Whenever I have a family vacation, I can’t help but think how unnatural our present lives are. For thousands of years, we essentially just lived with and around family.
Yet now I get to see my entire family for a few days every year. Some cousins I haven’t met in years.
The people I spend the most time with everyday are also the people I care the least for - colleagues and acquaintances.
I don’t have a solution. But I just know innately that this isn’t how things are supposed be.
Language ruined everything, as it allowed us humans to update and maintain our social network (not the digital ones, the in-brain one) without seeing or (like apes do) touching each others for days. Our groups/tribes jumped from 30 members maximum (chimpanzees) to 100-200 (Dunbar’s number, calculated from a meta-study). That’s nearly 7 times more close relationships, and no need to see more than one or two daily to keep track!
From there, it’s all downhill, with writing allowing even bigger groups, distant communication, the printing press, telephone, allowing our small brains to manage huge social networks across the world and over the years.
Really, language is the source of all these fake, distant relationships!
Good articles to read, even more if you are building or studying internet social networks, communication tools, etc.
For thousands of years, most people just couldn't move very far due to physics and economics. The were mostly forced to be neighbours with family. It's always valuable to have good relationships with neightbours, whether they're family or not. As the old Dutch saying goes "Beter een goede buur dan een verre vriend” ("it’s better to have good neighbour than a distant friend").
(I think that's an adaptation of a section of the Bible Proverbs 27:10: "Do not forsake your friend or a friend of your family, and do not go to your relative’s house when disaster strikes you— better a neighbor nearby than a relative far away.")
I grew up around a large extended family and now live in a large metro away from anyone I’m related to other than my wife and kids.
I wish my kids could grow up like I did but my siblings don’t look like they’re having kids soon and neither do my wife’s siblings.
But, I feel so sad for my children when it’s just us on Christmas. It feels lonely because growing up, Christmas always had like 20 people.
We’ve thought about moving back closer to my family now that I work remotely but my wife is from a different part of the country and that makes it tougher because it would take us further from her family. She’s also from the city (not our current city) and doesn’t like the idea of living somewhere rural (she considers it rural, the metro we’d consider has 500k people though).
Even a couple of generations ago things were very different. Maybe Americans don't see this so much because it's a country of migrants, but it was common over here in the UK, just a century ago, for people to spend their entire lives within a 10 mile radius of where they were born.
You have hit on an issue which always seems to be overlooked. It is easy to talk about "extended family" as of it was one thing. It isn't and can't be.
When a child marries, as a couple they belong to two families. When their children marry they belong to two families. And so it goes. [1]
An older individual may see all descendents as "their family", but in reality they are all shared. Somebody here mentioned the Kennedys, but despite a powerful image, the same applies to them.
The only way for a real extended family to survive is by all living in close proximity to everyone else so those structures interleave. Like, I assume, the Navajo.
The bicycle was first to blame, then the car, then the plane.
[1] "marry" used in a loose context here, any relationship in reality.
Maybe its a cultural thing, but I've always been taught that even extended family is family, regardless of how often I see them, and if they come to me for help, I'm obligated to help them.
The median American lives 18 miles from their mom. Americans are moving less than at any time in US history. For the most part, the idea of a nation in motion is over.
The typical American isn't the typical Hacker News reader though, the typical Hacker News reader is going to go where the money is, not stay where the family is.
In human's natural state (hunter-gatherer), most of the deadly infectious diseases didn't plague us. They only started jumping to humans when we started doing animal husbandry (new diseases got to us via close living with animals) and when we started living in dense cities. Both conditions were only met circa 10k years ago.
That's also around the time where our natural tooth defenses started to become overwhelmed, and cleaning of the mouth, tongue, teeth, and gums became necessary.
Well said. I'm not sure which method is "better" (maybe a society's overall productivity increases if children leave the home, but I don't know if this is "good" for the individual or not), but this does seem unnatural.
However, I didn't feel this way during high school. I spent eight hours there during school itself, and then two or three hours afterwards playing sports with my friends. My memory is a little hazy, but I don't recall spending a lot of time with my parents even back then. But for some reason it feels different today, even though I actually think I spend more time with my parents today (I usually visit them on weekends).
I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because high school (for some of us, not for everyone) is largely spent with your friends, so your "social needs" are more readily met, versus at your typical rank-and-file corporate environment.
Anyways, I'm rambling again. I agree with you though fundamentally: this arrangement seems unnatural, and suboptimal too.
I also would have preferred to spend more time with my friends than with my parents. Due to conflict with my parents I have no real desire to talk more to them nowadays either.
I think one of the reasons is because children are generally building their personality at high school, where as by the time we reach work we've already built over personality and we are no longer flexible.
in my case, i'm the youngest of the family (and mid 30's) and lost many many many relatives already. i'm aware that people will die one day and so I try to enjoy my family while they still alive
Do we? I picked the company I'm at. I had a little input on the team I'm on. I don't have any control over who comes and goes on our team. If I were to join a new company I'd be picking at best a vague group of people I've met once while interviewing.
I agree, about one year ago while backpacking for couple years I landed in a rural village in rural Australia, met a girl there and stayed for 18 months. I myself am from the Netherlands, and really noticed how life there revolves around things that I think are so much more important. Like bigger families, nature, lots of space and better work life balance. In the end I couldn't live with the thought of me creating a new family there and leaving my parents, sisters and niece's behind even though I would love my future siblings to life this simpeler rural life.
On top of this, the girl I broke up with visited for the last 3 days and just drove her to the airport, she dug up all these emotions again and second guessing my decision again..
As they say you can't choose your family, but you can choose friends, so I can see how many/most of the people would choose between age 20-40 to stay away from family, then when you have your own kids you will start seeing your parents in different context as you became parent and see you was maybe more harsh on them than they deserved plus them helping with watching grandkids is also bonus (this doesn't really apply to me, my mother is 4 hours away by train, father 6 hours and inlaws 11 hour flight.
> then when you have your own kids you will start seeing your parents in different context as you became parent and see you was maybe more harsh on them than they deserved
Is this really so common or just something a writer said once? Because I definitely went the opposite way. And genuinely, I never seen anyone say that they did became more understanding toward stuff that bothered them the most when they were younger.
I know both people who try to emulate parents with own parenting and those who are firmly decided to do things differently. (Most have both aspects.)
It's my own experience, while I still disagree with many things my parents did, I don't judge tham as much as before I had kids, now I'm more understanding. It doesn't even mean you approve their approach, you can choose different one, but you can see how difficult it is whatever you decide to do.
Yeah its really sad. Most of the time I've spent with my family has already happened. The future holds at most a week or two each year in the future. It is really hard as well since I really dont want to live in the part of the country ANY of my family currently lives in.
If you were around your family all day you'll get over them just like your colleagues. The most unnatural thing about modern life IMO is that we are not doing physical labor all day and instead sit. Whilst also working more.
Minor quibble with the usage of 'unnatural'. Humans are part of nature and our creations/society we build are a result of nature as well.
In the bigger picture, I don't see why 'physical labor' should be considered some privileged activity of humanity that we must hope to get back to. Movement and physical activity are important for our bodies, but that doesn't mean physical labor is an unalloyed good. If anything, we're seeing evolution at play, we're expending less human energy for our labor over time. That seems good! We just need to figure out how to not let our physical bodies degrade in a way that can worsen our quality of life.
I get what you're saying, but doesn't that kind of negate the usefulness of the word 'natural' to use it in this way? If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?
I actually don't think invocations of 'natural' are very useful given:
1. There's a degree of ambiguity involved with the term as far as what gets lumped in with natural vs not
2. This ambiguity gets leveraged by those who want to push for whatever their subjective takes on the ideal state of the world/human relations. (i.e. it gets used a lot as a cheap tactic to dismiss human behavioral changes or how we organize ourselves or technological change, etc.)
3. Using 'unnatural' or 'artificial' to describe the modern world on the surface has an air of being descriptive/fact-based, but in reality the speaker tends to be assigning a value judgment (natural = morally good, artificial = morally bad) to a portion of the world they don't like. I don't think I've ever seen someone say "[X] is unnatural, we should have more of it!"
To answer your question on "If the modern human lifestyle isn't 'artificial', what is?' - my answer would be why are we trying to describe the modern human lifestyle as 'unnatural' or 'artificial' in the first place? What are we really trying to convey? I think humans are part of the natural world, and we cannot escape the laws of nature. We live within the bounds of the laws of nature. Calling some of our activities 'artificial' seems to be really about saying we don't like the given activities for whatever reason. And if that is the reason for using the term 'unnatural' or 'artificial', why not just say it and then state why we don't like it?
To bring it all back to the parent I was responding to, is it really that physical labor is some 'natural' thing whereas non-physical labor is 'unnatural' (do any other animals or oganisms do 'labor' as we use the term?)? In general, types of human labor seems like a weird area to assign a natural/unnatural label on. Or is it really about thinking something may be getting lost as we move away from physical labor? And if so, we should just say so instead of leaning on the power of the word 'natural'.
One thing I have noticed now, and I'm not sure if its a function of myself and my family being older, is that we feel much less compelled to get together for holidays and other events even though the travel time has remained mostly the same. When I was younger, my family would make it a habit of getting together at least on Christmas and Easter and usually also the 4th of July for a big party. Not everybody lived super close but most were within a 45-60 minute drive.
Now, not only is that drive seen as a barrier, but nobody actually wants to host these events and deal with the preparation, the hosting duties, and the cleanup that comes afterwards. I realize that as people get older they don't have the time/energy for these types of activities as much, but I also feel like people were more amenable to these types of gatherings back before social media and smartphones in every pocket happened. There was just less going on and less demand of your time, so a big family party was something that could knock out a big chunk of the day and you would look forward to it.
I came across an interesting take on this in the book Algorithms to live by [1]. They argue that old age is a time of exploitation (as in explore/exploit strategy) where we tend to prioritize relations/experiences that we know to be rewarding. At a younger age, we are more accommodating to explore new experiences. That is why a teenager entering a dorm in a new environment full of strangers can get excited while for old people entering a retirement home it can be a harrowing experience.
I think the other commenters here really don't get what you mean or have never been to a retirement home. For people that really don't understand how this is not a good example: retirement homes reek of death. Even if you yourself are still fit, most people there won't be. This means that even though you would have the (mental/physical) capacity to enjoy your time there, you first need to find the few people that have that as well. Compare that to a college dorm, where almost everyone wants to socialize...
It really isn't just about mindset! Sure, that will have something to do with it, but it's really a minor part, and even then, it will be much much much harder to have a positive mindset there then in a college dorm. (Again, I'm not saying it's not possible - I'm really just trying to make people empathize with older people that don't want to go into a retirement home. I think that it's a really reasonable thing not wanting to go there)
One of them is sign of being more capable and more independent. The other is sign of being less capable and in need of more help. One of them is getting ready for future career. Other is getting closer to death.
I would theorize part of it is boredom and specifically fighting it. When I was very young, there were only a few channels on television. I could read some books, watch tv, play with my toys, but that was about it as far as entertaining myself. Today, I have plenty of things to fight boredom and to socialize without leaving the house, as do my kids.
When you are bored a large percentage of the time, you seek ways to alleviate boredom, such as going to events, hanging out with friends, hosting parties, etc.
I think a lot of people don't realize how boring life was as early as the 1980s for most people. I can't imagine how boring things were prior to that.
Another reason is just the fear people have today, facilitated by the news and politicians. I'm sure it plays some sort of role. There was a lot of fear peddling in the 1980s too.
Perhaps a controversial take on why we feel like doing less – remember the pandemic? It’s been just long enough that the last 2 years feel like “This is how it’s always been and always will be”
But it’s not! The last 2 years are abnormal in every regard. The joy for life will return. The gatherings will be back. Seeing family will be fun again.
Might take a little effort at first to break new old habits …
I've come to see this as symptom of increased prosperity.
When money was tight, people were what provided comfort. Everyone got together to prepare and celebrate. Now that families can afford to pay someone else to do it, we are basically left with a lunch/dinner and some time talking, which doesn't feel far off from old school aristocratic galas. There is little emotional investment beyond 'maintaining the network' and the same 1 hr drives start looking like barriers.
I always preferred small (3-8) groups for company so the phenomenon has hit me slightly less severely, as it is easier to get small group together and emotionally involved, but bigger family gatherings are definitively getting rarer.
It’s not just that when times were tight people provided comfort, it could quite literally mean the difference between survival or not to have built the bonds of social
capital across households, including within the extended family/tribe.
This is an interesting view on it that I hadn't previously considered. But you're right - whereas before a lot of members of the family would prepare food separately and bring it, now there is a lot of use of catering/prepared food for one-off entrees
I can't speak to trends, but this hasn't matched my experience personally. The generation just changes. Back in the 80s and 90s, my immediate family would go gather at my aunt's house for Christmas Eve to see my mom's family, then my grandma's house for Christmas to see my dad's family. Today, we trade off between seeing my wife's parents and siblings and their kids for one of either Christmas or Thanksgiving, at her sister's house, and then we visit my parents and siblings and their kids for the other, at my sister's house. Those sisters had to step up and become that next generation, though. There was a gap of a few years after both my mom's parents died when we no longer visited that extended family, but started to have our own as my sisters started having kids old enough to be worth visiting (in the sense that they'll actually form memories) and for us all to be in fairly stable living arrangements.
Once that happened, though, as in we started having kids, stable houses to visit, and enough money to make those flights a few times a year, we picked back up just as the previous generation had. And social media and smartphones weren't really a widespread thing yet during the gap, so that clearly wasn't the cause. It was just the older generation dying off and the newer generation not having immediately stable lives and their own younger families to share.
I've noticed the same thing. I think it comes down to social media/internet has gotten so good at capturing our attention, that other stuff like sitting with relatives and talking about lives and such just seems less interesting. It's really messed up.
Same here, but everything changed as some folks started having children. Now all events are back, people attend & they are fun again. So, at least in my family, the events are there for the kids and, without kids, no one gets interested.
Not sure if I missed it but this only count in-person interactions as spending time?
It's not that I feel 100% like I'm spending time alone if I'm on voice chat with friends, or even chatting or playing games. Maybe it's an edge case of the people who grew up on IRC but... sure I am home alone but I'm still interacting with people for most of my awake time after work (Interestingly I never counted texts as that, maybe because it was too shortened, and not supported with other media like posting links, images, videos, articles). Why would I not count that? (I am not saying this is or isn't a complete replacement for meeting people, I'm just not sure if it would not highly skew my answers for this graph, but I'm not American anyway :P)
The illusion of being together when being virtual probably is the single largest reason for isolation. not to mention, when your friends/partners/siblings are texting other people while next to you - you're not even getting their 100%, as they could have.
You can call it illusion, I call it talking to the same friends I'm sadly not seeing every week and then continuing our online discussions in person, or vice versa.
I've actually tried to hint that I'm not trying to convey this as a complete replacement, it works fine for me. I personally don't feel alone when I can talk to certain people over the internet, but I do when I am not conversing.
I had a flatmate who I played games with before moving in with him. After we moved in, sure I saw him here and there around meals, but in some cases if we were on slightly different schedules we could literally go a few days without seeing eachother, while still talking over a game of Valorant or Overwatch every night, just like before
We have essentially replaced being with each other in many different ways. People used to play music to us, now we listen to it digitally, we used to laugh, cry, get scared by the stories people told us, now we watch tv shows & social media. Not saying that's bad but we have replaced the need for each other. We have become more atomised and alienated to each other. Much of chemicals in our body (perhaps that helped us bond)are fired for content consumed from digital devices.
I think something not measured here but potentially important is the amount of acquaintance contact people have.
If you imagine living in a time before high-speed travel and big cities, the people you interacted with day-to-day were basically the same throughout your life. Maybe you weren't "friends" with these people, but just in order to live your life, you would inevitably be bumping into people that you had known in some capacity for years.
Nowadays when we go shopping or for a haircut or whatever, we are mostly interacting with basically anonymous people that we are unlikely to remember even if we do ever see them again.
The level of loneliness we can manage to achieve now seems quite a bit higher than when no matter what you do, just to get food to eat, you're going to have to go see someone who've you known for a decade and make small talk.
Probably not saying this well, but when I imagine day-to-day life in a small village, this seems like one of the most significant differences. It seems like it would be hard to ever go a day not interacting with other people that you knew in some capacity. Now it's so easy you might not even notice when you do it.
I think even in a larger town this is viable to see plenty of people that you know. Part of the problem is the car centered infrastructure in America that makes it impossible to walk places and makes it seem normal to have to travel 20 miles to get groceries or a haircut.
He is right in terms of major cities in Europe. I grew up in a small-mid sized town and I still get surprised when I meet someone I know, let alone cities the size of Atlanta.
> Nowadays when we go shopping or for a haircut or whatever, we are mostly interacting with basically anonymous people that we are unlikely to remember even if we do ever see them again.
That's your choice. I shop at the same small businesses food market every time and see the same faces year after year exchanging life anecdotes. I see the shopkeeps there more often than I see my actual friends.
This graph is why I don't like in the USA. When my parents got their green-cards after my dad finished his post-doc in California he spoke to all his researcher friends and noticed that in the US it's common for family to move away to other states so they returned back to our country.
Since I live in a small country - I see my parents (and my in-laws) almost every week and they help (considerably) with child-care and see their grand-kid a lot more.
I wouldn't hold a grudge if they helped less but seeing the joy they have when they're with him probably makes it worth giving up living in the US for them.
Family members do live for a year or two abroad at times (for work) but always return.
The real wisdom of this graph is that for people who aren't friends with their coworkers, they are spending 4x as much time with not friends as friends. For people who are friends with their coworkers they're just cheating on that play, boosting their friend time.
I think it depends on your role and the relations between the coworkers. Most people can't really be boss and friend at the same time. In some companies backstabbers are plenty and you need to be careful with whom you share your thoughts and weaknesses. So it's wise to clearly separate the "shallow&fake friends" from your real friends with whom you can let your guard down.
On the other hand we can use it as a criterion on selecting a good workplace. If you do not feel comfortable with your coworkers then maybe you should not work there.
I've never lasted long at any position I didn't rapidly make friends. It certainly doesn't apply to everyone's personality but if I can't enjoy the company of people I spend a massive part of my day with it's a no go.
I don't find fulfillment in my work. I hate the question "What do you do for a living?" I am there because I need to be until I have enough not to be, and so while I'm there I can't afford to be miserable too.
I presume that you are an American. In many cultures the idea of making frie. In many cultures the idea of making friends at work is frowned upon because
I've always thought not being friends with your coworkers is a defense mechanism. Most of us have to work to survive, so getting emotionally involved and ending up with an uncomfortable or toxic environment (one with conflict and favoritism) is a big risk.
I've observed that the more highly paid and "professional" your work environment, the harder it is to make friends through work.
This is one of those points of controversy that foreigners in Japan bring up. But for me the idea of making friends at work seemed unusual and I felt that the Japanese way of doing things was correct, and it come to me that the Japanese expat community is highly US-centric.
In Japan it is however common for people from university to graduate together enter their workplace together at the same job, and then get promoted together and change department together etc..
I used to work with a few coworkers in the same team and had a very 'defensive' approach as mentioned. Once we actually moved into completely separate departments we actually became pretty good friends. I think that removes the 'competitiveness' factor somewhat.
Something I told the younger engineers in my last so-many years before I retired: "It's not the project you're working on, it's your co-workers. If you find a team where you're happy, where the manager is cool, stay there."
I’ve seen this graph before and it always makes me very sad - friends and family fade after 40, and everyone ends up spending the vast majority of time alone past 60.
Some things accumulate over your lifetime. You don't need to make the same experience over and over again if you can remember it instead. Also energy goes low for many, so they meet up once per month instead of several times per week, just to save energy and regenerate. Life doesn't really get worse because of it. Time just moves faster and faster.
I would reread the chart. Time with friends and time with partner stays the same through 60. You just don’t work as much, and your kids move out. It doesn’t seem so tragic to me.
that you implicitly reduced family to "partner" says a lot. Not seeing your adult kids or them not seeing you or their grandparents, not maintaining a multi-generational and extended family, as used to be the case until very recently is a sad state of affairs in my opinion.
I agree. I think we have taken a wrong turn when we 'decided' to ditch the extended family. As I get older I increasingly feel the deep wish to live with the ones I love in a group. Including my children and their children.
This by the way would solve a lot of societal problems we have, including health care, mental health, financial problems, parental care to name a few.
I absolutely agree that maintaining a multi generation, extended family is a goal worth having. But the chance of the endeavour succeeding seems to be, anecdotally, around 50%. Some families are just miserable when they are together.
Tragic for folks without a friend circle - your main remaining company is basically your partner which, unless you delight in each others company, isn't great.
Have you ever had a long-term romantic partner whose company you enjoyed so much that you felt tempted to substitute it for that of your friends, and have this feeling continue consistently, over many years?
I'd say the only major thing is time spent with friends sharply decreasing, but that happens in the 20s. Family is an odd one since there is also the category of children and partners. I guess family means your parents, siblings, and extended family? In general speech I would say spending time with your partner or kids counts as spending time with your family.
I also don't think the difference is that drastic over time. The charts shows people spending about 4-5 hours a day alone in their 30s-40s, and then 7-8 hours alone when they get into their 70s-80s. 2-3 hours extra per day doesn't seem like that much to me, especially when you consider the main reason is retiring from work
Personally I'm terrified of having to spend a portion of my life alone. I've spent my adult life (25 years) with a romantic/domestic partner, doing everything together. I don't spend time with friends in the absence of my romantic/domestic partner. Once, during those 25 years, that relationship ended and I lived alone for a while. You should feel free to laugh at me and say this paragraph is hysterical or lacks perspective, seeing I was perfectly free, but it felt like prison. I completely failed to handle it. It is very hard to contemplate the idea of my partner's death in the future, and attempting to live beyond it.
I have a lot of alone time, even though I live with my partner. I don't have coworkers, kids, family, or friends, so if I'm not with my partner, I'm alone.
Dang I just turned 30 and according to this graph, I will be looking to spend even more time alone each year although I have two kids and a partner.
I think this could also be related to our culture shaping around modern technology such as the internet and social media. We're more connected than ever, but even more alone.
This isn't to say we're "lonely" in terms of community, but rather we experience our respective communities "alone".
I think our culture needs more people who point out that their love can be misplaced. When you're desperately in love with someone, it's almost impossible to see their failings. When you get enough distance however, you can see how problematic something can be. I think that applies to family, friends, coworkers, and even the technology we use every day.
It's a sad realization, but a realization nonetheless.
Looking at my parents who are further along on the X axis it seems part of that "alone" may be due to assisted living or deceased spouses (ie, not by choice).
People’s desire to hangout or seek relationship is dropping in countries like China and Japan. First cause is the high cost of living/dating or raising a child. Also they can get low cost entertainment from apps like TikTok or mobile games. A lot of things can be done online that they would rather be alone after a day of hard work
It doesn't say "their children" it says "children". Perhaps siblings count? I was basically responsible form younger sibling when I was growing up like 1-2h a day (we were latchkey kids).
Yet now I get to see my entire family for a few days every year. Some cousins I haven’t met in years.
The people I spend the most time with everyday are also the people I care the least for - colleagues and acquaintances.
I don’t have a solution. But I just know innately that this isn’t how things are supposed be.