[softsound]

Why is loneliness more common? Look at the work week. Everyone is working long hours, doesn't get time off, or is too broke to spend it doing social stuff in America or other countries. Lots of fear increases this too, with people working too much social skills go down and mental health issues become an issue. And lack of interactions with others increases fear in general.

Now if you are lucky enough to be well off enough not to have that issue then the second thing is tech replaces people in a lot of areas - food, entertainment, health, ways we connect with others etc. If you had to rely on others more I bet most people would be less lonely in general. Isolation becomes easier the more tech you have available - be it cars or computers it can easily isolate you if you don't purposely avoid isolation. Now tech can bring people together, I'm in a long distance relationship and tech makes it very easy nowadays but it's still not the same, as in person face to face experiences.

But I also think people will always face loneliness in every generation, it just might go by other names.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

But people worked a lot more in the past. The 5 day work week is a relatively recent invention. The 8 day work hour is also relatively recent. Why are we having a crisis of loneliness now and not when 18 hour workdays 7 days a week was the norm in a factory somewhere?

[yamtaddle]

The 5 day workweek and 8-hour workday weren't won that long after unvarying (same job every day, same amount every day, no seasonal variation) optimized cog-in-a-machine industrial wage labor started to not just exist, but be common.

Incidentally, a ton of early cinema (1900-1930, say) is very concerned about the dehumanizing effects of industrial (and office!) work, and the anti-social lost-in-the-crowd effects of cities (usually contrasted with rural or small town living) which nonetheless draw the masses with promises of money and glamor. Those seem to have been their major anxieties, in this realm of thinking.

[hombre_fatal]

I think it mostly boils down to how trivial it is to entertain yourself these days with a smartphone.

I was just on a weekend beach trip with friends and, at the end of the day, we considered playing some card games, but frankly we all wanted to just chill on our phones in bed for the last hour of the day, and we chuckled that we would have opted for the card games back in the days without smartphones.

It’s hard for going out and socializing to compete with solitary smartphone time. And it’s easy to avoid ever doing the former, especially once you need it the most.

[whstl]

Agree.

This is chilling to hear. Sometimes I really hate the industry I work on. We're really destroying mankind, and it's not in the ways most people predicted. Even Huxley's Brave New World looks optimistic compared to what we're doing.

[badpun]

Smartphones are just the final nail to the coffin. Before smartphones, TV had already killed a of people's sociability (and radio did a lot of damage before TV as well). The book "Bowling Alone" was written well before the era of smartphones.

[floren]

> Lots of fear increases this too, with people working too much social skills go down and mental health issues become an issue. And lack of interactions with others increases fear in general.

I think fear is an important thing to bring in here, because it's easier than ever to go down a path of "only the specific subculture on this subreddit/discord/whatever understands and accepts you, if you go to the Elks lodge the elderly crypto-nazis will literally murder you. Best to stay inside and post more about how scary those other people probably are"