This is very relatable. I don't use IG myself, in fact I've never tried to use any apps to find IRL friends. Nevertheless I've noticed that socializing has become inordinately difficult. "Community" is a bad joke these days. Everything seems to have fallen apart. I tried church but no one actually talks to one another - they leave as soon as the service is over. There's the bar but that's at best a friend simulator, if you're lucky you might meet a couple people over a few drinks but it's just as likely you'll spend an hour staring at your phone because that's all anyone else is doing. Professional connections disappear as quickly as you change jobs. It's all just incredibly depressing and demoralizing.
FWIW, I'm not in a suburb or a big city, but a small town. The social wasteland is universal.
Part of the problem is that the Internet has delocalized relationships. People have text buddies all over the planet, but don't know their neighbors. Because of that, at a cultural level you end up having more in common with an online group of weirdos than with the people sharing your physical locale - and everyone is in the same boat. When one does manage to strike up a conversation, it frequently turns out that the interlocutor is embedded in a hostile ideological matrix - thus every in person interaction becomes fraught and guarded, they can't fully relax and neither can you. Of course one can always attend meetups from whatever online circles one is plugged into, but that's generally not a weekend thing as it involves long distance travel to collect any reasonable number of people together.
I don't have any good advice here. If I did, I wouldn't have found your scream of frustration so relatable.
“Part of the problem is that the Internet has delocalized relationships. People have text buddies all over the planet, but don't know their neighbors. Because of that, at a cultural level you end up having more in common with an online group of weirdos than with the people sharing your physical locale - and everyone is in the same boat.”
This is very well said. You’ve hit the nail on the head in regards to why loneliness has become a problem for so many of us. The general solution is for like-minded people to move to the same city, but that can be unrealistic and expensive. The other idea is to get a small group of people to purchase commercial property and convert it into a live-in workspace, but that comes with its own set of difficulties. I think the last thing that we need to do is give up, though. As more people come out of their cocoons, others will follow suit. What other choice do we have but to lead by example?
Like-minded people colonizing an area is essentially the intentional community idea ... In practice that doesn't usually work, as it often turns out that ideological affinity does not a community make.
Coming out of our cocoons is ultimately what needs to happen. During the lockdown I felt sure that once it lifted we'd see an explosion of people dancing in the streets, hugging one another, coming together ... feeding that hunger for human contact. Instead, we ... didn't. It was like everyone was broken by learned helplessness. The cage door was opened but they all stayed in the cage.
It's going to take conscious, sustained effort. As you said, lead by example. We need to rebuild the community structures, fraternal societies and church halls and so on, that we used to have. Not necessarily replicating the old forms but rather the old functions. I think there is a real desperation for embodied human sociality, an exhaustion with the terminally online life. But there's also a collective action problem: when everyone is on their phones all the time, there's nothing to do but be on your phone.
“During the lockdown I felt sure that once it lifted we'd see an explosion of people dancing in the streets, hugging one another, coming together ... feeding that hunger for human contact. Instead, we ... didn't. It was like everyone was broken by learned helplessness. The cage door was opened but they all stayed in the cage.”
I felt this so hard. I lived in the city during the first lockdown and expected the same thing as you when it ended - a great coming together again. I was excited about it happening. Instead, there was just...silence. People had got used to cocooning. They wanted to cocoon indefinitely. They resented having to give the cocoon up.
My life and social life has never got back to how it was pre-lockdown. I agree with you that the solution might be to revive physical meeting places like community halls. But with government cuts to these kind of gathering spaces in my country, it all feels a little hopeless.
I think you are exactly correct about this. The Internet has become a prison. It isn't bright and shiny any more. It needs to be relegated to its proper function - a tool for gathering, sorting, and disseminating information, and for coordinating social activity, and *nothing more* - so that embodied experience can take its rightful place at the center of our lives.
Such a possibility is quite unlikely because the people thus addicted to being screen-agers have had their brains and nervous systems brainwashed (patterned/rewired) by their activity. The Jesuits used to say that if given the child for the first seven years of its life it would thus almost indelibly "belong" to the church for the rest of its unconsciously brain-washed life. Young people (even two year olds) now spend many hours every day staring (transfixed) by their screens.
Nicholas Carr addresses this issue too beginning with his book The Shallows and via his Rough Type website.
I’m sitting here in a new (to us) country, trying to sort out how to make IRL friends. It’s tough. I’ll keep plugging at the church... ask for a visit from the pastor/elders- that’s our current plan. I agree- seems like everyone disbands after church here but I hope to make a suggestion to the pastor in this regard.
Also, I’m trying to make specific habits, like going to the deli counter to get meat and cheese, to force an interaction with a human being. On a walk I’ll say hello to anyone I meet along the way. Offer help to someone who needs it- a guy had trouble with tying his boat- although he didn’t need help we know his name now and some interesting info about the area. A couple of times we have picked up people from a bus stop and taken them closer to their final destination (this is a common activity in this country), by doing that we’ve learned more about the area. We have been here almost 2 weeks now and are slowly making progress.
Another pointer- make a point to remember their names- write the names down if necessary. When you see them again you can greet them and surprise them too! 🤗
It's not just friendships are hard to come by, but community in general is dead in America. Ever read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam? The situation reminds me of his research in that book. Over the years, my wife and I have noticed that our social circle seemed to shrink year by year. Part of it was the kids, but the fights over Covid, and then moving not just to another state but to rural country and a smaller parish, and the inflation on gas, food and entertainment....gathering with others has more obstacles to it. Even at church, it's tough to get people to stay and interact after Mass...everyone just wants to head back home.
Btw, Putnam's research showed that as you increase diversity, you decrease trust. Over and over. He actually sat on his research because he hated the results, but he was eventually forced to publish it.
This has been on my list for a while. I think it didn’t hit me so hard until I got older, the lockdowns happened, and I lost the majority of my connections due to having to leave the city. Now I simply want to understand it.
It could be said that the most prophetic voice re the appearance of the now everywhere malaise of loneliness, especially in Amerika was Philip Slater via his book The Pursuit of Loneliness. Another book to take into account is The Sibling Society by Robert Bly which describes the flatland hollowing out the normal dreadfully sane one-dimensional Amerikan every-person.
People I know who had pets for company during lockdown are now impossible to hold a conversation with because they just obsessively focus on the pet. The generally mean vindictive character of the internet and the dark foreboding zeitgeist makes everyone feel that society is full of people who want to hurt them (and they’re probably right if the person can get even a single like in exchange). It’s a real nightmare situation.
That makes a lot of sense. These people were so focused on their pets during lockdown that it became a default mode for them. It’s almost like a state of catatonia, in a way. I think you’re right about the character of the internet too, especially with the younger generation having no reference to life before it. If you assume everyone is going to behave offline like they behave online, you’re going to retreat into your little bubble for safety. It’s such a sad state that the world is in right now. I do what I can to make things better, but if people do not emerge from their cocoons, we are headed for nothing short of total social collapse.
I love this !! What I think.... and probable because I'm a crazed hippie shaman, is that what people cant handle is the energy flows that flow out of people with the face to face relationships. There is an energy interchange... even if you want to be scientific and say its pheromonal based. :)
If you can remember what it was like to be at a party with 50 people and no one on there phones you will get an idea of this. I started traveling to and studying communes around the world and what I found was that the people there could handle the emotional energy interchange between each other.
People are getting less able to handle it. Next step is the pods.
In traveling to cities when I was a corportate Headset stage guy and meeting people who were in the fuked electronic cocoon and making them put their phones away and talk to me, I saw many reactions. Terror. Anxiety etc.... because they couldn't communicate on a VIA.
Some would just come apart like soft bread under a normal round of interactions like we would do back before the phones.
I now bring people to my farm and make them turn their phones off and take their shoes off and come walk about. Its too much for many. They look like a cat thats never been outside.
So I'm comiting to the commune shared intentional community experience.
If you want to lean into people who are in the face to face interaction bell jar I could point you in the direction. I will warn you though... its just another kind of Hell.... but you will be hugged. :)
I feel so grateful I am old enough to remember life before the black demon slab apocalypse, and that I live in a wilderness area where I can take long walks in the woods.
The problem I see with the Internet is it encourages something that's very fake: it's all about looks, money, toys and status. I have no interest in such people and I don't know why they would have an interest in me. One thing you left off the list that I would include is church groups or spiritual worship centers: they need not be secular, of a particular faith or corporate controlled. The conversations are much more meaningful and genuine in those places at least if you stay away from convert to our viewpoint or we will shun you types. We're all looking for meaning during our time here...
Oh how much I resonate with here! The comfort of being able to dissipate into the cyberether if the anxiety of meeting a person face-to-face is too strong is precisely the problem. Freedom is the issue, and freedom is the solution. I think the lesson we will learn from this era of culture is that without necessity nothing gets done. The deepest friendship form when people Have to be together and struggle together, combined with aligned interests and spirits of course, but if the option is there to quit it, people often will. Could something like blockchain be a possible solution here? A way of signing a contract where you actually have to committ a bit?
My husband experienced a time in his life for about five years where he had no friends except his parents, who were 3,000 miles away. This is when he said he was able to get his thoughts together and became very close to God. But he was very lonely during that time and had a little human companionship.
All of my friends are through local comedy, the synagogue, and the bar, in that order (with the bar being a distant third. Bar friends are kind of like online acquaintances: they’re not your friends, they’re the bar’s friends).
Comedy is the surest way I’ve found to make friends. In some communities open mic is like church; it happens every week, and if you show up, they have to accept you. Getting in front of the mic is like hazing and getting initiated. (I don’t perform as much anymore because I got sick of the vulnerability ; I’m also no longer in the inner clique of comedians in my town. C’est la vie).
The synagogue is self-explanatory. See the same people every week, get friends.
I also used to go to DSA meetings. Made some good friends there.
Way back around 2006, I made some good friends through blogging, but those days are probably gone.
Getting out of the house is the best, maybe the only way, to make friends outside of the house. Tango? Volunteer? There’s tons of cool activities out there.
I love open mic and have never been shy about it. Usually I do poetry rather than comedy, though I’m one of those people who will do anything in front of an audience because of some autistic counter-shyness, (extrovert without a clear understanding of reserved social norms) so I’d also be up for doing a comedy open mic. I really miss improv too. While I personally have never met anyone at synagogue that turned out to be a real friend, I also don’t go very often. Perhaps I should go change that. Anyway, these are all good suggestions, except that I would never go to a DSA meeting. 😂
Poetry! That’s my jam as well. Maybe I should go to a poetry reading or two and see what happens. BTW I have much more to say on this topic in another comment which I really want to dive into because it deeply concerns me. In the meantime thank you for breaking the proverbial ice on this topic which has affected us all in so many ways. More later...
Hehehehe. I wouldn’t go to one anymore, but things were different for me back in 2016.
The cool thing about making friends at a place of worship is that they’re not necessarily the friends you’d gravitate on your own. We had a party, and our backyard was full of old people and little kids.
I love the Gary Numan reference! If you lived in my town we could totally hang out. I agree about not wanting to text with strangers. Quelle horreur.
And I apologize for commenting a list of suggestions before reading your whole article 😳
I’m scheduled to go knit with a friend this afternoon. I thought about canceling (I mayyyybevam starting to get a cold?) but I will take your article as a sign and shovel myself out of the house.
Oh!!! I think we’ve all gotten bad about getting out of our houses in general. It’s not just social media; it’s also doordash and Amazon. We are *out of practice* at going outside.
"I will sooner create an entire cast of characters in my head and venture into self-administrated schizophrenia than text with someone who I have no real chance of meeting in person."
Next step is to write about your imaginary friends and pretend it's art as a cope.
This loneliness thing is really grating, isn't it? Ironic how a guest post I wrote about "The Great Disconnect" in the age of AI today brought me to your Substack Rachel. (Even more ironic, I posted the link to mine in a Substack Discord community I'm in, and they linked to your Substack). On yet a third level of irony, I've made some wonderful friends who I connected with online originally. Note, online, not through an app. Our society is being atomized one annoying emoji at a time.
But all pendulums swing, and this one is coming awfully close to the end of its arc. All we need to give it that last little shove is a solar flare large enough to take out a few data centers :)
If you ever come to the SF Bay Area, please ping me, I'll take you out for lunch. Some amazing places here in the south bay! The only texting we'll be doing is to confirm the time and place. No cat photos, promise! ('coz I ain't got none o'those)
Now I'm curious what Discord community this was. It seems like so many people are thinking about loneliness and disconnection lately, which is definitely a sign of a collective awakening. In a few years, very few people will even be online anymore. Society will revert to IRL gatherings. I get into detail about this here:
It's late here (by god much later for you!) so I'm off to dreamland but have that post on my list to read as well. I respectfully beg to differ on the online exodus in that short of a timeframe... at least barring major catastrophes (you know, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, stampeding wild turkeys in critical infrastructure areas). Our economy, society, transportation, education, healthcare, and just about every pillar of life is far too intertwined in the networks—too much of a Gordian knot to untangle. Granted, some things I could personally see go up in digital smoke (most social media for example), but overall I'd advocate for balance. A tall order for us humans.
It’s too bad you’re not in Colorado, Rachel. You’d probably have no issue making friends. Although many people here do not understand the concept ofvthe passing lane on I-25, most Coloradans are friendly, gregarious, love to get outside, and they enjoy making new friends. And we’re the most physically fit state in the union. And that truism goes all the way from Ft Collins and Boulder to Colorado Springs (which are areas with widely different political views!). Out here you’d have probably already met a bunch of people IRL and done cookouts and hikes. (By the way, perhaps it’s just my age, but I asked three of friends what IG and IRL stood for before I looked them up, because I had no clue, and none of them knew!)
Since 2020, i’ve lost my friends Megan, Dan, J.P., and Michelle (JP and Michelle died within two weeks of each other), all of whom had been good friends since the 1970s. Gregg was a customer who treated my wife and I to dinner once a year. John Pelan was my editor friend that I’d known for 20 years. My wife lost two of her closest brothers and the favorite Uncle, all back in Mongolia.
Perhaps it’s just our age group, but we’ve found it easy to make friends, find common interests, rekindle old friendships. Most people are waiting for you to take the first step. Invite people out for walks, coffee, whatever. Even if it’s just 2-3 times a year, followed up with occsional texts and phone calls, if you have 4-5 good people to do this with, you’ll never be lonely and find your friendships getting deeper over time.
My friend J.P. treated everyone he met as a potential new-best-friend. It’s a wonderful attitude to have.
Okay, I am going to cut this short. There’s some kids playing out on the street (most wonderfuul sound in the world) and i’m going to talk to my neighbor (who I didn’t know from anyone and now were friendly) and see if he wants to kick back with a couple beers on Friday night. Later!
Just because you are married, doesn't mean you aren't lonely.
I've been married for close to twenty years now, and my wife is more like my room mate. We don't share the same interests. She likes to go sports stuff, I hate sports. We rarely go out on date nights, because we have kids. I used to have friends and a D&D group, but the long hours at my last job wrecked that. I haven't had a true friend since my buddy died.
I miss going out for a drink with buddies or playing games.
It is hard to make new friends, especially if you are an older person (54 years old here.)
I remember being very lonely when I was married because people assumed I already had my husband and that I was good to go, so to speak. I wasn't. I can only imagine that this gets much harder in your 50s. People treat you more and more invisibly as you age. Everyone wants a piece of the affluent 22-year-old that I alluded to in this post. The rest of us... we're on our own.
Invisible. Yes, that's a good description. When I was growing up, my dad always went to the local pool hall or fertilizer store to meet with other farmers. It was those two places, or the donut shop.
There's an absence of pool halls, and local fertilizer dealers don't exist. Churches are okay, but people don't stick around after services.
All successful civilizations are genetically homogeneous and based on high trust culture that sometimes takes centuries to form. Your article shows influence from what Lewis Mumford called Automated Man theory, which is the belief that humans are like machines and merely need adjustments in their inputs and outputs to be healthy. Less carbs, more friends, more Neil Diamond, less binge watching. Except none of it is real. Our European culture and civilization framework is designed entirely around a culture of pious, faithful and very good natured Christian people of regular and reliable core virtues all engaged in a common enterprise. All that has been blasted to atoms. The fact there is no such culture and no such nation exists any longer is at the center of your problem ... if you are genuine about wanting to solve it. If you think it is ever going to be recovered with people from Somalia who grew up as cannibals living next door trying to figure out how a doorknob works then you are pining for a fantasy world that never was and never can be. Once you have watched enough television, Automated Man theory starts to make sense because the crazy people who make TV infect you with their crazy, whacky notions of how civilizations work. All of them descended from people incapable of ever building a society like Europe, America or Australia. They just feast on the ashes.
This is very relatable. I don't use IG myself, in fact I've never tried to use any apps to find IRL friends. Nevertheless I've noticed that socializing has become inordinately difficult. "Community" is a bad joke these days. Everything seems to have fallen apart. I tried church but no one actually talks to one another - they leave as soon as the service is over. There's the bar but that's at best a friend simulator, if you're lucky you might meet a couple people over a few drinks but it's just as likely you'll spend an hour staring at your phone because that's all anyone else is doing. Professional connections disappear as quickly as you change jobs. It's all just incredibly depressing and demoralizing.
FWIW, I'm not in a suburb or a big city, but a small town. The social wasteland is universal.
Part of the problem is that the Internet has delocalized relationships. People have text buddies all over the planet, but don't know their neighbors. Because of that, at a cultural level you end up having more in common with an online group of weirdos than with the people sharing your physical locale - and everyone is in the same boat. When one does manage to strike up a conversation, it frequently turns out that the interlocutor is embedded in a hostile ideological matrix - thus every in person interaction becomes fraught and guarded, they can't fully relax and neither can you. Of course one can always attend meetups from whatever online circles one is plugged into, but that's generally not a weekend thing as it involves long distance travel to collect any reasonable number of people together.
I don't have any good advice here. If I did, I wouldn't have found your scream of frustration so relatable.
“Part of the problem is that the Internet has delocalized relationships. People have text buddies all over the planet, but don't know their neighbors. Because of that, at a cultural level you end up having more in common with an online group of weirdos than with the people sharing your physical locale - and everyone is in the same boat.”
This is very well said. You’ve hit the nail on the head in regards to why loneliness has become a problem for so many of us. The general solution is for like-minded people to move to the same city, but that can be unrealistic and expensive. The other idea is to get a small group of people to purchase commercial property and convert it into a live-in workspace, but that comes with its own set of difficulties. I think the last thing that we need to do is give up, though. As more people come out of their cocoons, others will follow suit. What other choice do we have but to lead by example?
Like-minded people colonizing an area is essentially the intentional community idea ... In practice that doesn't usually work, as it often turns out that ideological affinity does not a community make.
Coming out of our cocoons is ultimately what needs to happen. During the lockdown I felt sure that once it lifted we'd see an explosion of people dancing in the streets, hugging one another, coming together ... feeding that hunger for human contact. Instead, we ... didn't. It was like everyone was broken by learned helplessness. The cage door was opened but they all stayed in the cage.
It's going to take conscious, sustained effort. As you said, lead by example. We need to rebuild the community structures, fraternal societies and church halls and so on, that we used to have. Not necessarily replicating the old forms but rather the old functions. I think there is a real desperation for embodied human sociality, an exhaustion with the terminally online life. But there's also a collective action problem: when everyone is on their phones all the time, there's nothing to do but be on your phone.
I would like this 20 times if I could.
Liking? How very parasocial of you.
What I'd much rather to is talk about such things in person. Sadly I'm several thousand km away from Florida. Delocalization strikes again.
“During the lockdown I felt sure that once it lifted we'd see an explosion of people dancing in the streets, hugging one another, coming together ... feeding that hunger for human contact. Instead, we ... didn't. It was like everyone was broken by learned helplessness. The cage door was opened but they all stayed in the cage.”
I felt this so hard. I lived in the city during the first lockdown and expected the same thing as you when it ended - a great coming together again. I was excited about it happening. Instead, there was just...silence. People had got used to cocooning. They wanted to cocoon indefinitely. They resented having to give the cocoon up.
My life and social life has never got back to how it was pre-lockdown. I agree with you that the solution might be to revive physical meeting places like community halls. But with government cuts to these kind of gathering spaces in my country, it all feels a little hopeless.
I think you are exactly correct about this. The Internet has become a prison. It isn't bright and shiny any more. It needs to be relegated to its proper function - a tool for gathering, sorting, and disseminating information, and for coordinating social activity, and *nothing more* - so that embodied experience can take its rightful place at the center of our lives.
Such a possibility is quite unlikely because the people thus addicted to being screen-agers have had their brains and nervous systems brainwashed (patterned/rewired) by their activity. The Jesuits used to say that if given the child for the first seven years of its life it would thus almost indelibly "belong" to the church for the rest of its unconsciously brain-washed life. Young people (even two year olds) now spend many hours every day staring (transfixed) by their screens.
Nicholas Carr addresses this issue too beginning with his book The Shallows and via his Rough Type website.
Nailed it!
I’m sitting here in a new (to us) country, trying to sort out how to make IRL friends. It’s tough. I’ll keep plugging at the church... ask for a visit from the pastor/elders- that’s our current plan. I agree- seems like everyone disbands after church here but I hope to make a suggestion to the pastor in this regard.
Also, I’m trying to make specific habits, like going to the deli counter to get meat and cheese, to force an interaction with a human being. On a walk I’ll say hello to anyone I meet along the way. Offer help to someone who needs it- a guy had trouble with tying his boat- although he didn’t need help we know his name now and some interesting info about the area. A couple of times we have picked up people from a bus stop and taken them closer to their final destination (this is a common activity in this country), by doing that we’ve learned more about the area. We have been here almost 2 weeks now and are slowly making progress.
Another pointer- make a point to remember their names- write the names down if necessary. When you see them again you can greet them and surprise them too! 🤗
By the Rideau, huh? Are you in Canada?
Not any more. 😉
It's not just friendships are hard to come by, but community in general is dead in America. Ever read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam? The situation reminds me of his research in that book. Over the years, my wife and I have noticed that our social circle seemed to shrink year by year. Part of it was the kids, but the fights over Covid, and then moving not just to another state but to rural country and a smaller parish, and the inflation on gas, food and entertainment....gathering with others has more obstacles to it. Even at church, it's tough to get people to stay and interact after Mass...everyone just wants to head back home.
Btw, Putnam's research showed that as you increase diversity, you decrease trust. Over and over. He actually sat on his research because he hated the results, but he was eventually forced to publish it.
This has been on my list for a while. I think it didn’t hit me so hard until I got older, the lockdowns happened, and I lost the majority of my connections due to having to leave the city. Now I simply want to understand it.
It could be said that the most prophetic voice re the appearance of the now everywhere malaise of loneliness, especially in Amerika was Philip Slater via his book The Pursuit of Loneliness. Another book to take into account is The Sibling Society by Robert Bly which describes the flatland hollowing out the normal dreadfully sane one-dimensional Amerikan every-person.
People I know who had pets for company during lockdown are now impossible to hold a conversation with because they just obsessively focus on the pet. The generally mean vindictive character of the internet and the dark foreboding zeitgeist makes everyone feel that society is full of people who want to hurt them (and they’re probably right if the person can get even a single like in exchange). It’s a real nightmare situation.
That makes a lot of sense. These people were so focused on their pets during lockdown that it became a default mode for them. It’s almost like a state of catatonia, in a way. I think you’re right about the character of the internet too, especially with the younger generation having no reference to life before it. If you assume everyone is going to behave offline like they behave online, you’re going to retreat into your little bubble for safety. It’s such a sad state that the world is in right now. I do what I can to make things better, but if people do not emerge from their cocoons, we are headed for nothing short of total social collapse.
I love this !! What I think.... and probable because I'm a crazed hippie shaman, is that what people cant handle is the energy flows that flow out of people with the face to face relationships. There is an energy interchange... even if you want to be scientific and say its pheromonal based. :)
If you can remember what it was like to be at a party with 50 people and no one on there phones you will get an idea of this. I started traveling to and studying communes around the world and what I found was that the people there could handle the emotional energy interchange between each other.
People are getting less able to handle it. Next step is the pods.
In traveling to cities when I was a corportate Headset stage guy and meeting people who were in the fuked electronic cocoon and making them put their phones away and talk to me, I saw many reactions. Terror. Anxiety etc.... because they couldn't communicate on a VIA.
Some would just come apart like soft bread under a normal round of interactions like we would do back before the phones.
I now bring people to my farm and make them turn their phones off and take their shoes off and come walk about. Its too much for many. They look like a cat thats never been outside.
So I'm comiting to the commune shared intentional community experience.
If you want to lean into people who are in the face to face interaction bell jar I could point you in the direction. I will warn you though... its just another kind of Hell.... but you will be hugged. :)
Welcome to Earth 2023.
I feel like... we need to throw a festival.
Keep me in the loop if you do, I'll scrounge up the money to attend somehow.
Ill be having plenty and there will be an anvil an a hammer for people to smash their phones ;)
This appeals to me more and more every day.
That would be amazing! I'll bring the chocolate! 🍫 and do a tasting. That's one thing you can never do online...
Now we are talking!
I feel so grateful I am old enough to remember life before the black demon slab apocalypse, and that I live in a wilderness area where I can take long walks in the woods.
Im my commune we will have a computer room which will be avalibe for use from 7- 10 PM. five days a week :)
We will have Lan games... HAHA. Like 99 !
The problem I see with the Internet is it encourages something that's very fake: it's all about looks, money, toys and status. I have no interest in such people and I don't know why they would have an interest in me. One thing you left off the list that I would include is church groups or spiritual worship centers: they need not be secular, of a particular faith or corporate controlled. The conversations are much more meaningful and genuine in those places at least if you stay away from convert to our viewpoint or we will shun you types. We're all looking for meaning during our time here...
Oh how much I resonate with here! The comfort of being able to dissipate into the cyberether if the anxiety of meeting a person face-to-face is too strong is precisely the problem. Freedom is the issue, and freedom is the solution. I think the lesson we will learn from this era of culture is that without necessity nothing gets done. The deepest friendship form when people Have to be together and struggle together, combined with aligned interests and spirits of course, but if the option is there to quit it, people often will. Could something like blockchain be a possible solution here? A way of signing a contract where you actually have to committ a bit?
My husband experienced a time in his life for about five years where he had no friends except his parents, who were 3,000 miles away. This is when he said he was able to get his thoughts together and became very close to God. But he was very lonely during that time and had a little human companionship.
All of my friends are through local comedy, the synagogue, and the bar, in that order (with the bar being a distant third. Bar friends are kind of like online acquaintances: they’re not your friends, they’re the bar’s friends).
Comedy is the surest way I’ve found to make friends. In some communities open mic is like church; it happens every week, and if you show up, they have to accept you. Getting in front of the mic is like hazing and getting initiated. (I don’t perform as much anymore because I got sick of the vulnerability ; I’m also no longer in the inner clique of comedians in my town. C’est la vie).
The synagogue is self-explanatory. See the same people every week, get friends.
I also used to go to DSA meetings. Made some good friends there.
Way back around 2006, I made some good friends through blogging, but those days are probably gone.
Getting out of the house is the best, maybe the only way, to make friends outside of the house. Tango? Volunteer? There’s tons of cool activities out there.
I love open mic and have never been shy about it. Usually I do poetry rather than comedy, though I’m one of those people who will do anything in front of an audience because of some autistic counter-shyness, (extrovert without a clear understanding of reserved social norms) so I’d also be up for doing a comedy open mic. I really miss improv too. While I personally have never met anyone at synagogue that turned out to be a real friend, I also don’t go very often. Perhaps I should go change that. Anyway, these are all good suggestions, except that I would never go to a DSA meeting. 😂
Poetry! That’s my jam as well. Maybe I should go to a poetry reading or two and see what happens. BTW I have much more to say on this topic in another comment which I really want to dive into because it deeply concerns me. In the meantime thank you for breaking the proverbial ice on this topic which has affected us all in so many ways. More later...
Hehehehe. I wouldn’t go to one anymore, but things were different for me back in 2016.
The cool thing about making friends at a place of worship is that they’re not necessarily the friends you’d gravitate on your own. We had a party, and our backyard was full of old people and little kids.
gravitate *to
I love the Gary Numan reference! If you lived in my town we could totally hang out. I agree about not wanting to text with strangers. Quelle horreur.
And I apologize for commenting a list of suggestions before reading your whole article 😳
I’m scheduled to go knit with a friend this afternoon. I thought about canceling (I mayyyybevam starting to get a cold?) but I will take your article as a sign and shovel myself out of the house.
Oh!!! I think we’ve all gotten bad about getting out of our houses in general. It’s not just social media; it’s also doordash and Amazon. We are *out of practice* at going outside.
Wish I could chat about PKD with you over a beer!
"I will sooner create an entire cast of characters in my head and venture into self-administrated schizophrenia than text with someone who I have no real chance of meeting in person."
Next step is to write about your imaginary friends and pretend it's art as a cope.
For my next trick...
This loneliness thing is really grating, isn't it? Ironic how a guest post I wrote about "The Great Disconnect" in the age of AI today brought me to your Substack Rachel. (Even more ironic, I posted the link to mine in a Substack Discord community I'm in, and they linked to your Substack). On yet a third level of irony, I've made some wonderful friends who I connected with online originally. Note, online, not through an app. Our society is being atomized one annoying emoji at a time.
But all pendulums swing, and this one is coming awfully close to the end of its arc. All we need to give it that last little shove is a solar flare large enough to take out a few data centers :)
If you ever come to the SF Bay Area, please ping me, I'll take you out for lunch. Some amazing places here in the south bay! The only texting we'll be doing is to confirm the time and place. No cat photos, promise! ('coz I ain't got none o'those)
Now I'm curious what Discord community this was. It seems like so many people are thinking about loneliness and disconnection lately, which is definitely a sign of a collective awakening. In a few years, very few people will even be online anymore. Society will revert to IRL gatherings. I get into detail about this here:
https://culturalfuturist.substack.com/p/offline-is-the-new-online
I'd love to come back to SF and get together with you. Have always wanted to explore the South Bay more. <3
It was the Soaring Twenties Social Club :)
It's late here (by god much later for you!) so I'm off to dreamland but have that post on my list to read as well. I respectfully beg to differ on the online exodus in that short of a timeframe... at least barring major catastrophes (you know, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, stampeding wild turkeys in critical infrastructure areas). Our economy, society, transportation, education, healthcare, and just about every pillar of life is far too intertwined in the networks—too much of a Gordian knot to untangle. Granted, some things I could personally see go up in digital smoke (most social media for example), but overall I'd advocate for balance. A tall order for us humans.
It’s too bad you’re not in Colorado, Rachel. You’d probably have no issue making friends. Although many people here do not understand the concept ofvthe passing lane on I-25, most Coloradans are friendly, gregarious, love to get outside, and they enjoy making new friends. And we’re the most physically fit state in the union. And that truism goes all the way from Ft Collins and Boulder to Colorado Springs (which are areas with widely different political views!). Out here you’d have probably already met a bunch of people IRL and done cookouts and hikes. (By the way, perhaps it’s just my age, but I asked three of friends what IG and IRL stood for before I looked them up, because I had no clue, and none of them knew!)
Since 2020, i’ve lost my friends Megan, Dan, J.P., and Michelle (JP and Michelle died within two weeks of each other), all of whom had been good friends since the 1970s. Gregg was a customer who treated my wife and I to dinner once a year. John Pelan was my editor friend that I’d known for 20 years. My wife lost two of her closest brothers and the favorite Uncle, all back in Mongolia.
Perhaps it’s just our age group, but we’ve found it easy to make friends, find common interests, rekindle old friendships. Most people are waiting for you to take the first step. Invite people out for walks, coffee, whatever. Even if it’s just 2-3 times a year, followed up with occsional texts and phone calls, if you have 4-5 good people to do this with, you’ll never be lonely and find your friendships getting deeper over time.
My friend J.P. treated everyone he met as a potential new-best-friend. It’s a wonderful attitude to have.
Okay, I am going to cut this short. There’s some kids playing out on the street (most wonderfuul sound in the world) and i’m going to talk to my neighbor (who I didn’t know from anyone and now were friendly) and see if he wants to kick back with a couple beers on Friday night. Later!
Just because you are married, doesn't mean you aren't lonely.
I've been married for close to twenty years now, and my wife is more like my room mate. We don't share the same interests. She likes to go sports stuff, I hate sports. We rarely go out on date nights, because we have kids. I used to have friends and a D&D group, but the long hours at my last job wrecked that. I haven't had a true friend since my buddy died.
I miss going out for a drink with buddies or playing games.
It is hard to make new friends, especially if you are an older person (54 years old here.)
I have internet friends, but it's not the same.
I remember being very lonely when I was married because people assumed I already had my husband and that I was good to go, so to speak. I wasn't. I can only imagine that this gets much harder in your 50s. People treat you more and more invisibly as you age. Everyone wants a piece of the affluent 22-year-old that I alluded to in this post. The rest of us... we're on our own.
Invisible. Yes, that's a good description. When I was growing up, my dad always went to the local pool hall or fertilizer store to meet with other farmers. It was those two places, or the donut shop.
There's an absence of pool halls, and local fertilizer dealers don't exist. Churches are okay, but people don't stick around after services.
All successful civilizations are genetically homogeneous and based on high trust culture that sometimes takes centuries to form. Your article shows influence from what Lewis Mumford called Automated Man theory, which is the belief that humans are like machines and merely need adjustments in their inputs and outputs to be healthy. Less carbs, more friends, more Neil Diamond, less binge watching. Except none of it is real. Our European culture and civilization framework is designed entirely around a culture of pious, faithful and very good natured Christian people of regular and reliable core virtues all engaged in a common enterprise. All that has been blasted to atoms. The fact there is no such culture and no such nation exists any longer is at the center of your problem ... if you are genuine about wanting to solve it. If you think it is ever going to be recovered with people from Somalia who grew up as cannibals living next door trying to figure out how a doorknob works then you are pining for a fantasy world that never was and never can be. Once you have watched enough television, Automated Man theory starts to make sense because the crazy people who make TV infect you with their crazy, whacky notions of how civilizations work. All of them descended from people incapable of ever building a society like Europe, America or Australia. They just feast on the ashes.
This is great! Just messaged you to see if you want to meet next week in Fort Lauderdale.
I concur and I love art gallery too and is Drake actually coming to the Tchaikovsky event???
Now that, I’d love to see!
If you are ever in northern Michigan swing by, I'd even be willing to leave my hermit shack and go to Traverse City to see some music or something.
a friendcel? this article is kino, great work :)
Aww, thank you!