[the-printer]

The most glaring thing about this article to me is that I didn’t find the author having mentioned that he had any significant offline relationships prior to taking a year off. I mean, he encounters various people under an array of pretenses throughout the article, but I can’t help but wonder what his issue could have been with connecting with people without the internet with these different encounters taking place within the year. In this sense, the story as an experience raises more questions than it answers because I don’t know the guy.

But at the same time, this account fits right in with more recent ones that I’ve come across about how difficult it is for people to find social networks offline, particularly for young men (I think the author was in his late 20s when this was published?).

[kurtdev]

I feel like the difficulty of finding social networks offline is an effect of the availability of online connections, something that I noticed a lot during the pandemic.

Whenever I talk to people who are much older than me it strikes me how much work and effort goes into the maintenance of their offline social networks. The non-existence (to some older folks) of online social networks doesn't stop them from maintaining relationships, often over the same long distances. It is, like you say, a matter of forming those relationships instead of maintaining them that is getting harder.