There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was.
After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc.
I can't but think that so many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is. (The irony of posting this on the Internet is not lost on me.)
We are a tribal species. We need the company of others in our physical environment in order to feel safe and at home. Obviously, some amount of solitude is important too, but for a communal species like Homo sapiens, being alone or around strangers most of the day is the environmental equivalent of being in a desert with no shade.
This is also how I remember my childhood and even early teenage years. My friends would just pop over unannounced and ask me out to play or play sports or something. Also relatives and grandparents would do this occasionally since basically my whole extended family lived in the same village. I also feel like things would have continued the same way if it wasn't for everyone (including me) moving away to study, work, etc. As an adult, it's very difficult to reconstruct the same kind of social network once it has been broken.
I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.
My teenage years were similar. Cells phones were a thing but relatively rare and texting was limited. Friends in HS would often enough just drop by. Nowadays, if you just stop by a friends house, it feels borderline rude or intruding.
My hypothesis is that given the rise of everyone having always connected cell phones, texting, etc, that subconsciously we've all shifted to viewing our physical homes as our form of privacy. Essentially dropping in takes away the last place we feel we can control our interactions with others.
I wonder how much of the changed behavior comes from the less intrusive communication options having gotten much lower effort. Even calling someone unannounced is almost unthinkable except if it's an emergency. I think that's because it's so easy to just send a text message first to ask if it's convenient. In the past text messages weren't as common. Before that, I could have called for example before stopping by a friend's house. However, I would have had to call the landline which nobody might have answered because maybe they were outside. It would also have been disruptive because anyone in their household would have felt like they needed to answer. So why not just stop by if I am passing by anyways? Now though, I better first send a text, then it's not ideal right now because they are cooking or something, so we postpone, even though I could have just helped with the cooking. But nobody wants to propose cooking together. It feels like you are imposing from both sides, but probably both sides would enjoy it. We are just overthinking it.
Anecdotal data for another factor: Too much effort is made! I've recently tried to make an effort to build up more of a friend network and turn some acquaintances into friends. I've noticed that we try to make everything so "nice" that it becomes inconvenient. The hosts always spend at least an hour getting their place ready and prepping food. This leads to a "barrier entry" for getting together that makes these events less. I even brought that up one time, but hosts seem unable to reduce the effort they make. Guests commonly bring gifts. Nobody needs the gifts or the super tidy home to visit. Just ring the doorbell, grab a beer and let's just hang! I say that, but I'd never do this either because it would feel like a transgression. The only exception I've noticed is that sometimes we'll end up chatting with neighbors for a prolonged time when we randomly run into each other while going for a walk or something. However, nobody would ever say "let's take this party inside". It seems to have become cultural and I am not sure how to fix this as an individual. I think part of it is that we are always busy now or feel like we should be. Gotta run those errands, work on my side project, etc.
> Anecdotal data for another factor: Too much effort is made! I've recently tried to make an effort to build up more of a friend network and turn some acquaintances into friends. I've noticed that we try to make everything so "nice" that it becomes inconvenient. The hosts always spend at least an hour getting their place ready and prepping food.
Most of my adult acquaintance friends are like this, but its nice to have a handful of friends that you've known for long enough where you don't feel bad just going to their house uninvited, without bringing anything and they will do the same to you. The problem is making these friends if you don't already have them, or turning the more polite acquaintance friendships into these. I imagine it will only happen after many years of effort. I've not created this type of friend in adulthood, only have kept around the ones I had when I was younger.
I lived in a very orthodox Jewish neighborhood for a while and what you described is exactly what happens on Shabbat still (since there’s no phones being used).
People just feel welcome to drop by. The house is usually a total mess because « work » is not allowed, and there’s no gift bringing either because of religious reasons.
I always admired it. Just one day where no one’s working or traveling and everyone’s free to come over and hangout.
This is so close to my thinking about these things that it's almost scary considering it came from a person who presumably lives halfway across the planet from me.
Since we are in HN, I feel obliged to ask: how do we fix this?
> As an adult, it's very difficult to reconstruct the same kind of social network once it has been broken.
This describes my parents' situation perfectly. We are a family of migrants, my parents were very social and had a big network of friends back in their home country. Even since we moved here, they became insular, and never made many long term friends. In fact, they are pretty much alone and not very happy in their older age.
>I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.
This reminds me of a joke from comic Sebastian Maniscalco called Doorbell (it's on YouTube) about how people reacted to having someone ring their doorbell today vs 20 years ago. He talks about how 20 years ago we'd be excited by an unexpected guess ringing our doorbell versus today we'd be more incline to being upset. Really recommended giving the joke a gander for a good laugh.
I'd love to get completely unexpected visits, but it happens so so so rarely. I can only remember it happening once in the past 5 years or so. Sometimes, a friend calls me on the phone because they're nearby and then we meet up, which is the next best thing I guess.
I mean I am only 31 so I can't speak to 20 years ago, but I moved out of home at 16 and I always fucking hated unannounced doorbell rings, depending on who it was it could lead to a pretty massive disruption to what I had planned for the day
Not even just the neighbors and friends - people used to live in large family units with 10+ people per household. This meant a much broader support network if, for example, you got ill and couldn't take care of your kid for awhile.
3 more family members are about to move into my house. No matter how much I tell myself that having a larger household and more social time will be "good for me", and of course having help with childcare will be hugely convenient, I'm really starting to dread the loss of privacy.
Two years ago, my wife and I invited my parents to move into a home with us and our children. I expect to always be glad we did, but it has been challenging in ways we hadn't really anticipated. In particular, it requires a more conscious effort for my wife and I to have time to have conversations between just the two of us.
The help with childcare is great as well as the extra hands for household chores. The biggest advantage (and the trigger for this) is that we get to spend time with my ailing dad in his remaining months or years (and he gets to know his grandkids). It also allows us to own fewer cars (2 cars in a household with 4 adults, versus 1 car for each adult). I do wish I had bought a house with an extra bed/bath, however. Not enough to make it worth moving at this time.
That's just a function of how you (and I) grew up. In many cultures, the norm is that offspring live with their parents until marriage, and in some, even the married couple lives with one set of parents.
This is just a reminder that a lot of the things we find comfortable aren't inherent; they're just a reflection of what the norms where during our formative childhood and early adult years.
It also means you need to help others and sometime take time off work from it. People in age range 16-55 were actually people doing more help then receiving it.
On HN it always sounds like you are only receiving, but actual deal ia you provide until you are really old or sick.
But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.
I just happened to see a YouTube video yesterday about how difficult life was as a baker in England in Victorian times. An average baker was not expected to live past age forty five, iirc from the video [0]. These people were working long hours so I don't know how much leisure they got.
Your comment reminded me of this video about how life for a baker used to be much better before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution didn't do much good for bakers. I can only hope our future generations will get to live so much of a better life than us so they can look back at us and try to feel empathy for us.
That doesn't mean everybody else had it easy. In fact, at some point, it seems like one in four(?) babies didn't survive beyond age five[1]?
[1] There is a common misunderstanding about life expectancy, as though it is the age at which most adults could expect to die.
In fact, the mean length of life can be heavily skewed by infant mortality. For example, in 1850 in England and Wales life expectancy at birth was 42, but over 25% of children died before the age of five. For those who survived, life expectancy rose to 57. Moreover, 10% of people born in 1850 lived to over 80.
I don't know, plenty of alienation in 19th century literature where everyone was living in everyone else's pocket. A lot has changed in that time, including our openness to expression of our internal suffering.
I grew up in a similar way, my overwhelming memory was that it felt utterly stifling! I couldn't wait to move away and be anonymous.
I have noticed in social circles that skew heavily Western that a large majority of small talk revolves around media consumption, whether it's recounting TV episodes, quoting movies, meme-ing Spongebob, etc.
There's a lot of factors to blame for our feelings of isolation. I tend to look toward the fortress-ing of private homes and the sprawl of suburban developments, which encourage seeking enjoyment through pseudo-socialization with the characters on your screen.
Parasocial relationships were a thing long before Twitch and OnlyFans, only people were attaching to fictional characters so the effect wasn't quite as pronounced until actual humans became the objects of consumption (see: Disney adults, MCU ultrafans, etc.). This probably has to do with isolation from social groups as you describe, particularly as people in general lost community centers such as churches due to the sprawl and pace of modern life.
Seeing parasocial relationships infect the internet like regular celebrities in the past is really a bummer and not what I had hoped for the technology. Real life interactions are the way to go more often than not.
> many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is
Media consumption is just a replacement for social interaction. And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work. Our society is geared towards extracting maximum profits from people. It does not permit them to have any excess energy left at the end of the workday.
>And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work.
Did people not socialize in the days before worker protections demanded worker protections? I just don't think your reasoning covers the causes well, especially in the suburbanite 40 hour week type that travel by car for an hour+ a day to a single family home.
Media consumption exists because technology has allowed media to show up everywhere at all times very rapidly and we have not had a society wide inoculation to its negative effects.
> Did people not socialize in the days before worker protections demanded worker protections?
Socialization was a luxury that certain segments afford before worker protections. Most families worked, children and all, and after doing what daily chore needed to be done at home, they slept. Socialization happened during dinner etc, which is why a lot of working class families used to give a lot of importance to dinner.
People don’t have the energy to spend time with people because everyone is guarded now. Back in the day everyone usually knew the worst parts/weaknesses/fears of everyone else you spent time with. This made spending time with those people very comfortable.
No evidence but this is how it still is in South/East Asia.
Also anecdotally the best friends are the ones that are constantly making fun of each other. The modern recommendation of speaking in psychologist provided templates don’t lead to close connections, atleast in my experience.
Few things struck me on this topic in the last year:
- both me and my in laws are buying estate and I found it curious how to both of us (and most friends too), cameras and alarms were priorities
- leaving my old flat me and my SO realized we knew no one in the building
- went back to where my grandma lived in Poland. Classic but beautiful (really) soviet style neighborhood with parks, swings, etc. In the 90s it was so alive, children playing anywhere, women and men speaking on benches, there was a terrific super safe community. Going there it was just sad: no one around, most of the benches and trees taken down for endless waves of cars "progress" brought.
As a reminder, you can still do those things. Have a weekly hangout day with friends with no firm plans. Spend time at hobbyist shops on the regular. Play board games with strangers.
It's theoretically possible, but not really if you're honest.
People have gotten used to the isolation, so they're not gonna enjoy it if you randomly invite yourself literally every day of the week.
You'll need like-minded friends and that's not something you can really "just decided" to change.
I'm seconding what the others say. I see a few close friends 1-3 times a week in relatively unstructured or impulsive situations, and I also go to martial arts and latin dance clubs at no regular interval (although I should work on getting that back on a regular schedule), and play dungeons and dragons once a month. You can absolutely meet people with mutual interests in person, and it is worth pursuing regardless of whether you consider yourself an introvert or not.
It can’t be scheduled. The crux of the whole thing is people can drop by at anytime and more importantly you have to genuinely like it. Can’t treat people dropping over as some sort of event.
The great thing about joining a club is that you know everyone there is already interested enough in the subject of the club to participate with you whenever they've availed their time to be at the clubhouse.
You don't have to drag your old friends out so much as make a couple new (low stakes, with boundaries at first, if you are anxious about it) friends.
That's a really interesting anecdote about that memoir. It immediately reminds me of a lot of fantasy type novels I've read.
For example, I'm a big fan of the Wandering Inn series. Essentially, one of the main characters is a young woman transported to a fantasy-style world who takes over an abandoned inn outside a major city. A large part of her story is about interacting with the locals, just wandering around shops and visiting friends she makes along the way, etc. Very reminiscent of the book you mention.
When I look at a lot of other similar books, they often rely on the same style of small community interactions among the characters.
Makes me wonder if part of the reason such stories are so popular is because we're missing so much of that in our everyday lives.
One thing I like about living in SF is that despite its problems, a lot of the city is based around neighborhoods and being walkable. I see the same folks at the local restaurants and hang out with friends and associates at the local pub each week. So I still get some amount of that traditional daily interaction, and unfortunately some of the drama that comes with it.
I mean look at the success of Stardew Valley, a game whose entire premise is that you move to a small rural town to start a farm and forge relationships with the locals. Its a well designed game to be sure but I really think some of the popularity stems from scratching that itch of communal living that so many folks feel they lack.
Been thinking about it a bit. Isn't the key thing about those interactions that you're all at work? You're tending your cows, Robin is running a carpentry business, that couple is running a shop, etc. (I forgot the names of everyone, sorry; been years since I binged on SDV).
Closest analogue to this in modern life is... your co-workers in the office. That chat you have with Maru on the way to sell your wheat in the store is equivalent to that chat you had with Frank from accounting on the way to give your report to the manager upstairs.
Therein, perhaps, lied the magic of countryside/pre-industrial socialization: everyone was always working, but always next to each other. The whole village was the office/plant.
Definitely something to that, although I think a huge part of the appeal of Stardew is that there's no actual pressure to do anything. It's relaxing because your engagement with anything like work is entirely voluntary, you can't really fail in any meaningful sense no matter what you do.
profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is
This is the main problem in my marriage, we don't consume the same media - we've tried to find something in common to watch, but mostly spend it on our phones watching our own media streams, edu-tainment YouTubers for me and Netflix/Disney/Facebook watch for her.
You can't make cultural references or have inside jokes if you don't consume the same media.
It's been years of arguments that end with "we'll find something to do together".
Our media consumption habits probably aren't the core problem, being able to easily ignore the other person; because the barrier to entry to time wasters is so low, certainly doesn't help.
All of that os possible only if you work 8 or less hours a day and then go home close to work. It is not possible with current "if you work less then 60 hours a week you are not passionate" frequent ideology. Nor with long commute actually.
What you praise here is called being lazy. And also it relied on kids being unsupervised which was ok at the time.
One thing I like about my apartment complex is we have a hot tub outside. The weather is almost always nice here, so it’s a nice place to be, so I go out most nights, and often hang out with regulars.
Even though it’s super nice (basically resort-quality), there’s probably only a half dozen regulars, while there’s hundreds (200?) apartment units here.
This is the good thing about shared facilities like this: the cost per-unit is really low because there's so many units to share the cost of just a few things like this (or an exercise room, a game room, etc.), and so much space is saved by sharing these things among hundreds of units. But most residents don't use them most of the time, so for the occasional users, they have it available for the 2x a year they want it, and the regular users don't usually feel crowded.
I grew up in the midwest and I remember a lot of non-commercial social events like potlucks that were commonplace. Some based around churches, others family groups, and others friend/community based. Talking to my family that still lives there, the number of these events over the decades has dropped dramatically. In general these types of events were low cost and had high socialization. It is thought by some that the commercialization of leisure [1] in advertising culture gives too much time and importance to high expense low socialization gatherings and focuses on convincing the consumer to consume more media thereby increasing advertising. Many social media outlets are thought to worsen this situation by optimizing to keep clicking an app (anger clicking, parasocial relationships, etc) rather than focusing on closer in person relationships.
So I would say yes, a lot less people meet in person [2]
There were idiots in the 50's crowing about how some day we wouldn't have to eat at all. I really wonder about the diet and favorite dishes are like for someone who thinks never eating is progress. And that's without even getting into the communal aspects of eating with a group.
You can enjoy eating, meal preparation, and the like and _also_ recognize how very, very, very money, time, and resource consuming it all is.
If you could replace a typical home-cooked meal which cost $3->5 in materials and at _least_ half an hour in personal labor with a pill that costs $0.03->0.05 and can be produced in the thousands per hour, that's a significant win. And if you can build those pills from the byproducts of vats of cheap-ass microbes (rather than through ordinary (or -worse- factory) farming), then that's a massive win for both the environment and animal welfare.
> The pitch was not that you could skip a meal when you were in a hurry, but skip all meals, every day, forever.
I'm aware, yes. That's what a nutritionally-complete pill would enable you to do.
I mentioned "home-cooked meal" for a few reasons.
1) Some people seriously underestimate the cost and labor that goes into small-scale commercial cooking. Such folks will _usually_ have a better understanding of the details of in-home cooking.
2) Some people have decided that all food that one gets at a restaurant is inherently unhealthy.
3) If you plan well (and/or have a large surplus of time and energy) you can totally set things up so that you can eat home-cooked meals every day. That's what leftovers are for.
> ...cramming 2000 calories into four or five pill sized spaces is practically violating the laws of physics, is it not?
I very much doubt it. I has been decades since I studied any physics, but I'd expect that there are many examples of substances that pack at least 2000kcal of energy in four or five pill-sized spaces. As mentioned elsewhere, it's a biology problem, not a physics problem.
Well biology but not physics (since from physics' perspective, there's plenty of energy in a nuclear fuel pellet), but yes. I think olive oil is the most calorie-dense thing food ingredient, and you'd need to drink about 8 ounces of it to get 2000 calories.
• Making really tasty food for the foodies, rather than meh food for everyone (including people who don't appreciate it).
• Art
• A really big Minecraft server
• Doing something about the fact that populated islands are sinking into the ocean and some biomes are changing classification multiple times a year and we're all just sitting at computers and manufacturing thneeds.
Pretty much anywhere else, really. Wasted money, time and resources are wasted money, time and resources. If we could replace food with magic pills – and somehow ensure that the money, time and resources saved weren't just snapped up by the already-wealthy, leaving everyone worse off – why not do it?
I finished my thesis thanks to a group of people scattered over the internet, all agreeing to do pomodoro. In the breaks we'd chat about our day to day lives then get back to work when the bell rang. I'll always be grateful for their presence, getting me through hard times when I'd perhaps have given up if I felt completely alone; or at least not worked so deeply and thoroughly.
It might be a good way to run an office. Define pomodoro blocks in which you cannot interrupt your coworkers. No slacks, texts, phone calls, or conversations until the cycle ends.
Body doubling (or doing something with others around) is an awesome technique to overcome a motivational hurdle for activities. While the term originated in ADHD circles, it is definitely applicable to those outside of the ADHD community as well.
We're actually building something just for this ( https://doubleapp.xyz ) and it can be for any sort of activity - cooking, running, working, studying, etc.
Thanks! And for sure - on the top of the Double page we have Double communities you’re able to join right now instead of scheduling a Double for the future.
Is that the “Let’s get going” button? It’s also not clear to me where I can start doing this right now.
If it is that button I’d suggest some sort of soft sign up flow. It’d be really nice if I could join a double immediately, give an email or some identifying info, and that’s it. After my first session make me finish the sign up.
Thanks for the feedback! We'll keep working to make it clearer for sure.
To answer your question: yes, once you hit "let's get going" you should be brought to a soft sign-up. After that, you'll be redirected to a page that let's you join a Double community immediately via the "start now" button.
In college, I lived in a 17 bedroom house (2 quads, 4 triples, 6 doubles, and 4 singles) with 35 fraternity brothers. It was glorious!
Of course we had schedules but there was very little "planning". Everyone was just there almost all of the time. Anything you wanted to do, someone like-minded was just there. We played cards in the winter, football or frisbee in the shoulder season, ate, hung out, socialized with guests, and of course, studied together. It just worked.
I can still think of a hundred things I regularly did in those days that I haven't done since.
Now I'm an empty nester, tired of pandemic living and tired of working so hard to recreate what came so naturally back then.
Nice to see someone trying to use the technology that displaced so many of us to bring us back together. Best wishes. I think you'll need it.
I think this is the reason why in-person work environments will be more productive over the longer term for any larger organization. Not saying I’m against remote work, as I actually prefer it myself.
Seems like a pretty coarse level of analysis asking if “in-person” is better. What’s more productive for a manager will be different, maybe the exact opposite of what’s productive for a programmer. Some people get paid to talk, but many of us do not. The talking is paid for by our sacrifice of personal time, time spent with kids, or exercising or whatever. Managers, being decision makers, will push us back to offices because they benefit from it, because they are paid to talk. Something to be sensitive to, if you’re not already.
I agree with you that productivity for managers versus programmers is different, but my view is that the majority of workers do more work in person and people actually really enjoy being productive! The “body doubling” that goes on in offices is IMHO an underestimated phenomenon, especially for new employees coming into the workforce. For remote work to be a permanent choice, I think we need to be a bit more honest about the benefits of being in-office. Giving employees the choice is very important to me, just trying to give my perspective.
That sounds like the right orientation to me. There’s a lot of importance in hearing the disagreements, because for many the reality is that returning to the office means lowered productivity and we all want to believe that our productivity matters. If we are more productive at home but management pushes us back in, the only sane conclusion is that our productivity is not actually what matters, rather our sitting in some glassy air conditioned building somewhere keeping up appearances. Of course reality is somewhere in between.
In my view majority of workers are as productive at home as they are in the office or more. The “body doubling” also happens at home, when more family members work from home. There is also much less interruptions and noise polution at home. We should also not pretend office work is without serious down sides compared to work from home. E.g. so much time wasted in traffic.
And I respect your view that generally workers are more productive at home. We can agree to disagree there. Also, work commutes in traffic are indeed silly.
This post is about body doubling, which happens far more in offices. That is a fact. Your reply makes it seem like that’s not the case. But, I agree with your gripes about in office work, which is why I work from home :)
Edit: my point is that what’s best for you, me, and other individuals may not be best for organizations. Do I care about organizations more than myself? No, but it’s at least something to recognize because I still care for some of them.
Surely it’ll depend on many factors: employees’ own preferences, level and sincerity of support-in-principle from leadership, actual working environments, relative distribution of remote vs in-person, level and burden of effort to accommodate mixed teams.
I also prefer remote (and have been remote probably 75% of my career). I’m also ADHD, and while I’d never even heard of ”body doubling” by name it’s something I’ve found helpful sometimes, under some circumstances.
For the minority of my career spent in office, it’s ranged from wildly productive (great team fit, good balance in favor of focus time) to hilariously counterproductive (excessive meetings and process ceremony, continuous interruptions whether ostensibly work-related or social, unbearably noisy).
For the times I’ve worked on mixed remote/office, I’ve generally felt my own and my teams’ productivity is great except when leadership found the arrangement objectionable (self-fulfilling prophecy I guess), or when team communications became challenging at scale (eg we found it hard to do “standups” with ~15 people in office and ~10 people on a screen; but realistically we shouldn’t have had that many people in any meetings).
As someone else with ADHD, I've found that one of the downfalls of "body doubling" is that it works both ways. Productivity can lead to more productivity because the body double can help me overcome the urge to research woodgas vehicles or the history of bread in Mesoamerica. But the double's lack of focus (e.g. being social, or forced meetings) destroys all focus because it's already enough of a task to manage my own executive functioning in a good environment.
The best balance I've found is remote work (so I am my only distraction), maybe with occasional in-person focused work sessions (à la hackathon), and occasional remote "body doubling" sessions with a friend or internet stranger.
TLDR:
Solo remote work is better than attempting body doubling in an office environment, but remote "body doubling" is also occasionally helpful.
I actually do this more effectively working from home with my wife. For people who like the aesthetics and atmosphere of an office for some reason, I think a coworking space would as productive or moreso than the company office. (Is this Body Doubling website coworking industry guerrilla marketing?)
I was dragged back into the office for a couple months in 2021. I was stupefied by how pointless it all was. From the time and resources wasted driving to and fro to the office every day to the meetings which were still largely done online (since we were a distributed team.)
I had to go 5 days a week. The company bled people. Most the people who were sticking around as I was leaving confided to me that they weren't happy about it. The company struggled to hire new workers. That's probably all abated to some extent since then. With a flexible hybrid schedule, I think they could have found a sweet spot.
If anything, remote work actually supports my social needs much more thoroughly than working from an office environment.
At home, I am within a few seconds from my wife (since she is working from home too), which allows for a significantly more rich social environment for myself and her, than having to be in the extended physical proximity of those in distant social tiers (e.g., loose ties, or "work friends").
I value the time I have been able to spend at home so much more than any social connections I may have made at the office; in fact, I focus on getting my stuff done even more quickly precisely so I can return to the quality time that I have to focus on those who truly matter to me.
I am no longer at the age where I care to go for a drink afterwards with work friends. For those of us who have richer social home lives than work lives, remote work is a godsend.
“Many people with ADHD find it easier to stay focused on housework, homework, bill paying, and other tasks when someone else is around to keep them company.”
Not true for me!
If anything the reverse is true!
With my ADHD I also get a form of rejection sensitivity dysphoria, so worry I’m being judged or watched.
Not with everything. Just somethings, and mostly my desk based work.
I like silent rooms away from people.
Any distractions at all with detail me for possibly hours!
Same here, in fact I'm rather surprised to learn that this isn't the norm for people with ADHD, apparently.
On a related note, my office is currently doing a sort of ad-hoc, informal hybrid work schedule, so some days of the week there's very few people in the office. On those days, I find I'm so much more productive just due to the fact that there's less commotion and fewer people talking. WFH was great for my productivity as well, of course. Anyone else notice the same?
In many ways the pandemic was the best thing that happened for me!
I got to work from home, and then transitioned to running my own consultancy from my home office!
I’m fortunate and have a nice home and work well with my wife.
At an office I used to find an empty meeting room and work on my own, and this was seen as anti social…
And I was like, so which is it?
Shut up and do you work, or chit chat in the office?
Apparently it all depends and the unspoken unwritten rules of social conduct in offices prove that companies are not families and culture is about who the majority like and nothing to do with do embracing diversity.
I found that am super productive when travel by air, just sitting and working at the gate or mid flight. Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
I am like that too. I discovered one reason for this was that I was super hydrated - drinking up all my water before going through security had a noticeable effect on my ability to concentrate.
> Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
I used to study at the student center on campus (Rutgers New Brunswick) for this reason. I tried the library a few times, but it felt off to me for some reason; too quiet, perhaps.
A while back I started the legendary `xeyes` application and just had it open for a few weeks while working.
Interestingly, I noticed that whenever I switched to a desktop without those eyes, I instantly felt a small but noticable twinge of loneliness. So I thought, if this silly application can help the monkey part of my brain feel at ease, it might as well stay open. And yes, it's slightly embarrassing to be a human, so posting anonymously.
Human needs are weird. Years back I noticed clearly that I'd go insane after only a few days without human interaction. However, after only a couple of hours of low quality smalltalk, which I dislike, with people I find uninteresting and didn't have much respect for, the crazy went away.
> Years back I noticed clearly that I'd go insane after only a few days without human interaction. However, after only a couple of hours of low quality smalltalk, which I dislike, with people I find uninteresting and didn't have much respect for, the crazy went away.
I had the same experience, and arrived at the same conclusion. I just need some minor socialization each day and everything runs smoothly in my brain.
As someone who also has social anxiety, I suspect that it would be very difficult for us at first but if we pushed through that, it would not just help us be more productive, but also help with our social anxiety.
Help with the social anxiety, you're probably right about that.
The productivity thing may vary based on the individual.
If there's stuff going on around me, I can't focus. I want to be in a quiet place alone (pandemic has been easy street for me, sometimes I don't leave my apartment for weeks on end).
Same boat, I don't know if it's social anxiety for me. My mind can never completely zone in on the task when people are around. My brain just constantly observes what others are doing around me.
I am surprised to learn that this originated in ADHD communities. A huge part of my mental life that sits firmly within my ADHD diagnosis is hyperawareness.
If there are people around, I have at least several mental threads running monitoring their state. It doesn't matter if they are present physically or digitally - nor whether I can see, hear, or smell them, see message notifications from them, or am simply aware of their presence. It's incredibly useful in many situations - but means that I only achieve focus in complete solitude.
Does the effect fall off with the square of the distance? Is it linear? Is there a threshold?
Does adding a third person (or more people) affect it?
How is it different from, say, sitting in a cafe with another person? Do you have to know each other? If there is a difference what criteria determine that difference? Can one "pretend" that one is "body double"-ing with a unknowing stranger? Or does each person have to know they're doing it?
If you really want to investigate this IMO you're going to have to look at everything from near-field EM to Ramana Maharshi (who often taught in silence), you should study Cybernetics (by which I basically mean read "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby), you should take high-speed video of people doing this and then analyze it for e.g. unconscious synchronization, etc...
> Does the effect fall off with the square of the distance? Is it linear? Is there a threshold?
You seem to want to treat it as some sort of physical field or force. IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but it seems fairly self-evident that the effect arises from the awareness of being observed, which leads to you observing and mediating your own actions. Based on that, I would predict that physical distance is only indirectly relevant. The strength of the effect is going to depend on how many of your activities are theoretically knowable by the other person. If they are physically present but farther away, you can "get away with" doing more things without them knowing, so you'll omit such behaviors from the self-monitoring loop. If they are virtually present, I would imagine that the strength of the effect depends on how clearly you can observe them (because we can't see how they see us, but we'll assume that it's roughly the same).
Which would make for an interesting experiment: do body doubling with very asymmetric visual quality, size, and latency but without informing the participants that they are seeing anything different. My guess is that the one who sees a better quality signal will experience a much stronger effect.
Like many things in psychology, though, there are tons of confounding variables. Your relationship to the person matters—specifically, how much you care about their opinion of you and your actions. I would imagine body doubling with a dog would work temporarily and then the effect would fade away as you got comfortable with goofing off in front of them.
Anybody you double with, you'll place on a scale from somewhere between "dog" and "attractive person I am desperate to impress". (And the latter end of the scale can be paralyzing, so this isn't a small→large effect scale.)
> You seem to want to treat it as some sort of physical field or force.
Of course (I'm a rational materialist) it's "some sort of physical field or force", there's nothing else it could be, eh?
How much of the effect is due to power (in the physical sense) and how much due to modulation (communication)?
(Not to be coy, I'm a rational materialist but I'm also a Reiki Level III Master and I would really really like someone somewhere to do science to that. If I can influence these folks to take a more scientific materialist tack on their investigation they might discover something relevant to my own curiosities.)
Historically, this could be the underlying reason for the existence of various professions: adjutant, batman, valet, secretary, personal assitant - perhaps the main function they provided was just providing a presence?
Perhaps a function but I don’t think I would go so far as to say primary. They also lugged their stuff around and handled all of the boring parts of life, like opening doors, writing letters and so on, that they didn’t want to deal with.
I read about influencers who basically stream themselves while studying, seems to be a similar idea with more even participation (and less likelihood of becoming internet-rich).
Even participation isn’t really a good unto itself. Most people can successfully body double to a stream or Youtube video and so one person can provide the “passive” service to millions of people.
Having this kind of content plentiful and available 24/7 is really helpful.
You're presenting it as if there was something intrinsically better or more efficient about streaming, but the millions of people could also be matched in pairs or small groups. There would be a bit more friction, but also more personal touch.
Objectively, I think they're fairly similar. It really does come down whether you value even participation or the chance to participate in a lottery that will may propel a few individuals to stardom (and leave a lot more disappointed) more, which is ultimately subjective.
I've thought about doing this before even if I have zero audience. The "threat" that someone could join the stream and see me slacking off on YouTube might be stressful but I imagine it could help me stay on task?
That's what the streamers in the article I read said - they all pretty much started out to "force" themselves to be reasonably productive (and/or in a small group of friends with the same goal).
Don't underestimate the force of this, I reckon it's similar to precommitment (eg, announcing to all your friends that you're giving up smoking), for which there's evidence that it's an effective tool to drive behavioral change.
I don't know how but personally, this actually works.
Another thing that works is setting a not so exciting but also not so boring tv series playing on your mobile next to you and do work while it plays on. Again no clue how or why it works. My pet theory is that adhd brains just like multi tasking and keeping a portion of extra bandwidth zoned out is helpful in not getting distracted.
Body doubling might help on not getting up from the chair while working on a computer. However, not having someone watching over my screen -which I’d rather not do for obvious reasons- allows me for infinite procrastination. For other kind of tasks like studying, writing on paper, or doing phone calls, I agree body doubling does the trick.
It's weird to me to call this "doubling" instead of "mirroring" but anyway, I'm not neurodivergent, but I've always found it nice to sit with someone else in silence, reading or studying. Its a very calming experience.
Mirroring has you copying the other's actions, thus performing the same task. Doubling allows each to work on their own separate tasks, from what I've understood.
> In simple terms, it’s merely being in the same room with another person who is having trouble getting things done on their own. As a body double, you don’t need to help or even say anything. All you need to do is just be there in the room, and through some invisible power, the other person is able to focus and finish their work. ...
I had to do a double take there to make sure this wasn't parody. Being more productive with another person in the room? But they don't actually do the work? And they help through an "invisible power"?
I oftentimes want something like this as well. I’m not looking for a taskmaster or someone who could report my work but simply a nonjudgmental human who is just busy themself.
My problem is I'd have an overpowering urge to interrupt the other person whenever I was stuck. That and my other mutterings, pacings etc would probably be intolerable.
Everyone on my team, including myself, mutters to themselves like this. I’ve asked some of my team members about it to determine if it bothers them and was surprised to find they feel the same way I do. It’s actually somewhat endearing. Granted, we could be drawing the line at different places here. I just curse under my breath at things that have me stumped, sulk for a moment to collect my thoughts, and then get back to it.
Muttering under your breath, cursing, etc is a form of emotional regulation. That's why it helps you focus, which is very cool.
If you were hooked up to an MRI and asked to do a coding challenge, but were prohibited from talking/regulating, I'd bet your amygdala would be more engaged compared to your control.
There are adjacent areas of research, such as "joint attention" and "joint action" that touch upon similar phenomenon. However, for body doubling research it seems that it is still in its infancy.
We're really looking to push this phenomenon into the limelight and accelerate its research because there's definitely something powerful here. Speaking from personal experience, body doubling is almost like magic with how it works.
What’s the question you want the research to answer?
Because you don’t really need a study to figure out if it works for you. Just try it! Because I can literally feel my understimulation block fade when there’s another person around — it stokes a little guilt and anxiety to get you started and then they act like a pace runner providing some artificial forward momentum.
It’s not one of those things where you won’t be sure whether it’s working or not.
> What’s the question you want the research to answer?
Is it actually effective at all? Who is it effective/ineffective for? Why is it effective or ineffective for them? How effective is it? How can its effectiveness be optimized? In what other ways can its effectiveness be achieved? What other types of problems can this be used to help with?
Maybe I try it and find that it works, but maybe that's simply a placebo, the way someone might find that crystals or charms help them. It's easy to say it shouldn't matter so long as it works for someone, but I think we'd agree that its better to have things properly researched and understood.
Maybe I try it and it doesn't work but could have with some modifications to accommodate my needs or situation. Maybe a sort of digital avatar or AI works or can work just as well for a body double as a real person! Maybe it even works better than a real person in some cases! How great would it be not to always have to coordinate schedules with another person or impose on their time to get those same benefits! Maybe employers could benefit from pairing people for work in certain tasks!
It's all idle speculation, theory, and guesswork until people put in the time and effort to research it all properly. The anecdotal evidence is encouraging, but only the start.
I'm reminded of this meme[0]. For me, typing commands into my terminal with someone looking at the screen gives me feelings of power. They assume I'm an elite hacker, but really I'm clearing my bash history.
The name seems like ridiculous marketing to me. Kind of like clickbait.
I think more accurate would just be something like "silent work partners".
It's also bizarre that people seem to think that having trouble concentrating for a significant period of time on something tedious means you have ADHD. It's not at all abnormal to struggle with this at times. It's really more extreme cases that should be considered ADHD.
ADHD is not just "having trouble concentrating". It is a completely broken prioritizer, executive function deficit, and nearly non-existing ability to linearize tasks into intermediate-scale command sequences. And tons of other things, some of them good (like immediate recall of association trees, whether we like it or not; this helps if you want some original ideas), but most of them bad.
About 3% of population have ADHD. And it is quite easily recognizable and distinct from just "troubles of concentration".
I wonder, if AI visualization gets to a specific point that looks and sounds realistic enough, can you just have a service that would do this but it would be random... Kind of like body double chat roulette. Are you going to get a real person, or an AI bot? And if the interaction is limited, could you even tell the difference?
This is great. I like how I did not have to sign up for separate account to use this. Instead it just Took me to discord channel and I got started right away.
Again pop-sci loves to invent terms and then sell those terms. Psychology is regularly guilty of this.
This is not a "phenomenon" with "invisible power" and it doesn't need a litany of semi-awed, near mystical, and pseudoscientific testimonials. That's just nonsense branding.
This isn't new or magical and there are other services that do just this with less BS.
Yeah, I was pretty turned off by that. I clicked on the link wondering if it was some sort of cloning technology, or perhaps just some sort of video editing/generation technology, but was disappointed to see it's just "co-working" or "physically-present emotional support" if you want to capture the essence of it. Sure, that latter term is a bit wordy, but "body doubling" is IMO just a very strange thing to call this.
I don't have ADHD as far as I know(which it seems is helpful to those folks), but I still use body doubling. My use of body doubling tends towards tasks that I have an negative emotional response or apprehension towards. For example, paying an unexpected bill, or making a difficult phone call, or writing an email to someone I don't like. You could say these situations are triggering in the sense that they trigger the fight or flight response and arranging to have someone in the same room during those tasks down regulates that response.
Cuddling as a service seems to be done in America, too. I searched for "Cuddler for hire in (my state)" or something and got a bunch of results once.
Assuming they were not all fake. But since they're clearly posting a price (competitive with psychotherapy) and not pretending to be dates on a dating site, I doubt they're spam.
Not me! My chosen field is what I naturally hyperfocus on, which is the typical recipe for high functioning ADHD. The WFH struggle for me is stopping work.
It's the rest of life that I struggle with, and I've had friends literally come to my house to veg out in front of the TV while I clean. And then, once the kitchen is clean, it's suddenly easy to cook a meal. It's honestly quite embarrassing to need that as an adult, but by making it win-win, I've managed to convince myself to do it. Cool to see that other folks do this.
Not at all the same. At least not how offices are usually structured. It doesn’t work as well with groups which is why “just go work at the library” isn’t also a solution.
An office set up for body doubling would be pairs or small groups of people from completely different teams sharing an semi-isolated space.
Whenever I visit for my parents for holidays, they have the TV playing something. However, I've always found the ads incredibly distracting, like they're intentionally designed to get my attention.
Does distant/muffled coffee shop music fall under limited forms? I’m like you but I’ve found lately that this works for me. I’m beginning to suspect the fidelity of modern consumer speakers and headphones are just too good for focus because they seize my attention. It makes me wonder what would happen if I tried an EQ that cut bass/mids.
My problem is that “focus” music is often pretty repetitive. It can drive me nuts if I listen to it for 8 hours.
The reason that you "all know it" is not that knowing it is a characteristic feature of ADHD. Rather, it is because you are all related and in contact with each other. 100% of your family having ADHD does not make your family representative of the general ADHD population.
After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc.
I can't but think that so many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is. (The irony of posting this on the Internet is not lost on me.)
We are a tribal species. We need the company of others in our physical environment in order to feel safe and at home. Obviously, some amount of solitude is important too, but for a communal species like Homo sapiens, being alone or around strangers most of the day is the environmental equivalent of being in a desert with no shade.