[jwells89]

Modern loneliness is a far more multifaceted issue than it’s often presented as.

For instance I’m sure that a major factor is the need for people to move great distances away from family and the community they grew up in to be able to find education, living wages, and other forms of opportunity. That breaks existing connections and makes it harder to form new ones, but I never see that talked about.

[hibikir]

Those kinds of movements aren't new though: Entire generations in many a country ended up emigrating across the sea, back when it was far slower and dangerous, to make their fortunes, as their home was too poor to handle more than one son. And today we have our home culture on our phones. I can watch TV from my home country, and my home team's soccer matches live. I can video call whenever, for free.

So maintain connection has never been easier, and migration is not any worse. I have no doubt there are far more things than social media making people more unhappy than historically, but having to move away from where we were born isn't it.

[jwells89]

Moving itself is probably wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t as frequent, for instance if maybe moving once after college would be it for most people. That’d still give people time to set down roots.

Instead it’s often necessary to move repeatedly, for reasons varying from going to school to getting a job to finding housing with room for kids to just trying to keep rent from eating up the majority of one’s paycheck.

In my case I’ve moved 9 times in the ~15 years since I turned 20 and it’s very likely I’ll be moving again in the future. It’s been very disruptive for maintaining connections, even with the power of modern communications at my disposal. I’ve more or less grown used to it and am kind of introverted anyway so I’m not depressed but I could see where others might not be so lucky.