Everyone always gets the causality reversed. Social media didn't cause the epidemic, it filled a niche to help cure the epidemic. People were lonely long before the internet arrived, the internet just made it easier for those lonely people to connect to each other. And now many of them prefer the internet over socializing with people they don't care for that much in person.
In other words, the problem is structural. Moving to a new city where you don't know anyone, only work with people for a few years, and where there are no longer institutions like the church, how is anybody supposed to meet anyone? Meetups? Half the people can't even afford a car.
There is no solution other than meeting a lifelong partner.
It used to be that you knocked on the door of the residence beside you.
> And now many of them prefer the internet over socializing with people they don't care for that much in person.
This is the crux of it. Your neighbours weren't ever likely to be your soulmate, but that is who was there to befriend, so you did. But now you don't have to. And since they now feel the same way, they aren't putting in the effort either.
There is also the problem of familiarity. It's awkward.
Traditionally you'd live around the same people your whole life. Invariably they'd feel like family and it wouldn't feel awkward to get together. But that's not how modernity works. People move to different communities all the time, so it becomes difficult to build familial friendships with others.
That's the essential problem. The internet allows us to stay in touch with people who feel like family. That's what we want to do psychologically. If all those people were in the same city there'd be a lot more socializing.
> People move to different communities all the time
Although now considerably less than in the past. Peak mobility occurred during the mid-1900s. Most, and increasingly more as time marches forward, will stay close to where they were born.
> That's the essential problem.
It is a problem for individuals in that situation, but does it explain a population-wide epidemic when most never actually leave their familial roots?
> If all those people were in the same city there'd be a lot more socializing.
I am among those who still live near where I was born and have known a lot of the people my whole life. Color me skeptical. Nobody has the time to. They're at work all day and when that's done it is into the car to drive their kid to who knows where to play in a sporting match thinking they are going to become a professional some day.
It was a little different 15-20 years ago. You used to be able to go down to the community centre on a Saturday night and the whole town would be there, ready to mingle. But it turns out the draw was really alcohol, and when police started cracking down on drunk drivers and health concern messaging started to gain attention, it all dwindled pretty quickly.
It's all about priorities, and socializing just isn't a priority for most people anymore. There are so many other things also vying for attention.
I agree. When I say people lived in close proximity I don't mean 'across the city' or 'the next town over', I mean that traditionally you were actually in the same physical location where socializing required essentially no travel, and you'd often have to exist in communal spaces.
These days even people who are nearby are still far. That 30 minute drive both ways along with coordinating a time is a lot of extra work to add onto an already busy life.
But if these same people lived on your street you could just pop over for a quick coffee. As is what actually happens. My wife and I have socialized with new friends in our neighborhood more than close family lately because they're right around us. The kicker is we built the friendships through our kids school and repeated proximity rather than artificially.
Yes of course people were lonely before the internet and social media, but that pushed them to go outside and solve the problem. Now they do the digital equivalent of taking drugs to make the problem go away.
I think you're oversimplifying and overgeneralizing. Plenty of people remained lonely back in the day, plenty of people socialize now. It's just that now they have the option to socialize through the internet.
Prior to the internet people were staying home and watching TV. The dynamic is much longer lived than you think. Check out the book 'Bowling Alone'.
This is a good way of putting it. And whether someone is happy is indeed personal.
For me, company culture has always been a primary concern. Is the company a non-stressful place to work and am I working with grownups. That's a massive factor, and the reason I've left two previous jobs.
Laudability is also big. Or in other words purpose. Once all the sheen of working in the software industry wears off do you actually care about the work you're doing? That can go a long way in providing motivation.
But then there are some who are happy to grind out code for exorbitant amounts of money and no purpose. So YMMV.
I believe most of these people would make the time if they lived close by, but we're all in the season of parenthood where even a little bit of distance makes it hard. And a lot of distance makes it impossible. There's also relationship dynamics.
When one of our kids started school we met a few families in our neighborhood and we see them fairly regularly. The difference is with them we can step out the door and we're already together. No planning required.
I wonder if social media essentially allows us to maintain friendships artificially, beyond the normal bounds of connection. It actually creates more maintenance overhead because you've got to maintain these contacts despite the relationships being largely irrelevant.
I think this hits the nail on the head and is actually the approach I've taken. Everything is deactivated but I log in from time to time. Maybe it's the best possible approach.
There is also the lingering pressure to share but maybe, at the end of the day, these cheap shares are just a trivial blip in other people's days. If we can't actually talk to someone due to social dynamics or energy constraints then they're effectively no longer a part of our life and social media is a bit of an illusion.
One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.
Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.
I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.
I converted my Windows PC to Linux Mint and let my kids play GCompris on there, which is an educational, non-addictive game suite. As of now neither of them know that the internet exists, and my wife and I keep them away from screens as much as possible.
Once the flood breaks and they discover the internet we'll be using NextDNS.
On the money. Recently reading has been branded as a 'pill that's good for you' rather than 'way more interesting than everything on TV' which isn't very encouraging.
But let's face it, the reason people aren't reading anymore is because most of us are lazy and there are swaths of less cognitively demanding alternatives. People also can't afford books. Reading has always been a pastime of the wealthy.
Books had their heyday in the 19th century before the rise of computers and when print technology was quite robust.
I'm an avid reader (several dozens of books per year at least), and one of the things that bums me out is all of the morality around my hobby. 3 or 4 times out of 5 when I talk to people about it the reaction is "oh man I'm such a bad person because I don't read enough books."
It's fine! The number of books you read is not a reflection on your quality as a person.
Reading absolutely has positive benefits, but really it's exactly what you said. It's just more interesting than other options out there. The tradeoff is yes, it can require some effort, but that's the same as any other effortful activity. You have to get past the cost, but there's a really nice reward on the other side.
And for what it's worth, there ARE television shows, movies, etc. that have more value than many books. ("The Wire" is a prime example, probably better than 70-80% of the books out there.) The point is just generally that more cognitively demanding avocations can have a higher cost-benefit ratio than cheaper ones like TV. On average, books fall more into this category than other media, but that's just on average.
Anyway this is a long way of saying that feeling bad about the media you consume is counterproductive. The message should be that there is potentially a more rewarding experience out there, but whether you pursue it or not is totally up to you and doesn't make you a good or bad person either way.
Yes to all of that. My biggest pet peeve is the Goodreads reading challenge, I cringe at it every year. Imagine that but a 'TV show challenge', it would be absurd. This is the way people think about books.
Read what you want, how you want. Pick up the same book five times. Do whatever. Forget arbitrary challenges.
I always laugh when people say something like oh wow you must be so smart reading all those books. Nah I'm reading about Goblins, Gnomes and vampires in space its really not ground breaking intellectual stuff. I enjoy reading but its similar to sitting down and watching a movie or TV show in my eyes.
I agree. Books have a higher intellectual ceiling than most things, but there is as always a mountain of slop, too. I'd rather someone spend a year interrogating Plato or Moby Dick than read 300 Agatha Christie or Steven King type novels. There is nothing virtuous about reading in itself.
I echo the sentiment of the sibling comment: book count challenges are foolish and missing the point.
I did see one a long time ago but there's no way I can find it now. Basically it said that wealthy people read significantly more than poor people.
It's not that difficult to understand. For example, my kids go to a low income school where many families are having a hard time feeding their kids consistently. How many books do you think they're buying? Maybe some, but a hell of a lot less than my wife and I are.
Reading itself also takes effort and energy. If you barely have food to eat then reading isn't an appealing activity, most of the time.
Afford books? I just pulled one from the Little Free Library around the corner.
I see that a movie ticket in Silver Spring costs $14. Second Story Books on P St. has outdoor carts with $4 books, so I can get three books and change back for the price of a movie ticket.
Not really. You're underestimating how poor many people are. Even transport to a library can be a problem for some. And reading itself is a metabolic activity that takes work.
The poor obviously do read, but wealthy people have significantly more time and energy for the hobby, meaning that they read more.
If transport costs to a library are the limiting factor here, that's a person who's also unlikely to be able to responsibly buy other forms of entertainment though. Say it costs $10 transport to the library (probably an overestimate), and you go once a month to return old books and get new books, that's cheaper than a month's subscription to most streaming platforms. The only comparable form of entertainment (I'm excluding things like running for obvious reasons) I can think of that may be cheaper is video games, assuming you have a computer that can play at least more basic ones or are content with phone games.
I think you're underestimating how rich people most people are for the purposes of this discussion. The amount of people who would read but for funds is negligible. People spend their money on tons of useless absurd things every day. Money is not a main factor of the phenomenon of reading less.
Sure LLMs can churn out code, and they sort of work for developers who already understand code and design, but what happens when that junior dev with no hard experience builds their years of experience with LLMs?
Over time those who actually understand what the LLMs are doing and how to correct the output are replaced by developers who've never learned the hard lessons of writing code line by line. The ability to reason about code gets lost.
This points to the hard problem that the article highlights. The hard problem of software is actually knowing how to write it, which usually takes years, sometimes up to a decade of real experience.
Any idiot can churn out code that doesn't work. But working, effective software takes a lot of skill that LLMs will be stripping people of. Leaving a market there for people who have actually put the time in and understand software.
In other words, the problem is structural. Moving to a new city where you don't know anyone, only work with people for a few years, and where there are no longer institutions like the church, how is anybody supposed to meet anyone? Meetups? Half the people can't even afford a car.
There is no solution other than meeting a lifelong partner.
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