[jrochkind1]

I'm with you 100% until the last paragraph.

We are definitely social creatures, and living lives of increasingly less social interaction is not going to work out for us personally or as societies.

But I see no reason we can't handle society at a scale of millions or billions of people. It, after all, always is experienced as less than that, even people who live in NYC or Mexico City have regular interactions with a smaller group of 100-200 people at most, even if incidental daily interactions with more people than most of us.

But those incidental daily interactions with a huge number of people -- I am pretty sure are actually positive. To the extent that I'd predict that even in the present society with social interaction limited by the social forces we're talking about -- someone living in manhattan who, on the average can't help but interact incidentally with a huge number of people daily (on average, there are exceptions, going up with wealth!) -- is likely on average to be happier, due to those interactions, than someone in a suburb working remotely who has one to two incidental interactions... a week?

I think those incidental interactions are in fact key to happiness, the more the better, and there is no problem if due to living in some of the densest places on the planet, they are with a huge number of diverse people.

Also I think people seriously under-estimate the extent to which humans have lived in "urban" societies for many thousands of years. Granted, the scale of "urban" was smaller than it is now (a city of 20K people was enormous 500 years ago), but we have always been extremely social creatures, always in fact, in general on aggregate, looking to maximize our number of relationships and interactions. (See eg _Dawn of Everything_). (I also think people way over-estimate the universal cultural homogeniety of "ancient" and "pre-historical" civilizations. Things were not as we assume).

[somenameforme]

Your prediction is extremely intuitive, but there's a bit of a surprise here. People in rural areas tend to experience substantially less loneliness than those in cities. I'll link to a random study [1] showing this, but I'm not saying this because of that study. It's a well known result that's been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated.

I think the probable reason is pretty straight forward. When there are "too many" people in an area there's a really good chance any given person you encounter is someone you'll never encounter again, or sporadically at best. So you start seeing other people as something more like NPCs. We obviously understand other people are other people, but given you'll probably never see this person again any sort of encounter is generally going to be exceptionally superficial.

And even if you try to change that, it's probably not going to be reciprocated. If somebody in a small town wanted to kick up a conversation with and get to meaningfully and really know me, I'd happily reciprocate. Go to their house for a beer or even dinner? Sure, why not? If it happened in a large city, I'd expect he's probably a scammer or just not all there. In either case, I'm going to be looking to end the conversation and move along ASAP.

So you get this paradoxical scenario where people surrounded by orders of magnitude more people end up lonelier than those with far fewer faces about.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/

[tomtheelder]

I would propose a different hypothesis: that populations in urban areas might be more itinerant and much more likely to be removed from family structures.

[flangola7]

I wonder why rural people have less empathetic world and political attitudes then. That is also paradoxical.

[tomtheelder]

I think that one is pretty straightforward: homogeneity. I grew up in a much more rural area than I live in now, and you just don't get your perspectives and views challenged very much (unless you happen to be outside the norm, in which case your life can be extremely difficult).

[somenameforme]

I don't think most really realize how neglected rural communities are. It can take something like a miracle to get the government to fund paving a road off the beaten path. Now put yourself in their shoes, and imagine how it feels when you see a government sending hundreds of billions of dollars to countries half way around the world.

This is why things like 'America first' resonate so strongly with rural communities. It's not some jingoistic message, let alone some sort of a secret dog whistle for some sort of a race nationalism thing. It's just people seeing tremendously large amounts of money and interest being spent on things like countries halfway around the world, with little to nothing to show for it all domestically.

[oblio]

The thing is, depending on what kind of rural community type we're talking about, there's no amount of money available in this world that could save them.

Even if you could theoretically build all that infrastructure, the maintenance burden would just crush you 20 years down the line, it would crush your kids and your grand kids.

The real tragedy is that cities are unaffordable.

[somenameforme]

With all due respect, you have to appreciate that nobody everybody thinks as you do. People in rural areas don't want to be "saved", and the vast majority have no interest in moving, let alone to a city - especially in current times, regardless of cost. Surprisingly there was a very recent poll on this exact issue [1].

As for maintenance, I'll elaborate on that story. People on the road of this town had been petitioning the government for years to get their road paved. Each time it'd rain, the road (made of mostly compacted dirt) would get into pretty rough shape. There'd been several accidents precisely because of this, particularly with kids, and it was also pretty rough on people's vehicles. People, as in people - not the government, would patch it up, but that'd take time, and it was non-trivial.

The government clearly had no interest in paving the road, so eventually the people raised the funds themselves over a rather lengthy period of time, and then paved the road themselves. As for maintenance, spot repairing potholes is a whole lot easier than dealing with part of a road getting washed out by rain. It wasn't cheap. And so things like this really make you wonder why you're paying taxes. And then you see headlines of a government and president seemingly gloating about sending hundreds of billions of dollars to countries half way around the world. It just doesn't inspire positive feelings, and makes the government seem desperately out of touch.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...

[int_19h]

It's not really less empathetic, it's just more parochial (i.e. empathy tends to be reserved for the in-group).

Conversely, I find that urban politics often produce the kind of "empathy" where people say things in the abstract that are in line with empathy, but it doesn't translate to actual person-to-person interactions - i.e. it's more of a play act.

The "monkeysphere" concept comes to mind, and it does make me wonder sometimes if true empathy can even be scaled to large and diverse populations in principle.

[throwaway2037]

I felt the same in NYC. It was a weird combination of aggressive and impersonal. I frequently felt lonely.

[idiotsecant]

Parent post is right, we are inherantly tribal creature capable of really empathizing and aligning ourselves with maybe 7-10 people. We can find a tribal identity with maybe 30 people. We can productively coordinate with groups of as many as 50-75 people. Any more than that, and we simply can't hold those relationships in our monkey brains and default to 'stranger bad'.

Fortunately, at some point we gained an abstraction layer on top of our monkey brains, capable of empathizing with abstract characteristics such as nation, race, religion, etc. These abstractions are socketed right into our monkey layer and are a hack that can simulate the 50-75 people type relationship for billions of people. Unfortunately that layer needs to be trained, and it's even more unfortunately very easy and quite profitable to train in the wrong ways.

[jrochkind1]

I suppose we can all keep posting "I'm right", "No, I'm right"!

I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years (in some but not all places/times over that span, sure), it's a misconception to think this is new or unusual for humans.

We have not only done fine with it, we have thrived with it.

(Also having relationships over distance too, for a long long time).

[lm28469]

> I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years

Ok but could they follow 500 influencers, watch people die everyday, get the ever up to date flow of new disease, earthquakes, terrorists attack fed 24/7, compare themselves to the best of the best, see the worst of the worst, &c. ?

For people who lived/grew up before the 90s/2000s it is very obvious that things changed in a massive way extremely quickly, a lot due to internet but eve more due to pocket computers.

I think you're massively underestimating the scale of the issue. People don't thrive on social medias interactions, they're addicted to them, depending on the survey/study you look at it's anywhere from 4 to 9 hours per day on average.

[ameister14]

>watch people die everyday

Maybe not every day, but death was a lot closer to people for everything up to the last hundred years or so.

Look at child and maternal death rates.

[oblio]

Even so, you're talking about 1 tragic event every 6 months at most, on average (except for wartime).

Not a slew of garbage about 10000 tragic events happening each day.

[throwaway2037]

"People don't thrive on social medias interactions, they're addicted to them." This is a choice phrase. Well said.

[ye-olde-sysrq]

Have we thrived, though? If we're talking about monkey brains and evolution, we need to keep in mind that all of the stuff we're talking about is even only a tiny fraction of the time that humans have been anatomically modern (300000 to 100000 years ago depending on exactly how modern you mean, with the 100k years ago mark being where an autopsy wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless it were specifically trying to date the corpse based on things like carbon13 or noting the dental care etc).

So all things considered, I don't think we can really say that we've proved out that the stuff we've been up to since the dawn of agriculture (10k years ago) is going to stand the test of time. Maybe let's at least see where global warming goes over the next 100-200 years before we start throwing around words like "thrive".

[idiotsecant]

I think if you re-read my post we're saying the same thing.

[forgottheoldone]

I agree that it doesn't come by itself, it takes will and dedication and work... I don't think we can take for granted that everything will go by itself. I'm quite pessimistic as to the actual outcomes, to be honest -- but not because I think it's impossible, but I think we're in the process of kinda failing at it. We're certainly not excelling.

> As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. [...] This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.

-- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (1871)