On the Loneliness Epidemic
I recently watched Vox's video on the Loneliness epidemic as part of their series "Glad you asked", which investigates some truly interesting topics in a hybrid news-report/video-essay like style which I frankly find more digestible then many other mainstream formats. And it's opened up some interesting follow-up questions in my sphere of mind.
It's question into the root cause of loneliness; one of the statistics that surprised me was an increase in the term "loneliness" around when modern cities began forming, and the video explains the reasoning behind why city life can be lonely fairly well. But it's interesting to think about how a city, where a lot of social events and nightlife can happen, isn't actually structured to combat loneliness, that here, the risk is not of having enough humans around you to satisfy Dunbar's number, but rather having too many options, in a weird form of consumer's dilemma around choices of friendship. Pair that with a turbulence of an evolving city, such as people moving out to the suburbs to raise families or just people moving to different parts of the city that increase the distance between a person and a part of their friends circle, whether job mobility has them changing to a different firm where-ever that may be, stores opening and closing, and the problem with people feeling lonely due to more frequent relationship changes becomes less and less surprising.
Of course, this isn't unique to cities; the countryside feels the impact too as people (rather ironically) move to the cities. Towns die as people and businesses move to the city, and the work that united rural populations becomes either gets automated or moves abroad to countries where the same work can be done for cheaper under neoliberal policies. Moreover, these kinds of jobs are deemed "undesirable" by society as they are low pay, don't get as much coverage and don't fall into an image painted by mass media of what an ideal american lifestyle is like (I'll get back to this in a minute). The result are thinning populations in rural areas that struggle to maintain unifying identity in the void of their homegrown, family businesses and flourishing productive towns, instead turning to other forms of community such as religion, family, race etc...
All in all, though there are certainly structures in both cities and rural towns of forming relationships, keeping those relationships has become more difficult, and therefore the way of keeping relationship networks and systems together are becoming worse.
In comes the internet, the supposed cure all, except not really. Perhaps it's just a matter of human evolution, or perhaps the technology isn't there yet, but while people can stay connected through social media and the internet, it is inherently in low fidelity. As everything moves online, from stores to all forms of media, people try to move their relationships online too. But humans aren't quite at the point of accepting online relationships as replacements for real ones. You can fool yourself into thinking you're having a meaningful interaction with a friend via text or voice chat, but that doesn't make it an adequate replacement for the real thing, and your subconscious isn't fooled that easily. That can lead to people feeling depressed because they're not truly getting a high enough fidelity of interaction than they need, even though they have the option of interacting texting or video calling with people with whom they had high fidelity relationships with in the past or at select times of their life. I'd need some data to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are spending less time socializing in person than in the past because they're interacting with people more on social media.
We are surrounded by people, many with their vices but the mass majority friendly, dignified, respectful, more open-minded than we give them credit for. But I worry that the image society pushes of friendship and relationship, which can differ from group to group, creates an image that is both helpful but harmful to how people actually relate to one another.
Take Friends, for example, an American Sitcom about 6 white people living together in New York City. Friends is a good, funny, feel-good sitcom. Which is the thing. Watching Friends makes you feel like you are actually in the room with a bunch of people, making and being friends with them; you know their ins and outs of life so well that they feel like real people. But they aren't, and no matter how much you love Friends, it isn't a substitute or even an accurate representation of real-life friendships. Friends is constantly producing a laugh-track, and disproportionately focuses on those moments of levity and people constantly trying to get into one another's pants than demonstrating the content of relationships. They're not becoming friends, they are already friends, and it's their antics, not their real day to day. They're always quipping, and I don't know about you but I don't make 10 quips a day.
What worries me is whenever I overhear one of two things: "Let's watch Friends" or "Let's watch The Office". They're both great shows, but it isn't only natural for people to be suspicious of homogeneity, it's a duty. To my eyes, there's a kind of insanity to watching Friends with friends; why not just create experiences of your own? Why are you creating experiences watching another group of friends instead of living your own experiences? To me that's just more of a demonstration of one's own fear over their ability to form meaningful relationships, the show's humor acting as a method of deflecting that fear instead of facing it, similar to how The Office could be a way of subverting people's modern insecurities about their potential future at a boring office job by injecting humor into it.
Things wouldn't be so bad if friends was the exception to the rule, but it very much isn't. How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory are eerily similar scenarios, and shows that are likewise exceptionally popular. New Girl is more a tad more diverse but still falls guilty to "the Loft" trope (referring to the type of apartment they're all able to afford to live in together). Sitcoms could be guilty of teaching people an image of friendship that doesn't quite line up with reality. Situation Comedy: its a TV show that relies on their being some situation for people to react to, which there isn't always in the real world with real friends. In fact, I would argue that those moments of mundanity are what truly makes a relationship. Nothing is happening, maybe its boring and they could be anywhere else, but friends are still there with you.
And of course, this is can be forgiven as long as this is purely for the sake of entertainment. But when it becomes part of the day to day discussion, when you meet someone and they start making references to a show like Friends in their everyday life, there's room to be concerned as to how real the show is for them. They know that the people in the show don't exist, but they don't care, because they believe the relationship between the characters is real. You get into this zone of "Supertruth" where you can't tell what part is acting and what part is the real person coming through, and so you get fans searching for evidence of that relationship via talk about the actors and their relationships. It's at that point you have to wonder how much people are taking the friendship on screen to heart, and how much they are losing from searching for evidence of that surrealistic portrayal of friendship, and also how much that incomplete version of friendship is rubbing off on real-world dynamics.
Then there's the issue of True Love; Unrealistically high standards for people to search for "the one", living potentially a lifetime of dissatisfaction for a chance for one good relationship instead of investing in many satisfying relationships that have the potential to last over the course of one's life. To me, it's insidious, and another way of perpetuating loneliness.
So in the end, what is it? Why are more people lonely than ever? Is is economics, people moving to turbulent cities from comfortable and close but hollowing out towns? Is it sociological in nature, in the wake of evolution, have we forgotten or neglected developing systems of connection among people? Is is technology, whose dark side is giving us more connections all over at the expense of fidelity? Or is it popular culture's image of relationships that don't line up with the reality, despite people taking them more to heart than ever?
I'm 100% sure they are all factors, it's just a question of which is the worst offender.
It's question into the root cause of loneliness; one of the statistics that surprised me was an increase in the term "loneliness" around when modern cities began forming, and the video explains the reasoning behind why city life can be lonely fairly well. But it's interesting to think about how a city, where a lot of social events and nightlife can happen, isn't actually structured to combat loneliness, that here, the risk is not of having enough humans around you to satisfy Dunbar's number, but rather having too many options, in a weird form of consumer's dilemma around choices of friendship. Pair that with a turbulence of an evolving city, such as people moving out to the suburbs to raise families or just people moving to different parts of the city that increase the distance between a person and a part of their friends circle, whether job mobility has them changing to a different firm where-ever that may be, stores opening and closing, and the problem with people feeling lonely due to more frequent relationship changes becomes less and less surprising.
Of course, this isn't unique to cities; the countryside feels the impact too as people (rather ironically) move to the cities. Towns die as people and businesses move to the city, and the work that united rural populations becomes either gets automated or moves abroad to countries where the same work can be done for cheaper under neoliberal policies. Moreover, these kinds of jobs are deemed "undesirable" by society as they are low pay, don't get as much coverage and don't fall into an image painted by mass media of what an ideal american lifestyle is like (I'll get back to this in a minute). The result are thinning populations in rural areas that struggle to maintain unifying identity in the void of their homegrown, family businesses and flourishing productive towns, instead turning to other forms of community such as religion, family, race etc...
All in all, though there are certainly structures in both cities and rural towns of forming relationships, keeping those relationships has become more difficult, and therefore the way of keeping relationship networks and systems together are becoming worse.
In comes the internet, the supposed cure all, except not really. Perhaps it's just a matter of human evolution, or perhaps the technology isn't there yet, but while people can stay connected through social media and the internet, it is inherently in low fidelity. As everything moves online, from stores to all forms of media, people try to move their relationships online too. But humans aren't quite at the point of accepting online relationships as replacements for real ones. You can fool yourself into thinking you're having a meaningful interaction with a friend via text or voice chat, but that doesn't make it an adequate replacement for the real thing, and your subconscious isn't fooled that easily. That can lead to people feeling depressed because they're not truly getting a high enough fidelity of interaction than they need, even though they have the option of interacting texting or video calling with people with whom they had high fidelity relationships with in the past or at select times of their life. I'd need some data to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are spending less time socializing in person than in the past because they're interacting with people more on social media.
We are surrounded by people, many with their vices but the mass majority friendly, dignified, respectful, more open-minded than we give them credit for. But I worry that the image society pushes of friendship and relationship, which can differ from group to group, creates an image that is both helpful but harmful to how people actually relate to one another.
Take Friends, for example, an American Sitcom about 6 white people living together in New York City. Friends is a good, funny, feel-good sitcom. Which is the thing. Watching Friends makes you feel like you are actually in the room with a bunch of people, making and being friends with them; you know their ins and outs of life so well that they feel like real people. But they aren't, and no matter how much you love Friends, it isn't a substitute or even an accurate representation of real-life friendships. Friends is constantly producing a laugh-track, and disproportionately focuses on those moments of levity and people constantly trying to get into one another's pants than demonstrating the content of relationships. They're not becoming friends, they are already friends, and it's their antics, not their real day to day. They're always quipping, and I don't know about you but I don't make 10 quips a day.
What worries me is whenever I overhear one of two things: "Let's watch Friends" or "Let's watch The Office". They're both great shows, but it isn't only natural for people to be suspicious of homogeneity, it's a duty. To my eyes, there's a kind of insanity to watching Friends with friends; why not just create experiences of your own? Why are you creating experiences watching another group of friends instead of living your own experiences? To me that's just more of a demonstration of one's own fear over their ability to form meaningful relationships, the show's humor acting as a method of deflecting that fear instead of facing it, similar to how The Office could be a way of subverting people's modern insecurities about their potential future at a boring office job by injecting humor into it.
Things wouldn't be so bad if friends was the exception to the rule, but it very much isn't. How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory are eerily similar scenarios, and shows that are likewise exceptionally popular. New Girl is more a tad more diverse but still falls guilty to "the Loft" trope (referring to the type of apartment they're all able to afford to live in together). Sitcoms could be guilty of teaching people an image of friendship that doesn't quite line up with reality. Situation Comedy: its a TV show that relies on their being some situation for people to react to, which there isn't always in the real world with real friends. In fact, I would argue that those moments of mundanity are what truly makes a relationship. Nothing is happening, maybe its boring and they could be anywhere else, but friends are still there with you.
And of course, this is can be forgiven as long as this is purely for the sake of entertainment. But when it becomes part of the day to day discussion, when you meet someone and they start making references to a show like Friends in their everyday life, there's room to be concerned as to how real the show is for them. They know that the people in the show don't exist, but they don't care, because they believe the relationship between the characters is real. You get into this zone of "Supertruth" where you can't tell what part is acting and what part is the real person coming through, and so you get fans searching for evidence of that relationship via talk about the actors and their relationships. It's at that point you have to wonder how much people are taking the friendship on screen to heart, and how much they are losing from searching for evidence of that surrealistic portrayal of friendship, and also how much that incomplete version of friendship is rubbing off on real-world dynamics.
Then there's the issue of True Love; Unrealistically high standards for people to search for "the one", living potentially a lifetime of dissatisfaction for a chance for one good relationship instead of investing in many satisfying relationships that have the potential to last over the course of one's life. To me, it's insidious, and another way of perpetuating loneliness.
So in the end, what is it? Why are more people lonely than ever? Is is economics, people moving to turbulent cities from comfortable and close but hollowing out towns? Is it sociological in nature, in the wake of evolution, have we forgotten or neglected developing systems of connection among people? Is is technology, whose dark side is giving us more connections all over at the expense of fidelity? Or is it popular culture's image of relationships that don't line up with the reality, despite people taking them more to heart than ever?
I'm 100% sure they are all factors, it's just a question of which is the worst offender.
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