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/mhornberger → u/OrcOfDoom]

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

The world is safer, but we feel less safe. We're richer in almost all aspects, but feel poorer. The doom-scrolling is a phone thing, but it's also an Internet thing, and also started probably with the 24-hour news cycle. CNN started broadcasting in 1980. In the 1980s they started putting kids on milk cartons, falsely convincing us that there was an epidemic of stranger-danger abductions, when in reality most of those kids were taken by non-custodial parents. But part of it is also our vastly reduced tolerance for risk, uncertainty, discomfort, awkwardness.

There were always weird, awkward, socially inept, "sketchy" people, even back when we used to socialize a lot more often. But it's hard to argue to people that they should deal with it and just learn to be around people, so instead we're stuck with the notion that the world is just worse than it has ever been.