Longitudinal data would be informative. I strongly suspect people spent less time alone in the past.
(Note: The X-axis is age.)
My theories:
* Multitude of choices given to us by technology have led to fewer things we pay attention to in common with our friends and neighbors. Thus, fewer shared loci of interaction. Career specialization is another key contributing factor.
* More recently, dopamine rush generated by endless new contents tailored to our preferences has made real-world interactions and activities dull by comparison. More people choose to spend time alone with that rush. In the long run, it might result in weaker social ties and less healthy psychology for some/many people.
Research has shown that strong social ties are important for mental and even physical health.
How do we design technologies and social institutions to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems?
A gender breakdown for both single and married would also be useful. For marriages there should also be another dimension based on the health of the marriage.
Recent literature suggests that men are lonelier than women which incites my curiosity on gender differences in this topic. I've been theorizing that if true, those men who fall further below the envelope of social interaction end up having greater difficulty in developing and maintaining relationships as they age.
Most women I know have a hoard of men waiting to take them out and entertain them. On the other side, most men I know struggle to get a single woman to go out with (or men for that matter as friends).
Men are in such compitition now that they have deep distrust of other men and won't let them into their circle.
It's funny I just got back from a Meetup mixer. I'm in Seattle too, coming from the east coast. It feels like another country at times.
But all the meetups I've been to there is a gender imbalance. Either a number of men to women or vice versa. The latter being the most common. Tonight I was watching as 8 guys were trying to talk to one woman.
Yes. Seems like the entire west coast is similar. Also, there are few places where women outnumber men. And if you look under 40 the ratio is even more skewed towards many more men than women. I think this impacts men's mental health as they are unable to build a relationship of any sort. Men commit more crime, go to college less, commit suicide more, are heavier drug users, and so on. I wonder how the male/female ratio plays into that.
Well, there is the societal expectation that in order to "grow up" a man must stop spending time with his friends and/or on his hobbies and "settle down". There is no such expectation/pressure on women.
There is a lot of pressure on women to have children, though, and having kids drastically changes how, when, and with whom you socialize.
To elaborate, in case you don't have kids: for the first several months, you're likely exhausted and don't even want to socialize. If you do, you're still limited due to time - young children just sleep and eat, and you're bound to their schedule. If you're exclusively breastfeeding, you can't drive an hour out to see a two hour movie with your friends, because your kiddo's feed is going to fall within that timespan.
Once they get older, you can go out again, but you're not going to necessarily be doing the same things you wanted to earlier. Being woken up hungover by a screaming baby at 5am is terrible, so you're going to cut down your social drinking. Going camping on the weekend is more difficult, too - you're leaving your partner in the lurch. Spur of the moment plans are difficult, too - you're still tied to your kid's schedule, and there are places where it is difficult to take a small child. ("You wanna go rock climbing?" "Yes, but...")
We all, regardless of gender, face different types of pressures from outside. Women are often seen (and mystified) through motherhood, and men through stoic toiling. Women are supposed to be the emotional ones, and men hard and logical and impervious to emotions. You see it all the time in various forums when people comment on a sad article, with the "I'm not crying, I'm cutting onions schtick." A lot of this comes down to old gender roles born out of a confusing soup of evolution, Abrahamic social norms, and history. It's not just the men facing social pressures, it's everybody in the society.
> Well, there is the societal expectation that in order to "grow up" a man must stop spending time with his friends and/or on his hobbies and "settle down".
I'm not sure I've ever encountered that expectation. I'm in my 30's and have four or five close friends I spend regular time with and a load of other 'mates' that I see every now and then.
I'm not convinced by your argument with regard to the multitude of choices. A counter point could be that we should be more likely to have at least something in common with more people. Somebody must be consuming mass-media, problem the masses.
I think a better theory to support your point is that we tend to be less religious and therefore less community oriented. I don't really know if that holds up though. We have to be careful about romanticising the past, so yes longitudinal data and cultural comparisons would make these data more informative.
> How do we design technologies to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems?
Isn't the answer to this "Social Networks"? The market has spoken, Facebook is King. Every time there's conversations about the ills of Facebook there's always people pointing out that Facebook makes organising events a lot easier. That's definitely something I miss since getting off Facebook and moving to a new city.
Fwiw, when I got off of Facebook my family decided to explore local churches and found one that has been great. We've made about the same amount of friends there in 6 months that we did living here for 13 years without going there. Plenty of activities too.
When I was on Facebook I found that I was spending significantly more time chatting it up with my friends from college who are all over the country. Not that I don't want to keep in touch with them, but I'd rather be more social with people I can do things with.
Facebook gives you a social crutch. You have to get rid of it and create that gap to feel the need to fill it with something else.
Socially, the church itself doesn't do anything other than a big BBQ every year. Other than that the churchwide events are all very much on-mission (mission trips, charity work, youth activities).
Sunday school classes tend to be where the social aspects come from. We'll do a day at the lake or a get together for a meal and some activity.
We've gotten together with one or two other couples to get dinner and do an escape room, shoot targets at a guys farm, gotten the kids together to play. Even got invited to a dueling piano bar, which caught me by surprise since I assumed that would be frowned on. Turns out most grown adults are perfectly content to go have a drink, just not many.
My theory assumes as a presupposition that people are only likely to travel a certain distance to see others, since time is a scarce and non-renewable resource.
If interests are fragmented, the number of people we both share interests with and are friends with within a given radius becomes smaller.
Facebook might help a bit for organizing events and maintaining existing ties but it also contributes to the dopamine rush above.
Some sort of ways to connect new people with one another within a local area could be helpful. I found Meetup interesting and useful but could be improved upon. I used to attend some events organized by WeWork and those felt more energized but still no real friendships emerged.
The only thing that really helped make new long-term friends for me was sharing a co-working space with people who had some interests in common.
Because to view any Facebook event page you must agree to a Nondisclosure Agreement that restricts you from revealing the particulars of the event to people who do not have Facebook accounts.
Because there's so much more friction involved in including people who don't have Facebook accounts that, eventually, you just stop bothering to do it.
Yes my last high school reunion was like that. (i.e., people who weren't on facebook weren't invited, even if they were known in the community and available at phone numbers advertised to the public.) Their loss!
I wonder if that is why I didn't hear of any high-school reunion yet. Last year was my 10th anniversary of graduation. (Although, it might just be that reunions are not as common in Germany. Maybe noone bothered to put one up.)
My wife and I hate Facebook and aren't on it; and yeah, we sometimes get miffed when people assume everyone who matters (or close enough) is on it, and use only it for communicating with family, friends, a social club, or whatever.
We're the kind of people who are _proudly_ not on Facebook, and not at all shy about it. The only social network worth a damn is LinkedIn, and only so long as they are useful in finding work.
Hard to fake a heartfelt, mortified apology. That's the thing - if I'd been deliberately snubbed, I wouldn't fuss, because generally when that happens there is a reason for it. But one doesn't receive an apology when that happens, either - especially not such a shamefaced one.
This was just that Facebook's walled garden expanded to surround my erstwhile social circle, and once that happens, you maintain your presence in that circle on Facebook's terms or not at all.
To how many mainstream-culture American weddings have you been invited? It has been more than a few for me, and in general the (printed, hand-signed, often hand-decorated, mailed) invitations are fussed over by the bride and her mother nearly as much as the flowers. All of those brides would have been mortified at the suggestion to just leave it to facebook...
Quite a few, including my own. No one I've ever heard of has actually used Facebook to send invitations. But, in at least two cases over the past four years, Facebook friends lists have been the only source used in constructing an invitation list. Not being on Facebook, I wasn't in those lists. And so...
I mean, I get that it's hard to believe what I'm saying can possibly be true. I wouldn't have believed it myself before I saw it happen! It sounds like something out of the kind of third-rate sf dystopia that fails to achieve much popularity even among genre fans. But here we are.
Only source? Wow! That's tragic for grandma, but I guess some weddings are better off without old folks anyway? b^) Actually, in a couple of years that will be a good way to leave out young people...
I think that your theory is not accounting for how ageing will change the way you interact/adopt technology. Looking at the "old" edge of the charts from a youngish perspective might miss some important drivers of how older people view the world...
Some data from an interview with Prof. John Cacioppo, the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009)
"I’ve seen studies that suggest the percentage of Americans who report chronic feelings of loneliness has risen over the past few decades.
Looking from a few different sources of data, it seems that way. The percentage of Americans who responded that they regularly or frequently felt lonely was between 11% and 20% in the 1970s and 1980s [the percentage varied depending on the study].
In 2010, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) did a nationally representative study in 2010 and found it was closer to 40% to 45%. And a recent study done on older adults out of University of California - San Francisco put it at 43%. In our own longitudinal studies, we’ve seen it at about 26% and longitudinal studies in Europe have found around the same thing; there could be mathematical reasons for why it’s lower in longitudinal studies than in cross-sectional studies ones.
So loneliness levels are on the rise, we’re just not sure by how much. Why do you think this is the case?
We aren’t as closely bound. We no longer live in the same village for generations, which means we don’t have the same generational connections. That releases social constraints—relationships are formed and replaced more easily today. We have Tinder, Match, eHarmony and all these kinds of places you can dial up and find friendships, connections and opportunities that didn’t exist. In the last 15 years or so, many of those face-to-face connections have been replaced with social networking.
We’ve found that if you use social networking as a way to promote face-to-face conversation, it lowers loneliness. But if you use a destination, as a replacement for the face-to-face, it increases loneliness."
If I need to guess I'd say that online social networking may promote face-to-face socialization among students, while it is often used as a replacement for in-person interactions among older adults.
These graphs are a great example of why you should always label your axes. If you submitted these to a journal they'd be sent back for correction (assuming the editor didn't rage-toss your paper at first sight). If you included these in an undergraduate lab report they'd be docked marks heavily.
Especially because there was no label on the axes... and also no n size whatsoever and no information on how the question was asked and how the data is reported (averages? if yes it's completely useless data, averages are typically the worst kind of data you can extract).
Additionally the coloring choices are bad. The purple/blue split indicates relationships between items with the same color that don't exist. Combined with the confusing axis labels, my first interpretation of the plot was this was data comparing 2003 to 2015.
Rigtheo, so now we need to compare to other cultures and overlay the results with mental health issues, self-reported happiness, income, GDP, obesity, and all the other interesting metrics.
We already know the results though: people who have strong family ties and closer and enduring friendships and sense of community live longer healthier lives than their lonely counterparts and are more productive at work and in their own pursuits.
On the up side: people who are more separate, isolated, lonely, without being to far in to the pathological extremes, tend to buy more things, which is good for The Economy.
On the up side: people who are more separate, isolated, lonely, without being to far in to the pathological extremes, tend to buy more things, which is good for The Economy.
I would expect them to buy more functionally useful goods, like televisions, but fewer positional goods, like houses with lawns. Since the price of manufactured goods is constantly being brought down by markets, but positional goods by definition cannot be, I would expect the socially connected to spend more. They have to drink in bars, not at home; they have to buy a car that impresses, not one that drives; they have to buy a home to entertain in, not a shipping container.
We already know the results though: people who have strong family ties and closer and enduring friendships and sense of community live longer healthier lives than their lonely counterparts
I've often wondered whether, in the absence of any action to correct the issue, it's better to promote this conclusion (which feels a little bit like loneliness-shaming) or to tell less social people that being alone is OK and doesn't mean you're less of a person.
Appreciating solitude is one thing. Being lonely is another. Telling people loneliness is "OK, and doesn't mean you're less of a person" isn't going to make it feel any better to be lonely. It's not going to ameliorate the way in which, lacking the same social framework as everyone else you see, you really do feel like somewhat less of a person.
Well, it isn't for me anyway. Anecdote blah blah whatever, but I can't really imagine that I'm such an outlier in this regard, at least. If anything, as a middle-aged and rather tired divorcé, I don't really have it so bad - I can't imagine being twenty and having the same problem. "Hell" is the word that comes to mind.
I think the bump just before 20 on the "Alone" graph is really interesting. I'd also like to see the data with genders separated, could be interesting too.
It seems that bump is pretty obvious, after school if you are not doing something that regularly has you around other people(college or some job), then time spent alone will increase. For me, the most interesting part here is how this actually goes down a little bit on the late 20s.
That has to be assumed, as otherwise the "time spent alone" for children would be much higher, as having your own bedroom as a teenager is still pretty common.
1) It partially involves demographic and political aspects that are not permitted to be discussed on this site; that leads to a lot of echo chamber "I donno" responses. You can't have insight when discussing something you can't discuss. Whats the point of hitting the echo chamber like a tuning fork other than to verify "yes it continues to ring with only one note"? Yup that tuning fork / echo chamber is still not a hi-fi speaker in terms of expressing full bandwidth reality.. so is it more likely the article is inappropriate or that moderation standards will change? It seems more likely this is a bad article.
2) The ratios make very little sense. Mush together the "family" graph, the "children" graph and the "partner" graph for a couple ages for a specific example. Much as "coworkers" doesn't mean everyone works part time, it really means a minority of us work more than full time while the majority don't work and have no coworkers by definition. So comparing the ratios in the "children" graph with more than half unemployed with a side dish of typical breeding years it implies something like half of stay at home parent age bracket has pre-school kid at home, which would not appear to be nearly enough to maintain population. If almost no one had kids this would make sense. There's no point discussing an article that has highly questionable aspects to it.
3) There will be the usual ultra-low quality comments bashing introverts for being born that way. Time alone is only horrifying if you're horrified with yourself or who you are. Otherwise, its a lot of fun. Extroverts being a malfunctioning minority, implies its not really a problem that introverts are doing just fine as they age. Intro/Extro debate is mildly interesting yet mostly irrelevant to the article.
4) As a side dish its mostly a collection of cultural mis-beliefs that are somewhat impermissible, even with this evidence. Well, everyone knows every 20-something spends every night fashionably socializing all night long. Uh, no, almost no 20-something does that outside the echo chamber and most importantly the "everyone knows" aspect, and even the tiny minority of extreme party people are in a somewhat exponential decline to zero by age 30. For an example of an impermissible thought, how do you sell "new urbanism" to everyone, when statistically no one goes out at night? The amount of time people spend with their partner is shockingly stable for decades although everyone knows all marriages decline, except that it seems on very few actually do decline. Everyone knows that grandparents are taking care of more (grand)kids than ever before, yet the absolute number in the graph is scarcely larger than teen moms. Everyone knows the time alone graph goes up with age because friends are dying off or moving away and supposedly people forget how to make friends or similar nonsense and that's the only socially acceptable explanation, except for the friends graph shows a predictable child-bearing age decline and then actually slightly increases with age, such that people are both alone much more as they age while also spending slightly more time with friends. The problem is none of these issues are demographically or politically verboten like point #1 but are socially unacceptable to think about or express in public. So again the article cannot be discussed, making it a bad article.
My theories:
* Multitude of choices given to us by technology have led to fewer things we pay attention to in common with our friends and neighbors. Thus, fewer shared loci of interaction. Career specialization is another key contributing factor.
* More recently, dopamine rush generated by endless new contents tailored to our preferences has made real-world interactions and activities dull by comparison. More people choose to spend time alone with that rush. In the long run, it might result in weaker social ties and less healthy psychology for some/many people.
Research has shown that strong social ties are important for mental and even physical health.
How do we design technologies and social institutions to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems?