This is very relatable. I don't use IG myself, in fact I've never tried to use any apps to find IRL friends. Nevertheless I've noticed that socializing has become inordinately difficult. "Community" is a bad joke these days. Everything seems to have fallen apart. I tried church but no one actually talks to one another - they leave as soon as the service is over. There's the bar but that's at best a friend simulator, if you're lucky you might meet a couple people over a few drinks but it's just as likely you'll spend an hour staring at your phone because that's all anyone else is doing. Professional connections disappear as quickly as you change jobs. It's all just incredibly depressing and demoralizing.
FWIW, I'm not in a suburb or a big city, but a small town. The social wasteland is universal.
Part of the problem is that the Internet has delocalized relationships. People have text buddies all over the planet, but don't know their neighbors. Because of that, at a cultural level you end up having more in common with an online group of weirdos than with the people sharing your physical locale - and everyone is in the same boat. When one does manage to strike up a conversation, it frequently turns out that the interlocutor is embedded in a hostile ideological matrix - thus every in person interaction becomes fraught and guarded, they can't fully relax and neither can you. Of course one can always attend meetups from whatever online circles one is plugged into, but that's generally not a weekend thing as it involves long distance travel to collect any reasonable number of people together.
I don't have any good advice here. If I did, I wouldn't have found your scream of frustration so relatable.
It's not just friendships are hard to come by, but community in general is dead in America. Ever read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam? The situation reminds me of his research in that book. Over the years, my wife and I have noticed that our social circle seemed to shrink year by year. Part of it was the kids, but the fights over Covid, and then moving not just to another state but to rural country and a smaller parish, and the inflation on gas, food and entertainment....gathering with others has more obstacles to it. Even at church, it's tough to get people to stay and interact after Mass...everyone just wants to head back home.
Btw, Putnam's research showed that as you increase diversity, you decrease trust. Over and over. He actually sat on his research because he hated the results, but he was eventually forced to publish it.
People I know who had pets for company during lockdown are now impossible to hold a conversation with because they just obsessively focus on the pet. The generally mean vindictive character of the internet and the dark foreboding zeitgeist makes everyone feel that society is full of people who want to hurt them (and they’re probably right if the person can get even a single like in exchange). It’s a real nightmare situation.
I love this !! What I think.... and probable because I'm a crazed hippie shaman, is that what people cant handle is the energy flows that flow out of people with the face to face relationships. There is an energy interchange... even if you want to be scientific and say its pheromonal based. :)
If you can remember what it was like to be at a party with 50 people and no one on there phones you will get an idea of this. I started traveling to and studying communes around the world and what I found was that the people there could handle the emotional energy interchange between each other.
People are getting less able to handle it. Next step is the pods.
In traveling to cities when I was a corportate Headset stage guy and meeting people who were in the fuked electronic cocoon and making them put their phones away and talk to me, I saw many reactions. Terror. Anxiety etc.... because they couldn't communicate on a VIA.
Some would just come apart like soft bread under a normal round of interactions like we would do back before the phones.
I now bring people to my farm and make them turn their phones off and take their shoes off and come walk about. Its too much for many. They look like a cat thats never been outside.
So I'm comiting to the commune shared intentional community experience.
If you want to lean into people who are in the face to face interaction bell jar I could point you in the direction. I will warn you though... its just another kind of Hell.... but you will be hugged. :)
Oh how much I resonate with here! The comfort of being able to dissipate into the cyberether if the anxiety of meeting a person face-to-face is too strong is precisely the problem. Freedom is the issue, and freedom is the solution. I think the lesson we will learn from this era of culture is that without necessity nothing gets done. The deepest friendship form when people Have to be together and struggle together, combined with aligned interests and spirits of course, but if the option is there to quit it, people often will. Could something like blockchain be a possible solution here? A way of signing a contract where you actually have to committ a bit?
The problem I see with the Internet is it encourages something that's very fake: it's all about looks, money, toys and status. I have no interest in such people and I don't know why they would have an interest in me. One thing you left off the list that I would include is church groups or spiritual worship centers: they need not be secular, of a particular faith or corporate controlled. The conversations are much more meaningful and genuine in those places at least if you stay away from convert to our viewpoint or we will shun you types. We're all looking for meaning during our time here...
All of my friends are through local comedy, the synagogue, and the bar, in that order (with the bar being a distant third. Bar friends are kind of like online acquaintances: they’re not your friends, they’re the bar’s friends).
Comedy is the surest way I’ve found to make friends. In some communities open mic is like church; it happens every week, and if you show up, they have to accept you. Getting in front of the mic is like hazing and getting initiated. (I don’t perform as much anymore because I got sick of the vulnerability ; I’m also no longer in the inner clique of comedians in my town. C’est la vie).
The synagogue is self-explanatory. See the same people every week, get friends.
I also used to go to DSA meetings. Made some good friends there.
Way back around 2006, I made some good friends through blogging, but those days are probably gone.
Getting out of the house is the best, maybe the only way, to make friends outside of the house. Tango? Volunteer? There’s tons of cool activities out there.
My husband experienced a time in his life for about five years where he had no friends except his parents, who were 3,000 miles away. This is when he said he was able to get his thoughts together and became very close to God. But he was very lonely during that time and had a little human companionship.
"I will sooner create an entire cast of characters in my head and venture into self-administrated schizophrenia than text with someone who I have no real chance of meeting in person."
Next step is to write about your imaginary friends and pretend it's art as a cope.
This loneliness thing is really grating, isn't it? Ironic how a guest post I wrote about "The Great Disconnect" in the age of AI today brought me to your Substack Rachel. (Even more ironic, I posted the link to mine in a Substack Discord community I'm in, and they linked to your Substack). On yet a third level of irony, I've made some wonderful friends who I connected with online originally. Note, online, not through an app. Our society is being atomized one annoying emoji at a time.
But all pendulums swing, and this one is coming awfully close to the end of its arc. All we need to give it that last little shove is a solar flare large enough to take out a few data centers :)
If you ever come to the SF Bay Area, please ping me, I'll take you out for lunch. Some amazing places here in the south bay! The only texting we'll be doing is to confirm the time and place. No cat photos, promise! ('coz I ain't got none o'those)
It’s too bad you’re not in Colorado, Rachel. You’d probably have no issue making friends. Although many people here do not understand the concept ofvthe passing lane on I-25, most Coloradans are friendly, gregarious, love to get outside, and they enjoy making new friends. And we’re the most physically fit state in the union. And that truism goes all the way from Ft Collins and Boulder to Colorado Springs (which are areas with widely different political views!). Out here you’d have probably already met a bunch of people IRL and done cookouts and hikes. (By the way, perhaps it’s just my age, but I asked three of friends what IG and IRL stood for before I looked them up, because I had no clue, and none of them knew!)
Since 2020, i’ve lost my friends Megan, Dan, J.P., and Michelle (JP and Michelle died within two weeks of each other), all of whom had been good friends since the 1970s. Gregg was a customer who treated my wife and I to dinner once a year. John Pelan was my editor friend that I’d known for 20 years. My wife lost two of her closest brothers and the favorite Uncle, all back in Mongolia.
Perhaps it’s just our age group, but we’ve found it easy to make friends, find common interests, rekindle old friendships. Most people are waiting for you to take the first step. Invite people out for walks, coffee, whatever. Even if it’s just 2-3 times a year, followed up with occsional texts and phone calls, if you have 4-5 good people to do this with, you’ll never be lonely and find your friendships getting deeper over time.
My friend J.P. treated everyone he met as a potential new-best-friend. It’s a wonderful attitude to have.
Okay, I am going to cut this short. There’s some kids playing out on the street (most wonderfuul sound in the world) and i’m going to talk to my neighbor (who I didn’t know from anyone and now were friendly) and see if he wants to kick back with a couple beers on Friday night. Later!
All successful civilizations are genetically homogeneous and based on high trust culture that sometimes takes centuries to form. Your article shows influence from what Lewis Mumford called Automated Man theory, which is the belief that humans are like machines and merely need adjustments in their inputs and outputs to be healthy. Less carbs, more friends, more Neil Diamond, less binge watching. Except none of it is real. Our European culture and civilization framework is designed entirely around a culture of pious, faithful and very good natured Christian people of regular and reliable core virtues all engaged in a common enterprise. All that has been blasted to atoms. The fact there is no such culture and no such nation exists any longer is at the center of your problem ... if you are genuine about wanting to solve it. If you think it is ever going to be recovered with people from Somalia who grew up as cannibals living next door trying to figure out how a doorknob works then you are pining for a fantasy world that never was and never can be. Once you have watched enough television, Automated Man theory starts to make sense because the crazy people who make TV infect you with their crazy, whacky notions of how civilizations work. All of them descended from people incapable of ever building a society like Europe, America or Australia. They just feast on the ashes.
I deleted everyone on FB and such after basically going through the same disillusionment. I'm in central FL and would have totally met up with you had you been close or if I had even read this then. I have always been an introverted extrovert and the nicest rude person walking oxymoron of a human but I think there are so many of us experiencing this. You have made me feel better for choosing solitude and my child and husband but it's different and my husband doesn't like concerts, the theater, the symphony,museum's and stuff that I like to do any the people who I used to do these things with had whiddled down even before covid. I didn't even know there were others as fed up with the covid caves and social media device obsessed culture, which in itself is madness making. I would literally talk to strangers like everywhere just to somewhat test out my hypothesis that honestly had been forming since roughly 2010 when I first joined FB but then quit using it until 16, then hiatus again until I got sick of basically being excluded from everything bc I wasn't on FB and didn't check messages and didn't know about events until way later when my phone number hadn't changed. I absolutely understand what you mean about block and delete. Too bad your in the NY now.
This is very relatable. I don't use IG myself, in fact I've never tried to use any apps to find IRL friends. Nevertheless I've noticed that socializing has become inordinately difficult. "Community" is a bad joke these days. Everything seems to have fallen apart. I tried church but no one actually talks to one another - they leave as soon as the service is over. There's the bar but that's at best a friend simulator, if you're lucky you might meet a couple people over a few drinks but it's just as likely you'll spend an hour staring at your phone because that's all anyone else is doing. Professional connections disappear as quickly as you change jobs. It's all just incredibly depressing and demoralizing.
FWIW, I'm not in a suburb or a big city, but a small town. The social wasteland is universal.
Part of the problem is that the Internet has delocalized relationships. People have text buddies all over the planet, but don't know their neighbors. Because of that, at a cultural level you end up having more in common with an online group of weirdos than with the people sharing your physical locale - and everyone is in the same boat. When one does manage to strike up a conversation, it frequently turns out that the interlocutor is embedded in a hostile ideological matrix - thus every in person interaction becomes fraught and guarded, they can't fully relax and neither can you. Of course one can always attend meetups from whatever online circles one is plugged into, but that's generally not a weekend thing as it involves long distance travel to collect any reasonable number of people together.
I don't have any good advice here. If I did, I wouldn't have found your scream of frustration so relatable.
It's not just friendships are hard to come by, but community in general is dead in America. Ever read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam? The situation reminds me of his research in that book. Over the years, my wife and I have noticed that our social circle seemed to shrink year by year. Part of it was the kids, but the fights over Covid, and then moving not just to another state but to rural country and a smaller parish, and the inflation on gas, food and entertainment....gathering with others has more obstacles to it. Even at church, it's tough to get people to stay and interact after Mass...everyone just wants to head back home.
Btw, Putnam's research showed that as you increase diversity, you decrease trust. Over and over. He actually sat on his research because he hated the results, but he was eventually forced to publish it.
People I know who had pets for company during lockdown are now impossible to hold a conversation with because they just obsessively focus on the pet. The generally mean vindictive character of the internet and the dark foreboding zeitgeist makes everyone feel that society is full of people who want to hurt them (and they’re probably right if the person can get even a single like in exchange). It’s a real nightmare situation.
I love this !! What I think.... and probable because I'm a crazed hippie shaman, is that what people cant handle is the energy flows that flow out of people with the face to face relationships. There is an energy interchange... even if you want to be scientific and say its pheromonal based. :)
If you can remember what it was like to be at a party with 50 people and no one on there phones you will get an idea of this. I started traveling to and studying communes around the world and what I found was that the people there could handle the emotional energy interchange between each other.
People are getting less able to handle it. Next step is the pods.
In traveling to cities when I was a corportate Headset stage guy and meeting people who were in the fuked electronic cocoon and making them put their phones away and talk to me, I saw many reactions. Terror. Anxiety etc.... because they couldn't communicate on a VIA.
Some would just come apart like soft bread under a normal round of interactions like we would do back before the phones.
I now bring people to my farm and make them turn their phones off and take their shoes off and come walk about. Its too much for many. They look like a cat thats never been outside.
So I'm comiting to the commune shared intentional community experience.
If you want to lean into people who are in the face to face interaction bell jar I could point you in the direction. I will warn you though... its just another kind of Hell.... but you will be hugged. :)
Welcome to Earth 2023.
Oh how much I resonate with here! The comfort of being able to dissipate into the cyberether if the anxiety of meeting a person face-to-face is too strong is precisely the problem. Freedom is the issue, and freedom is the solution. I think the lesson we will learn from this era of culture is that without necessity nothing gets done. The deepest friendship form when people Have to be together and struggle together, combined with aligned interests and spirits of course, but if the option is there to quit it, people often will. Could something like blockchain be a possible solution here? A way of signing a contract where you actually have to committ a bit?
The problem I see with the Internet is it encourages something that's very fake: it's all about looks, money, toys and status. I have no interest in such people and I don't know why they would have an interest in me. One thing you left off the list that I would include is church groups or spiritual worship centers: they need not be secular, of a particular faith or corporate controlled. The conversations are much more meaningful and genuine in those places at least if you stay away from convert to our viewpoint or we will shun you types. We're all looking for meaning during our time here...
All of my friends are through local comedy, the synagogue, and the bar, in that order (with the bar being a distant third. Bar friends are kind of like online acquaintances: they’re not your friends, they’re the bar’s friends).
Comedy is the surest way I’ve found to make friends. In some communities open mic is like church; it happens every week, and if you show up, they have to accept you. Getting in front of the mic is like hazing and getting initiated. (I don’t perform as much anymore because I got sick of the vulnerability ; I’m also no longer in the inner clique of comedians in my town. C’est la vie).
The synagogue is self-explanatory. See the same people every week, get friends.
I also used to go to DSA meetings. Made some good friends there.
Way back around 2006, I made some good friends through blogging, but those days are probably gone.
Getting out of the house is the best, maybe the only way, to make friends outside of the house. Tango? Volunteer? There’s tons of cool activities out there.
My husband experienced a time in his life for about five years where he had no friends except his parents, who were 3,000 miles away. This is when he said he was able to get his thoughts together and became very close to God. But he was very lonely during that time and had a little human companionship.
"I will sooner create an entire cast of characters in my head and venture into self-administrated schizophrenia than text with someone who I have no real chance of meeting in person."
Next step is to write about your imaginary friends and pretend it's art as a cope.
This loneliness thing is really grating, isn't it? Ironic how a guest post I wrote about "The Great Disconnect" in the age of AI today brought me to your Substack Rachel. (Even more ironic, I posted the link to mine in a Substack Discord community I'm in, and they linked to your Substack). On yet a third level of irony, I've made some wonderful friends who I connected with online originally. Note, online, not through an app. Our society is being atomized one annoying emoji at a time.
But all pendulums swing, and this one is coming awfully close to the end of its arc. All we need to give it that last little shove is a solar flare large enough to take out a few data centers :)
If you ever come to the SF Bay Area, please ping me, I'll take you out for lunch. Some amazing places here in the south bay! The only texting we'll be doing is to confirm the time and place. No cat photos, promise! ('coz I ain't got none o'those)
It’s too bad you’re not in Colorado, Rachel. You’d probably have no issue making friends. Although many people here do not understand the concept ofvthe passing lane on I-25, most Coloradans are friendly, gregarious, love to get outside, and they enjoy making new friends. And we’re the most physically fit state in the union. And that truism goes all the way from Ft Collins and Boulder to Colorado Springs (which are areas with widely different political views!). Out here you’d have probably already met a bunch of people IRL and done cookouts and hikes. (By the way, perhaps it’s just my age, but I asked three of friends what IG and IRL stood for before I looked them up, because I had no clue, and none of them knew!)
Since 2020, i’ve lost my friends Megan, Dan, J.P., and Michelle (JP and Michelle died within two weeks of each other), all of whom had been good friends since the 1970s. Gregg was a customer who treated my wife and I to dinner once a year. John Pelan was my editor friend that I’d known for 20 years. My wife lost two of her closest brothers and the favorite Uncle, all back in Mongolia.
Perhaps it’s just our age group, but we’ve found it easy to make friends, find common interests, rekindle old friendships. Most people are waiting for you to take the first step. Invite people out for walks, coffee, whatever. Even if it’s just 2-3 times a year, followed up with occsional texts and phone calls, if you have 4-5 good people to do this with, you’ll never be lonely and find your friendships getting deeper over time.
My friend J.P. treated everyone he met as a potential new-best-friend. It’s a wonderful attitude to have.
Okay, I am going to cut this short. There’s some kids playing out on the street (most wonderfuul sound in the world) and i’m going to talk to my neighbor (who I didn’t know from anyone and now were friendly) and see if he wants to kick back with a couple beers on Friday night. Later!
All successful civilizations are genetically homogeneous and based on high trust culture that sometimes takes centuries to form. Your article shows influence from what Lewis Mumford called Automated Man theory, which is the belief that humans are like machines and merely need adjustments in their inputs and outputs to be healthy. Less carbs, more friends, more Neil Diamond, less binge watching. Except none of it is real. Our European culture and civilization framework is designed entirely around a culture of pious, faithful and very good natured Christian people of regular and reliable core virtues all engaged in a common enterprise. All that has been blasted to atoms. The fact there is no such culture and no such nation exists any longer is at the center of your problem ... if you are genuine about wanting to solve it. If you think it is ever going to be recovered with people from Somalia who grew up as cannibals living next door trying to figure out how a doorknob works then you are pining for a fantasy world that never was and never can be. Once you have watched enough television, Automated Man theory starts to make sense because the crazy people who make TV infect you with their crazy, whacky notions of how civilizations work. All of them descended from people incapable of ever building a society like Europe, America or Australia. They just feast on the ashes.
This is great! Just messaged you to see if you want to meet next week in Fort Lauderdale.
If you are ever in northern Michigan swing by, I'd even be willing to leave my hermit shack and go to Traverse City to see some music or something.
This is incredible, it was like a thought I had buried in my mind and you pieced it together and vocalized it.
I deleted everyone on FB and such after basically going through the same disillusionment. I'm in central FL and would have totally met up with you had you been close or if I had even read this then. I have always been an introverted extrovert and the nicest rude person walking oxymoron of a human but I think there are so many of us experiencing this. You have made me feel better for choosing solitude and my child and husband but it's different and my husband doesn't like concerts, the theater, the symphony,museum's and stuff that I like to do any the people who I used to do these things with had whiddled down even before covid. I didn't even know there were others as fed up with the covid caves and social media device obsessed culture, which in itself is madness making. I would literally talk to strangers like everywhere just to somewhat test out my hypothesis that honestly had been forming since roughly 2010 when I first joined FB but then quit using it until 16, then hiatus again until I got sick of basically being excluded from everything bc I wasn't on FB and didn't check messages and didn't know about events until way later when my phone number hadn't changed. I absolutely understand what you mean about block and delete. Too bad your in the NY now.