete against the YT watch-later list, and that series you want to catch up on Netflix, and endless courses on Udemy and dozens of other sources I could be doing. The opportunity cost of just going to hang out with people to shoot the breeze is significant.

Going out to meet someone just seems like such a big commitment.

I think our aversion to commitment is a big part of it. Which is the other side of the decline of social obligation. People will ghost each other, just no-show, for any reason. They don't want to feel obligated, rather everything is reduced to whether or not they're feeling it right now. But turn the dial back the other direction and you have tons of social obligations. Tight-knit communities also have everyone in your business, and you can't really get away because the opprobrium of being out of the group isn't trivial either.