But (to varying degrees) most of the new construction around the world since WW2 has been oriented around driving and separation of land uses, and as a result when you age you end up living in a nice little garden home far removed from any day to day life going on. And once it gets hard for you to drive... then you really end up spending a ton of time alone.

I don’t think there’s an easy fix for this, and that makes me sad.

I moved to USA.

“Damn it I didn’t mean that far” ~ mom

My sister lives with her boyfriend in his mom’s house. There is indeed a ridiculous amount of meddling even though they’re technically separate households.

What I always heard was something like:

”Move far away enough that your parents can’t visit in their slippers, but not far enough that they have to packs their bags to visit"

Then my parents moved to Greece, we moved to London for career and bounced around the south east.

Eventually though we settled in Cheshire, and the parents followed - one is a 10 minute walk away, the other is 20 minute drive. It’s amazing what having grandchildren does.

Trouble is we’d feel guilty about moving to New Zealand now.

We don't have a network for our (young) children. Because their aunt and grandmother live 1+ hour drive away. Things like that severely limit your freedom. If you can park the children at grandma's easily, or have grandma visit easily, it allows you to even get things done for which otherwise one would need to stay at home, or you'd have to take all children to the appt.

Luckily, we got really nice neighbors, but we try to not play that joker card until inevitable. Its not something to rely on on the long term. Family is reliable.

If you live near each other, you just need to make proper appointments. Something with scope & boundaries...

It is just feeling good about people who don't show their strugglers and their real themselves to you.

Speaking from experience here.

My best friend lived upstairs from her parents for years. It was her own apartment but the arrangement was hell on earth. Multiple times a day every day her mom would come barging in (and I do mean barging) to insert herself into whatever was going on in my friend's apartment, make nasty comments, or borrow/take something. Her mom eventually just stopped buying her own stuff because she just would take whatever my friend had if she needed it, plus it gave her more reason to bother my friend more often, which seemed to be her favorite activity in the world. Her mom even stopped driving her own car and just took my friend's whenever she wanted to go somewhere. The constant stress of the situation was so bad for my friend, it legitimately was ruining her health.

Distance and cutting off contact (restraining order if necessary) are profoundly effective boundaries.

Psychological and emotional boundaries are required. Cutting off contact by itself is not enough. You have to communicate that you are cutting off contact. That's what establishes the boundary. In many cases you won't get a restraining order if you haven't established that boundary. The restraining order is a tool for physically enforcing an established psychological and emotional boundary.

Downright psychological abuse.

You can't solve a boundary issue by not dealing with the boundary issue. At best, you can avoid it and hope it's no longer a problem. The underlying issue still remains.

It's easy enough to tell someone to never contact you again. But if you see them daily as you prepare to commute because you live next door, a lifetime of social pressure to not be so rude as to ignore people is likely to get them to slip up and at least say "good morning!", even if they want to respect your boundaries (and definitely if they don't, and are looking for an excuse to trample all over them while perhaps pretending otherwise!) If you share a common living space or other "shared business" it's even worse, as there's also the completely understandable pressure, if not outright need, to resolve problems involving that shared business.

Moving is an action that can help disentangle you from shared business - be it common living spaces, shared fences, shared neighborhood issues, etc. - and help dismantle habits that would undermine your boundaries.

Slaughtering the cows would be like... selling her car so her mom can’t use it. Her mom can’t hurt the cow anymore, sure, but there’s still no fence there.

In contrast, telling her mom “No, you can’t use my car” would be setting a boundary. But telling her mom “I don’t want you in my life” would also be setting a boundary. These are just two different fences. In both cases, the cow/car are just fine.

My sister aligns politically with my mom and she moved to MONGOLIA to get away from her. I'm glad for people who truly like their families, but not all of us won that particular genetic lottery.

The Red Tribe still has Christianity, so they don't need another one.

One thing I've learned in my 30s is its not a genetic lottery. There are definitely very irrevocable dynamics but many can be molded with a level of concern, effort and boundary setting that we usually associate with work added with a dash of true sincerity and deep care.

I think this largely depends on factors outside our individual control—specifically, the other person. Sometimes setting boundaries, doing the work, can help the other person see the way their behavior is impacting you. Other times, it won't, so if you want the relationship to continue you have to be willing to always and repeatedly do all the work to maintain the relationship. Without the other person being capable and willing to recognize their own issues (and maybe get some therapy), no amount of your own effort can effect a permanent change.

I don't know the solution other than everyone agreeing not to talk politics, ever. And even better, actually deciding that politics is pretty insignificant and only something to think about on election day.

Unless you think civil liberties are at stake. The Supreme Court will be tilted to a way I believe is harmful for my children’s future, and personal health, and so I consider politics to be very significant.

Did I imagine growing up without dental care or healthcare because my immigrant small business owner parents could not access affordable healthcare? I personally know small business owners that are open about supporting politicians because they don't want the minimum salary for exempt workers to be raised, so that they can continue to exploit immigrant "managers" to run their businesses and pay them $32k per year to work 60+ hours a week.

These are real matters that have affected me and many others in the country. To say politics isn’t significant is ridiculous.

My influence on politics is insignificant vs my influence on other things that will impact my quality of life and those around me. In fact, politics and political news are a huge time suck for lots of people. Might as well be playing video games or watching sports.

The point that we are all governing in one way or another, like Greek Gods, still stands.

Funny you bring up capitalism where the story is about parent-children relations.

I am not passing judgement here. The women woke up in the morning and cooked for everyone else.

> It was so nice to have that much support around all the time.

People have written about this in books that are now almost four decades old. Everywhere women entered the workforce in a highly compensated way, this arrangement came to an end, the number of children went down, etc.

Of course on Hacker News, where maybe 9% or less of the commenters are women, there are people fondly writing about these pastorals where the women do all this crappy work. It's completely bonkers. Or it's the men who come from immigrant backgrounds, looking at photo albums of grandmas and grandpas in school, not admitting how rare it was for the average person, in the 50s, to go to college - that your family isn't average, it was rich in all the ways that mattered, even if in some superficial sense it was a destitute or hardscrabble life.

It's easy to explain the rise in time spent alone among the oldest Americans. You're really observing a trend in reduced dependence.

The one place where they historically had the shorter end of the stick is the high risk of dying in childbirth. Things have improved much with regard to that, though.

Cooking is not "crappy work". Risking your life in coal mines, fixing broken pipes of shit, garbage disposal, being shot to death in useless wars, those things are crappy work (although apparently many miners like their jobs).

You can perhaps argue about having a choice, but even that works both ways. Men rarely have the choice to stay at home to do the crappy work, rather than risk their lives in the outside world. But that is for another discussion. I just wanted to point out your obvious misguided bias about cooking here.

It doesn't seem impossible to stay living close together and still give people more options. Most freedoms were won by the invention of the washing machine and other modern appliances, making household chores less time consuming.

My SO cooks like 65% of the time, but it’ nice for her being able to just rely on me when she is overwhelmed, or just doesnt feellike it.

I believe everyone should learn to cook to some degree.

You can save money and eat more healthy foods that way compared to takeouts / fastfood (which would be the alternative if your SO wont cook and you cant)

> I have a full time career

> despite that I still find cooking for my family

that's nice for you.

we were talking about people without that choice though.

so you are a man. you have a full time career. period.

this is the happy multi generational family living that was described.

Do men with full-time careers not qualify as people without a choice? ;)

(Of course, you meant the choice of cooking.)

I am another man with full-time work who cooks at home. Used to be 50% before corona, now it's maybe 80% because it is easier to do while working from home; as a bonus, I can now also eat with my family. I wouldn't mind sharing the cooking with someone, like one day I would cook for two families, the next day the other family would cook for me. (Cooking twice the amount is not twice as much work.) I am too shy to offer this deal to my neighbors, but if I had family members living close to me, I probably would have arranged something like this already.

I agree that multi-generational family living is unlikely to work well; with that much closeness, the temptation to interfere is just too high. I suppose the optimal distance would be on the same street, in a different building. So you can easily share child care or cooking, but having to put on your coat and shoes somewhat discourages unnecessary visits.

In theory, you could have a similar arrangement with your close friends. But that also requires them living close to you. My point is that this degree of cooperation, if it works well, can make your life significantly easier. Just imagine, if you have kids of similar age, you could have free babysitting 50% of time in return for having an extra kid or two in your house the rest of time. Again, twice many kids is not twice as much work; sometimes it's even less work, as the kids play with each other and leave you alone.

Do we, though?

It seems the past generation had a very nice thing going about 30-40 years ago. Fast forward and our societies are literally crumbling around us, what once took one man going to an average job to provide is now taking two full-time people on skilled labour to do the same. Happiness is down. Stress is up. Planet is rotting.

So do we really need to keep beating down a path that has, quite obviously, served us very fucking poorly?

The social approach is to change a culture so that we make deep friendships for life. Like having a new family, except by choice. Make it normal for friends to buy houses next to each other, so that in future they can help each other take care of kids, cook for each other, and other things family members could do for each other. This could help people live in a commune of their own choice.

(The obvious problem: two people get married, each of them has a different group of friends. In some sense this is a nice problem to have, because it assumes that many people already have communes. Still a problem.)

The technical approach is to make houses like Lego bricks, with standardized dimensions, that can be picked up from one place and placed to another place. To make relocation easier and cheaper than it is now. So again, you have a group of friends, and you agree to live together. Except, if you find new friends, you move to live close to them.

In places where most homes are rented, this is a potential product for a very rich company: make a few buildings in different parts of town, with identically shaped flats (or maybe two or three types of flats of different size, each type existing in each building) and provide a furniture that is easy to disassemble and reassemble. Part of your offer would be the possibility of cheap and simple relocation: if someone chooses a different bulding where a flat of the same type is available, you could disassemble the furniture, move it, and reassemble in the same shape in a week. You could also provide some related services, such as redirecting mail coming to the old address.

This is very disrespectful to the many women, and a growing number of men that are making a conscious choice to prioritize raising children and caring for a family over salary work.

The problem is forced labor here, i.e. not having a choice to enter the work force. Not that the work is inherently "crappy" - it is not.

Also something I was thinking about lately: in every other human endeavour there has been increasing specialisation and humanity has benefited from greater productivity. Why is domestic duties (cooking, cleaning, looking after kids) something where we cannot have specialisation? I don't really care if the man or woman does it but would we not benefit from one partner doing most of it efficiently rather than both doing it badly in between stressful jobs?

For various reasons, many families don't even have the choice anymore. They need both parents to work fulltime to make ends meet.

> I would love to spend a lot more time cooking

> I do all the cooking on weekends and holidays/vacations because it is so much fun. I love it when I have my six week sabbaticals since I can cook everyday.

This is exactly the kind of choice that we were talking about which does NOT exist in the "happy multi generational example" that we were talking about.

As a woman, as well as being in STEM, I see how tenuous my position still is. On my team I’m still the only female in an engineering role. I can’t imagine what life would have been like if I had been born 100 years ago.

That's not to say we don't all deserve self-determination but the story we were sold, of ultimate freedom for everyone, is just a new wage-slavery for everyone. Lest you think I'm a deplorable, loveless man shaking his fast at the world from his parents' basement: I am loved by a wife of the bravado feminist ultra class who herself acknowledges this secret trap Capital sprung upon us.

Your life will be wrung from you, bit by bit, and you'll profess it was your dream the whole time.

Two people earn a lot more than one person used to by any material metric. People don’t feel any richer because any surplus gets eaten up by positional goods. It’s not enough to have a perfectly reasonable 1950s house. You must have one twice as big, like your friends. It’s not enough to go on a camping holiday, or road trip. You have to have a trip to the Caribbean twice a year. Most of all, the ultimate positional good, the real prestige markers, an Ivy League degree for your children and a house in a good school district, i.e. one with no poor people.

This is a global trend

... in the US maybe.

Other places are arguably way more progressive in their equality between men and women, and do not have this problem either.

(the lesson from this should be that the USA has multiple problems, not all of which stem from lack of equality, one of which is their cultural attitude wrt capitalism, in particular being nearly blind to its obvious shortcomings)

OP was talking about Vietnam, my experience is in rural Italy and matches the idea of people helping each other, not of the exploitation of the women.

And not in an idealised way either, I could make countless examples that I experienced first hand, growing up with 18 cousins and spending together every easter, Christmas and summer holiday for large part of our lives. Especially summer holidays that last three months in Italy.

They are my sisters and brothers, even though I only have one "real" sister, my 8 aunts are my moms, my 8 uncles are my dads, when I was a kid I probably spent more time with them than with my parents that were working 12 hour shifts in hospital (they did the exact same job and shared 50/50 parenting) and sent me and my sister to our grandparents when schools were closed, so we didn't have to be alone at home or with a baby sitter.

I feel lucky to have a family where no one is left behind or alone.

I never felt we were dependent, on the contrary, they let me develop my independence and I have been a kid who spent long moments alone and still do as an adult.

What you call pastoral I call it sense of community.

Yes, women had it bad in the past, but what you're seeing is not reduced dependence, it's solitude.

Maybe the fact that I grew up in a socialist family makes my perspective different, but I can't imagine old people wanting to be alone, away from their family and loved ones, unless they are forced to.

And the worst thing is that even if you were right and old people are simply fulfilling their desire of independence, women have it worse all the same: stats say that in USA 75% of the elderly living alone are women and to make things even worse widowers have more chances of remarriage than widows.

Considering that old people living alone have more chances of falling into poverty, that poverty increases the chances of being alone even more, that eating it's a social activity for many people, so living alone increases the risk of malnutrition and that in the presence of health issues loneliness increases the chances of the symptoms getting worse, I wouldn't consider more time alone a blessing, not for men nor for women.

Or, to reitate once more, a family that accepts you for who you are.

I'm glad for you that it's been so happy and all, but really get it into your head, this situation is not, CANNOT, be for everyone.

You're excluding people without a family and/or who chose not to breed.

Are you saying that most elderly have no family or kids?

And why people with no family or kids should live in solitude?

I have no kids, for example.

Family is not built on blood alone.

A good chunk of what I call family is formed by people who had no family, lost everything during the ww2 and are not my blood relatives.

I simply said that a community that cares about its members is not a pastoral, there are place where it's still the way they live.

The community can be a group of houses in the Italian country in the middle of nowhere.

Not sure when I first heard that quote.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...

Fuck, can't even eat breakfast in peace!

Maybe the secret is to retire in a place where one can maintain a good social life at an advanced age.

Indoor malls used to be similar gathering places for people who wanted to walk without being in the weather.

Basically, look anywhere the 20- or 30-somethings aren't.

I have no idea what the difference between here and America is. Amazon is not super big here like it seems to be in America.

In the U.S., there are ~2,827 people per mall.

In Australia, there are ~15,337 people per mall.

There are probably just way too many malls in the U.S. given a population that's moving to online shopping.

In the case of American suburbs, places will need to change by basically tearing everything down and rebuilding differently, either a piece at a time or all at once.

You make this statement like there are national zoning laws. Doing exactly this is common in northeastern New Jersey, and the result is pretty dense and walkable suburban areas. That said, much of this is due to momentum; many of the suburbs were platted before car ownership was widespread and the later ones continued similar, familiar patterns.

Separately a lot of state and local legislation that is contentious can be copy pasted and sent along by lobbying groups.

I can’t imagine any elderly person with mobility issues being able to cross any road with more than a 25mph speed limit, especially the main roads that are 4 to 8 lanes wide at intersections with 40mph speed limits.

I’m not sure how you get to this without literally shutting down the country, but that aspect was nice.

Seems like there are two attractors in the mass transit space:

Attractor 1: The mass transit is safe and clean. Everyone uses it, because it is convenient. Because everyone uses it, people care about keeping it safe, clean, and convenient.

Attractor 2: The mass transit is dirty and dangerous. Only poor people use it, because they have no other choice; all middle-class people use cars. Because no one important uses mass transit, no one really cares about making it less dirty and less dangerous.

From what I heard, the former attractor seems more frequent in Europe, the latter in USA.

There are also other things involved in the attractors, such as width of roads, sizes of blocks, whether sidewalks exist or not, etc. These would be even more resistant to change.

Letting me go where I want, when I want, means I can't let my kids go anywhere, ever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18014283

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21267283

They need family members who care. The family members need parking spaces. The fewer steps from bedroom to car, the better. A nice goal would be to have less than 50 feet from bedroom to car.

My grandma was very feeble at the end of her life and the biggest pain point for her was getting her in and out of the car. If we could get her in her wheelchair and just roll her down the street for brunch, she would have gone out so much more. Instead we had to get her to the car, then pick her up to get into the car, buckle her down, fold up her wheelchair, drive somewhere, then do everything in reverse. Then do it two more times on the way home. She disliked the entire process so much she usually didn't want to bother leaving the house.

It’s a huge subsidy that society pays to have cars around. There is a huge cost due to the space dedicated to cars, parking them, driving them and keeping them from killing people.

Chinese friends of mine would like to bring their parents from China, but they're having nothing to do with it. They don't want to lose the active social network they have at home.

I mean, there is, which is to reintroduce mixed use zoning. You essentially allow people to operate small businesses out of their homes.

This changes the dynamic very quickly because the change can happen before the new construction. As soon as it's allowed, someone buys a house on your street, or one of your existing neighbors does this, and it becomes a bistro from the hours of 6PM to 10PM. The neighbors gather there on a regular basis and get to know each other.

Then the house across the street converts a room to a convenience store, and now you can walk to a convenience store instead of having to drive to Walmart.

What makes these things viable is that the proprietor still lives in the house, which reduces their operating costs and allows them to compete with the big guys. But it's currently prohibited by zoning.

Really what might do something great is to have a new class of zoning designated for owner-occupied small businesses, i.e. you can operate a business there but only if someone who owns at least 30% of the business also lives there. Then rezone the majority of residential properties as that.

Or one that is safe.

Or sane.

Or will accept them for who they are.

Etc etc etc.

The idea that "family is who you got and you stick with them" is very nice if you have a great family, but please don't force this on everybody.

It's very similar to the antiquated idea that you should be sad for a woman because she doesn't have a man.

The problem is loneliness. By treating it as a "family" problem, any solutions will exclude people who still can't fall back on a functional/safe/sane/accepting family.

I can understand it makes you sad if you have a happy family and wish this for others. But in some situations it'd be equivalent to wishing someone would stay with their abusive partner.

Also, what's this about only grandparents getting to enjoy company in their old age? What about the people without children+grandchildren?? That singular fact makes their lives carbon neutral several times over, which deserves quite an amount of respect, unlike people who did it because say, they feared being alone in their old age. Which you should not underestimate as an actual reason people use. And it also does not create happy families.

Many (to a degree or another) get tired of other people. Divorces, break-ups, tired of fights for money/inheritance, tired of people acting stupid, tired of fighting about politics, favourite teams, and many many many more.

I think people are getting tired of not getting 'what they want' from life, a partner, their kids, society, 'the system', so they self-isolate, do the things they enjoy (nothing, fishing, watching the birds, watching tv, etc.) without having anyone telling them to get their feet of the couch, don't eat cookies in bed, and other similar annoyances.

Also, depression, poverty, lifestyle, nostalgia. I was reading* that men tend to go back to their hometown and grow old/die there, women want to stay where they are or move forward. I assume that (for the 50+) this maybe has to do with the inequality and how women suffered/were treated badly when they were growing up in place A, 50 years ago vs living on place B, with today's change social mechanics.

I can think of a dozen more reasons.. I am not a psychologist, I just started observing how the 50+ like to live, as one day we will all get there :)

*Addition: I tried to remember more about that book and a couple of interviews but for the life of me I cannot remember the guy's name or face.. just his voice. He went on to explain the reason for that; in some countries/societies, when a couple marries, it is accustomed to live to the MAN's hometown, and in some other countries/societies they go to live to the WOMAN's hometown. So there could be the chance that they are not 'very' happy, they spend a life oppressed, and towards the end of their lives (and especially if the couple drifts apart -post empty nest, or one passes away) they want to go back to the place they grew up, which was not tarnished by 'hurtful memories' and they only have fond memories. Somewhere where they 'always belonged' either if they have not been there for 20-40 years. They will return and find their old friends.

I consider this attitude a good example of why things are the way they are. But I take pride in going against the norm here.

Of course, it depends on the individual’s personalities and whether or not they can accept the compromises of living near or with each other.

I would want to commit suicide before I subject my kids or grandkids to permanently doing basic tasks like cleaning up my bodily functions or spoon feeding me, but I certainly don’t mind helping my elders with various tasks every now and then.

One remedy is as simple as a phone call. Calling old time friends and relatives can make wonder. Most will rejoice at hearing a familiar voice.

Another remedy is acceptance of being alone. Being alone without feeling lonely is an acquired skill.

It was sort of like parents talking about children, except here the children could read, had been parents and were wiser.

No one proposing to ask the elders what they might want or need. People pushing political and social agendas tangential to the core issue (surprise, surprise). Sweeping generalizations with no supporting information or, at best, anecdatum (always one datum). Par for the online course, but easier to see when you are the target demographic.

Old people, like old trees, become more gnarled and unique as time progresses. Some might say more interesting, some say less useful..check out Taoism for more insight there. Young people are more similar and they look to many others for stimulation because they themselves are...pretty boring. Old people are much more interesting in their own right, and each of their old friends pack ten times the interestingness of a stripling, so far fewer are needed. An old friend or acquaintance brings an order of magnitude or more adult experiences, a multidimensional nature, and the metadata of all the times and places in which they were lived. A young person (<30, maybe 40) is a scalar variable, and you’re lucky if it’s double precision.

From a heart standpoint, the older a person gets, the more transpersonal their emotions and energies, in preparation for their next journey. The truly aged are the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but they aren’t around long enough for the young to realize it. Conditioned love is there, but is “emptying into white”. Best not to muck around too much if you are young, even if you are a family member.

Bring us grandkids, for exactly one day, or stay the hell away.

There's an asymmetry here, which is important to account for when designing environments.

I mean, the fix is really straightforward. You prevent the burbs from siphoning tax dollars off the host city they surround so that the high cost of sprawl is placed on them, rather than poorer city-center districts.

Then, you emulate the community and land-use strategies of areas in which the eldest are least displaced. One of the key features of global blue zones is the inclusion of elders in society.

This means opening up a lot of zoning space to mixed medium density residential/commercial zones and designating very generous volumes of family-sized units in high and medium density developments to restrict the optimization of development projects into tiny bachelor accommodation units and ultra-spacious penthouses. In short, make medium density housing in walkable communities and stop transferring wealth away from those communities.

But I would hardly call that easy, when you need to undo generations of legislation, business convention, and nearly the entire structure of the financial markets, in order to accomplish all that.

My only regret is that my extended family lives on the other side of the planet. When I was little everyone lived in the same city (Dhaka, Bangladesh). My mom’s sisters were at our house several times a week. Moving to the US was depressing—so much so that my mom has always been quite bitter about it.

But the thing is, time with family, friends, and spouse stay basically constant. The only thing that changes is time spent with coworkers, and time spent with children.

But when you're at your office hacking away at your computer, are you really "with coworkers"? Is it really less lonely to sit at your desk, with your coworkers at their desks, than it is to sit at the workbench in your garage with your wife in the house?

I know there are exceptions -- people whose spouse has died, who live alone, and crave every bit of social interaction they can get. But on the whole this graph was fairly positive for me.

There's a lot of incidental, in-person interaction that happens when sharing a space with other people. Even little things like meeting a coworker at a coffee machine, or going for lunch at the same time. Adults at work spend as much time, or more, around their coworkers than kids spend around their classmates at school.

It was an interesting show, and they claim the health benefits to the elderly were significant. The interviews with the old people were very poignant, with one saying she was considering suicide before the experiment, because she felt so lonely. The kids also seemed to appreciate it a lot, being at that age where they just like having fun and learning new things.

Sadly the epilogue of the show sad Covid-19 stopped any further expansion of the experiment, but hopefully it will continue once it's safe again. It seems to me like a great idea, combining child care with elderly care.

And if so, is such technology even possible?

My guess for first step would be finding out what kind of devices do elderly have access to and more importantly, what kind of devices they use.

Side-thought: Such a MMORPG could even have a subscription based financial model, as most elderly do get regular monthly income.

The moral question: Is it better to be addicted but not alone, or is it better to be alone and not addicted.

I personally think that not only could this bring new light for the elderly and a opportunity to connect with others including the younger generations.

I think such a solution could help elderly feel less lonely, and it is a solution that could be provided at their homes.

Sure its possible to have a healthy relationship with such a thing if you have fulfillment in other areas of your life, but if you don't its not good for you.

I think perhaps it would be possible to design something that pushed people together a lot more, but if you were going to do that it would probably be better to work on actual real life social engineering, making meetup groups etc.

I think the model they created will persist into post Covid, with the addition of physical connection.

I've been on reddit for ~12 years, for example, and after five or six years still hadn't really cultivated any kind of 'group' or relationship with anyone, so I just started rotating my accounts regularly because the social aspect of the platform is essentially of zero value. HN feels much more like a community, and some of the forums I frequent are even more so, despite being largely undiscoverable and frosty to newcomers.

I won't even touch on the idea/harm of replacing physical connections with purely online ones. A lot of my friends are people I have met via the internet, but our friendships have often been cemented by eventually meeting up in person. I suspect the same is true for most people who talk about their extensive online social graph.

We have more nerves devoted to touch than any other sense. We're a social primate species. We need to shoulders to cry on, hugs, handshakes, etc. We crave being in the same space with others, experiencing their physicality.

Even the smell of our loved ones is an important component of being connected to them. Most of us probably have deeply evocative memories of the smell of "grandmas's house" or an ex's shampoo. Scent is tied to our emotional memories more deeply than any other sense.

As a young person today, I feel totally disconnected from the people around me, even moreso because of the pandemic, and I actively try to spend less time "socially"/"digitally" etc. because they only increase feelings of loneliness. No technology besides basic telephony has done anything to help me stay more connected to my friends.

Huh, amusing way to see it.

Introvert here.

I see it as a natural progression. "Finally, I don't have to be around people all day and can have lots of time to myself!".

I'm actually impressed at how few Americans live alone under the age of 30. I guess having roomates is more of a thing in the US...?

I think your focus on construction is looking at a symptom - this is an unintended consequence of the nuclear family emphasis; the construction changed to support it.

I already spend the vast majority of my time alone, so I don't find it sad.

This sort of thing is advertised as one of the primary use-cases for self-driving cars IIRC. I.e. give people mobility who otherwise would not have the ability to drive (so also e.g. people who are blind etc)

Don’t you have neighbours and normal community areas in this case? Doesn’t that count as day to day life? What else are you expecting?

Architecture, and city planning, are the main reasons for this. Proof is that even immigrant populations (e.g. Greeks, Italians) still adapt and adjust to the new environment - almost completely abandoning the healthy community habits of their country of origin. It's not the people, it's the environment - at least to a large extent.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone

Also, the spending time with children is sadly low, imagine growing up with no grandkids to see man that must suck

I'm a bit doubtful about this study. It's only anecdotal evidence, but I heard many old persons complaining heavily about loneliness.

I place the blame entirely on the govt that is squeezing and squeezing young working people for taxes and turning everyone against each other. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the undignified fight for land. Everything is instigated by the dissatisfaction of what do I get in return for the taxes I pay.

The govt should work for US. We are working for the govt. In California, this is gaslighting of the public at a state level. I want to shake people out of this stupor and show them that they are being abused by the politicians in Sacramento.

It starts at the public school level where children are indoctrinated to be sheep and follow the ‘leader’ because they are most vulnerable. It carries on to university level especially if the students are not in brain cell burning hard subjects or even anything that completely consumes them and suffuses them with concentration for the love of learning. They end up with too much time on their hands and go out in the world to tilt windmills.

Your last line: yes! There is an easy fix for this. Multigenerational family homes. This is high density living that is sustainable without any of the cons associated with it. And your are living with people you like. And still able to meet a variety of diverse people outside your home. Because communities that are multi generational have people of all ages. Older people have experience but not working productively. Young people can work but not as wealthy as older people. Children have nothing and have the all kinds of help from a multigenerational family..not just mothers, uncles and aunts along with grandparents but also siblings and cousins.

Having a huge compound that shares resources like water, electricity, micro grid, gardens, play spaces and shared vehicles. Home schooling is possible and most importantly childcare. Ideal family size would be 6 and can be as much 18-25 depending on how big the compound is...this is a lesser footprint.

The advantage of multigenerational families vs a large family is that the former has many people covering diff roles but in a family only the parents do every thing. There is more work distribution and allocation. Multi generational families frees women from the traditional chokehold of household duties by distributing it and they can go to work or study more because they know uncles or aunts or grandparents are around for caregiving of children.

I grew up in such a family, so I also know the downsides of it. In my generation, most families were multigenerational and like like. And I have thought long and hard about this and I think it comes down again to resources. When families are forced to be multigenerational due to necessity or tradition, it comes with its own set of issues. But if it’s a planned family with guidelines agreed upon by the family members themselves, it can function efficiently.

It clearly states more alone time does not necessarily mean they’re lonelier as individuals.

Perhaps as a species this nuclear family model we have to start with should really be giving way in later life to more autonomy?

After 20+ years being parented and pushed into team work, is it so terrible to consider enabling free agency and experience?

What makes me sad is the idea there’s objective truth to living in what we know was often an abusive and stifling lifestyle for many many people.

The easy fix: don’t personally seek a holy war where one does not exist. As soon as we start wondering what to do top down, we start focusing on arbitrary correctness and ignore the individual. Cultural “facts” always lose to facts of physical reality. No culture has found that perfect social glue. Maybe it’s a mirage fed to us through historical story, not something that is real?

This is an entirely western or American POV. I have no idea if it came from media (movies/books telling us we should move out as soon as possible) or from advertising (because if you can get people to move out you sell more stuff. More housing, more cars, more every day appliances etc...)

In plenty of cultures there is ZERO stigma of not moving out of your birth home until you get married and that might not happen till your 30s or 40s. It's just normal.

That's my instinctive suspicion personally. The Western world has long devolved into having "CONSUME" blasted at you 24/7 from 360 degrees so I've no doubt that the above is any different.

Surprised we're not being pushed into 𝚌̶𝚛̶𝚎̶𝚊̶𝚝̶𝚒̶𝚗̶𝚐̶ ̶𝚊̶𝚗̶ ̶𝚎̶𝚟̶𝚎̶𝚛̶ ̶𝚐̶𝚛̶𝚎̶𝚊̶𝚝̶𝚎̶𝚛̶ ̶𝚐̶𝚛̶𝚊̶𝚙̶𝚑̶ ̶𝚘̶𝚏̶ ̶𝚌̶𝚘̶𝚗̶𝚜̶𝚞̶𝚖̶𝚎̶𝚛̶𝚜̶ having more babies... although that corporate thirst is probably better satisfied with mass immigration and therefore more immediate dollars.

There's so much credit available for developers to build housing that it's widely available and affordable. Many countries do not have that kind of financial market.

The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.

But the point I do want to make is that our physiology and psychology is largely fine tuned by evolution for a certain operating environment. When we step outside that environment, it often introduces dysfunction in unpredictable ways.

An extreme example: as land animals we wouldn't survive very long at the bottom of the sea. More prosaic example: it's undeniable an environment with many more and tastier calories creates chronic health problems. Metabolic disease is virtually unknown in hunter-gatherers.

A rough heuristic is that removing purely adversarial elements from the evolutionary environment produces an improvements. Pathogens, predators, physical injuries, birth-related traumas, and famine. Removing or mitigating those elements are the main reason life expectancies have improved relative to hunter-gathers. But once you step outside the totally hostile elements, most environmental changes tend to be neutral at best and harmful at worst. Physiology and psychology rely on delicately tuned equilibria, which are easy to disrupt. The consequences aren't terrible, but do tend to subtly accumulate over time. Hunter-gathers die fast because they get a concussion and bleed out. Westerners die slow from the accumulation of plaque in their arteries.

Agreed. My point is just that we should look at physiology and psychology as guides, not anthropology (which is interesting but not necessarily prescriptive).

A diet of Twinkies and Coke is obviously terrible. But a finely tuned, balanced modern diet guided by nutritional science is likely superior to a primitive hunter-gatherer diet. There are plenty of people today who are in great physical condition; this is very feasible within our modern society.

Similarly, different modern countries often have differing familial arrangements, so we can look at empirical outcomes there instead of trying to guess at what our distant ancestors did, who had little choice but to do what they did, not having modern civilization as an option.

They're different, not really better.

Hunter gatherers definitely got more involuntary exercise. But modern people can choose to get better (more specialized/effective) and safer exercise than ancient people ever could have.

Hunter gatherers had to eat what was around them, and would involuntarily periodically fast. It's much easier and cheaper for modern people to have a varied diet. Many modern people also periodically fast. But you have to choose to do so.

Ancient people typically struggled with parasites and various diseases. That is largely not a factor in modern life. Modern people sometimes are affected by serious pollution issues - modern air quality from burning fossil fuels may be such a crisis. Airborne lead from leaded gasoline was almost certainly one. It's difficult to compare the effects of such problems.

There's also a pretty strong selection effect going on here: lots of people 100,000 years ago used to die. People would die in childhood, people would die in adulthood. This mean that women had to have lots of babies, which means women died in childbirth a lot.

So, I think it's true that, left to their own devices, modern people tend to be somewhat unhealthy. Mostly due to laziness. But modern people also pretty clearly have the opportunity to be much more healthy than ancient people.

Add to it easy to cure sicknesses, injuries that are nothing more and would kill you back then, their higher chance to contact said injuries and it is unlikely they would be so much healthier.

Also, there is reason why agrarian societies pushed away hunter gatherers - it is just easier to stay alive and healthy. Getting all the food a hunter gatherer in all seasons is hard.

In addition, childbirth in their society would both kill or forever damaged more women. They would also have harder time to leave physicly abusive situation, meaning likely more of it, meaning yet another negative impact on their health.

No.

Agriculture exists because it supports more people per unit of land than what the traditional way of life did (on average). This is as hard of a fact about history as you're going to get.

Now, you need to be savvy about what the statement is not saying. It is not providing a reason for an individual, or group of people, to make the switch from hunter-gather to agriculture. History did not lay that choice upon the discretion of people. It plays out in a much more complicated way.

Since the relatively natural land will only support so-many humans per acre, what happens when there are too many children? They move. Okay, what happens when that next region has too many children? Do they start making farms based on their ledgers of expected food production to population ratio - NO. The people who have political decision power are not the same people who starve or get their heads lobbed off as a result of their decision. If anything, a leader would prefer the neighboring tribe lose a few heads to adjust for the starvation problem. Do people start "switching" to farms anywhere in this? No. Only over a vast period of time, many climates, lots of movement, tribal reorganization, do people start... semi-nomadic animal husbandry. One day this will lead to agriculture.

All of this is vastly more complicated than it is on the surface, and the newly-established farmer occupation, when it comes around, could possibly be seen as the sucker at the table. There was constant tensions between "civilized" societies and their tribal neighbors, and only over the super long term does the higher calorie density of civilization win out. Even if their soldiers are shorter and stupider, there are more of them. We don't read about this, because recorded history picks up at a time when superior organizational capabilities of civilization is starting to give them a quality advantage as well (and as a side-effect, writing).

We would see that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes you get a great network of cousins who hook you up with business opportunities.

Sometimes you end up enslaved by your mother in law.

Our minds and bodies were not designed. They evolved — slowly — under conditions of relatively harshness and scarcity that to a large extent no longer exist. The human "habitat" has changed radically in the past several hundred years. One might argue that we're no longer adapted to our environment. Evolution doesn't work quickly enough for that.

I'd also suggest there was widespread physical and mental suffering in the distant past. It wasn't the Garden of Eden in prehistory.

I would agree that we are no longer adapted to our environment, and this seems to be the cause of many "modern" forms of suffering that are unrelated to scarcity, like mental illness and diseases of over-consumption. To me this implies that we have done a bad job in creating an environment for ourselves. We replaced suffering caused by scarcity (something we historically had little control over) with suffering caused by deliberate choices.

The point isn't that aligning our choices with biological and psychological needs will end all suffering. It's that not doing so pretty much guarantees a lot of unnecessary suffering.

They did not had diseases of over-consumption, but they had diseases from under-consumption.

To say that evolution is a "red herring" is absurd. It has literally determined every aspect of our being. You can't move forward without understanding what got you where you are.

So has physics. Why stop at hunter-gatherers, why not go back to the Big Bang? Would you argue that we need to study astrophysics to deal with obesity?

It's not absurd at all to suggest that evolution is a red herring, any more than it's absurd to suggest that astrophysics is a red herring. Prehistoric archaeology is highly speculative at best. I'm not saying it's unscientific, I'm just saying there are a lot of things about prehistoric societies that we could be very wrong about, due to lack of direct observation and evidence, and thus it would a poor guide for our current and future societies even if we decided to base our behavior on our ancestors (which we shouldn't).

No one is saying that we should live exactly like our ancestors.

In general, modern advances have maybe added 10+ years to an average adult lifespan. The quality of the added lifespan is harder to assess though.

> Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures

Is it? In a sense, the choice is still available to adopt the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, if you wanted. I don't know many who would want to do that.

Nonetheless, i'm not sure that the last ten years of my Dad's life (suffering from vascular dementia) were particularly good for him (I know that they were super hard for the rest of us).

I think the general point is that it's hard to trade-off the quality of those extra years, which is the point I was trying (unsuccessfully, it appears) to make.

For example, I'm Mexican. Here it's quite normal to spend plenty of time with your extended family, live near them, have your parents help you take care of your kids for extended periods of time, etc. at least in my experience. We're an industrial nation and have modern medicine, but this is more a matter of culture and social attitudes I think.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...