How to leave the house

I hate that I live in a world where people get a dog because socialization is so broken and a nameless interaction at a park is among the barrel-scraping interactions people are doing to cope with it. Like if it's gotten that bad we should be having a revolution, not getting dogs.

People have always been shy and unsure about meeting others. It is expressed different in different societies but the issue is there.

Are you sure that people have always been shy as unsure about meeting others? I honestly can’t imagine that. That seems to be a modern thing to me but happy to be proven wrong.

No way. I mean, yes, but the magnitude changes. People are way less social today than they were even ten to twenty years ago.

Exactly what cause for the decrease in social interaction would we be revolting against? I'd say things like cell phones would be on the top of the list, but protesting Apple and Android won't cause an appreciable shift to decreased phone usage. People like their smartphones a lot.

Remote work also plays a big part in isolating us, but people seem to want to work remotely more than they want to go into an office. So again, you're fighting the tide.

Socialization is as broken as you want it to be. There is no shortage of activities like pickleball, which is highly social by nature, or more niche activities if sports aren't your thing. If anything, I'd say the massive number of available activities make it so easy to find our niche that we end up never interacting with other huge swaths of society simply because we have that choice.

There used to be this plethora of study groups, non-profit associations doing whatever, book circles etc to meet people in a somewhat formalised manner that wasn't a date.

Big tech has displaced those and replaced them with nothing.

Revolutions need targets. What's the target for how socialization has gone the past few decades? What material, unpopular opinion entity can be abolished to fix things?

Book clubs are alive and well, my SO is part of two right now. I'm reading a book with coworkers and we'll be discussing in a few weeks.

Some old traditions are now competing with a larger variety of physical and virtual activities. IMO you could blame the car as much as the smart phone.

Not always, just in living memory.

My grandparents are in their late 90s and they never had such issues. I was always amazed how they knew all their neighbours and visited each other without announcement. I guess it's something we lost with WW2.

Some people were always like that.

I blame the car more personally. My parents lived very isolated lives in the suburbs long before they got phones.

If it was easy to have a target we'd have had the revolution by now. That's why it's taking so long: no one's quite sure what to do about it.

My money's on "social revolution where we all destroy our TVs and unplug our internet and throw away our phones" as the best way out.

But there's a lot of other things that need revolutioning at once. It's gonna take a big movement.

fuckin

all of them

man

there's no shortage of opportunities--sure, no one said there wasn't. I said society is fucked up and huge numbers of people are lonely. the problem isn't that they can't get out of it, the problem is that they aren't.

Some people, yes, but a whole community?

Blaming cars is an interesting theory. They spread out the practical community from like some mile or two to quite far. But can't fuzzy date 'the decline' with automobilism? Maybe the effects were delayed two generations?

Almost everyone was like that.

I knew every neighbor on my block, growing up. If someone wasn't outgoing enough to join the neighborhood group events, they stood out.

So, it will work like "the war on terror"?

You're not even trying to converse, go away.