“but it’s better than drinkin’ alone”
Is it?
Here on the internet, the Dope, games, online only friends, doing business online, families chatting on those sites. Streaming movies at home.
Are we a lonelier world?
Is physically being in someone’s presence necessary for happiness?
Where does it end?
Is this the route to human extinction?
Of course not. How silly.
Lonliness is an extremely personal experience, and naturally is unique to each individual. For instance:
I love being alone and am quite envious of single people who live by themselves. My fantasy life is living in a rustic cabin far off the grid, a hermit’s hermit. I could go weeks or even months without speaking to another human being and would be very, very happy. That was the the only good thing about Covid – forced isolation. I loved that part.
As any teenager can tell you, many of these things result in an increase in personal interaction. While not the same experience as a face-to-face conversation, chatting on Snapchat or sharing stuff on Instagram is still a personal, individual exchange – a real-time conversation with friends. My son, who when home is on his computer playing games with his friends, is communicating and sharing with his peers more than I ever was at his age despite the fact that he’s sitting at a desk in an otherwise empty room. Thanks to social media, interactions with other people are laughably easy.
Streaming movies is just the 2024 verson of the big video rental store from 1990. It really doesn’t have anything to do with social interactions.
From my point of view, it’s more connection, not less.
I have a good friend in Washington state and one in Colorado. We don’t get to see each other often, but we’re involved in each other’s lives because we can connect electronically. I remember my mom bemoaning how hard it was to keep in touch with friends in other states (or countries), because of the time it took to exchange letters.
My older daughter is living more than a thousand miles away, but I know what cute things their cats are doing and what her garden looks like because we can text back and forth.
If we didn’t have electronic communication, I would just be watching more TV alone.
As you say, I like my own company better than most. Altho’ I would never survive out in a rustic cabin in the woods. Never would have. But it’s a nice dream.
I just wonder if people will get used to never being in the same room that doing it would be unpleasant.
Of course I love chatting with my internet friends and distant family. Seeing their faces and pets.
I feel lonely with a houseful of people around me. I do a bunch of living inside my head.
I can’t quite give up on humanity yet.
Well if the average person only bumps into another person of the opposite gender twice in their lifes, and those occasions are a progenitive success, then humanity will survive quite nicely.
A couple of years ago my father, in his late 80s succumbed to cancer.
To keep the family informed of progress and arrangements a group on messenger was set up and it still functions. It’s not a humming hub of activity but for those of us who are 10s of hours away from the “ancestorial” home, we have never before been as connected.
An article on this very topic in The Atlantic:
(Gift link good through March 4.)
From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.
I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty.
Long before the internet, the advent of TV and air conditioning were cited as factors in people not getting together like they used to. I mean, why sit on the front porch and say hi to your neighbors when you can be comfortably cool and watch Uncle Milty in your living room?
I’ve argued in other threads in the past that activities like SDMB are what I called “social methadone”. They blunt the pain of withdrawal from real social interaction but don’t give the high either.
So better than nothing, but not better than an equal supply of the real thing.
The problem is that for most people, the supply of real people isn’t equal, and never could have been. e.g. …
Despite this being a relatively productive day for me, in the 12 hours I’ve been awake now, so maybe 10-1/2 useful hours net of showering, eating, etc., I’ve spent about 5 hours of them with y’all. I’ve “talked” with at least 50 people about 30 things. Real life can’t compete with that unless I’m a professional party-goer and posse leader.
So for many people, modern virtual social interaction is a triumph of quantity offset by a reduction in the peak quality. Whether the average quality is up or down is a harder decision and varies a lot by person and circumstance.
e.g. for physically isolated folks it may be an improvement in quantity and quality. Being the only gay or Mensan or ??? in a small west Texas cattle town is a lonely one-of-a-kind outcast existence. On the internet, those folks are legion. And can find their like-minded compatriots with relative ease. Bingo: instant society / social life!
From all that I find it difficult to say the new reality is worse. Different? You bet. Worse overall? Tough call.
I consider myself a pretty firm introvert but I’ve noticed that I do need to have some face-to-face time with people that I like. Most of that I can fill with my family (so lockdowns weren’t really that bad for us) but I also do need the occasional time with other people, otherwise I start getting kind of grumpy. My spectrum kid is the same – she doesn’t actually really talk socially to people outside her family (we’re working on this), but she does like being around them once in a while. (I mostly get my RL people fix from church.)
That being said, I absolutely love being able to “talk” with people online. I have a fair number of niche interests for which I don’t know anyone else in my geographical area who would want to talk about it in person to the extent that I’d like, but I know people online who will. If I’d been an adult before the internet, I think this part of me would have been really lonely. (I also like the asynchronous nature of it so that I can reply when I’m not busy with kids or dinner or whatever.)
I tend to be of this bent. I don’t see people as often as I used to, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the Internet. It’s just that I’m in the part of my life with marriage and raising kids and not everybody is able to hang out as often (nor am I). I still make it a point to go out and see my friends every couple of weeks, same as seeing my parents. I volunteer on Wednesdays at a food pantry, so for several hours I have interactions there.
I have far more opportunities and ability to communicate and exchange ideas with people using the internet (and that includes text, voice, and visual communication) than I did before. Frankly, it’s god damned amazing. I can chat and collaborate, say, on music with friends in the UK and Hungary – I don’t have to wait until we somehow end up next in the same room together which, honestly, is likely to be never (in the sense of all of us being together.) This option wasn’t available to me in the pre-internet days.
There are minuses to relying on this type of connection, sure. But I’m an optimist at heart, and most technological advances I see as positive, despite the naysaying “get off my lawn” type of folk. There’s always pluses and minuses to everything, to be trite.
I appreciate the time I’ve spent here at the Straight Dope as I’ve engaged in many productive threads over the years. Interacting with Dopers helped me change my enthusiastic support for the death penalty to my current mild disapproval of it. (I don’t think it’s wrong to kill people, but I acknowledge the problems with it and believe we’re better off without a death penalty.) I recognize the posters here are human beings and I do feel bad when Dopers pass away and miss the ones who stopped posting for whatever reason. When TubaDiva passed alway she was in the process of helping me fix my username when we switched over to the new board.
I started posting on the Straight Dope way back in 1999, but I haven’t formed any deep, meaningful relationships with anyone here. I can’t discount the possibility that I’m an odious individual and that’s why nobody here has formed any strong bond with me. But I think it’s a little more difficult to form a meaningful friendship with people in an online forum than it is face-to-face. In the real world, we can read one another’s body language, the inflection in our voices, and we have more time to chitchat about the little things in life.
This place isn’t a substitute nor an adequate replacement for good old fashioned human interaction. But I do appreciate it for what it is.
I’ll take a waterglass full of The Macallen.
“oh, man…what am I doin’ here?”
Is there someplace you’d rather be?
Coo coo ka choo
I am The Egg Man, so that means you must be…
Granny Hawkins!
Nahhh. You the Fishman. Don’t confuse me.
Yes.
I live alone. I work online. I order groceries and liquor and food delivery online. My two cats bring me some joy, but I need to go out and interact with physical people as well.
I’m really lonely if I don’t, even if it is a random chat with a stranger.
I do have 2 children, but am unfortunately divorced, so I hugely value both the fatherhood and the interpersonal connection when I do see them.
I’m married and work from home. We live pretty isolated, perhaps 1 or two cars will travel our road a day. Often zero. And I have two dogs, they get me out every day. I go into town about once or twice a week for stuff, be it the grocery store or whatever.
I don’t do Twitter or Facebook 'cause I don’t want to get sucked into another time waster. SDMB does that for me. This place is special though because of the random things I learn and the crazy questions I can ask. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t tell my wife - “I saw that on the Straight Dope”.
I work pretty closely with a few people, where always IMing and emailing about projects, and sometimes just shoot the shit. I’ve gotten to know people better this way. Before we where smaller groups, now we are still in those small groups, but we connect on other stuff as well. Some of these people are very funny.
I guess I’m kinda a loner, but I sure don’t feel lonely. Working from home has been fantastic. I prefer to communicate by the written word anyway, I’m quite hard of hearing, and that causes me all kinds of problems and frustration.
If one is “sharing a drink called loneliness”, doesn’t “sharing” indicate that the two people sharing are no longer lonely because they’ve found a kinship and a common bond?
I took a semester of philosophy, and I loved these kinds of discussions. LOL